PESHAWAR, Pakistan-- Taliban extremist forces, facing threats of an army assault and a flurry of criticism from Pakistani officials, began withdrawing Friday from a district in northwest Pakistan they had occupied for the past week.
Regional officials announced shortly after noon that the militant forces would leave the Buner district by night, and television news channels showed dozens of masked, heavily armed Taliban fighters driving out of Buner's main town in trucks and vans.
The withdrawal, if successfully completed, could salvage a crumbling peace deal that the government signed recently with the Islamist forces based in the conflicted Swat Valley, hoping to stave off a surge in suicide bombings and attacks across the country. Under the deal, officials agreed to allow strict Islamic law to be imposed in Swat and six surrounding districts, including Buner, in exchange for the Taliban fighters laying down their weapons.
There were reports Friday afternoon that some hardline Taliban were refusing to leave Buner, which lies just 60 miles from Islamabad. But regional officials said they assured Taliban leaders at a meeting that Islamic law will be brought quickly to Swat and the adjoining districts if they recalled their fighters back to Swat.
The apparent turnaround came after the Pakistani government and military, facing strong pressure from Washington and increasing domestic criticism of a potential Taliban advance toward the capital, warned that they would take forceful action if the militants refused to stop their armed expansion.
Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the army chief, told a meeting of senior army officials Friday morning that the army possessed both the will and the capability to defeat armed extremists, according to a statement released by the army. Kayani said the military "will not allow the militants to dictate terms to the government or impose their way of life on civil society."
Prime Minister Yusuf Gillani, who until Thursday had played down the threat from the Taliban forces occupying Swat, also told journalists Friday that the government would not allow the militants to set up a parallel state. If the peace deal is violated, Gillani said, "other options" would be considered.
The Taliban sent mixed signals as their fighters advanced from Swat into the neighboring Buner and Shangla districts Thursday. They ambushed a convoy of frontier police sent to protect government buildings in Buner, but they also extended a deadline for all nonreligious judges to leave Swat and said they had entered the other areas "only to preach."
But Pakistani news media reported that the Taliban have forcibly overrun Buner in the previous several days, while many state judges and officials have abandoned their posts. The black-turbaned fighters have occupied a popular shrine and turned it into a radio station for extremist broadcasts. Public markets were reported to be deserted except for Taliban troops, shown on TV news channels wearing masks and wielding assault rifles.
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"The Pakistani government is fiddling as the Northwest Frontier Province burns," Pakistani representatives of the human rights group Amnesty International said Thursday in a statement. The organization said that hundreds of thousands of Pakistani civilians are "now at the mercy of abusive and repressive Taliban groups" and that the government has given no indication of how it intends to protect them.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that President Asif Ali Zardari's government was "abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists." U.S. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is meeting with Pakistani leaders this week, and special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke called Zardari on Thursday evening.
Regional officials in this northwestern city sponsored the peace deal in a desperate effort to bring peace to the Swat Valley after months of brutal intimidation and defended it strongly even as the militants moved into new areas and made new demands all week.
But they agreed at an emergency meeting Thursday that forceful action needed to be taken if they did not pull back, official sources said.
Several local officials suggested that if the agreement fails, it will provide the domestic political cover needed for army forces to take on the insurgents with no holds barred. Rumors have circulated this week of a planned army assault in the Swat area.
"I still believe it was the right decision," said Afrasiab Khattak, a leader of the Awami National Party, or ANP, a secular bloc that governs in the northwest and that sponsored the agreement. "If the militants do not lay down their arms now, there will be no more excuses. The common soldier will feel everything possible has been done to avoid war. The government will have the moral high ground, and the army can go in with a much bigger operation than before. This time it will be different."
Some analysts here say the Islamists, who control much of the tribal belt along the Afghan border, have succeeded in establishing Swat, which lies in Pakistani's interior, as a launching pad for their wider ambitions. They say the army, trained to fight a conventional war against India, still has no stomach to fight its Muslim countrymen, many of whom were once sponsored by Pakistan and the United States to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
There is widespread public disappointment in Pakistan's civilian leaders for so easily ceding ground to extremists who butchered and bullied their way to power in Swat. Parliament approved the deal allowing sharia after almost no debate, and Zardari signed it.
"We have a severe leadership crisis," said Athar Minallah, a lawyer who helped lead a successful, two-year protest movement to restore deposed senior judges. "The Parliament is deaf and dumb, and Zardari is living in bunkerized luxury. If the political elite think everything is so great in Swat, why don't they send their families to live there instead of abroad?"
Partisan rivalries have also tainted the decision about how to respond to the Islamist threat. When Sherry Rehman, a legislator from Zardari's party, spoke in Parliament against the Swat accord, saying she feared it would leave women and children at the mercy of harsh fanatics, she was immediately denounced as a party-splitter.
"I am under fire from everyone now, but I just had to speak up," Rehman said shortly after Parliament approved the Swat deal. "Terrorism and militancy are spreading, people are afraid, and the state is in retreat. The problem is not about sharia, it's about who will enforce it. If you allow a rabble with guns to dictate things, it will create a culture of impunity and fear."
Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Zardari's leading rival, this week joined the chorus of concern about the Taliban advance, but he was widely assumed to be polishing his moderate credentials after years of close relations with religious parties and his own attempt, as Pakistan's leader in the 1990s, to impose sharia nationwide.
A third factor in the confused national reaction to the Swat agreement, and to the wider threat of Islamist violence, is the deep resentment many Pakistanis feel about the U.S. military role here. There is widespread belief that the problem of radical Islam in Pakistan stems from the unfinished war between the United States and the Taliban in next-door Afghanistan, where tens of thousands of U.S. troops are stationed.
Even a rash of terrorist strikes in major interior cities, including a suicide bombing at a hotel in Islamabad and a commando attack on a police academy near Lahore, have not fully dispelled the popular notion that militancy can be confined to the northwest. Alarms about homegrown terrorism are being drowned out by nationalist anger over bombing raids by unpiloted U.S. aircraft on militant targets near the Afghan border.
Meanwhile, with Taliban fighters occupying more and more areas in the northwest and vowing to bring Islamic justice to the region, political and professional leaders have fled. Few officials from the ANP and Zardari's Pakistan People's Party dare visit the constituencies that voted for them in the February 2008 elections. Mohammed Khan, a lawyer from Swat who fled the region last month with his family, recounted how pressure from the insurgents prevented secular candidates from holding rallies or campaigning before the elections. But their two parties swept the polls, while religious ones fared poorly.
"One [Islamist] party used the symbol of a book, telling people it was the Koran, but Swatis voted for the lantern of the ANP," Khan said, referring to the symbols used on ballots to indicate a candidate's party. "Now the ANP has had to swallow the bitter pill of sharia rule, but how can anyone say the people wanted that? They have been pushed into a corner, and now no one is there to defend them."
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