Daily Times

Imran Khan, chief of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), speaks a lot about the war on terror and the role of Pakhtun tribes on both sides of the Durand Line in this war. On the internet, for example, there are numerous YouTube clips in which he elaborates his point of view. I have randomly selected one of the clips to deconstruct his argument, narrative and discourse, which are all misleading, marred by factual errors or perhaps wilful lies, and anti-people. Also, this deconstruction is important because Imran Khan’s views are an extension of the stereotypes about the Pakhtun tribes constructed, prompted and propagated by the British colonial and Pakistani establishment. This also includes the stereotypes that dehumanise the tribal people. Due to widespread illiteracy, the Pakhtun could not deconstruct the stereotypes. Rich and educated Pakhtuns, a few exceptions apart, never took upon themselves the moral responsibility to question the narrative and discourse by the ‘others’. The Pakhtun nationalist political parties never developed, not that they could not, but they did not due to a lack of foresightedness, the organisational capacity to have functioning think tanks in place to interact with the intelligentsia and the media around the world to disseminate information and question any misleading ideas about society that they — not the PTI with youth support base in Punjab — truly represent, especially in terms of belongingness to the indigenous soil, culture, history and traditions.

This is the YouTube clip from which I take Imran Khan’s narrative, discourse and argument regarding the Pakhtun and the war on terror: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr-IFLJn00A (title: ‘Imran Khan explains ‘War of Terror’ and ‘Pakistani Taliban’).

In summary, Khan says this: “You can win a war against terrorism if you win hearts and minds of the people among whom the terrorists operate. You can win the war when the people consider them terrorists. You can never win the war when the people consider them freedom fighters. The Taliban are the popular Pakhtun freedom fighters. Upon the US’s behest, the Pakistan Army is killing its own people with F-16s and gunship helicopters. The bombs cannot differentiate between terrorists and innocent civilians. Usually the terrorists are too clever to be caught by the bombs, including bombs from the US drones. So they get away with the bombing, but innocent people are killed. Consequently, there is a popular backlash. In lieu of the US money, the Pakistan Army entered Waziristan in 2004 to catch 800 al Qaeda men. This ended causing collateral damage, including large scale human displacement. This was reciprocated by the tribal society by a backlash in the form of multiple suicide attacks on the state institutions and society in Pakistan, including attacks on the Pakistan Army. The Pakistan Army has no will to fight its own people. Soldiers of the army began to surrender in droves to a handful of the Taliban. The army was forced to negotiate peace with the Taliban. All political parties in the ruling alliance of Pakistan, including the Pakhtun nationalist ANP, want negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban. But the US government has a one-window operation with President Asif Ali Zardari, before they had the same with President Musharraf, whereby the Americans put pressure to send the Pakistan Army to the tribal areas to fight against our own people. What is happening in FATA is not religious extremism. It is radicalisation. People whose children are dying in the war of, not on, terror, how are they not going to be radicalised. Unless the US and NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan, there is no chance of peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The reason is very simple. The Pakhtun have successfully resisted against the conquerors of the world, including Alexander the Great, the Mongolians, the Mughals, the British and the Russian. The Pakhtun tribes fight against each other but whenever an invader comes, they are all together. This time they are united against the US and NATO forces. What you see now is not the Taliban or al Qaeda. It is Pakhtun nationalism.”

It is factually wrong that the Pakistan Army entered Waziristan in 2004. The army had already entered South Waziristan in 2002 when it conducted a fake military operation near Azam Warsak, ostensibly against the al Qaeda militants and al Qaeda-led Taliban. According to the local people, the Taliban were tipped off by the army officers before the operation to vacate the area, which they did, but nevertheless the operation was conducted. Actually the operation was to humiliate and discredit the tribal leaders who were not taken into confidence before the operation. All those widely respectable tribal leaders were anti-Taliban, most of whom were killed one after the other in mysterious targeted killings from 2003 onwards. This operation and the later operations and the so-called peace deals with the Taliban were meant to tear apart the tribal socio-political order led by the tribal leaders and replace it with a Taliban order so as to provide safe havens to al Qaeda and al Qaeda-led Taliban for cross-borders attacks on the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Within days and weeks of the UN-mandated US attack on al Qaeda and Taliban positions in Afghanistan, the militants came to South Waziristan, where the well-known cleric Maulana Noor Muhammad, famous in Waziristan for his deep longstanding links with the military establishment of Pakistan, was announcing in mosques that all Pakhtuns must stand up to welcome and protect their great guest, Osama bin Laden. This immediately prompted voices of dissent from within Waziristan, most of which were silenced through targeted killings and the remaining silenced through fear of targeted killings. Who in South Waziristan can forget Farooq Yargul Khel, a widely respected tribal leader in Wana, who in response to Maulana Noor Muhammad’s call for hospitality to Osama bin Laden, publicly announced that “Osama or his dad, as long as I am alive no militants can enter Wana bazaar.” Indeed, as long as he lived no militants could dare to enter Wana bazaar. Farooq Yargul Khel was the first anti-Taliban tribal leader in FATA who was target killed in 2003.

The point that I wish to make is that Imran Khan is fabricating stories, or at least distorting facts, whereby he minuses the indigenous tribal resistance to the Taliban in his zeal for painting the Taliban as Pakhtun nationalists. His ideas are uncritically accepted by his urban supporters who have no clue about how FATA was ‘won’ by the Taliban. Imran Khan may win the next elections with the support of the military establishment whose strategic agenda he is religiously promoting, but he must remember that — as told to me by several tribesmen across FATA — ‘tribal memory dies very hard’. This implies that the tribal people will never forget what al Qaeda and the Taliban did to them. Imran Khan must remember how he might go down in the tribal memory: standing with the assassins of those sons of the tribal soil who gave their lives in resistance to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

(To be continued)

The writer is the author of Taliban and Anti-Taliban