Pat Dollard | Young Americans

BADABER, Pakistan - A showdown is shaping up in Pakistan’s turbulent northwest between secular-minded ethnic Pashtuns and those who support Taliban-style Islamists—a conflict that is likely to sharpen regardless of which side wins Monday’s elections.

Politicians and analysts fear the vote for a provincial assembly, which is being elected at the same time as the national parliament, will produce a coalition powerless to curb the frontier region’s slide toward domination by Islamic militants.

Five years ago, hard-line religious zealots swept to power in North West Frontier Province’s regional government. They capitalized on Pashtun anger over the U.S. invasion that toppled the Pashtun- dominated Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan as well as President Pervez Musharraf’s move to sideline mainstream political parties opposed to his military rule.

The result, in effect, was an open door policy for al-Qaida and Afghan Taliban fighters. Their move into the province, especially its autonomous tribal belt, allowed them to regroup and recruit followers among religious Pashtuns on this side of the border.

Today, al-Qaida operatives move more freely through the tribal areas than Pakistan’s army. Taliban fighters are edging ever closer to the provincial capital of Peshawar. Two weeks ago, Pakistani troops battled Taliban militants here in Badaber, 12 miles from Peshawar.

Many people in Badaber say they are terrified of the militants, but also of government forces. Many soldiers are ethnic Punjabis who ignore the region’s customs and whose presence fires up ethnic resentments that are never far beneath the surface in Pakistan.

But with security worsening and no improvements in public services, many people in this largely Pashtun province have become disillusioned with clerical rule.

That discontent has improved the election prospects for the secular nationalists of the Awami National Party and a breakaway faction of Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, which are challenging radical religious parties like the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islami, or Party of Islamic Clerics.

Yet, while secular candidates are expected to fare better than in some politicians and analysts worry that whatever regional government is seated won’t be strong enough to face up to pro-Taliban extremists.

“This will be a ‘hodgepodge’ of two or three parties in a coalition that will not be able to take any decisions or resolve anything, and it will help the Islamists,” said former interior minister Aftab Sherpao, who has survived two assassination attempts. “It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Hard-liners in Tehrik-e-Taliban, a coalition of militant groups fighting government forces in the region, say they don’t care who wins the election, which they consider irrelevant.

Spokesman Maulvi Umer told The Associated Press that fears the umbrella group would try to disrupt the voting were “totally baseless.”

Nevertheless, more than 35 people have died just this week in attacks on campaign rallies in the province. Tehrik-e-Taliban’s chief, Baitullah Mehsud, has been accused by U.S. and Pakistani officials of masterminding the Dec. 27 suicide attack that killed Bhutto.

Although the government has mounted a major investigation into Bhutto’s assassination, bombings and suicide attacks in the tribal areas are rarely investigated, Sherpao said.

“When we don’t resolve these cases it encourages others to carry out attacks. But it’s also a `no win’ situation for the police, who are scared for their lives. How can we expect them to give up their lives for the 6,000 rupees ($100) a month they earn,” Sherpao said.

Afrasiab Khattak, provincial leader of the Awami National Party, said the fight against extremism is difficult because “the state is contaminated from within.”

“These militants have their sympathizers in the government, in the military, the intelligence agencies,” he said. “It is very dangerous.”

Many Pashtuns trace the crisis in the northwest to the events that unfolded after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Musharraf threw his support to the United States, reversing Pakistan’s alliance with the Afghan Taliban.

Sherpao said the Musharraf government, in which he served, failed early on to counter the propaganda of Islamic militants, who convinced many Pakistani Pashtuns that fighting American troops in Afghanistan was a religious duty.

Militants used the 14,000 madrassas, or religious schools, across Pakistan to fan the flames of anti-Americanism and turn many Pashtuns against the national government in Islamabad.

“We haven’t been able to counter this,” Sherpao said.

With unrest growing in border areas, Pakistan’s army was sent to restore order in districts that had been ruled by tribal leaders. But the army’s heavily Punjabi element fanned ethnic rivalries, and pro- Taliban hard-liners convinced many people the troops were part of a plot against the Pashtun people along both sides of the border.

“A lot of people here have a soft spot for the Taliban. They have sympathy for them and when the army came in, they believed it was a Punjabi conspiracy to pitch Pashtun against Pashtun,” said Kamran Arif, a human rights lawyer in Peshawar.

“People like me have less and less space,” he said. “I am more careful of what I say now than I would have been, say, five years ago. I remember when the mullah (cleric) was the lowest of the low. Suddenly they are a force to be reckoned with. People are afraid to even speak out against them.”

Fear of the extremists is pervasive.

One of Peshawar’s largest video store owners, who didn’t want to be quoted by name for fear he would be killed by extremists, said he received threats last year from Islamic militants who told him: “Shut down or we will kill you and your family.”

He said he turned to the police, but they advised him to stay closed.

(AP)