Taliban influence is spreading
PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN » In Pakistan’s rugged tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan, a quiet and persistent warning is circulating: The Taliban are returning.
Pakistan’s own Taliban movement, which had in years past waged a violent campaign against the Islamabad government, has been emboldened by the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. They seem to be preparing to retake control of the tribal regions that they lost seven years ago in a major operation by Pakistan’s military. Pakistani Taliban are already increasing their influence. Local contractors report Talibanimposed surcharges on every contract and the killing of those who defy them.
In early September, for example, a contractor named Noor Islam Dawar built a small canal not far from the town of Mir Ali near the Afghan border. It wasn’t worth more than $5,000. Still, the Taliban came calling, demanding their share of $1,100. Dawar had nothing to give and pleaded for their understanding, according to relatives and local activists. A week later he was dead, shot by unknown gunmen. His family blames the Taliban.
Pakistan’s Taliban, known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban or TTP, is a separate organization from Afghanistan’s Taliban, though they share much of the same hardline ideology and are allied. The TTP arose in the early 2000s and launched a campaign of bombings and other attacks, vowing to bring down the Pakistani government and seizing control in many tribal areas. The military crackdown of the 2010s managed to repress it.
But the TTP was reorganizing in safe havens in Afghanistan even before the Afghan Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15.
“The Afghan Taliban’s stunning success in defeating the American superpower has emboldened the Pakistani Taliban. ... They now seem to believe they too can wage a successful jihad against the Pakistani ‘infidel’ state and have returned to insurgency mode,” said Brian Glyn Williams, Islamic history professor at the University of Massachusetts, who has written extensively on jihad movements.
The TTP has ramped up attacks in recent months. More than 300 Pakistanis have been killed in terrorist attacks since January, including 144 military personnel, according to the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies.
The events in Afghanistan have also energized the scores of radical religious parties in Pakistan, said Amir Rana, executive director of the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.
These parties openly revile minority Shiite Muslims as heretics and on occasion bring thousands on to the street to defend their hardline interpretation of Islam. One party, the Tehreek-eLabbaik Pakistan, has a single agenda: to protect a controversial blasphemy law. The law has been used against minorities and opponents and can incite mobs to kill simply over an accusation of insulting Islam.