Page 1 of 2 To die under the
wings of B-52s By Philip
Smucker
CHAKDARRA FORT, Malakand District,
North West Frontier Province, Pakistan - This week
I returned to a corner of the globe that
represents for me one of the starting points for
George W Bush's "war on terror".
It was
here in November, 2001, when I had a casual chat
with a Pakistani frontier cop that I realized that
it was not going to be an easy war for my country,
the United States, to win. Of course, the kingpin
who planned and boasted about the success of the attack
on
the World Trade Center was somewhere out there in
the snowy Afghan highlands, but he represented
just the tip of the iceberg.
I had just
paid a jihadi recruiter for a music cassette tape
of a mother singing to her son, admonishing him to
prepare for his own death for the sake of the holy
war. It was a kind of a duet sung back and forth
by the son and mother in the anticipation of an
ensuing mission that, beneath the wings of the
B-52 bombers overhead, was already looking
suicidal.
On that balmy day I asked a
senior prosecutor in the Malakand district,
Mohammad Zaman, what he intended to do about the
thousands of jihadis rallying to run into
Afghanistan and meet the US ground troops. His
answer did not reassure me. "They have been
blocking our roads and threatening us at every
turn, so our attitude is let them go and die in
Afghanistan beneath the wings of the B-52s, if
that is what they really want."
But that
view wasn't really representative, and I felt - at
the time - that he was hedging a bit. A great
number of Pashtun locals in Pakistan's remote
tribal regions saw the war in Afghanistan as yet
another opportunity to take on Western infidels,
as they had done the Soviets with such success -
and so they openly or secretly supported Sufi
Mohammed, the leader of TNSM (Movement for the
Enforcement of Islamic Laws), who was about to
send a few thousand locals to their death or
imprisonment in Afghanistan.
I also spoke
to a regular cop, a bearded and cordial chap named
Farman Ullah. He spoke to me beneath a sturdy
British fort, where a young Winston Churchill, one
of President George W Bush's personal heroes,
reported on the efforts of British troops to
subdue a local uprising and reign in Islamic
radicals during the Raj's semi-glorious Victorian
era.
Ullah smiled up at the crusty little
embattlement and said: "Some people say he was a
good man, but as far as I'm concerned he was just
another infidel."
And so over five years
on, I had now returned to the same wretched valley
- none the wiser, but considerably more jaded -
with the intent of gaining some insight into the
current attitudes of the locals about the war and
Westerners. There had not been much good news,
particularly in the last year.
In October,
2006, there was an air strike on a madrassa
in adjacent Bajaur district that left some 80
militants and students dead - as well as one
Liaqatullah, a leading follower of Sufi Mohammed.
Elders and local supporters said that under the
rubble they discovered religious students, some of
them not even in their teens.
Though
President General Pervez Musharraf claimed
Pakistani responsibility for the attack, calling
the school a militant camp, tribal leaders and
locals still insisted to me that US bombs caused
most of the damage. They said the bombing actually
began some 20 minutes before the Pakistani
helicopter gun ships even arrived overhead.
Out here on the perimeter of the civilized
universe, perceptions are everything. Retaliation
came a week later, and it was massive, greater
than any suicide attack ever witnessed in
neighboring Afghanistan. On a Pakistani Army
sports field shaded by eucalyptus trees, a lone
suicide bomber blew himself up, killing 42 and
injuring 39 recruits of the Punjab Regiment
Center.
I asked the same group of frontier
cops about all this. "People here were clearly
upset at what happened at the madrassa,"
said Ghulam Khaliq, a police official. "There is a
general feeling that the Taliban is under attack
and oppressed both here in Pakistan and in
Afghanistan. We have been unable to determine if
more young men are going for the jihad in
Afghanistan, but, on the other hand, we can't
check every car."
No one really knows how
many young jihadis are bolting into the highlands
of Afghanistan this summer. But from US military
and Afghan intelligence reporting, it is a fair
number and many of them are equipped with a lot
more than a Kalashnikov.
Contrast that
with the demoralization that took place when most
of Sufi Mohammed's minions were virtually
annihilated in 2001 and 2002, and you've got a
much bigger jihad on your hands. And the attitude
towards Americans, I found, is pretty much "catch
and kill as you can".
A grizzled Fazul
Haq, a sit-in for the now imprisoned Sufi
Mohammed, who is due to be released this year,
told me further north in Mingora city in the
tranquil Swat Valley that "American spies" will be
beheaded as soon as they are apprehended by his
group.
"We have informed the government in
writing that if we see American spies in Swat,
whatever happens to them, we are not responsible,"
he said. "They want us to rescind our order, but
we refuse." Several of Fazul Haq's local
madrassa students listened attentively as
he spoke.
I asked one of them if he had
seen any of the myriad jihadi DVDs available in
the local market, some of which showed "live"
beheadings of American soldiers in Iraq. He nodded
with a smile. "I am happy to see non-Muslims
beheaded," he said and then shut up to listen
more.
There has been an awful lot of talk
in the Western press about the frightful and new
"Talibanization" of Pakistan. But the
radicalization of Pakistan has been a long time
coming and the
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