Blighted Garden

• The deal is between the government and TSNM’s Maulana Sufi Mohammed.
  
• The government will enforce the Shariah Nizam-e-Adal Regulation, or Regulation for Islamic System of Justice. In return, Sufi Mohammed is to try and bring to an end the bloodletting in Swat.
  
• The deal was struck after the Pak army failed to root out the militancy waged by Sufi’s son-in-law, the Taliban’s Maulana Fazalullah, who wanted imposition of Shariat there.
  
• This will now encourage other militant groups to impose their version of Islam.
  
• TSNM has strong links with the Taliban. Even Sufi had waged jehad in Afghanistan.
  
• The deal gives the Pak army a breathing space, allows it to concentrate on the badlands bordering Afghanistan.

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In private, officials fear Islamabad’s gambit will provide a safe haven to the (Afghan) Taliban in one more pocket of the NWFP at a time when the US is sending additional troops to Afghanistan. The only official to express Washington’s disappointment was the irrepressible Richard Holbrooke, America’s special representative to the region. In a TV interview, he said Swat has "confused and troubled" the Obama administration. "We do not want to see territory ceded to the bad guys, and these are very bad people.... Even in faraway Lahore, the Pakistanis were traumatised, in a state of real near-shock at the fall of Swat, which is, after all, a resort they all went to for vacations." Then he made the critical connection, "9/11, the Mumbai attacks and those who took over Swat have the same roots."

But the big question engaging most in Washington is: has official America been muted in its criticism of the Swat deal because it allows the Pakistan army to ease up in a region closer to Punjab and concentrate on the area bordering Afghanistan? Former state department official Daniel Markey, who’s currently at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Outlook, "It may create a breathing space for Swatis and the Pakistani army who have been so badly hammered, but this is a very minor benefit." He feels the deal will turn Swat into another safe haven and, once that happens, the truce will fail. He dismisses suggestions that the Swat truce is intended to influence US strategy in the region. "The deal was struck because of Pakistan’s weakness," he said. For nearly 17 months the Pakistani army has been fighting a losing battle in Swat that killed many and alienated the local population.

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"The truce is a concession to reality. The Taliban gets the signal that itcan use terror to impose its own brand of Shariat."
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"The truce," says Marvin Weinbaum, a former Pakistan analyst in the state department. "is a capitulation to reality." But, Weinbaum adds, "everyone is swatting at the Swat truce" because it sends a dangerous signal to those parts of Pakistan reeling under the influence of the Taliban, to which the TNSM is closely linked. This signal, basically, is—you can use terror to impose your version of the Shariat, however repressive it may be. As Shuja Nawaz of the Atlantic Council of the United States told Outlook, "The constitution of Pakistan provides that no law will be implemented that is un-Islamic.... But in this case one has to constantly repeat that what they want is not the Shariat but their idiosyncratic view of it."

Worse, the deal portrays Pakistan as a nuclear state teetering on the edge of chaos. This frightful scenario is expected to bring no immediate change in US policy in the region—drone attacks in Pakistan, for instance, will continue. Markey believes it will take a couple of months to get a sense of how the Obama administration is factoring in developments such as the Swat truce, the release of nuclear scientists A.Q. Khan and the Mumbai attacks into its policy toward Pakistan. The administration, he says, will find the Pakistani government "generally well-intentioned but lacking in capacity."