US and British officials are no doubt delighted to see tribesmen in northwestern Pakistan fighting the Taleban after years of sheltering, tolerating or supporting them. Elsewhere in the country, there has also been an unprecedented wave of public, political and even religious support for the army’s campaign in Swat, despite the massive exodus of refugees.
This appears to show that Pakistanis have at last heeded Western warnings that the militancy they face is indigenous and threatens the existence of the Pakistani state.
What is less encouraging — and less well advertised — is that a key reason for the backlash is that many Pakistanis believe the Taleban is being funded and armed by America as part of an elaborate geopolitical conspiracy.
Absurd as it may sound to Westerners this conspiracy theory, like so many others in Pakistan, seems to have taken root among even well-educated people in the political, military and religious establishments.
It was outlined recently in an interview with Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi, a respected Sunni cleric who set up an alliance of 22 Islamic groups and political parties last month with the explicit goal of opposing the Taleban.
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He explained that the Taleban preached an extreme version of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam, while most Pakistanis followed the more moderate Barelvi school.
He said that many Pakistanis were outraged when the Taleban attacked Barelvi shrines, and denounced Pakistan’s constitution and democratic system as unIslamic.
Halfway through the interview, however, he suddenly added that the Taleban was also being funded and trained by the CIA, Mossad, and India’s RAW intelligence agency. Why? As part of a strategy to carve out an independent statelet in northwestern Pakistan to help to contain China’s growing military and economic power. And to capture Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
So America is now funding the Pakistani army and using CIA drones to attack militants who are in fact funded and armed by America?
Yes.
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And what about the militants blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai? They were Indian intelligence agents who staged the attack to give India an excuse to exact revenge by staging another attack — this time on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.
And why would India want to do that? So that Pakistan would not be able to co-host the 2011 cricket World Cup, of course.
He went on to say that most of his fellow clerics felt the same way, and many included such theories in their sermons at Friday prayers. No wonder such ideas spread fast across the country — 45 per cent of which is illiterate — and are reinforced through repetition in the domestic media, especially the Urdu-language press.
Nor are these theories confined to the civilian population.
A few days after the interview with Dr Naeemi, a senior Pakistani security official admitted that similar views were common in the army and the intelligence service, although they were not official policy.
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His justification made slightly more sense, although it was equally hard to prove or disprove: he claimed that the CIA had on at least one occasion had Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taleban chief, in the sights of one of its drones but had decided not to kill him.
He was also convinced that Washington had never wanted Pakistan to have nuclear weapons, and cited US media reports about contingency plans for American special forces to secure, or destroy, Pakistan’s atomic facilities.
Yes, he conceded, there was an unprecedented level of public support for the Pakistani army. Just don’t confuse that with support for the United States.