Two Impressions from the Islamist Front

Somalia is one of the world's biggest refugee producing countries. UNHCR provides protection and assistance to some half a million Somali refugees in nearby countries, including Kenya (292,194), Yemen (142,394), Ethiopia (40,439), Uganda (8,889) Djibouti (8,741), Eritrea (4,636) and Tanzania (1,527). We are also coordinating protection and shelter activities for the 1.3 million displaced in Somalia [1]

“I have never lived by myself before. I am worried, what will I feed my daughters.” With tearful eyes, she added, “but I am more worried about my family. I don’t know if they are alive or dead. I just want to know what has happened to my family.” [2]

While Somalia's rebel uber-Islamists continue to fight the government's now incumbent Islamists, Somalis continue to find the middle path between bullets and decamp Mogadishu for the camps on its fringe and elsewhere.

The residents of Swat Valley and surrounds in Pakistan would seem to be dodging another sort of monster: an army providing a fine demonstration of its "heavy metal" and conventional war fighting skills, which efforts may well sanitize the region primarily by driving out or killing most of its inhabitants.

Will Pakistan's War on the Taliban turn out a Big Show?

It may if the military and the residents of Swat Valley (and surrounds) put less effort into resettlement and reconstruction than they have migration and war.

In terms of Pakistan's Islamic Small War, military operations will have done little to alter the baseline insurgent tactics revolving around assassination, campaigns of intimidation, and roadside and suicide bombing; however, in relation to who may have been killed or captured in the latest effort, Al Qaeda and the Taliban may be at least temporarily de-energized as regards their expression through violence.

Life--development, modernity, progress--goes on around the Islamic Small Wars. 

This is one chink in the cancer metaphor often hauled out to describe the Islamist Front: whether the displacement through warfare of 1.25 million Somalis or an approximately 1 million Pakistanis, millions of others in Somalia and Pakistan and billions of others around the world simply go on about the business of living in remarkably different circumstances and under a most colorful umbrella of varying beliefs about the divine and philosophies about living as brave good men and women.

Presidents Zardari and Sheikh Ahmed should be working furiously on security force recruitment and deployment for current battle and near-future policing, and they should be devising reconstruction and repopulation plans with appropriate defense elements and systems as they go.

"War without end" may have an oscillating existence in Islamic philosophy, and to the effect that where westerners would say "enough", Islamists would seem to want to say "now or later", but even so, the want of peace for all may become unexpectedly primary.

The woman says, "I just want to know what has happened to my family."

Oh, Islamist, tell her what you have done with her family.

Reference

1. UNHCR.  "Escalating violence displaces Somalis."  Via Alertnet, May 26, 2009: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/UNHCR/7446ac6f76968e21b8606567c67e88f1.htm

2. Oxfam GB - UK.  "Pakistan's displaced people: one woman's story."  Via AlertNet, May 26, 2009: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/220803/8d7e92d49aebf2f930e34e3504adda3b.htm

Comments

[Tammy Swofford]

The repatriation into Swat Valley will be difficult as some will find plots of land where houses once stood. Warfare which spares the landscape is not a valued concept within some military engagements.

If you did not see the Frontline special on Swat, Jim, the book-ended reports are worth it. The middle segment, on the missing journalist appeared a bit too choppy for my taste; but the interviews with little girls denied schooling and later, the boys of the madarassa, make for worthy time investment.

The Taliban are somewhat like locusts who march in rank, without apparent leader at the front. But they are pushed along by the ideology which has commandeered their minds.

Tammy