(The following is an excerpt from Pakistani feminist scholar Humeira Iqtidar’s ‘Who are the Taliban in Swat', www.opendemocracy.net)
Much media attention has focused on the worsening plight of women in Swat, particularly after the video-taped public flogging of a 17 year-old girl. Unfortunately, the kinds of atrocities perpetrated by the TNSM against women also occur in the feudal holdings of many of the "secular" political elite of Pakistan. Yet these incidents do not make headlines in the same way. Few Pakistanis can ignore the fact that restricting women's mobility and reducing their educational opportunities (as the TNSM intend to do) along with gang rape, abduction, and honour killing have a long history in southern Punjab and Sind, areas where both President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani have vast landholdings.
The alleged video recording the public flogging of a woman by Taliban in Swat has not been conclusively proven as authentic. A woman named Chand Bibi was initially identified as the one being flogged. However, she was reported to have sworn before a judge that the video was not hers (Jang newspaper, 11 April, 2009, front page). It is entirely feasible that she did so under duress. Quite rightly, the video generated debate and outrage within Pakistani print and television media.
Along with the very legitimate concern for women's rights, sectors of the Urdu language press as well as various local TV channels expressed disquiet that the video and its reception have echoes of the campaigns carried out just before the US attack of Afghanistan. "White men liberating brown women from brown men" (to use Gayatri Spivak's terminology) has a long history in justifying wars and occupations. The brutal treatment of women by the Afghan Taliban became the subject of email petitions, news reports and first person accounts in magazines like Elle, Ms. and Cosmopolitan.
Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood point out the usefulness of this campaign in justifying the attack on Afghanistan and the callousness that was allowed within this framework:
"In the context of this intense concern for Afghan women, it is striking how silent the vast majority of Americans have been about civilian casualties that resulted from the US bombing campaign. In December 2001 - two months after the start of the US military offensive - the Feminist Majority website remained stubbornly focused on the ills of Taliban rule, with no mention of the hundreds of thousands of victims of three years of drought who were put at greater risk of starvation because US bombing severely restricted the delivery of food aid. The Feminist Majority made no attempts to join the calls issued by a number of humanitarian organizations - including the Afghan Women's Mission - to halt the bombing so that food could be transported to these 2.2 million Afghans before winter set in." (Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency, Anthropological Quarterly, 2002)
Hirschkind and Mahmood wrote this in 2002. It is arguable whether women in Afghanistan have benefited at all from the invasion since then. Even with the best of intentions the actual reach of the NATO forces remains severely limited within Afghanistan, and the writ of the Karzai government hardly extends beyond Kabul.
This is not to say that the developments in Swat should not cause concern, or that TNSM deserve our support, but rather that we need to look deeper to see where their strength stems from. Only then can we come up with an effective counter-strategy. The way the crisis is being constructed in mainstream media - highlighting the group's affinity with the Afghan Taliban - seems likely to generate only one kind of response- a military one. US and UK governments have been openly pressurising Zardari to take the military option. Since Sunday, Pakistani troops have already started another "operation" in Buner.
However, the attention that the Swat TNSM have received from the US administration, including most recently Hilary Clinton, in recent weeks belies more than benign concern for the fate of the Swatis. The threat of these "Taliban" justifies the blatant disregard for civilian lives evidenced by the US army's drone attacks inside Pakistan and creates the ground for an overt extension of the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan. This extension of the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan has resonances with earlier tried and tested strategies of the Pentagon. Using a template from the Vietnam war, Washington's "AfPak" strategy follows a familiar logic: "The US has pretty much won the war in Vietnam/Afghanistan. This is the last little bit that needs sorting now, because Cambodia/Laos/Pakistan are harbouring Communists/Taliban. Once they are cleared up we can declare complete victory."
Pakistan face many real problems, stemming in large part from the stifling inequity that pervades its political structures. The task of tackling these challenges is not abetted by intensifying militancy in the country, which has increased dramatically since the US invasion of Afghanistan, a spill-over effect that Pakistan can ill afford.
However, it is still not beyond the capacity of Pakistani society to contain these militants. I am reminded here of what Shirin Ebadi, Iranian Nobel Laureate and Human Rights Activists said in response to a question from an audience at Cambridge University some years ago. She was asked about what feminists in the west could do to help women in Iran. "Nothing," she said, "We are capable of fighting our own battles and will manage, as long as you can stop your governments from invading us."
