Pakistan: Militias Provide Protection When the State Cannot
Rational Review News Digest carried an interesting story from the Washington Post today.
The government of Pakistan, facing pressure from the West and increasing concern among its own citizens, has been struggling for months to contain an epidemic of religiously cloaked mayhem that is spreading from tribal havens along the Afghan border into the surrounding belt of “settled” areas that are theoretically protected by the state.
Authorities have tried various methods, first using the army to attempt to quash the [fundamentalist and criminal] rebels, and more recently negotiating truces with individual militia groups. Thousands of conflict-zone inhabitants, terrified by government bombing and insurgent brutality, have fled their homes. Few local officials dare visit their constituencies without military escorts.
A few tribal leaders, however, have refused to budge and are urging others to do the same. One of the first was Anwar Kamal Marwat, a former member of Parliament, who decided to organize a self-defense force in 2007 after Taliban militias began kidnapping and threatening people in his native Lakki Marwat district, demanding their support for a holy war.
“We are Muslims, and we know what holy war is. What they were doing was committing crimes,” Marwat, 60, said last week in Peshawar. “They kept threatening us, but our tribe is very united and every village went on alert. We wanted to stop them before the cancer spread. It took many months, but now all their camps are gone, and they have not been back.”
Marwat’s success has been both an inspiration to other vulnerable communities and an embarrassment to the government, whose police are supposed to keep order and whose army is supposed to fight extremists.
A statement likely to resonate with anti-authoritarians came from village council head Fahim ur Rahman, who would probably be called a “warlord” by Western media if he wasn’t fighting against the same people the United States is:
If our tribe were not so united, we would have no hope of defending ourselves. We do not have permission to do this, but we have no choice.”
