McClatchy Washington Bureau | 09/26/2008 | Pakistani tribesmen organize to fight Taliban insurgents WARI, Pakistan — A popular resistance movement is emerging in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province to challenge Islamic extremists, who now exercise control over whole districts and maintain a stranglehold over the local population.
The movement in both the province and the lawless tribal territory bordering Afghanistan relies on fierce tribal customs and widespread ownership of guns in the north west of the country, to raise traditional private armies, known as a lashkar, each with the strength of hundreds or several thousand volunteers.
The movement arose after local tribal leaders came to realize decided that the state can't or won't come to their aid as a radical, alien, form of Islam seeks to impose itself on them down the barrel of an AK-47.
There are parallels with the "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq, where tribesmen took on al Qaida militants in Anbar province and elsewhere. While it's in only a few pockets so far in northwest Pakistan, its existence could mark a turning point in Pakistan's battle with violent extremism.
These tribal armies can't stop individual acts of terrorism, such as the suicide bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad last week. But they may be able to stop the development of an extremist mini-state, which would threaten the existence of both nuclear-armed Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan.
The Taliban are heavily armed and entrenched in a line that runs along the Afghan border from South Waziristan, northward through Bajaur and Mohmand, in the federally administered tribal area, and in adjacent "settled" districts in NWFP, including Swat, which are governed by provincial authorities. The lashkars are appearing in many areas, including Bajaur, in the federally administered tribal zone or FATA, and Dir and Buner, which are in the "settled" areas of NWFP.
"There's going to be a civil war. These lashkars are spreading," said Asfandyar Wali Khan, leader of the Awami National Party, which controls the provincial government in NWFP. "It will be the people versus the Taliban."
Dir — a long, narrow valley in NWFP — is sandwiched between Taliban strongholds in Bajaur and Afghanistan to the west and more militants in the valley of Swat to its east.
Last weekend around 200 elders from the Payandakhel tribe met in Wari, a small town in the north of the region. In the dusty front yard of a high school, they held a traditional tribal meeting, or jirga, and made rousing speeches that resulted in a resolution to assemble their own lashkar. Among the decisions was that anyone sheltering Taliban in the area would be severely punished.
"The government forces cannot even save themselves, what good will they be to us? They are just silent spectators," Malik Zarene, a tribal elder, told the crowd. "We will rise for our own defense."
Many of the men at the jirga arrived with machine guns, some dating back to the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The meeting was called in response to a scare a few days earlier, when a group of Taliban tried to seize a local school and take 300 children hostage. Without waiting for the authorities to act, tribesmen themselves successfully tackled the assailants.
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