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print versionWhile Islamabad’s authority does not extend to the tribal areas, Taliban’s unofficial court in Waziristan rules on cases in Karachi
by Jon Boone in Karachi
A policeman in Bannu checks ID of residents fleeing a military offensive against the Pakistani Taliban stronghold of North Waziristan. Photograph: Reuters
Few places illustrate how Taliban-controlled enclaves in Pakistan have undermined the state’s authority better than Mufti Noor Wali’s busy courthouse in North Waziristan, a notorious area bordering Afghanistan where a long-awaited military offensive, Operation Zarb-e-Azb, began on Sunday.
For years people have flocked to the softly spoken, slightly cross-eyed Taliban judge in Miran Shah, the capital of North Waziristan, to adjudicate disputes and settle arguments.
Such "shadow justice" systems have been established by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in areas of both countries they have sought to control. But the mufti’s jurisdiction is not North Waziristan, or the many other parts of Pakistan’s troubled north-west where the state’s writ is limited or non-existent.
Instead he deals exclusively with settling the business, property and family disputes of people living 600 miles away in Karachi – Pakistan’s commercial and industrial capital, which hosts the country’s stock exchange, bank headquarters and the country’s most important port.
It is an example of how the Pakistani Taliban has been transformed in just seven years from being a contained nuisance in a distant region regarded by many Pakistanis as a "foreign land" to a critical threat to the entire country.
On any given day plaintiffs and defendants make the two-day journey from the teeming megacity to Miran Shah, inventing excuses to get past army checkpoints.
No one dares ignore a summons but many are happy to make the effort, reflecting a widespread belief that Taliban justice is superior to the slow and corrupt courts – something counter-insurgency theorists describe as the "out-governing" of the state by illegal groups trying to usurp it.
In one dispute last year between a group of Karachi tyre wholesalers and a businessman who owed them 20m Pakistani rupees (£120,000) the mufti managed to please everyone.
After hearing both sides of the story, making his own enquiries and pondering the matter for five days he announced the tyre-sellers would get their money back but the businessman would have five years to pay it back. The arrangement would be monitored and enforced by Taliban muscle in Karachi.
"I was delighted because it meant the [other side] would have to stop coming and threatening me," said the businessman, a pious Muslim but not a man with any great enthusiasm for the Taliban project to turn Pakistan into a Sunni theocracy.
Without the Taliban such disputes would turn violent, he said.
Militants first moved in large numbers to the FATA after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001. An area the size of Belgium soon became a miniature version of pre-9/11 Afghanistan, hosting Islamist terrorists from around the world, including al-Qaida.
It did enormous damage to Pakistan’s standing abroad, angering both Afghanistan and the US as well as disquieting its key ally China, which has reportedly complained that Islamist rebels fighting in western China have bases in North Waziristan.
And it plunged the country into domestic chaos, particularly after 2007 when leading militants united to form the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and turned their guns on the Pakistani state, killing tens of thousands and launching audacious terrorist attacks, such as last week’s assault by a squad of 10 suicide fighters on Karachi’s airport.
North Waziristan also became the centre of an uncontrolled outbreak of polio that threatens the global project to eradicate the disease following the Taliban decision to ban vaccinations in 2012.
Medical teams may finally get the access to North Waziristan’s children in the coming weeks, following the launch on Sunday of the long-awaited operation, which Pakistan’s army says will eliminate militant safe havens once and for all. But many analysts say the insurgency has spread far beyond North Waziristan.
The situation is especially alarming in big cities with large populations of Pashtuns, the ethnic group that predominates in the tribal areas but which has migrated in huge numbers to other parts of Pakistan.
One small Karachi trader said Mufti Noor Wali’s office in Miran Shah was merely the Taliban’s "supreme court" that sits above countless locally run Taliban "peace committees" and jirgas, or tribal assemblies, that regulate key industries such as transport and manage the affairs of clusters of families within the city’s Pashtun population.
"Even if the disputes are settled in Karachi the authority comes from North Waziristan," said the trader, who like everyone else who discussed the issue feared to be identified.
Pashtun residents say the Karachi neighbourhoods they moved to in the 1990s increasingly resemble the worst parts of the FATA. They report mosques openly collecting contributions for the Taliban after Friday prayers and wealthy Pashtuns being stung for protection money used to fund operations around the country. The most troubled Pashtun districts almost completely encircle the city and have become home to radical seminaries, a proportion of whose students are likely to go on to become foot soldiers and bombers.
And like North Waziristan, there are some areas where the police and other law enforcers will not venture.
A major crackdown on the Taliban and other militant groups in Karachi was launched last year by the government, but a senior police officer responsible for one of the city’s roughest areas concedes there is still a long way to go.
His men rarely bother to arrest TTP suspects, shooting them instead in extra-judicial killings dressed up as "encounters".
"We kill them because otherwise the courts will just release them back on to the streets," he said. "We have no choice."
According to him in the last nine months there had been 350 such killings – an all-time high.
Echoing the view of some security experts, he fears Operation Zarb-e-Azb will simply send more TTP fighters into Karachi and other cities where the police are under-prepared and ill-equipped to fight an urban insurgency.
The TTP has proved adept at assassinating senior officers, including the city’s CID chief Chaudhry Aslam, whose armoured vehicle was blown up as it travelled in a convoy in January.
Police stations have been heavily fortified, with large trenches dug around their perimeters.
Even if Mufti Noor Wali’s courthouse is put out of business in the coming days, few believe it will be an end of Taliban justice in the country’s biggest city.
"The writ of Taliban is not in a piece of territory," said a journalist from Waziristan now working in Karachi. "They have established their writ in the minds of the people."
