‘City of flowers’ tainted by decades of flawed policies
Pakistan’s Peshawar was once known as “the city of flowers”, surrounded by orchards of pear, quince and pomegranate trees. It was a trading city at the gates of a key mountain valley connecting South and Central Asia.
But for the past four decades, it has borne the brunt of rising militancy, fuelled by conflicts in neighbouring Afghanistan and the geopolitical games of great powers.
On Wednesday, the city of about two million was reeling after one of the most devastating militant attacks in Pakistan in years. A day earlier, a suicide bomber unleashed a blast in a mosque inside the city’s main police compound, killing at least 101 people and wounding at least 225.
Analysts say the carnage is the legacy of decades of flawed policies by Pakistan and the US.
“What you sow, so shall you reap,” said Abdullah Khan, a senior security analyst. Peshawar was a peaceful place, he said, until the early 1980s when Pakistan’s then-dictator Ziaul Haq decided to become part of Washington’s cold war with Moscow, joining the fight against the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Peshawar — less than 30km from the Afghan border — became the centre where the American CIA and Pakistani military helped train, arm and fund the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets. The city was flooded with weapons and fighters as
well as hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees.
Arab militants were also drawn there by the fight against the Soviets, including the scion of a wealthy Saudi family, Osama bin Laden. It was in Peshawar that bin Laden founded alqaeda in the late 1980s, joining forces with veteran Egyptian militant Ayman al-zawahri. The Soviets finally withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 but the legacy of resistance the US and Pakistan fuelled against them remained.
The mujahedeen plunged Afghanistan into civil warwhile in Peshawar and another Pakistani city, Quetta, the Afghan Taliban began to organise, with backing from the Pakistani Government.
Eventually, the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, ruling until they were ousted by the 2001 American-led invasion after al-qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in the US.
During the nearly 20-year US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, militant groups blossomed in the tribal regions of Pakistan along the border and around Peshawar.
Chief among the anti-government groups was the Pakistani Taliban, or Tahreek-e Taliban-pakistani (TTP).
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it waged a brutal campaign of violence. Peshawar was scene of one of the bloodiest TTP attacks in 2014, on an army-run public school that killed nearly 150 people.
TTP attacks, however, have grown since the Afghan Taliban returned to power in Kabul in August 2021. Pakistani officials regularly accuse the Afghan Taliban of giving the TTP free rein to operate from Afghan territory.
On Wednesday, several police officers joined a peace march organised by the members of civil society groups in Peshawar, denouncing militant attacks and demanding peace in the country.
AP