Pakistan vow to take control of Swat valley
Updated
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari has vowed to control Taliban militants in the country's north-western Swat valley.
The president said the Taliban would NOT be allowed to set up parallel courts or threaten people with death if they do not appear before them. Pakistan's military is fighting extremists loyal to radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah and his supporters, who're waging a violent campaign to introduce Islamic Shariah law in the region - once a popular tourist destination.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Professor Rajan Menon at Lehigh University in Pennsylvannia
- Listen:
- Windows Media
LAM: Rajan Menon first of all tell us about the Swat valley, is it a pretty lawless region in Pakistan?
MENON: Well it never used to be but it is now. It's a very large region which is effectively out of the control of the government for the most part and therefore taking it back will require a very, very considerable military effort.
LAM: And tell us a bit about the cleric Maulana Fazllulah, he has Shariah ambitions for the Swat Valley?
MENON: Yes I mean he's created in Swat what amounts to a state within a state. He has a very clear ambition of what he wants to do, which is to sort of foist his own brand of Islam on the politics and society of the region, and the only way to deal with that it seems to me is to pose effective counter force. And the 64 million dollar question is whether the Pakistani army can do that.
LAM: Well you mentioned state within a state, in fact at one point I understand Maulana Fazllulah called the region an Islamic emirate. How did matters come to this point?
MENON: Well I think there's been a creeping involvement of Islamist extremists in an adjoining area, the so-called federally-administered tribal areas (FATA), and that's where most of the world's attention has been. But the fact is that Swat is outside FATA and what this tells us is that the presence of these groups is much wider and much deeper than has been the case. And so there's been a gradual process of ensconcement by groups such as the Mullah's group.
LAM: So does he enjoy much influence in the valley?
MENON: Well there's no question that he wields power and can influence people by virtue of the power that he wields. What is less clear is whether in fact he speaks for the genuine wishes of the people in the Swat Valley. That's a very difficult question to answer. But in a sense it's almost beside the point because if one makes the argument that you cannot have a country like Pakistan that's big, important, critical to the war in Afghanistan, armed with nuclear weapons, be ...(harried or troubled) by extremists groups that are operating as I use the expression, a state within a state, then one has to sort of decide what to do about this now. The other way of proceeding of course is negotiation and conciliation. But there's been very little evidence, so the Pakistani authorities have tried to do this in the past, that it's led to much positive result.
LAM: Indeed even though that region might have traditionally been a patriarchal region .. it might not necessarily mean that the locals agree with what Maulana Fazlllulah's trying to do. Do we have any idea what local leaders, what their attitudes are towards the cleric?
MENON: I suspect that some of them are sympathetic and others are not, but there is a heavy price to be paid by vocally expressing your lack of agreement with these folks, because they have guns and they're prepared to use them to kidnap people and to use significant amounts of violence. And there is therefore a very real risk in doing that, especially because if you cannot depend on the state to take action when you're under threat, then you're in a very vulnerable position.
LAM: Well now the state has announced that it will crack down. What reaction might we expect from Maulana Fazllulah and his supporters to this crackdown?
MENON: Well I think that they will be prepared to defend the gains that they've made in Swat and so there will be bloodshed. They can also raise the temperature by as it were, "escalating horizontally", that is to say using groups that are aligned to them or groups that they control or their own personnel to launch terrorist attacks on parts of Pakistan. And so you could see the escalation continue. Then there is the whole question of the will of the Pakistani army and the intelligence services. Have they decided to do it, all out war against these groups? Is the civilian government capable of really getting the army and the ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence Agency to do this? And we're sort of in an early stage where we don't know.
