Syed
Saleem Shahzad: Never forgotten By Vijay Prashad
This article
originally appeared on October 11, 2011, five
months after Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Asia Times
Online Pakistan Bureau Chief, was
murdered.
(To purchase Saleem's
Shahzad's book, Inside al-Qaeda and the Taliban,
click here.)
Several months ago, I received an e-mail
from Syed Saleem Shahzad, replying to a request
for an essay for a book on Pakistan that I am
co-editing.
Saleem was interested in the
project, but could not commit to it. He was
chasing some important stories, he said, and
besides, he was busy writing his own book.
I had read him in Asia Times Online and
enjoyed his remarkable access to sources inside
the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and his acute
and honest analysis of
their role in Pakistani society and in the "war on
terror".
It was with great sadness that I
heard the news that Saleem had been killed on May
30 at the age of 40. Not long after, Pluto
published his book. It reads like a summary of
Saleem's reportage and provides us with a window
into his superb journalistic skills and ethics.
Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban shows us
what journalists can do if they decide not to
"embed" themselves with the powers-that-be.
In early August, news came in that the
Taliban had shot down a US helicopter in Wardak,
with about 30 members of the Navy SEAL Team 6
killed along with a half-dozen Afghan National
Army personnel. This was the US armed forces
outfit that had been responsible for the
assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad,
Pakistan on May 2.
Given that Bin Laden's
death came at a time of considerable economic
distress for the people of the United States, one
would have thought that it was the perfect
opportunity for the US to walk away from the
conflict. Not so - promises of a drawdown of US
forces in Afghanistan come alongside a military
surge on the ground.
The attacks within
Kabul on September 13 had now dampened any talk of
an end to the conflict or withdrawal of the US
military.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai
grows increasingly frustrated with his Western
friends, as the mujahideen of the Quetta
shura advance from their Pakistani redoubts
into the southeastern districts of Afghanistan.
Talks about talks have gone nowhere. The war that
straddles the Durand Line that separates Pakistan
and Afghanistan seems unstoppable.
Strategic patience When then-US
secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld went to Kabul
in April 2003 to announce "the end of major combat
operations'"in Afghanistan, he should have taken
the trouble to fly across the border to Pakistan
to meet Saleem for verification of whether this
was actually the case.
It is true that the
"daisy cutter" bombs from the air and the dollars
liberally distributed on the ground had led to the
death or capture of around half the Taliban forces
by early 2002. But those that remained alive fled
to Pakistan and to their homes, waiting for word
from their amir ul-mu'mineen (supreme
leader), Mullah Omar, now said to be lodged in
Quetta, Pakistan.
What Saleem tracked was
the process by which both the Taliban and al-Qaeda
refined their strategy in the badlands of northern
Pakistan. It is the case that there is no single
Taliban, that there is now the Taliban of
Afghanistan (led largely by the Quetta
shura) and the Taliban of Pakistan.
Saleem acknowledges this but does not
accept the complete divide. The two branches of
the Taliban are able to operate with a common
strategy, foisted on them by their reliance on
each other through operations of the Afghan,
Pakistan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) armed forces.
The Taliban members
on both sides of the border are less interested in
al-Qaeda's civilizational war between the
"Crusaders" and "Islam". What the Taliban members
seem more given over to is a straightforward war
of national liberation, with Islamic
characteristics - with some differences in
Afghanistan, where the enemy is NATO, and
Pakistan, where the enemy is the United
States-influenced Islamabad government.
Al-Qaeda had much greater global
ambitions, which allowed its leadership to see the
Afghan theater from a regional and global
perspective.
It was al-Qaeda's wider lens
that allowed it to figure out a strategy to
distract the United States, to use its allies in
the Pakistan state and society, and to draw on the
remarkable geography of the Hindu Kush corridor to
link up with the Arab lands via Iran.
This
broad push enabled al-Qaeda to put the brakes on
the Taliban's urgent agenda, and to build a base
in northern Pakistan in anticipation of a suitable
time to strike in Afghanistan and, incidentally,
in Pakistan. The story of this strategic patience
forms the heart of Inside Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban.
To set up the new base,
al-Qaeda helped the Taliban to first displace the
traditional tribal authority structure in northern
Pakistan and then to replace the entrenched elders
by the younger mujahideen, helped along by the
pir bhais, what they call their
sympathizers in the military.
Al-Qaeda's
influence among these younger mujahideen was not
only military (their hardened Uzbek and Arab
fighters joined up) but also ideological - they
mention the position of takfeer, which is
to say that the Muslim rulers of Pakistan and
Afghanistan are apostates and could be overthrown.
The harsh treatment of the mujahideen at the hands
of the Pakistani military and the tribal police,
the khasadars, deepened the mujahideen's
antipathy to what they saw as a nominally Muslim
state.
Saleem knew many of the
second-level leaders of the mujahideen, and it is
from them that he learned the broad outline of
their strategy. (The portraits of these leaders,
such as Muhammed Ilyas Kashmiri and Bin Yameen,
are in themselves worth the price of the book.)
What the ground-level leadership of the
mujahideen wanted was to create a base for
themselves in northern Pakistan and in southern
Afghanistan, in the Pashtu-speaking regions. They
did not rely on one town or one district, but
moved their base if things heated up on either
side of the border.
The Pakistani Taliban
used these mobile bases to make forays into the
center of the country, including into the cities.
The general tendency for the Afghan Taliban was to
move their base from the Waziristan tribal areas
in Pakistan northwards to the districts of Bajaur
and Mohmand. Once this was accomplished, the
corridor into Nangarhar and Kunar provinces across
the border would be established. These
developments along the Hindu Kush set the stage
for the Afghan Taliban offensive in 2006.
That advance took the NATO forces by
surprise. But as one reads Saleem's book, it seems
inevitable that after trying to cut off the supply
lines into Afghanistan, the Taliban - which had
begun to fashion itself as the mujahideen, with
the glamour of the anti-Soviet years intact -
would make a move toward both Jalalabad and
Kandahar.
One reason Saleem is able to
grasp the strategy of the two Talibans and
al-Qaeda at this local level is that he does not
focus on the thinking of Bin Laden and his circle,
nor does he derive their theory from a
psychological portrait of them.
He notes
that Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri
(now leader) were "in the background" or even
"invisible"; as such, the death of Bin Laden would
not matter to the developments laid out in this
book. Instead, he traces the strategy of the
mujahideen and its al-Qaeda advisors, and
demonstrates how al-Qaeda-influenced thinkers and
militants made the most use of the contradictions
of northern Pakistan to establish al rayah,
the al-Qaeda black flag, in their mountain
fortresses.
It was this same kind of
fluidity that enabled these advisors to switch the
jihadis' battleground from Kashmir to Mumbai in
India (November 2008), not so much to further the
azadi (freedom) movement in the Kashmir
Valley as to distract the attention of the
Pakistani military away from the north toward the
Indian border.
(Arif Jamal's Shadow
War shows us how the Pakistani army tried to
refuel the jihadi commitment to struggle in
Kashmir, but found few takers. Their earlier
jihadi cadre was no longer willing to be used as
cannon fodder for Islamabad). The main purpose was
to consolidate a natural fortress in the Hindu
Kush from which to launch its campaign on both
sides of the Durand Line. Such has been the case
from 2006 to the present.
Al-Qaeda was
able to move its agenda through the two wings of
the Taliban only to a certain extent. When it
became clear that the Taliban were not simply
going to do al-Qaeda's bidding, the latter formed
its own military wing, the Lashkar al-Zil, its
shadow army, to facilitate its agenda. Just as
NATO guided and drove the Afghan National Army,
the Lashkar pushed and prodded the two Talibans.
By 2008, al-Qaeda's ideology "was too
deeply entrenched in the minds of the mountain
men", Saleem writes. "Their strategy so clearly
marked on every mountain, rock and stone in the
tribal areas, that the militant leaders felt
little worry facing the world's best armies." Note
the use of the last word in that quote in the
plural: Saleem had in mind the NATO forces on one
side of the Durand Line and the Pakistani forces
on the other.
Broader canvas One of the crucial points that Saleem makes is
that the Taliban of the Quetta shura and of
the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (the
TNSM, an Islamist group banned in Pakistan in
2002) had an agenda and a strategy that "did not
extend beyond localized boundaries".
In
Swat, the problem, as local historian
Sultan-e-Rome argues, is that the Pakistani legal
system was seen as corrupt, and it was the lure of
the Islamic courts that powered the TNSM.
Matthew Hoh, the senior US administrator
in Zabul province, offered a similar assessment
from the other side of the Durand Line in his
resignation letter of 2009: "I have observed that
the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the
white banner of the Taliban, but rather against
the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed
by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."
These local and regional contradictions
provided an historic opportunity for al-Qaeda,
whose "agenda stretches beyond borders". The
group's second-level intellectuals and militants
provided a framework for the local conflicts and
made them intelligible on a broader canvas. It is
this work that Saleem recounts, at least this work
on the Pakistani side of the border - no similar
study of the Afghan side is yet available,
although the work of researcher and writer Antonio
Giustozzi is very instructive. Saleem had no
interest in putting together a final chapter
containing advice to the mandarins of power. He
simply gives us what he sees, and how he sees it.
United States Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta said recently that the defeat of al-Qaeda
is "within reach", repeating the hubris of
Rumsfeld from 2003.
Such arrogance comes
up against reality in the Taliban's stronghold
along the Hindu Kush, an area well known to
Saleem, who is far less optimistic about easy
solutions.
Unlike Rumsfeld and Panetta,
Saleem loves the people of the spinal cord of
mountains that runs from Iran to China - he feels
for them and shares their despair and hopes. A
politics that comes from such humanity might
actually find a pathway out of the long season of
conflict that has torn apart the Hindu Kush. It is
what Saleem points toward. I hope we have the
capacity to listen.
Vijay
Prashad is Professor and Director of
International Studies at Trinity College,
Hartford, United States. This spring he will
publish two books: Arab Spring, Libyan Winter
(AK Press) and Uncle Swami: South Asians in
America Today (New Press). He is the author
of Darker Nations: A People's History of the
Third World (New Press), which won the 2009
Muzaffar Ahmed Book Prize.
(This
article originally appeared on October 11, 2011,
in HIML South Asian, see here.
Published courtesy of HIML South
Asian.)
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