GUARDIANS OF GOD
Inside the Religious Mind of the Pakistani Taliban
Mona Kanwal Sheikh
Oxford University Press
212 pages; Rs 626.96
This is an important book for Indians. It shows how the Pakistani military has helped ruin its own country by creating conditions that allowed the Pakistani Taliban to come into being and gain prestige, power and pelf. That, however, is not its central purpose, which is to write about the Taliban point of view.
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The author works for the Danish Institute for International Studies. She has produced a competent report based on interviews with several members of the Pakistani Taliban. Though they belong to different groups – and there are many – they all have the same point of view: Islam is under attack.
When she met the different Taliban leaders, says the author, her father would keep vigil outside. Sometimes, it would be an agent of the Inter-Services Intelligence. He, too, was there for her safety.
That’s the kind of unsafe country Pakistan has become, all thanks to its military.
There isn’t a great deal in her book, which reads more like a research report, that is not already known: Like the sense in the Muslim world that Islam is under siege from the West, led by the US; that the US is implacably opposed to Muslims; that it is up to the faithful to fight for Islam; that the only valid law is the law ordained by Allah; that good Muslims must agree to follow the Sharia; and, conversely, that if they disagree, they are not good Muslims; and so on.
The uncompromising nature of the Taliban mindset on some of these issues comes out with great clarity. There is no room for another point of view.
The message that the author seeks to convey sotto voce is that this is not very different from the Western mindset, which also doesn’t have much time for non-Western frameworks for governing human affairs. For both, it is my way or the highway.
Both have sought to export their viewpoints. In the latter half of the 20th century at least, the Korean and Vietnam wars notwithstanding, the West did so mostly peacefully. In the 21st century it has done it violently – mostly in the West Asia.
In defending themselves, the keepers, defenders and propagators of the Islamic faith have been less peaceful. The chapter on violence, therefore, assumes special significance.
Basically, says the author, the Pakistani Taliban – which we can take as being at least partly representative of the other Islam-based movements – has to justify two contradictions.
One, if God is omnipotent why does He need a Taliban to defend Him; two, if you condemn the opponents of brutality, why do you indulge in it?
The answer is known, of course: If you use religion to justify politics, you will always face this dilemma. The author has this to say about the Pakistani Taliban: “Ultimately, in the articulation of the rules and means by which the Pakistani Taliban conduct jihad, the defensive discourse, based on claims of exceptionalism, outweighs the religious discourse... their view of how to act in times of crisis are strongly influenced by the political circumstances.”
This is not very different from the way the West has been behaving. In order to protect the so-called “our way of life”, it, too, has used extreme violence. The notion that “my violence is justified but yours is not” is present on both sides.
The message – important for India but not articulated by the author – is that the Pakistani Taliban isn’t going to win power in Pakistan. It will continue to create mayhem — sometimes with the support of the Pakistani military and sometimes without it.
But one thing is quite clear. The Pakistani military, which sees the Taliban as a rival for political power, is not going to roll aside and let the Taliban take over.
So if India wants Pakistan to be not officially governed by the Sharia, it is the Pakistan army that will ensure that Pakistan doesn’t go the way of some countries that lie between it and Turkey.
This is the central paradox of India-Pakistan relations because the Pakistani military is, and will remain for the foreseeable future, an implacable enemy of India. It needs India to justify its hold on power in Pakistan. But India needs it to stay on in power to keep the Taliban at bay in Pakistan.
There is a lot of collateral damage from this paradox. The main victim is Kashmir, which the author does not mention even in once.
Thank god.