What Do the Taliban Want?

[Riaz Haq]

News headlines from Pakistan's tribal belt proclaim a new "Peace Deal" with "militants" along with an appeal for the Shia victims of the Kurram agency blockade imposed by the Taliban. On the surface, these two developments seem disconnected.

The News Headlines:
The "Peace Deal" involves a leading militant in Pakistan's Khyber region, Mangal Bagh, and the local administration to end nearly two weeks of fighting, according to the BBC.

Another BBC report indicates that doctors in Pakistan's north western tribal region of Kurram have appealed for urgent medical aid to avert a humanitarian crisis. Shia Muslim areas in Kurram have been cut off by the Taliban from the rest of the country since November 2007 following violence between Shias and Sunnis.

Strategy Behind Peace Deals:
Are these "Peace Deals" being made one deal at a time in a piecemeal way? Are there any enforcement mechanisms? Is there a comprehensive strategy to end the Taliban insurgency? Or is it just an interim effort to the postpone the inevitable battle for another day?

Given the history of the past "Peace Deals", each deal has helped the Taliban become stronger to make further demands. The Taliban have not only solidified their grip on the tribal belt on both sides of the Durand line, but the militants are now feeling strong enough to threaten settled areas in Swat and Peshawar as well as Kandahar. They are not on the defensive in FATA any more. They are bringing the war to Pakistan's and Afghanistan's major cities, including the capitals.

What Do the Taliban Want?
So, what do the Taliban want? Recently I had an email exchange with a gentleman in Pakistan on this question. I am sharing with you the message I received and the my reply below:

The Message I got:
No one wants to give the Country to Taliban and ironically neither are the Taliban interested.
All they want is purity in the Muslims all over the world, including, but not limited to Pakistan.
Their aims are simple. All Men should grow beards, and be dressed properly, i.e. kurta (long tunic) shalwar (baggy pants) and turban.
Women were created to serve the menfolk, nothing more, nothing less. They should reproduce and look after the children, do house chores, like sweeping, washing of dirty linen etc. For doing all this they do not need to go to school and get education. Education at home is enough.
Since music, video, films and the like are all haram (forbidden), all indulging in these sins needs to be made example of. Video Shops, Cinema houses and the like should be burnt down.
Idolatry is sin, so there should be no statues, no paintings of humans and animals, no cameras, still or movie.
Usury (Interest) is Haram (forbidden) so there should be no banks no cooperatives and the like.
All females should be veiled, from 6 years above and the veil should be total coverage which some low intellect people call shuttle cock. (helps boost the textile industry)
As long as Muslims adopt this (what is the basic edicts of Islam) the Taliban would not bother them.

My Answer:
Really? I like your sarcastic tone. Here's more in the same vein.
If what you say is correct (and I have no reason to doubt it), who will be the judge, the jury and the executioner?
Isn't there a need to have a ministry of vice and virtue?
And the powerful intelligence service and religious police?
So , the bottom line is, they do want power to become the final arbiters of good and evil. Of who is a Muslim and who is not.
They want a theocratic Police state, not democracy.
And they want exclusive monopoly on the use of violence in society.

How Should Pakistanis Respond?
While the tone in this exchange is satirical, the topic is extremely serious with far-reaching consequences for Pakistan, South Asia and the world. Though his remarks are tongue-in-cheek, the gentleman I corresponded with clearly understands the Taliban agenda. But do the rest of the Pakistanis understand it well enough to take a clear position? Why is their so much ambivalence on this subject in Pakistan? It seems to me that many Pakistanis are willing to accept the myth that the Taliban are fighting for Islam by standing up to "evil" Americans and America's allies in its "war on terror". What they really need to understand is that this a defining battle between two competing visions of Pakistani society. A battle for a modern, pluralistic and democratic Pakistan versus a medieval theocracy bent on coercive implementation of their misguided interpretation of the Shariah laws. Pakistanis need to stop being confused or neutral in this fight and clearly understand the large implications of the Taliban's success for their own lives.

[khalid Hassan]

Very interesting post Riaz Saheb, I am confused myself, couldn't find the answers yet, wish the scenario is as black and white as you have described. Personally, I see lot of grey here, can't take a side. To me, the notion, "A battle for a modern, pluralistic and democratic Pakistan versus a medieval theocracy bent on coercive implementation of their misguided interpretation of the Shariah laws" is very questionable. My argument is which modern, pluralistic and democratic Pakistan you are referring to, it could be an imagination of a very optimistic individual but in reality Pakistan has never been and the way things are going, will never be any of the above mentioned state. The whole existence of Taliban is a result of the failed socio economic system and a confused, imported system of governance that we inherited from the very beginning. I can see a paradigm shift of the whole ideology of the very definition of our culture and the nation as a whole in these past 15-20 years. I remember when I was growing up, I witnessed state sponsored recruitment of young, very sincere to their beliefs and faith individuals for Afghan and Kashmir Jihad, I have seen public congregations designed to exploit peoples religious feelings specially youths to participate in some one else’s war. What was that, to me it is a biggest injustice we did to our people, we created our own monster, we created a breed of individuals who are by the way, very passionate and committed people who delivered and who got the job done (at the cost of their lives) but now, since the policy has changed and they are not needed any more, we want them decommissioned. The core of the issue is, we are talking about ideology, which was taught and nurtured by our government, if some one realizes now that the whole deal is misguided, confused or outdated, it’s another story. The bottom line is, it cant be erased from the hearts and minds of people who live and die by it, just by telling them, guys the rules have changed now, what ever you’ve been doing and thinking is wrong and here is the new version, approved (and prescribed) by our lords. It won’t be easy and the confusion and neutrality of the nation you were referring to, I believe this is the main reason.

[Riaz Haq]

We can choose to dwell on the past and find a lot of blame to go around. But, right now, Pakistan faces an existential struggle against the threat of an enemy which we may have unwittingly created. Unless we can change our thinking on this issue and either reform or isolate and defeat the misguided zealots, we will never be able to live in peace and freedom.

[Riaz Haq]

Here's a PakistanToday story on HuT's campaign against voting and democracy:

The banned outfit Hizbut Tahrir (HT) has started its campaign across the country to convince people not to participate in elections and join hands with the outlawed organisation for the unification of Muslim world as a single state under the leadership of Sheikh Ata Abu Rishta.
The campaign has been started in almost all parts of the country and the HT activists have started holding public gatherings and corner meetings to convince people on a point that democracy was against Islam.
The intelligence agencies have started operation against the HT and arrested two of its activists from outside a mosque for distributing leaflets among the worshipers and preaching them not to participate in elections.
Through the leaflet, the banned outfit invited people to join hands with them to abolish democracy from Pakistan and establish caliphate.
The leaflet reads further, “Muslims have not been stung merely twice, but countless times by the current system in Pakistan. Each time new faces come through coup or election, the people curse the old faces. However, only after a while, the new faces appear even uglier and more despised than the older faces. The current system is incapable of looking after the affairs of the people and securing the rights that Allah guaranteed humankind, regardless of their race, language, gender or religion.”
It reads further, “Pakistan's current system is a continuation of the British rule occupation that abolished Islamic rule in the Indian subcontinent in the first place. Even though the Muslims shed their pure blood to establish Pakistan in the name of Islam, it was the British Parliament that created Pakistan’s initial legislation under its Indian Independence Act of 1947.”
“It is democracy, designed by and inherited from the colonialist kufr that separates our ummah from Islam and its ruling system of khilafah, whether in Pakistan, Egypt or Turkey, Tunisia or Indonesia. The claim that yet more elections within this system would bring change of system is a lie made to secure this system from abolition,” it also reads.
“It is the Khilafah alone that ensures our education, foreign policy, economy, judiciary, consultation; accounting and removing of rulers are all according to Islam,” the leaflet adds.
Talking to Pakistan Today, a leader of HT confirmed that they had started a campaign across the country for abolishment of democracy and establishment of khilafah in Pakistan.
“We will hold public gatherings, corner meetings and door-to-door campaign to boycott the elections as the democracy is un-Islamic,” he added.

http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/04/14/news/national/hizbut-tah...

[Riaz Haq]

What’s the relationship between education, income, and favoring the Pakistani Taliban?

Education, income, and favoring #Pakistan #Taliban? Better educated, higher income #Pakistanis favor #TTP much less. http://brook.gs/1W1U2sz 

The narratives on U.S. development aid to Pakistan—as well as Pakistan’s own development policy discussion—frequently invoke the conventional wisdom that more education and better economic opportunities result in lower extremism. In the debate surrounding the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill in 2009, for instance, the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke urged Congress to “target the economic and social roots of extremism in western Pakistan with more economic aid.”

But evidence across various contexts, including in Pakistan, has not supported this notion (see Alan Kreuger’s What Makes a Terrorist for a good overview of this evidence). We know that many terrorists are educated. And lack of education and economic opportunities do not appear to drive support for terrorism and terrorist groups. I have argued that we need to focus on the quality and content of the educational curricula—in Pakistan’s case, they are rife with biases and intolerance, and designed to foster an exclusionary identity—to understand the relationship between education and attitudes toward extremism.

My latest analysis with data from the March 2013 Pew Global Attitudes poll conducted in Pakistan sheds new light on the relationship between years of education and Pakistanis’ views of the Taliban, and lends supports to the conventional wisdom. The survey sampled 1,201 respondents throughout Pakistan, except the most insecure areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan. This was a time of mounting terror attacks by the Pakistani Taliban (a few months after their attack on Malala), and came at the tail end of the Pakistan People's Party’s term in power, before the May 2013 general elections.

On attitudes toward the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), 3 percent of respondents to the Pew poll said they had a very favorable view, 13 percent reported somewhat favorable views, while nearly 17 percent and 39 percent answered that they had somewhat unfavorable and very unfavorable views, respectively. A large percentage of respondents (28 percent) chose not to answer the question or said they did not know their views. This is typical with a sensitive survey question such as this one, in a context as insecure as Pakistan.

So overall levels of support for the TTP are low, and the majority of respondents report having unfavorable views. The non-responses could reflect those who have unfavorable views but choose not to respond because of fear, or those who may simply not have an opinion on the Pakistani Taliban.

The first part of my analysis cross-tabulates attitudes toward the TTP with education and income respectively. I look at the distribution of attitudes for each education and income category (with very and somewhat favorable views lumped together as favorable; similarly for unfavorable attitudes).

Figure 1. Pakistani views on the Pakistani Taliban, by education level, 2013

Figure 1 shows that an increasing percentage of respondents report unfavorable views of the Taliban as education levels rise; and there is a decreasing percentage of non-responses at higher education levels (suggesting that more educated people have more confidence in their views, stronger views, or less fear). However, the percentage of respondents with favorable views of the Taliban, hovering between 10-20 percent, is not that different across education levels, and does not vary monotonically with education. 

Figure 2. Pakistani views on the Pakistani Taliban, by income level, 2013

Figure 2 shows views on the Pakistani Taliban by income level. While the percentage of non-responses is highest for the lowest income category, the percentages responding favorably and unfavorably do not change monotonically with income. We see broadly similar distributions of attitudes across the four income levels.

But these cross-tabulations do not account for other factors that may affect attitudes: age, gender, and geographical location. Regressions (not shown here) accounting for these factors in addition to income and education show interesting results: relative to no education, higher education levels are associated with less favorable opinions of the Pakistani Taliban; these results are strongest for those with some university education, which is heartening. This confirms findings from focus groups I conducted with university students in Pakistan in May 2015. Students at public universities engaged in wide ranging political and social debates with each other on Pakistan and its identity, quoted Rousseau and Chomsky, and had more nuanced views on terrorism and the rest of the world relative to high school students I interviewed. This must at least partly be a result of the superior curriculum and variety of materials to which they are exposed at the college level.

My regressions also show that older people have more unfavorable opinions toward the Taliban, relative to younger people; this is concerning and is consistent with the trend toward rising extremist views in Pakistan’s younger population. The problems in Pakistan’s curriculum that began in the 1980s are likely to be at least partly responsible for this trend. Urban respondents seem to have more favorable opinions toward the Taliban than rural respondents; respondents from Punjab and Baluchistan have more favorable opinions toward the Taliban relative to those from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which as a province has had a closer and more direct experience with terror. The regression shows no relationship of income with attitudes, as was suggested by Figure 2.

Overall, the Pew 2013 data show evidence of a positive relationship between more education and lack of support for the Taliban, suggesting that the persisting but increasingly discredited conventional wisdom on these issues may hold some truth after all. These results should be complemented with additional years of data. That is what I will work on next.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/future-development/posts/2015/10/19-...