Daily Times

A dharna (sit-in) by the Shia Pashtuns of the Turi and Bangash tribes in Upper Kurram Agency’s capital, Parachinar, is in its second week now. The row, prima facie, is between two Shia factions. One side reportedly has the backing of the sitting member of the National Assembly from Upper Kurram, Sajid Turi, while the other side is prodded by Syed Qaiser Hussain, a formal air marshal of the Pakistan air force who had briefly served as the interim air chief after Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir died in an air crash in 2003. The bone of contention ostensibly is a cleric, Agha Nawaz Irfani, who leads the local mosque-imambargah congregation but differences date back to the May 2013 elections.
The highly charged protestors have rather straightforward demands: a) their arrested elders must be released forthwith, b) their cleric be allowed back in Kurram, c) the government should stop meddling in their mosque-imambargah matters, d) educational institutions should be reopened and e) the political agent, who has become partisan, be replaced. Bickering over funds and control of mosque centres, prolonged squabbles over elections and even demands to replace a political agent are not that uncommon but the tremendous interest the civil and military bureaucracy have displayed in this instance is really curious. Over the past few months, several rounds of curfew were clamped in Parachinar, scores of tribal elders arrested and cleric Agha Irfani banished from Kurram by the political administration while the military kept breathing down people’s necks. This massive intervention in favour of one side has raised serious concerns about the administration’s motives. While all politics is local as the adage goes, in this case it seems to have an overwhelmingly regional objective. It is well known that officials have tried for years to provoke Shia-Sunni conflict in the Kurram Agency and then brought in outsiders, e.g. the Haqqani network men, to arbitrate the 2011 peace deal.
I have noted in this column previously that the Upper Kurram Agency, including its Parrot’s Beak area that protrudes into Afghanistan, is the prize that the Pakistani establishment and its jihadist proxies covet. Kurram was a point d’appui from where the mujahideen rebels were unleashed into Khost and Nangarhar on each side of the Kurram jut, and into Logar and Kabul straight up. The Kurram-Khost-Logar route was a major tributary supplying the jihadists in the 1980s. After the Taliban resurgence, circa 2005, the region again became highly valuable to the Pakistani security establishment’s planners. Pakistan has been pulling the wool over the US’s and ISAF’s eyes in Afghanistan from the day they landed there. An integral part of this deception is to redistribute and conceal the Afghan insurgents holed up in Pakistan when the US ratchets up the pressure to eliminate them. The Afghanistan and India oriented jihadists, i.e. the so-called ‘good’ Taliban, have never been targeted in any of the Pakistani military operations conducted thus far in the tribal or settled areas. They have always had advance warning and logistical guidance to pack up and move to a new sanctuary, and the current Zarb-e-Azb Operation in North Waziristan is no exception.
The Jalaluddin Haqqani terrorist network, now run by his son Sirajuddin, was moved out of Miramshah, North Waziristan — their home for about 40 years — just in time to evade Zarb-e-Azb. It is not a coincidence that neither the Afghan/US nor Pakistani forces have fought a single battle against the Haqqani fighters since Zarb-e-Azb commenced this past June. I had noted here, and the international press has corroborated it since, that the Haqqanis have melted away to places like Tall in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the Orakzai and Kurram Agencies. In the case of the latter, relocation has reportedly been to the Sunni-dominated central and lower Kurram Agency. But while a simple relocation to these areas provides a logistical, planning and training sanctuary, it does not solve the issue of operational access to Afghanistan. The Haqqanis have operated out of the areas such as Mata Sangar in southeast Kurram Agency but Shia-dominated Upper Kurram had unfalteringly resisted the jihadist onslaught for a good five years since at least 2007. The Shalozan area northeast of Mata Sangar, known for its fabulous apples, came under a major jihadist attack in 2010, as they pushed to get a toehold next to Afghanistan. They were beaten back despite the government troops intervening on their behalf.
The local tribesman now claim that the Haqqani network fighters are moving into the Upper Kurram areas such as Shalozan, Muqbal, Narai and Shapo. The tribesmen maintain that the security establishment is relocating the Haqqanis under the guise of the 2008 Murree Accord between the Shia and Sunni tribes, which calls for repatriation of those who had fled due to the war. Kurram is not just the prisoner of its history but its geography too. The establishment appears unwilling to cut its favourite jihadists loose and is gung-ho to preserve them in the areas from where they can easily operate inside Afghanistan. The upper Kurram Agency with Nangarhar to its north, Khost in the south and Kabul close by, remains an ideal location for a new bridgehead for the perennial jihadist cohorts. The mock ‘whack-a-mole’ with the good Taliban, a la Haqqani network, seems underway in earnest with all signs pointing to their resurgence in the Kurram, Orakzai and Tall areas. The Haqqani network owes its pivotal position in the three-pronged Afghan insurgency, with Mullah Omar’s Taliban in the south and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Salafists in the north and northeast, to their central geographical position. If the Afghan and US/ISAF expectation was that the Haqqani network would not be allowed to regroup after Zarb-e-Azb, they may be in for an extremely rude surprise.
The Pakistani establishment has attempted to subdue the Upper Kurram Agency through one ploy or another for almost a decade now. From the Afghan jihadist Nasrullah Mansur’s network to the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba operative Eid Nazar Mangal to the Tehreek-e-Taliban thug Fazl-e-Saeed Haqqani, every arrow in the establishment’s quiver has failed thus far. An American Indian saying goes that the birds once complained that the arrows shoot them down. The arrows responded that they could only do so because they have got bird feathers to fly. The squabbling parties in Kurram must close ranks lest they have a debacle on their hands. With the Pakistani and US political leaderships on the verge of being duped yet again, the Kurram people will have to fend for themselves. The feud and its politics may be local but the manipulators have regional ambitions.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki