[DEBATE] : Swat deal: US wants fighting, not peace in Pakistan

[Riaz K Tayob]

Swat deal: US wants fighting, not peace in Pakistan

By Waseem Shehzad

Will the deal announced on February 16 in Swat bring peace to the 
troubled region that has been engulfed in violence for nearly two years 
now? More importantly, will it hold considering that it was criticized 
even before all the details were known? Both the US and its agents in 
Pakistan have launched a vicious campaign, raising the specter of a 
Taliban takeover of the rest of the country as well. Is this true and 
whose purpose does it serve if the military campaign against the people 
of Swat continues that has claimed hundreds of lives and turned an 
estimated 800,000 people into refugees that are now herded into the 
Jalozai camp (located between Peshawar and Nowshehra) in the North West 
Frontier Province (NWFP)?

Prior to the deal, the Taliban, or whosoever was involved in fighting 
against government forces, announced a 10-day truce. The following day, 
Pakistani officials said they had struck a deal to accept a legal system 
compatible with Shari‘ah in Swat in return for peace. This essentially 
amounted to accepting a de facto situation that had already existed on 
the ground for years. In much of the tribal belt, local customs mixed 
with a sprinkling of Islamic laws are applied. In Swat, a group led by 
Maulana Sufi Muhammad calling itself Tehrik Nifaz-e Shari‘at-e Muhammadi 
(TNSM) has operated for decades. Sufi Muhammad came to prominence just 
prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 when he sent 
thousands of volunteers in support of the Taliban. Many were butchered 
when US B-52 bombers dropped 1,000-pound bombs. Now his son-in-law, 
Mullah Fazlullah has also joined the fray and rules the roost in Swat.

“After successful negotiations, all un-Islamic laws related to the 
judicial system, those against the Quran and the Sunnah would be subject 
to cancellation and considered null and void,” said the Provincial 
Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain who belongs to the secular 
Awami National Party. This is, in fact, exactly according to the 
constitution of Pakistan but this provision has never been followed. 
Though unknown to him, Sufi Muhammad who had long advocated the 
restoration of Shari‘ah in Swat and pledged in return to persuade 
Taliban fighters to lay down their arms, was trying to fulfill an 
article of the Pakistan constitution. It appears that as part of the 
deal, a Chinese engineer, Long Xiaowei, who had been held hostage since 
August, was also released.

The fact that the deal materialized amidst intense fighting between 
government forces and the militants indicates that backdoor discussions 
were underway for sometime. Further, that the attack on Swat, as 
elsewhere in the tribal region, was instigated at the behest of the US. 
Several months earlier, the US ambassador in Islamabad, Anne Paterson 
had called the World Food Organization (WFO) representative and USAID 
officials in Pakistan for a meeting. During the meeting the US envoy 
told the WFO official to prepare plans to cater for 800,000 refugees 
from Swat to be housed at the Jalozai camp. The US would pay the costs. 
Why would the US be interested in looking after Pakistani refugees and 
how did the US envoy know that there would be 800,000 of them from Swat? 
This clearly points to prior knowledge of what the US expected the 
Pakistan army to do and what its consequences would be.

It is also interesting to note that the Pakistan army chief, General 
Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani accompanied by Pakistan intelligence chief, 
lieutenant general Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was in Washington a week after the 
Swat deal was announced. Kiyani’s visit was aimed at coordinating 
strategy with US military planners for a major offensive against the 
Taliban and al-Qaeda both in Pakistan and Afghanistan. US President 
Barack Obama has made Afghanistan the central plank of his war strategy 
that includes the tribal areas of Pakistan as well. Last month, the 
region was attacked twice: in the first drone attack in North 
Waziristan, 30 people were killed while in the second attack on February 
16 another 31 persons perished, this time in Sur Pul in the Kurram 
Agency. Since becoming president, Obama has intensified attacks against 
Pakistan despite claiming to change policy to improve US image globally. 
It would appear the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan are dispensable 
and not included in this “change of policy” deal.

The Swat deal must be viewed in the context of the larger US aim. It is 
not true that the Pakistani government led by Asif Zardari struck a deal 
with the Taliban in Swat on its own; Zardari cannot do anything without 
American permission. The deal is a ruse to draw the fighters into 
disarming with the ultimate aim of eliminating them. It will, therefore, 
not be allowed to succeed even if the people support it. There is an 
even more sinister plan at work. Many of these so-called Taliban 
leaders, including Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah, are on the US 
payroll getting huge sums of money to keep the region in turmoil. 
Pakistani commentators have asked why Imam Dera, Faz-lullah’s madrassa 
that sits across Fiza Ghat on the Indus River in Swat, has not been 
attacked while Jalaluddin Haq-qani’s compound in Waziristan has been 
repeatedly bombed? Fazlullah is a CIA asset; he serves the US plan to 
create so much mayhem that the ground would be prepared to remove 
Pakistan’s nuclear wea-pons for “fear” that they might fall into the 
hands of “terrorists”.

This is not merely Pakistani paranoia. Carefully placed leaks in the US 
media point to this fact. In one particularly detailed article, David 
Sanger of the New York Times wrote on January 11, 2009 about the 
“threat” posed by militants to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. To get a feel 
for how US officials think, consider the following from Sanger’s 
article, “Just last month [December] in Washington, members of the 
federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons 
of Mass Destruction Proli-feration and Terrorism made it clear that for 
sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a 
series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of 
Pakistan’s nuclear technology going awry. ‘When you map WMD and 
terrorism, all roads intersect in Pakistan,’ Graham Allison, a Harvard 
professor and a leading nuclear expert on the commission, told me. ‘The 
nuclear security of the arsenal is now a lot better than it was. But the 
unknown variable here is the future of Pakistan itself, because it’s not 
hard to envision a situation in which the state’s authority falls apart 
and you’re not sure who’s in control of the weapons, the nuclear labs, 
the materials’.”

Through their policies, the Americans are working to make sure that the 
State authority in Pakistan collapses. The release on February 6 of Dr 
Abdul Qadeer Khan from house arrest has provided further grist to the 
American rumor mill. For the record, Dr Khan, a highly respected 
Pakistani nuclear scientist and considered father of the Pakistani 
nuclear bomb, was not charged with any crime. In fact, in 2005 he was 
forced to “confess” on television that he was “solely responsible for 
smuggling nuclear weapons” and then promptly pardoned by then president, 
General (retired) Pervez Musharraf, for obvious reasons. Musharraf also 
declined to allow US interrogation of Dr Khan. Instead, he placed him 
under house arrest in Islamabad. Dr Khan challenged this in court that 
finally quashed his house arrest order. The US and Western media outlets 
paint Dr Khan as a person walking around with nuclear weapons in his 
suitcase. Regrettably, the ill-informed public in the West believes such 
propaganda. Dr Khan has not been involved in Pakistan’s nuclear program 
for many years. Besides, a nuclear bomb is not a toy that people carry 
in a suitcase but who should educate the ignorant people of America when 
there is such relentless propaganda against Pakistan? Nearly 30 percent 
of Americans still believe that Saddam Husain was involved in the 9/11 
attacks and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Lies repeated 
endlessly can make people believe anything.

There is another dimension to the Pakistani nuclear file that the US is 
peddling: they allege Pakistani nuclear scientists with Islamic 
sympathies could pass critical knowledge to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. 
Western journalists including Sanger, have a habit of quoting unnamed 
“senior intelligence officials” about how “foreign-trained Pakistani 
scientists, including some suspected of harboring sympathy for radical 
Islamic causes, were returning to Pakistan to seek jobs within the 
country’s nuclear infrastructure…” This is not very different from what 
the Sunday Times of London had reported on January 4, 1992 when it ran a 
screaming headline about Iraqi nuclear scientists “helping” Algerian 
scientists to make nuclear bombs. The story was based on information 
from the same “anonymous western intelligence sources”. Only a week 
earlier the Islamic Salvation Front had won a majority of seats in the 
first round of parliamentary elections in Algeria and was poised to take 
power. Before the military struck — with the blessings and encouragement 
of the West — the Sunday Times front-page story was aimed at raising the 
bogey of a “nuclear-armed Islamic Algeria”, and therefore, preparing the 
ground for Western action to prevent “Islamists” from getting hold of 
nuclear weapons. When the military in Algeria unleashed its reign of 
terror and the Islamic Salvation Front was destroyed, the London Times 
story vanished into the same thin air from where it had emerged, never 
to be heard again.

Sanger’s January 11 story uses the same technique that the Times story 
on Algeria utilized 17 years ago. Here is how Sanger’s story continued: 
‘“I have two worries,” one of the most senior officials in the Bush 
administration, who had read all of the intelligence with care, told me 
one day last spring. One is what happens “when they move the weapons,” 
he said, explaining that the United States feared that some groups could 
try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope 
that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons 
closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to 
seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai in 
late November, officials told me they feared that one of the attackers’ 
motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events. “And 
the second,” the official said, choosing his words carefully, “is what I 
believe are steadfast efforts of different extremist groups to 
infiltrate the labs and put sleepers and so on in there.”’ The function 
of these “sleepers”, Sanger’s intelligence officials tell us, is that 
they would “walk out the door with the knowledge of how to produce fuel.”

This knowledge of fuel production would then be passed on to Osama bin 
Laden in his cave in Afghanistan or wherever he might be, if he is still 
alive, or to the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Omar who would promptly 
build a nuclear bomb! So there you have it from the top intelligence 
officials of the United States of America! Obviously, the Americans 
would like the world to believe that making a nuclear bomb is no more 
complicated than baking bread and since most Pakistani nuclear 
scientists are either open or closet “Islamists”, the world has much to 
fear. They are also trying to find out how many nuclear bombs Pakistan 
has, where they are stored and how they are protected. No 
self-respecting State would give such critical information away yet 
Pakistan is under pressure to do so. Not surprisingly, Pakistani 
officials suspect that the real intent of the US is to gather the 
information needed to grab, or neutralize, the country’s arsenal.

But the US is not content with mere sniffing for nuclear information; it 
also has its Pakistani agents in the media, the political establishment, 
universities and indeed in the tribal belt itself that help advance its 
agenda. Further, US drone attacks and Pakistani military operations in 
the tribal area are meant to turn the people of this region against 
Pakistan. Nobody enjoys being bombed. A commonly heard refrain among the 
Pathans these days is that they do not wish to live in Pakistan anymore 
because they are being bombed and butchered by their own army. The US 
also continues to harp on the point that Pakistan cannot control its own 
tribal belt so the US must intervene to do it. Successive Pakistani 
governments—both military and civilian—have provided bases and other 
facilities to the US to operate there. For instance, the US has 
established a huge military base near Tarbela Dam where massive 
stockpiles of weapons are stored. There are fears that an accident could 
lead to a massive explosion causing breach in the earth-filled dam. This 
would inundate large parts of the Frontier province causing millions of 
casualties.

US-instigated mayhem in the tribal area has now seeped into the rest of 
the country as well. This is what the US wants to have a pretext to go 
in and take out Pakistan’s nuclear weapons before they “fall into the 
hands of the extremists”. This has been the US plan all along; only the 
naïve rulers of Pakistan have been unable, or unwilling, to see it.