Swat Valley in northern Pakistan is a great distance away from Canada and unless one has visited this region, as I did several years ago, neither words nor pictures can convey the beauty of this part of the world to outsiders.
The terrible conflict now raging in this idyllic valley with Pakistani soldiers seeking to contain Taliban fighters from advancing towards the capital, affects Canadian interests as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
The intensity of this conflict is revealing of the extent to which there is a fallout between Pakistan’s army and the Taliban movement, nurtured by the highly secretive and powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for more than a quarter century.
Swat is the area north of Waziristan, or the Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, on the border of Afghanistan.
It is also the southern approach to the Gilgit Agency sitting astride the strategic Karakoram Highway, going over the ‘roof of the world’ into China.
In spring 2006 Gen. Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s military president, quietly conceded FATA’s control to Taliban forces after the army suffered many casualties in the nearly four-year-long, faint-hearted effort to enforce Islamabad’s authority over the region.
Since the overthrow of Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime in Kabul in 2001 and the routing of al-Qaida out of Afghanistan, FATA became the refuge of the Afghan Taliban forces and what remained of al-Qaida and its depleted leadership.
It is important to keep in mind that distinctions between Afghan Taliban and their Pakistani counterparts barely make sense on the ground, given the close relationship among the tribal people on both sides of the international boundary known as the Durand Line.
The remote FATA is the likely key to eventually bringing the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan to an end. As the resurrected base of al-Qaida forces in the region, it is the gathering place of Islamist warriors from central Asia that will require dismantling.
With the new Obama administration in Washington, the pressure on the new civilian administration of President Asif Ali Zardari in Islamabad, to sweep FATA clean of al-Qaida-Taliban terrorists mounted.
It is likely the fight in Swat Valley is a diversionary tactic of the Taliban forces pre-empting the anticipated move of the Pakistan army into FATA, while threatening to sever Pakistan’s strategically important road link to China.
Meanwhile Taliban leaders have thrown the gauntlet at their former masters in Islamabad by sending suicide bombers into cities across Pakistan. This is a page taken out of the insurrectionary tactics of al-Qaida forces under the once vicious command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq during 2005-06.
In Iraq the superior counter-insurgency tactics of the American forces and the surge that former president George W. Bush ordered in early 2007, defeated the al-Qaida-led insurgency.
The situation in Pakistan is different.
On paper it remains a sovereign country and it is an important ally of the West.
American military support in defeating the Taliban insurgency might well be critical, but the heavy lifting will have to be borne by the Pakistani military.
The conflict raging in Swat and its spillover into the country below will test the resolve of Pakistan’s military and people, in defeating a homegrown insurrection that will be increasingly divisive and costly.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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