(The article describes the contradictions in Pakistani national and political attitudes towards their terrorist tormentors.
Nasik)
Four years ago, in the main street of Mingora, the largest town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, I saw a man trying to make and sell kebabs. The coals weren’t catching fire, he was fanning them with a rolled-up newspaper, and the skewers were all over the place; it was quite obvious that the man was new to this type of work.
Swat had just been handed over to a man called Mullah Fazlullah, who had terrorized the valley in a bid to usher in his one and only version of Sharia law. He was trying to achieve this by running a very lively and illegal FM radio station and commanding a bunch of fighters from tribal areas, along with young sectarian zealots from the Punjab who specialized in blowing up girls’ schools and slitting the throats of Pakistani soldiers. They didn’t like dancers, so they pulled one out of her home and executed her in the bazaar. They also didn’t care much for barbershops, video stores, or women. Under Fazlullah’s regime, the main square in Mingora was known as Khooni Chowk—“Bloody Square”—because his fighters dumped their victims’ bodies there.
The struggling kebab-maker told me that he had owned a video shop, until a few days earlier, at least. Now he was trying out a new career, but it seemed like he didn’t have much of a future in Pakistan’s booming barbecue business, either; his eyes were teary from the smoke billowing off his improvised pit. He tried to make a handful of minced meat stick to a skewer, and said, sardonically, “See here, true Sharia has finally arrived in Swat.”
In 2009, the Pakistani Army launched an offensive to drive the Taliban out of Swat—and forced Fazlullah across the border, into Afghanistan. These days, the valley is relatively peaceful, and Pakistani tourists have returned in droves.
Fazlullah kept himself busy in exile: among other things, he issued the order to shoot Malala Yousafzai, the young education activist from Mingora. But he got a promotion earlier this week, when the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (usually known simply as the Pakistani Taliban, or T.T.P.) elected him as their new leader. In his very first statement, he declared that he would refuse any peace talks with the country’s government, which had finally managed to get a mandate from all political parties to hold such talks. Instead, Fazlullah’s first priority will be to take revenge for the death of his predecessor, Hakimullah Mehsud.
Mehsud, who had been “killed” by American drone strikes on at least two previous occasions, was actually killed by another drone strike at the start of November—transforming him overnight, in the eyes of Pakistani politicians and commentators, from a mass murderer into a martyr.