[R-G] Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/world/asia/17pstan.html>
April 17, 2009
Taliban Exploit Class Rifts to Gain Ground in Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by
engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a
small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according
to government officials and analysts here.

The strategy cleared a path to power for the Taliban in the Swat
Valley, where the government allowed Islamic law to be imposed this
week, and it carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan,
particularly the militants’ main goal, the populous heartland of
Punjab Province.

In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the
Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who
held the most power.

To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that
became their shock troops, the residents, government officials and
analysts said.

The approach allowed the Taliban to offer economic spoils to people
frustrated with lax and corrupt government even as the militants
imposed a strict form of Islam through terror and intimidation.

“This was a bloody revolution in Swat,” said a senior Pakistani
official who oversees Swat, speaking on the condition of anonymity for
fear of retaliation by the Taliban. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it
sweeps the established order of Pakistan.”

The Taliban’s ability to exploit class divisions adds a new dimension
to the insurgency and is raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan,
which remains largely feudal.

Unlike India after independence in 1947, Pakistan maintained a narrow
landed upper class that kept its vast holdings while its workers
remained subservient, the officials and analysts said. Successive
Pakistani governments have since failed to provide land reform and
even the most basic forms of education and health care. Avenues to
advancement for the vast majority of rural poor do not exist.

Analysts and other government officials warn that the strategy
executed in Swat is easily transferable to Punjab, saying that the
province, where militant groups are already showing strength, is ripe
for the same social upheavals that have convulsed Swat and the tribal
areas.

Mahboob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American lawyer and former classmate of
President Obama’s, said, “The people of Pakistan are psychologically
ready for a revolution.”

Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have
long festered in Pakistan, he said. “The militants, for their part,
are promising more than just proscriptions on music and schooling,” he
said. “They are also promising Islamic justice, effective government
and economic redistribution.”

The Taliban strategy in Swat, an area of 1.3 million people with
fertile orchards, vast plots of timber and valuable emerald mines,
unfolded in stages over five years, analysts said.

The momentum of the insurgency built in the past two years, when the
Taliban, reinforced by seasoned fighters from the tribal areas with
links to Al Qaeda, fought the Pakistani Army to a standstill, said a
Pakistani intelligence agent who works in the Swat region.

The insurgents struck at any competing point of power: landlords and
elected leaders — who were usually the same people — and an underpaid
and unmotivated police force, said Khadim Hussain, a linguistics and
communications professor at Bahria University in Islamabad, the
capital.

At the same time, the Taliban exploited the resentments of the
landless tenants, particularly the fact that they had many unresolved
cases against their bosses in a slow-moving and corrupt justice
system, Mr. Hussain and residents who fled the area said.

Their grievances were stoked by a young militant, Maulana Fazlullah,
who set up an FM radio station in 2004 to appeal to the
disenfranchised. The broadcasts featured easy-to-understand examples
using goats, cows, milk and grass. By 2006, Mr. Fazlullah had formed a
ragtag force of landless peasants armed by the Taliban, said Mr.
Hussain and former residents of Swat.

At first, the pressure on the landlords was subtle. One landowner was
pressed to take his son out of an English-speaking school offensive to
the Taliban. Others were forced to make donations to the Taliban.

Then, in late 2007, Shujaat Ali Khan, the richest of the landowners,
his brothers and his son, Jamal Nasir, the mayor of Swat, became
targets.

After Shujaat Ali Khan, a senior politician in the Pakistan Muslim
League-Q, narrowly missed being killed by a roadside bomb, he fled to
London. A brother, Fateh Ali Mohammed, a former senator, left, too,
and now lives in Islamabad. Mr. Nasir also fled.

Later, the Taliban published a “most wanted” list of 43 prominent
names, said Muhammad Sher Khan, a landlord who is a politician with
the Pakistan Peoples Party, and whose name was on the list. All those
named were ordered to present themselves to the Taliban courts or risk
being killed, he said. “When you know that they will hang and kill
you, how will you dare go back there?” Mr. Khan, hiding in Punjab,
said in a telephone interview. “Being on the list meant ‘Don’t come
back to Swat.’ ”

One of the main enforcers of the new order was Ibn-e-Amin, a Taliban
commander from the same area as the landowners, called Matta. The fact
that Mr. Amin came from Matta, and knew who was who there, put even
more pressure on the landowners, Mr. Hussain said.

According to Pakistani news reports, Mr. Amin was arrested in August
2004 on suspicion of having links to Al Qaeda and was released in
November 2006. Another Pakistani intelligence agent said Mr. Amin
often visited a madrasa in North Waziristan, the stronghold of Al
Qaeda in the tribal areas, where he apparently received guidance.

Each time the landlords fled, their tenants were rewarded. They were
encouraged to cut down the orchard trees and sell the wood for their
own profit, the former residents said. Or they were told to pay the
rent to the Taliban instead of their now absentee bosses.

Two dormant emerald mines have reopened under Taliban control. The
militants have announced that they will receive one-third of the
revenues.

Since the Taliban fought the military to a truce in Swat in February,
the militants have deepened their approach and made clear who is in
charge.

When provincial bureaucrats visit Mingora, Swat’s capital, they must
now follow the Taliban’s orders and sit on the floor, surrounded by
Taliban bearing weapons, and in some cases wearing suicide bomber
vests, the senior provincial official said.

In many areas of Swat the Taliban have demanded that each family give
up one son for training as a Taliban fighter, said Mohammad Amad,
executive director of a nongovernmental group, the Initiative for
Development and Empowerment Axis.

A landlord who fled with his family last year said he received a
chilling message last week. His tenants called him in Peshawar, the
capital of North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, to tell
him his huge house was being demolished, he said in an interview here.

The most crushing news was about his finances. He had sold his fruit
crop in advance, though at a quarter of last year’s price. But even
that smaller yield would not be his, his tenants said, relaying the
Taliban message. The buyer had been ordered to give the money to the
Taliban instead.