ISLAMABAD – Pakistan has gambled that an offer to introduce Islamic law to parts of the northwest will bring peace to the troubled Swat valley, but analysts fear any lull will not last long and that appeasement will embolden the Taliban.
Western officials fear Pakistan is taking a slippery road that will only benefit al-Qaeda and the Taliban, but Pakistani authorities believe the alternative of using overwhelming force on people who are, after all, Pakistani poses a greater danger.
The central government has said the Sharia Nizam-e-Adl, or the judicial system governed by Islamic sharia law, will not be implemented in the Malakand division of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which includes Swat, unless the guns fall silent.
The Taliban announced a 10-day ceasefire on Sunday, while the NWFP government has said that while the military will remain deployed in Swat, there will not be any offensive measures, only reactive actions.
Amnesty International estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 people have fled their homes since late 2007, when the Taliban revolt began in Swat, an alpine region 130 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad.
Tens of thousands have fled since August last year after an earlier peace deal broke down.
Known as Pakistan’s “Switzerland” and once a popular tourist destination, Swat has recently become associated with sickening sights. People in the scenic valley have witnessed public beheadings and summary executions by the Taliban. Bombs have targeted security forces, schools have been torched as part of a campaign against female education, and aid workers running immunisation programmes for children have been chased away by Islamists.
“If peace comes through this agreement, then we wholeheartedly accept it. After all, we’re Muslims and want an Islamic system,” said Mohammad Naeem, a teacher in Mingora, the main town in Swat, whose own school was destroyed.
Analysts, however, see the pact as little more than a tactic to buy time, as the government seeks a firmer foothold in a region over which it had lost control.
They fear a reluctance to permanently deal with reactionary forces will lead to greater problems later on. That has certainly been Swat’s history in the last two decades.
“I think this is going to be another blunder by the government,” said Khadim Hussain of the private Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy.
“There may be a lull for awhile, but I think the government will again be trapped in more fighting. There will be more violence.”
Monday’s agreement was the third such pact signed by Pakistani authorities with Maulana Sufi Mohammad, a radical cleric who began a violent campaign for the enforcement of Islamic sharia law in the region in the 1990s.
The agreements have aimed at progressively ratcheting up the dominance of the Islamic legal code in the region.
Analysts say the government may be trying to drive a wedge between hardline followers of the elderly Mohammad and even more radical militants led by his young son-in-law, Fazlullah.
Even if the laws being brought in are far softer interpretation of sharia than the harsh Taliban version, giving ground to the Islamists would set a “bad precedent”, analysts suggest. It could convince the most irreconcilable militants that their violent campaign was working.
Generally a pact leads to a reduction in violence for a while and then it flares again. Analysts do not foresee Fazlullah and his fighters staying quiet for long. “The militants are not going to give up control . . . They will be getting more capability to launch more strikes . . . if the agreement does not work,” Mr Hussain said.