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Saturday, January 19th, 2008

three cheers for our side

you know, i’m not sure how to end this. a maulvi figurehead wouldn’t appease anyone, i think.

basically, this is an armed battle between the army - i.e., the state - and the tehreek-i-taliban. now, the army - even if it didn’t have taliban sympathisers within - can’t go after the taliban as strongly as they would some foreign attackers, because that would only alienate more people from the state. the taliban, on the other hand, don’t have this problem, i think, because their support is based mainly on ideological grounds. it seems like they think they’re fighting for a utopian ideal, and no cost is too great to achieve it.

in the middle ground, i guess, there are people who sympathise with political resistance against the state, but who are simultaneously in favour of a state that’s less committed to enforcing an ideology. i think they usually end up yielding in the face of force, whether from the taliban or the state. i don’t know, but it’s certainly possible that, if this does become a more widespread thing, we could see a third group - or maybe more - emerge - one that’s anti-taliban and anti-state. if any such groups ally themselves based on ethnicity, and not behind the idea of pakistan, then we could see the breakup of pakistan into more than just two or three parts.

in ideological terms, the strange thing about this situation is that both the pakistani state and the taliban have similar lineages - ones drawn from islam. despite the labels tossed around - infidel! extremist! - it’s very difficult to convince most muslims - like most pakistani citizens - to fight other muslims. in political terms, there’s the fact that most of the support for the taliban comes from places where people don’t consider themselves part of pakistan, and not accountable to the state.

in any sort of discussion or negotiation, i suspect the state and the taliban wouldn’t be able to reach a settlement because the taliban would ask for shariah law, and the state would ask them to lay down their arms. and, understandably, neither would be willing to make those concessions.

so, i think, there is definitely space for some sort of islamic project to reconcile the two, and there’s also space for a political project to reconcile them. martial law won’t do it, and neither will legions of suicide bombers. since they are both too busy fighting each other, someone else will have to start working on these issues.

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