"During numerous interviews in the school, a mosque, one of the official camps, and on the streets, I heard nothing but antipathy toward the Taliban, whose spreading influence and well-publicized violence finally prompted Pakistan’s army to take the fight to Swat and Buner. The refugees I spoke with from Swat all told stories of girls’ schools shut down, policemen beheaded, terror and intimidation spread through radio broadcasts and public displays of violence. But I heard little praise for the government either. A number of refugees and residents of Mardan questioned how serious it was about cleaning out the militants. “We can’t say if the fighting is real or a drama,” Hoti, the lawyer, told me. “Drama” was a word I often heard—it meant essentially a show. A civil servant sitting on a bench by Hoti’s desk said, “They’re shelling on innocent people, not Taliban. Every day you hear ninety militants are killed. Out of these ninety, eighty are innocent. Or maybe ninety are innocent.”" Journalist George Packer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo.
George Packer writes: Postcard from Mardan
Postcard from Mardan
from Interesting Times by George Packer
Caption: DSC00438 by the Human Development Foundation in Mardan<. Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, is in Islamabad today, and tomorrow he’ll visit the nearby region to which at least two million Pakistanis have been displaced by fighting in the Swat Valley and Buner between the Pakistani army and Taliban-led militants. On a recent trip, I spent a day in the town of Mardan, where the majority of refugees have congregated. A local lawyer named Ejaz Hoti, who was meeting with clients under a concrete shed roof in a dirt alley off Mardan’s hot, dusty main road, kindly agreed to show me around. The main problem, Hoti said, was that almost all the relief aid and media attention were going to displaced people in the four official United Nations camps, with food distributed by the World Food Program. But these people represented just a fraction of the total. A much larger, but mainly hidden, flood of refugees had at least doubled Mardan’s original population of one million people since the fighting began in early May. They were living in schoolrooms, mosques, and private homes, where they were sheltered and fed by local people—I heard of residents with a hundred or more people in their houses and gardens—in a spontaneous effort of self-organization that reminded me of the outpouring of aid that ordinary Burmese people extended to their countrymen after last year’s cyclone.
A school principal was working from dawn till midnight to keep the two hundred forty-four men, women, and children at his school fed. “I’m very proud of Mardan,” said the principal, Hamid Khan, sitting in his office under a portrait of Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder. “Local persons bring toothpaste, toothbrushes, clothes from hangars—who need it, get it. But there is no planning, no organizing. Government should have planned on month before the operations to arrange food and shelter.”
The streets of Mardan were full of local aid groups announcing their presence and their help. One group had pitched a tent next to a traffic circle that was festooned with the black-and-white, sword-bearing flags of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a supposedly humanitarian front group for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the jihadist organization believed to be responsible for last year’s terror attacks in Mumbai. After Mumbai, the United Nations designated Jamaat-ud-Dawa a terrorist organization, and the government of Pakistan put its leader, Hafez Sayeed, under house arrest (he was freed this week by a Pakistani court). But the group—calling itself by a new name, Falah-e-Insaniyat—was very publicly in Mardan, to compete for the hearts and minds of the refugees.
During numerous interviews in the school, a mosque, one of the official camps, and on the streets, I heard nothing but antipathy toward the Taliban, whose spreading influence and well-publicized violence finally prompted Pakistan’s army to take the fight to Swat and Buner. The refugees I spoke with from Swat all told stories of girls’ schools shut down, policemen beheaded, terror and intimidation spread through radio broadcasts and public displays of violence. But I heard little praise for the government either. A number of refugees and residents of Mardan questioned how serious it was about cleaning out the militants. “We can’t say if the fighting is real or a drama,” Hoti, the lawyer, told me. “Drama” was a word I often heard—it meant essentially a show. A civil servant sitting on a bench by Hoti’s desk said, “They’re shelling on innocent people, not Taliban. Every day you hear ninety militants are killed. Out of these ninety, eighty are innocent. Or maybe ninety are innocent.”
The government’s presence on the streets of Mardan was harder to detect than that of the militants. The forty-one-year-old mayor, Hamayatullah Mayar, told me that international aid wasn’t reaching the hundreds of thousands of hidden refugees. “The government has provided nothing, nothing, nothing,” he said. “People here are supporting the operation—they say the terrorists must be rooted out. They blame the Taliban.” I asked if their sympathies might switch if the tide of refugees continued to pour into Mardan and more help did not arrive. “People will not sympathize with the Taliban,” he said, “but they will turn against the government.” Then the mayor led a crowd of local councilmen in a protest march out on the main road: the government demonstrating against the government.
Also curiously absent was the United States. Four years ago, when an earthquake struck the high mountains of northern Pakistan, the American military used its tremendous logistical resources to ferry aid and shelter to the victims, and for a time the tarnished image of the United States gained a lustrous new sheen in Pakistan. This time, the proximity to a war zone and the extreme sensitivity of the Pakistani army have prevented American aid in the form of heavy-lift helicopters and medical personnel. Instead, as Holbrooke said today in Islamabad, the U.S. has provided half the total funding for the relief effort, and President Obama is asking Congress to commit another two hundred million dollars.
But Pakistani politics makes it difficult for the U.S. to claim credit, and for vital American assets to be used to help what has become the world’s largest group of displaced people. So this time, with the political stakes incredibly high, our help is almost invisible. Refugees are easily radicalized, and if the Pakistani army, which carries out counterinsurgency with a bludgeon, continues to create thousands of new ones, with no government plan for their return to Swat and the reconstruction of their homes, it’s quite possible that the long-bearded men under the black-and-white flags at the traffic circle will find a receptive audience for their message.
