GroundTruth

After just five days of reporting in Pakistan, I must say it was good to get out of there and land in the relative safety of Afghanistan.

You know it’s bad when you start thinking of Kabul as a sanctuary.

But in Pakistan, where the country is clearly and collectively turning against the Taliban with a new determination, the violence just keeps heating up. The Taliban are pushing back. And this is about to turn into an even more deadly brawl.

Photographer: Asim Hafeez / June 6 2009

My old haunts keep blowing up here, and sources I hoped to visit have added a whole new and macabre meaning to the old reporting phrase “unable to be reached for comment.” That is, they’re dead.

On this reporting trip I went to Peshawar, but I did not stay at one of my favorite hotels, the Pearl Continental, a pleasant, five-star establishment where you could get a beer and where lots of correspondents, diplomats and NGO types stayed. That’s what made it a target. I stayed there just two years ago and I have always stayed there since my first reporting trip to the country in 1995. The Pearl had a certain charm and it was always good to be on the Silk Road town of Peshawar.

But on this trip, the risk assessment team from Centurion, the security services firm made up of former British military forces who provide hostile environment training, specifically warned against the Pearl and other big, fancy hotels in Pakistan as likely targets of the Taliban. I’m glad I listened as I read our correspondent Shahan Mufti’s dispatch about the bombing that killed five people there and wounded dozens. (Update: the death toll climbed to 18 and 60 wounded as rescuers continue to dig through the rubble.)

The other hotel where I racked up a fair bit of frequent traveler points was the Marriott in Islamabad and that of course suffered the huge truck bombing in September 2008 that killed 40 people. Centurion, of course, had added the Marriott on the same list of high risk targets. At my colleague Shahan’s suggestion, I ended up staying instead at a quiet guest house hidden by a steel gate with four armed guards who protect the entrance 24 hours a day.

It wasn’t just hotels blowing up. Sources who I had hoped to interview keep ending up dead.

Two years ago, I interviewed Maulana Alam, the number two in the militant Islamist organization TNSM in the Swat Valley. The way events had turned, I knew it was unlikely that I would be able to see him again. But that assumption became an absolute certainty when he was killed last weekend. He had been taken into custody and was ambushed while traveling in a police van. As the police tell it, he was rubbed out by Taliban gunmen who wanted to kill him because they feared he had turned against them. Many in Pakistan are skeptical of the police account and wonder if he wasn’t actually killed in police custody and that an elaborate ruse was created to explain his death. Questions remain. But the fact is I won’t be interviewing him ever again.

The leader of the religious school affiliated with the Red Mosque in Istanbul, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, is another source I had hoped to interview. But just after I interviewed him, he was killed in July 2007, during a huge gun battle with military and police and a fire that destroyed the sprawling religious school where he served as headmaster. Shahan and I tried to go see his brother, Abdul Aziz Ghazi, who runs the mosque, which was being repaired after the confrontation that occurred there. He had served more than a year in prison for his suspected involvement with the Pakistani Taliban and just wasn’t up for talking.

I inquired about possibly doing an interview with Mohammed Shah, a baker from the Dir Province. I met him last time I was here just after he had been released from Guantanamo as a suspected Taliban insurgent. When I interviewed him in 2007, he had just been released from detention after the US had failed to build a case against him. His story of torture in the infamous prison had become a legend in the rugged, lawless region where he lived. Villagers would come to see him and listen to the tale and collectively rail against the U.S. I thought it might be interesting to reach out to him on this trip. But reports came to me from a British human rights organization that he had been killed by US forces in Afghanistan. I was unable to get to Dir as it is now part of a closed military zone during the huge offensive the Pakistani military is carrying out. But based on the sketchy reports I was able to get from my colleague Ashraf Ali, a long-time translator and producer for the BBC in Peshawar, it seems he is still alive, or at least he was several weeks ago when he was last seen.

These are just a few personal connections to the violence of a reporter who has never been based in Pakistan and traveled there relatively infrequently. But far more importantly, everyone in Pakistan has these kinds of personal touchstones to violence and physical geography of death. It touches everyone and it is all very close and getting closer day by day.

Photographer: Asim Hafeez / June 6 2009

But beyond the headlines of the violence is an important shift in Pakistani society, a new sense of confronting the Taliban and the daily terror it is unleashing. Here’s my dispatch from Islamabad:

By C.M. Sennott

ISLAMABAD –The wounded cop lay in Surgical Ward Three with his head bandaged from the blast that embedded shrapnel in his skull, and he began to tell the story.

It’s a story about a relatively small bombing within the horrific spate of violence unfolding here, but it is one that serves as a kind of modern fable about the fateful struggle in which Pakistan now finds itself and how it might just be turning a corner in that struggle.

Mohamed Tariq, 28, said he offered to give a lift home to his two close friends and fellow police officers but asked them to wait a few minutes while he attended evening prayers at the mosque adjacent to the Rescue 15 precinct house.

He took his place on a prayer mat along side some 50 other men, mostly officers, gathered for the evening prayer. There was a loud explosion and a blast of hot air.

That’s all Tariq remembers. What he found out when he came to in the emergency room of Pakistan’s Institute of Medical Sciences was that his two good friends had stopped a suicide bomber from entering the gate of the police station, and blunted the impact of the first Taliban attack in the capital in many months.

The bomber still managed to pull the detonator cord on the explosives strapped to his body and killed the two police offiers. Had the bomber gotten just ten steps further, he likely would have killed many if not all of the men at prayer.

Three others were wounded in the blast, but only the two officers, Tariq’s friends, “obtained martyrdom,” as the newscasters put it.

And so a suicide bomber claiming to be acting in the name of God tried to kill men of the law who were lining up for prayers until two heroic officers intervened and saved them all.
And there you have it. That is Pakistan today.

It is a country that is suddenly locked in a life-and-death struggle with a brand of Islamic militancy that is increasingly turning its rage inward on the country itself, even the prayerful.

It is a country that seems to be taking a stand – collectively and individually — against the Taliban and the militancy it breeds. People here from every level of society – policemen, politicians, journalists, religious leaders – all seem to have found a new consensus in the last two months to confront the militancy that is threatening their country.

Not all agree with the tactics of the military offensive underway in the Taliban-stronghold of the Swat Valley. It’s a massive, conventional military operation that has displaced more than 2 million Pakistanis to take the fight to an estimated 5,000 Taliban fighters. A human rights organization here claims 10,000 people have gone “missing” during the fighting. There are reports of some ending up in in a maze of underground prisons where torture is common and the rule of law is out the window.

In fact, there are still many here who disagree with the military’s tactics and its strategy. There is sustained outrage, for example, about the US military’s drone missile attacks, which have indiscriminately killed civilians.

Still, it is getting harder and harder in Pakistan to find anyone who doesn’t believe the Taliban has gotten out of control and needs to be stopped.

This was not the case the last time I was in Pakistan slightly two years ago. I was reporting on the then nascent movement that came to be known as the Pakistani Taliban.
It’s a strain of Islamic militancy that grew out of, but remains separate from, the Afghan Taliban.

The Afghan Taliban emerged out of the refugee camps here in the mid 1990s and in later years eventually took power and provided sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
It was toppled after the US-led invasion in the aftermath of the September 11th. The Taliban was then shattered and fragmented. Some remnants of the movement survived, regrouped and are now locked in a bloody insurgency against the US-led occupying forces on the ground in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani Taliban emerged at first in support of their Pashtun brothers across the border. But increasingly the Pakistani Taliban has turned against the Pakistani military, which has been pressured by the US to crack down on the different streams that emerged in the rugged, tribal areas that straddle the border.

Just two years ago, many Pakistanis turned a blind eye and on some level supported the Pakistani Taliban’s proclaimed mission to carry out jihad against US forces occupying Afghanistan. The Taliban were seen as perfectly acceptable opposition within a lazy and virulent anti-Americanism that was pervasive in that era of George W. Bush.

So what changed in the last few months? Certainly there is the impact of the speech by President Barack Obama from Cairo last week where he called for “ a new beginning” in relations between the US and the Muslim world. But most importantly, there was the barbaric acts of the Taliban.

Last week, they exploded a bomb outside a mosque and killed 30 people in the Dir Province in the northwest. They blew up the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad earlier this year. They have stepped up the burning of girls schools, and they have exacted their own puritanical brand of Sharia, or Islamic law. In the remote hamlets of the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Swat and Dir and Waziristan, they have developed a mafia-like hold on society.

Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani said at a press conference “the tide has turned” on the Taliban in Swat due to the military offensive. US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, has applauded the shift in Pakistan.

The change in tone is apparent in the media, which has shed much of its snide anti-Americanism and suddenly seems to have struck a note more akin to Fox News. It even has the same drum beat introductions to stories that glorify the acts of heroic soldiers with graphics, such as “Pakistan Fights Back.”

Even the conservative religious establishment in Pakistan has put its foot down. At an extraordinary conference held at the Serena Palace Hotel on Sunday, the top voices of Islamic fundamentalism, including Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the legendary firebrand cleric and founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami, spoke out against the Taliban.

Qazi dismissed the Pakistani Taliban as uneducated thugs who did not have the intellectual or theological grounding to understand Sharia, never mind proclaim to offer a new alternative to the legal system, grounded in Sharia, that Pakistan established more than 20 years ago.
And increasingly, the ranks of the secular intellectual elite are speaking out against the Taliban and in many cases supporting the military offensive against them as necessary.

I visited Pervez Hoodbhoy, a self-styled Pakistani version of Noam Chomsky, in his home where he verbally tangled with his 24-year-old daughter, Alia Amirali, who graduated from Hampshire College and has the nose ring to prove it.

“The secular left in this country has been pathologically anti-American,” he said, his daughter sitting next to him shaking her head in disagreement.

“Very unhealthy, very misguided. I think it comes from a need to blame our failures on others. … I think it’s good that the army has finally gotten its act together, a realization that territory has been lost,” he said.

Tarik, the cop recovering in the surgical ward, doesn’t talk politics. But sees meaning in the fact that going to prayers is what saved him.

“These people who did this have nothing to do with Islam. Killing other Muslims, this is not Islam,” he said.

And he believes his spirit to the fight the Taliban and their warped interpretation of Islam will now have “more force within me,” as he puts it.

“I’m not afraid. None of us are afraid,” he said, as several friends with “anti terrorism unit” shirts gathered around him in support. “As soon as I’m better, I’ll get back to work.”