Source: World (SAEED SHAH)

MATTA, PAKISTAN — The road to Matta in Pakistan’s scenic Swat Valley is lined with white flags. These flags are not signs of surrender, however, but a plea for peace that terrified locals fly from cars and buildings.

Just two days before The Globe and Mail visited last weekend, Pakistan’s army had recaptured the town from the month-long rule of Pakistan’s version of the Taliban, a band of religious fanatics led by a local warlord preacher, Maulana Fazlullah.

At Matta’s fort-like police station, officers had just taken down a sign put up by the militants that had renamed it “Taliban police station.” Matta’s senior police officer, Amir Zaman Khan, said that he and his men had finally decided to flee, after weeks of Taliban attacks, when four young officers were decapitated at a crossroads in the town centre.

“The people of Swat are willing to believe anyone. They are innocents,” Mr. Khan said. “These guys were bandits, not Taliban [religious scholars]. Fazlullah is a third-class failure. They were the ones preaching about Islam and look how they have blackened the name of Islam.”

The Taliban’s grab for the Swat Valley, which used to be a popular honeymoon destination, was the Islamists’ first real incursion into Pakistan proper.

The militants had already gained effective control of much of the tribal belt that borders Afghanistan, especially north and south Waziristan, but that area had always been semi-autonomous. Swat, however, was a regular part of the country. If the extremists could successfully take over Swat, it seemed that large parts of Pakistan could fall to them. The prospect gained urgency this weekend with news that the disparate militant groups were uniting.

While Swat does have a unique history, many of the conditions that led the locals to initially embrace the Taliban preachers are replicated across Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and other regions.

Until 1969, Swat was a tiny principality, ruled by a king or Wali. He introduced a form of sharia - Islamic law - to the valley that dispensed ready justice through religious courts. Since Swat was swallowed up by Pakistan, the country’s agonizingly slow and corrupt justice system was imposed on the people there.

“It is the collapse of governance that has led to this crisis,” said Adnan Aurangzeb, the grandson of the last Wali. “In Swat, people are very religiously inclined and they put their faith in mullahs. They all still want sharia.”

Instead, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf brought in a new system of local administration, which replaced the colonial Wali system. Instead of a powerful unelected official sent from the centre to run the district with an iron fist, the region had elected mayors, who were dependent on votes and afraid to crack down on a popular preacher such as Maulana Fazlullah, according to Shuja ul Mulk, a college professor in Swat’s capital, Mingora.

During their month under militant rule, the people of Matta said anyone suspected of being against the militants was beaten. At prayer times, the townsfolk would literally run to the mosque. Those that didn’t risked a thrashing.

The militants retreated just before the Pakistan army arrived in Matta. Maulana Fazlullah and hardcore fighters were said to be holed up in the surrounding mountains, at a camp about 20 kilometres from the town. Others, locals said, simply shaved off their beards and cut their distinctive long hair and had now melted back into the people of Swat.

The charismatic Maulana Fazlullah had attracted a following of tens of thousands over the past couple of years in Swat, which is close to the Afghan border, helped by an illegal radio station that he used to blast out his fiery lectures. According to the Pakistan army, he was joined by battle-hardened “foreigners” belonging to al-Qaeda when he launched a full-bloodied takeover of Swat during the summer with 5,000 militants, attacking police check posts and blowing up girls’ schools and shops selling recorded music and films. It is thought that by the end, Maulana Fazlullah had lost control of his movement to even more violent insurgents.

But a near-universal conspiratorial view is held by locals, educated and uneducated alike, which alleges that the authorities were the ones that first allowed Maulana Fazlullah to establish himself, for years turning a blind eye to extreme sermons and his pirate radio.

“The army was firing mortars on ordinary people, not the Taliban. The forces that had surrendered to the Taliban were sent back with money, while the Taliban slaughtered ordinary people,” said shopkeeper Mohammed Ali. “If this is not a game, then what is it?”

The economy of Swat, dependent on tourism, had collapsed.

By October, the local police and administration had fled. Those citizens that could had taken refuge elsewhere. The army was finally deployed on November 24, with a force of 20,000. According to the military, some 300 militants have been killed, around 200 captured, with no accounting for what happened to the rest.

The army has discovered a torture cell at Maulana Fazlullah’s headquarters in a village called Imam Dheri that was captured two weeks into the operation, army spokesman Major Amjad Iqbal said. He also said that alcohol, ladies’ underwear and Viagra tablets were also found at the site.

Business in Matta was quickly returning to apparent normality, with a brisk trade going on in the main high street as the locals savoured their freedom. At the police station, only about half the officers had returned. The rest, it seemed, had decided that service was just too risky. Many townsfolk were pleased to have their police back, though they were still frightened to speak against the militants.

A giant pot of pilau, a rich rice-based dish, had been sent by one grateful local to the police station - which the officers, squatting on the floor, were enthusiastically devouring. In the cells were a dozen sorry-looking inmates that the police said were suspected Taliban.

By last Sunday, the police chief of Mingora, Khan Mir Kassem, was claiming success in an interview.

“The writ of the government has been restored in almost the whole area,” Mr. Kassem said. “Life has returned to normal.”

At the very moment he was speaking, a car laden with explosives rammed into a police check post about 10 kilometres down the road. Nine people were killed, including three police officers and two children, in the suicide attack.

The Taliban, it seems, have not been turned back in Swat. They’ve simply adopted new hit-and-run tactics.

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Tags: matta, Maulana Fazlullah, swat, tourist attraction