Talibanistan: The Talibs at home

By Nicholas Schmidle

By Nicholas Schmidle

About a year ago, while sitting at my home in Washington, DC, I found myself with a sort of delayed-stress longing for the Taliban. The desire stemmed from an overseas dispute, a business deal gone bad. Back in January 2008, I’d been forced into a hasty transaction—shortly after five policemen knocked at my front door in Islamabad and announced their intent to kick me and my wife out of Pakistan. We had an hour to leave. Fortunately, through some well-connected friends, we managed to get 48 hours to pack our apartment into boxes, find a good home for our kitten, Cricket, and sell the four-cylinder Pajero Mini SUV that we had used to scoot around Islamabad for the past year.

That’s where the problem began; we didn’t actually sell the car. There was never an exchange of money. But we had reason to believe that the Pajero’s new owner, Bilal, would keep his word and pay for the vehicle. After all, Bilal’s father owned the house in which we had rented a three-room apartment for the previous two years. Moreover, Bilal worked for an international telecom company, so we knew he had a steady paycheck. And the deal cincher was that just a year earlier we had bought that very Pajero Mini from Bilal himself.

But collecting on an outstanding debt from halfway around the world isn’t easy. Phone calls went unanswered or ignored. Five months after being expelled from Pakistan, I asked a fellow journalist in Islamabad to intervene. He was the third or fourth person I’d enlisted for the job. Why didn’t we just call the police? The police are courageous and have suffered greatly in recent years from terrorist attacks, but when you see them thumbing for rides to work, you also get the impression that they lack the capacity to get certain things done. My friend, on the other hand, had moonlighted as a used car salesman and boasted of having repossessed a car or two. He seemed ideally suited to the task. But after weeks of chasing Bilal around town, he still hadn’t recovered the debt (or the car).

It was at this point that I pondered calling on some Talibs to get the job done.

To read the rest of this story, visit the World Affairs Journal, where this was originally published.

Nicholas Schmidle is the author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

SABIR KHAN/AFP/Getty Images

Does Baitullah Mehsud's death really leave al Qaeda exposed?

By Nicholas Schmidle

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By Nicholas Schmidle

Back in May, Michael Kinsley, holding the newly redesigned issue of Newsweek in hand, weighed the future of the newsmagazine. Guess what? He wasn’t particularly impressed. “Whenever they have an existential crisis - and this is not the first - they always make the wrong choice,” he wrote in The New Republic. But putting aside Newsweek’s innovative streak (or lack thereof), their coverage of Pakistan is pretty darn good.

Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, who survived a Taliban ambush and attempted kidnapping last November, comprise a fantastic reporting duo. Last month, they wrote my favorite piece (with the TNR-esque title “Fight Flub”) so far about the Swat refugees and the Pakistani government’s rush to get them back in their homes - even if the fighting is far from over.

On Friday, they wrote another thoughtful and descriptive article, this one about the implications of Baitullah Mehsud’s apparent death on al Qaeda. (Here’s my take, if you’re interested.) The central argument - “With Mehsud gone, Al Qaeda could be in trouble” - is a provocative one, but I don’t know if, despite some great reporting throughout, they ever really back it up. I agree that Baitullah Mehsud supplied suicide bombers on missions that were probably planned by al Qaeda, and I agree that Mehsud’s cooperation with al Qaeda made him exceedingly dangerous. But what are the signs that al Qaeda is feeling exposed?

But what really gave me pause was the claim that “Mehsud…proved to be an even better host for al Qaeda than Mullah Omar.” Moreau and Yousafzai follow this up with examples of how Mehsud benefited from al Qaeda: funds, military expertise, ideological guidance, etc. But is Mehsud a better host? I wonder where Bin Laden would rather be right now - in Kandahar in the late 1990s, with a country at his disposal, or holed up in South Waziristan, wondering if that buzzing is a mosquito in his ear or a drone flying 10,000 feet overhead? I’ll bet a world famous pomegranate from Kandahar would be tasting pretty good.

One other small quibble: the piece identifies Maulvi Nazir, another top Talib in South Waziristan, as part of Mehsud’s Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. He’s not. In fact, Nazir and Mehsud were known rivals, since Nazir is generally cooperative with the Pakistani government, and Mehsud pledged to overthrow it. Still, just before Valentine’s Day 2009, with love in the air, Nazir and Mehsud suspended their differences long enough to establish the Council of United Mujahideen, swearing fealty to Mullah Omar and Bin Laden. I can’t say whether the creation of the Council was a force multiplier, or purely cosmetic, but I can say that Nazir is not amongst those in the TTP who are ambushing Pakistani military convoys.