Dude! Who radicalised my people?

 A much delayed book review:  Taliban and Anti Taliban by Farhat Taj

What would a Pakistani pashtun academic and Michael Moore the writer and film maker have in common? I pondered this as I looked for a copy of the book Taliban and Anti Taliban in Pakistan. Barely anyone I had met, including those who had/have served in the tribal areas had heard of her work. 
If this book is a reflection, the two of them share a passion for the polemic and shattering myths.

Not so long ago it is said that there was a meeting between a tribal leader from Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas and a senior official of the Pakistan's government. The topic of discussion was the presence of Al Qaeda in his area with the alleged collusion of the state. Mirza Alam was a Waziri tribal leader of the Yargul Khel and by the end of his conversation he knew he was going to be killed. He is said to have gone to meet a local undertaker and informed him that he was about to die as a martyr and that suitable arrangements should be made. Shortly afterwards he was dead.

This story is the central premise of Farhat Taj's book the Taliban and anti Taliban and if there was any doubt on the writers views it should be answered by the front cover. The Front cover has a picture of between the Pakistan Corp Commander, garlanding the Taliban leader Nek Muhammad.

What makes this book different is that while Western writers have charged the Pakistan military establishment with duplicity in its dealings with the Taliban  this is the first by someone from the area. Taj challenges several key theories that have developed in the last decade about the Pashtun tribal areas. She argues that the radicalisation and fighting that has happened in the region is because of Pakistan state policy,Arab money, jihadi volunteers and not a product of the local culture of the society. 

The opening chapters introduce the reader to what is called Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. A buffer region that originally separated the British Raj from Afghanistan, it is governed by the FCR(Frontier Crimes Regulation). The FCR  ensured order in the region through a mixture of institutionalising tribal customs and including brutal punitive measures that kept the region separate from the rest of the 'settled' areas. The punitive measures and restrictions that apply are by todays standards exceptionally regressive and range from collective punishment for whole families and tribes for the acts of individuals. Imprisonment without the right of judicial review, and till recently political partys were not allowed to operate in the region.

In her words 'There is a great deal of British colonial literature on the Pakhtun that orientalize them. The Pakhtun have never systematically challenged the literature due to their backwardness in education. The researchers and journalists writing in the context of the war on terror have been uncritically drawing upon the colonial literature. This has contributed towards strengthening the colonial stereotypes about the Pakhtun'

Here the writer draws the distinction between the conservatism of the tribal people and that being equated with sympathy for Islamist related extremism. She traces the origins of the Pakistani state collusion with people like Gulbadin Hekmatyar in the 1970's as a means of countering Pashtun nationalism. This in turn was followed by the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan where in an attempt to control the Afghan Mujahidin, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) with the backing of Americans and Saudis marginalised Afghan nationalists in favour of Islamists.

Following 9/11, the escaping remnants of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda escaped into Pakistan. She highlights how the local representatives tried to rally tribal forces (called lashkars)  against the influx of Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda. Here the lashkar leaders were systemtically targetted by the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and either killed or forced in their thousands into exile.

The book for certain has flaws, the final chapter about extremism in amongst the Norweigian Muslims reads like an after thought. The book while being thorough does not attempt to seek a balanced argument on the causes of the Pakistan state insecurity. Her sympathy for Pashtun nationalism leads to her ignoring other major party's like the Pakistan People Party and Jamiat-Ulema Islam.

Another weakness is it does not look at the broader generational changes going through the region. The Tribal Areas dynamics have changed for other reasons, large expatriate populations, internal displacement, money and wars have changed the region forever.

What it does do is that it challenges the traditional narrative, it is a polemic in an age when academics shy away from confrontations.

More importantly it offers a narrative in a region defined by either the priorities of an occupying power next door or by a state narrative which relegates their own people to strategic assets. In that way it is a brave polemic and it deserves to be read.