If you’re ever in Lahore and happen to enter Cantt, you are bound to get stopped at various check points by men of the Pakistan army. Most cars are allowed through, while some are asked to stop for checking. A few questions are asked, NICs produced, and you’re off on your merry way, proud that the army is so affable.
Now if we change the location, and instead of Lahore Cantt, you try to enter say, Swat, my hometown, the welcome is slightly different. If you’re one of the many local citizens of Swat who don’t have a flashy car or a Lahore/Islamabad number plate, you are less likely to be afforded such niceties. There are various army checkposts on painfully short distances from each other, where the soldiers pick you out based on your appearance. (You’re in public transport so you’re less likely to be well-connected or have a lot of money, hence I will proceed to insult you.) I would like to say that this isn’t the norm, that these are just a few instances and our military men are proud citizens of Pakistan; but then I wouldn’t have the face of that soldier who pulled me out of the bus because I was ‘smiling too much’ imprinted in my head. Instances like this are not rare. And this bitterness is shared quite widely. When the army came to Swat in 2008, finally after two half-hearted previous operations, the people of Swat were happy. But they have over-stayed their welcome.
This, even though it is not the military’s own fault, has led to an eventual effacement in the pro-army sentiment. The army has been given the job of the local police. I cannot over-emphasise the role this has played in this turn of events. You are stopped at least twice whenever travelling from one village to the other (a distance of ten minutes) by men who have no idea if the village I’m from even exists. Drivers are slapped in front of everyone if the soldier thinks he’s being sassy.
Worse are the allegations that army officers are actually being paid off by the timber mafia. It doesn’t matter if these allegations are true or not, it matters that the people believe it. The people of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are not the simpletons that the urbanites of Islamabad, Lahore or Karachi stereotype them as. Every man on the street is well-versed in the ‘great game’ theory, and what’s worse is that they firmly believe that they are smack in the middle of it, with the Pakistan army being one of the major players.
The towns of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not colonies and their populations not your subjects. The army is doing its job but it can do its job while respecting the locals.
