What has caused the post-election upsurge in violence in Pakistan, asks Graham Usher in Mingora For most Pakistanis it wasn't simply the result of last month's elections that satisfied -- it was the hope that a new government might turn the page on their country's bloody conflict with Islamic militancy. Ceasefires, acknowledged and implicit, were holding in the Waziristan tribal agencies on the Afghan border. The Pakistan Taliban said it would cut the new government some slack to abandon the "pro- American" policies of President Pervez Musharraf. And the victorious parties all vowed "political not military" solutions to the violence, including, if necessary, negotiations with the Taliban. It felt like a new dawn. It lasted eight days. Since the 18 February elections, scores have been killed in a dozen suicide and bomb attacks, mostly in the restive North West Frontier Province (NWFP). No group has claimed responsibility but suspicion rests with the Pakistan Taliban and/or jihadist groups allied with it. Seemingly indiscriminate, the targets have been those civil bodies the next government wants to mobilise against the militancy -- not just the army, but local police forces and tribal councils or jirgas. "They are direct attacks on Pashtun society," says Mahmoud Shah, a former Military Intelligence chief in South Waziristan, referring to the ethnic Pashtun tribes that dominate the NWFP. And they are brutal. On 22 February an Iraq-like roadside bomb killed 13 members of a wedding party, including the bride. It happened in Swat, a lush, mountainous range in the NWFP that for the last three months has seen an attritional war between the army and pro-Taliban militants. "The bomb was meant for us," says Lieutenant-Colonel Nadir Hussein, who commands one of the region's snow-tipped heights. Other ambushes are more accurate. On 29 February a roadside bomb killed a senior police commander and three constables. The commander's funeral was in Mingora, capital of the Swat district. As a police guard gave their final gun salute a teenager detonated amongst them. Fifty were killed, mostly policemen, several torn to shreds. On 2 March another bomber, also a teenager, killed 40 tribesmen at a jirga in Darra Adam Khel. The council had been called to raise a laskar or militia to fight Taliban militants. In January, the fighters had briefly overrun the town and its strategic tunnel linking Peshawar to southern Pakistan. Darra Adam Khel is Pakistan's largest arms manufacturer. The capture was seen a grievous loss of sovereignty less than 40 kilometres from Peshawar. "All institutions, which represent Pashtun society, the wedding, the funeral, the jirga -- all have been targeted," says Shah. "They want to bomb the entire Pashtun society into submission". But to what end? In a society driven by vendetta, one motive is revenge. Last fall Swat was conquered. Local Taliban overthrew police stations, appointed district "governors" and meted out their own strain of "Islamic" law, which included the decapitation of "spies" and "apostates". Locals initially welcomed them. The Taliban's swift justice was an improvement on the government's none. But the violence appalled them. In November tribal elders called for the army to intervene. Three months later "90 per cent of the militants have been cleared out," says army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas. On 18 February Swat was "sanitised" enough for elections to be held throughout the district. Pashtun nationalist candidates won eight of the nine seats and, in certain areas, women voted for the first time. But the military operations were also brutal. Two hundred and thirty were killed, including many locals. Thousands of tribes- people were displaced from their homes and villages. Similarly in the army's recapture of Darra Adam Khel left 70 dead, again including locals. "There is vengeance in the air," admits Major General Nasser Janjua, Swat regional commander. Even today soldiers prefer to travel the district by helicopter than by road. But there is also politics behind the violence. On 28 February 10 people were killed in an explosion in a remote madrassa in South Waziristan. The dead included four Arabs and two Uzbeks, suggesting the men may have formed an Al-Qaeda cell. Major General Abbas said the blast was caused by materiel stored in the school. Local tribesmen said a missile had been fired from a pilot-less drone. Most observers believe the locals. Last month US military commanders prevailed on Musharraf to allow increased drone over- flights in the Pakistan-Afghan border areas, where Taliban fighters and their Al-Qaeda allies have regrouped. The drones are used for assassinations. The Pakistan president agreed. It was one in a series of measures he has approved to enhance Pakistan/US cooperation in the "war on terror". Others include US funding and training of the 80,000-strong Frontier Corps, local paramilitary forces that police the border regions. There is also talk that some of the extra 3,000 US troops dispatched to Afghanistan will be allotted to the border areas to cut the Taliban's supply lines, in coordination with the Pakistan army. The post-election surge in violence is thus probably a pre- emptive warning by the Taliban to the new Pakistan government that cooperation in the US "war on terror" means bringing the war to Pakistan on an Afghan scale. It poses the new federal and provincial governments with a terrible dilemma. For the only way they can garner the civilian legitimacy to prosecute the struggle against the Taliban on Pakistan's terms is if it is clearly decoupled from America's deeply unpopular war in Afghanistan. That cannot happen as long as strategic decisions in the conflict are taken in Washington and approved by a discredited, unpopular and unaccountable president in Islamabad.
