Pakistan: A Taliban Train the Populace May Climb Aboard

We return to Pakistan and the Army's effort to push back the tide of the Taliban. Over the last two months, it has seemed that the Army -- though long itself a pillar of the country's militant Islamic movement -- finally recognized that its creation now threatened the country's integrity. It has been fighting back against the Taliban. The news is that the Taliban appear to be adapting in a way that could seriously shift the tide in their favor. That adaptation? It is enacting by fiat the land reform promised by self-proclaimed liberals for three decades.

This news, buried in a startling piece by The New York Times' Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, is important because of the danger that the country's current leadership -- however flawed -- is swept away in favor of one decidedly favorable to the Taliban. David Ruccio rightly calls this powerful turn of events Taliban land reform.

For those like myself who covered the late Benazir Bhutto in her first campaign for prime minister in 1988, this point was paramount -- coming off of eight years of education at Harvard and Oxford, Bhutto vowed to change Pakistan's feudal landscape, in which most of its 170 million people live as virtual serfs under a stubbornly Raj-style landowning class.

A few years earlier, in my time as a reporter in the Philippines, I had been informed by a wise hand that a feudal never betrays her roots. This person was referring to then-President Cory Aquino, but the rule held in Pakistan as well: Bhutto, the scion of Sindh aristocracy and the daughter of revered former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, never came close to fulfilling her promise.

The Times piece is about Swat, the pristine northern Pakistan region that has been a principal battleground between the Taliban and the Army. The story is set within the context of landowners refusing to return to Swat after the Army swept much of the Taliban out of the area; they don't think it's safe, so many are staying in the capital of Islamabad. In the vaccuum, remaining Taliban "are spreading the spoils among the landless," Perlez and Shah write.

Then go on to quote Vali Nasr, the smart Islamic hand now serving as a senior adviser to U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke:

If the large landowners are kept out by the Taliban, the result will in
effect be property redistribution. That will create a vested community of
support for the Taliban that will see benefit in the absence of landlords.

There we have it. Pakistan's political system is wholly founded on the rule of the country's narrow, landowning and industrial class. That includes Bhutto's husband, Pakistan President Asif Zardari, opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, and virtually members of Parliament.

The article further paraphrases Nasr's thinking:

If [the land redistribution] continues, the landlords' absence will have
lasting ramifications not only for Swat, but also for Pakistan's most populated
province, Punjab, where the landholdings are vast, and the militants are gaining
power.

This is the point. The consequence of the Taliban's capture of Swat last year, and their subsequent shift into neighboring Buner, was always the danger of a tipping point, similar to how the Taliban's 1996 capture of Jalalabad tipped the balance and catapulted the group into Kabul, and rule of Afghanistan.

The political survivors in Pakistan's Parliament may want to think about getting in front of this moving train.