Pakistanis turn against Taliban Monday, 12 July 2010 03:47

ISLAMABAD: A series of militant attacks over the last week have sparked widespread anger in Pakistan. Suicide bombers killed over 100 people at government offices in the tribal agency of Mohmand on the heels of an extremist attack on a Sufi shrine in Lahore that killed over 40. In Pakistan, however, much of this outrage has been directed at Washington and Islamabad rather than at the terrorists.

“America is killing Muslims in Afghanistan and in our tribal areas [using drone attacks],” argued one Pakistani interviewed in the aftermath of the attack, explaining why the United States is ultimately to blame for the bombing. “Militants are attacking Pakistan to express anger against the government for supporting America.” Similar sentiments have circulated widely on Pakistan’s hugely influential private TV networks.

To understand this reaction, it is necessary to grasp the complexity of the domestic Pakistani debate about militancy. The good news is that, over the last 12 months, ordinary Pakistanis have decisively turned against the Taliban’s religious agenda. The bad news is that Pakistanis have simultaneously become even more anti-American - which in turn is distorting their perception of counterinsurgency.

Pakistani perceptions of the Taliban’s religious programme have shifted from tacit acceptance to revulsion. For a long time, the Taliban argued that they simply wanted to make the country more pious.

Until 2009, most Pakistanis saw nothing wrong with that declared intention and largely opposed military operations against militant havens in northwestern Pakistan. Last year, 80 per cent of Pakistanis approved of Islamabad’s February 2009 truce with the Taliban, which ratified jihadi control over large areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). But after the brutality of the Taliban’s “Islamic” rule became self-evident, Pakistani perceptions changed.

Last October, Islamabad, acting with broad public support, launched a major offensive against Taliban bases in South Waziristan. It has since followed that up with other operations in the tribal areas — for example, the Army is currently fighting in Orakzai.

Today, public approval of the Taliban has all but collapsed. According to polling conducted by Gallup last December, no more than 5 per cent of the population in any of the country’s four provinces believes that the Taliban has a positive influence on their lives, including a meager 1 per cent in the KP. INTERNEWS

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