Where Radicals Call the Shots
MINGORA, PAKISTAN—Along with the aging imam's call to prayer in the remote Swat Valley burns the voice of a religious firebrand over the airwaves of a clandestine FM radio station. Among other admonitions, the young cleric, who goes by the single name Fazlullah, warns followers to avoid United Nations-sponsored polio vaccinations. The campaign, he declares, is a western plot to further reduce the local Muslim population.
In town, you will not find Hollywood or Bollywood thrillers for sale, but vendors hawk DVDs, mostly al Qaeda productions, showing the beheadings of traitors. Zealots here openly boast about giving aid and sustenance to jihadis whose aim it is to overthrow regimes in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Jihadi fervor. Set amid towering Hindu Kush mountains, the Swat Valley is a former tourist haven visited by the queen of England in 1960. Today, the region, which borders Pakistan's troubled tribal areas, is awash in what Pakistanis call "Talibanization." The growing jihadi fervor has led to a spate of devastating suicide attacks on government security forces. It has also undercut Gen. Pervez Musharraf's ability to project a sense that either the military or the nation's police are in charge along the country's rugged frontier with Afghanistan. A Pakistani Ministry of Interior report in June warned that the instability and radicalization in the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, now threatens to spread like a cancer across the entire country.
In this region, Fazlullah's clandestine radio station and several dozen like it are gaining in popularity with devout Muslim residents angry at the Musharraf regime for siding with the United States in the war on terrorism. Musharraf and his associates take a verbal beating daily from 32-year-old Fazlullah, a black-turbaned cleric who spent a year and a half in a Pakistani jail for fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. "When Muslims are under attack in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have a duty to fight back against the American crusaders and their allies," says Fazlullah, in an interview alongside a group of Pakistanis who have recently been fighting in Afghanistan against U.S. and NATO forces.
Associates of Fazlullah are suspected of involvement in a massive suicide attack last year on a nearby Pakistani Army sports field, in which a lone bomber killed 42 and injured 39 recruits of the Army's Punjab Regiment Center. After the attack, the Musharraf government made a "peace deal" with local leaders in the Bajaur district, a tribal area west of Swat, as it had done earlier in Northern Waziristan. Residents and some western governments lambasted the deals as governmental "appeasement" of radicals.
But the battle lines blur in a region of Pakistan where politicians, intelligence agents, and mullahs have cynically used common citizens as cannon fodder for decades. Many of the radicals in Pakistan's troubled Northwest openly claim ties to rogue elements within Pakistan's intelligence services.
Evidence that the Taliban is tolerated, even condoned, by government officials in some regions has prompted critics to charge that elements within Musharraf's own regime are "playing with fire." Leading Pakistani academics believe that at least some of the emerging radicalization is orchestrated to help Musharraf gain in the eyes of his strongest benefactor, Washington, by appearing to be under increasing threat from fundamentalists—a perception that Musharraf's own advisers actively promote.
With Philip Smucker
This story appears in the July 16, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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