DE BORCHGRAVE: Pakistan another Iran?

President Obama’s foreign-policy gurus are baffled by Pakistan’s anarchic chaos, which is sweeping across one of the world’s eight nuclear powers. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she had trouble understanding why the Pakistani army isn’t moving to suppress Taliban insurgents inching closer to the capital city of Islamabad.

After six decades of independence - half that time under military dictatorship - Pakistan is still a largely feudal society where landless Taliban have started an uprising against the landlords that back the inept government of President Asif Ali Zardari. It is hard to imagine that he enjoys much support in the budding showdown between Pakistan’s “haves” and “have-nots.” He says Pakistan is in a state of war without defining the enemy. For Taliban and Pakistan’s landless millions, the enemy is Pakistan’s political establishment and the feudal estates that enjoy government protection.

Pakistan is increasingly a rerun of the Islamist fundamentalist revolution in Iran that ousted the pro-Western regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and proceeded to execute about 7,000 “counterrevolutionaries” in a few months, or thousands more than were sentenced to death during the shah’s 40 years on the Peacock throne. The Iranian equivalent of Pakistan’s Taliban (revolutionary Islamist students) seized the U.S. Embassy and kept 52 U.S. citizens hostage for 444 days.

To understand the angry growl of Pakistan’s 170 million people, look at the number of Taliban (students) who are graduated from Pakistan’s 12,500 madrassas, the free-board Koranic schools. They grind out about 2 million teenage boys a year.

They are the sons of peasants with little or no land who cannot afford the fees of proper schools. (Most Pakistanis subsist on $2 a day.) Besides free food, clothes, books and notebooks, many are promised jobs in mosques or other madrassas.

They learn Arabic and the Koran (by heart), an education based on memorization of medieval texts to the exclusion of analytical skills. It’s the ossification and stagnation of knowledge, one Pakistani professor harrumphed. Countless millions of young Pakistanis have been similarly brainwashed.

Many join the ranks of Pakistan’s professional army - and they believe that shooting at Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley or Buner, 60 miles northwest of the seat of government in Islamabad, or the seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) that abut the Afghan border is tantamount to killing the soldiers of Allah. For them, Islam is the only true religion. The others are heretical enemies that are on the warpath against Islam. That was drilled into most of them for 10 consecutive years, from age 6 to 16.

Under tremendous U.S. pressure to take action against Taliban and al Qaeda in FATA, Pakistan’s army lost 1,400 killed and 4,000 wounded in 2007-08. Their hearts were not in it. They were fighting their own people. The army negotiated cease-fires with Taliban that promptly were broken. Unknown numbers of Taliban guerrilla fighters then moved out of FATA and into the 70-mile-long Swat Valley, the country’s most popular tourist area.

There, too, the army grew tired of killing its own citizens; the Zardari government conceded defeat and allowed Taliban to impose Shariah law, a strict Islamic code of justice that allowed the public beating of a 17-year-old girl seen talking to a man to whom she was not related. Her screams were caught on a video that was shown widely around the world.

Then black-turbaned Taliban insurgents, with grenade-propelling rifles and AK-47s (automatic Russian assault rifles) slung over their shoulders, pushed their luck and moved into the neighboring Buner district.

Mrs. Clinton and special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke raised a cry of alarm and leaned on Mr. Zardari and army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq P. Kayani to take action. But Mrs. Clinton also conceded some U.S. responsibility for sowing the seeds of Islamist extremism as a means of undermining the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Today’s Taliban are the sons of yesterday’s mujahedeen guerrillas.

The Pakistani government responded by dispatching eight platoons of paramilitary troops to shore up its authority. Taliban militants ignored them and went about terrorizing a population of half a million. All music was banned. Barber shops were closed, and men were instructed to grow their beards to the regulation length, measured by holding one fist under the chin. From age 7, all girls were ordered to wear burqas, the ambulatory tent look. Taliban enforcers rode around in stolen vehicles.

Stung to the quick by U.S. criticisms, Gen. Kayani ordered helicopter gunships to attack Taliban guerrillas after they ambushed a convoy of security forces in Buner’s Lower Dir district.

But in downtown Islamabad, pro-Taliban religious extremists were back in charge of the Red Mosque after their leader, Maulana Abdul Aziz, arrested as he escaped an army siege in burqa camouflage, was released from prison. More than 100 were killed on both sides before the army prevailed in July 2007.

One Urdu-language TV channel called the Taliban “mazahmat kaar,” the latest translation for resistance fighters. State-controlled PTV labels them with a halo of respectability, “askaryet pasand,” a flowery translation for militant, which made them sound like a distant Tupamaros threat in Uruguay. In the towns and villages they occupied, they killed local policemen, even an army general in the medical corps.

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