Europe must not stand by while Pakistan unravels

Those attacks, and the growing humanitarian crisis caused by Pakistan's war with the
Taliban, are just two of the many threats that could lead to the country's unravelling.

That should be an alarming ­prospect for policymakers from London to Washington.

For the war with the Taliban is not just a Pakistani problem: on it hinges much of the West's wider struggle against jihadist terrorism.

Pakistan is a mess. More than ­2.6 million refugees have fled ongoing fighting between the army and the Pakistani Taliban.

There is a separatist insurgency in the province of Balochistan and up to 20 inter-ethnic killings a day in Karachi.

A Pakistani-led terrorist group that mounted a major attack on Mumbai last year, killing 166 people, has fouled up relations with India.

Meanwhile, the economy is in a state of meltdown.
Yet at this critical juncture, Pakistan is getting little support from European nations.

Tuesday night's attack was one of the most sophisticated seen in Peshawar, which has been the target of seven major terrorist outrages in the past four weeks.

Three suicide attackers dressed in army uniform opened fire on guards outside the Pearl Continental Hotel, once considered the safest in the city.

The attackers then allowed a pick-up truck laden with at least 500kg of explosives to drive into the hotel car park, where it exploded.

The six-foot-deep crater collapsed one wing of the hotel. Pakistan is at war with a broad-based alliance of some 40 extremist groups led by the Pakistani Taliban, who have strategic guidance and support from al Qaeda.

In the past month nearly 20,000 troops have been battling several thousand Taliban in the Swat valley, just north of Islamabad.

The army has successfully cleared much of the valley but has failed to kill or capture any top Taliban leader.

However, the fighting and the heavy use of artillery and air power by the army have led to some 2.6 million people fleeing the region.

"It's been the largest and fastest displacement of people since the Rwanda genocide 15 years ago," says Paul Risley, of the UN's World Food
Programme (WFP).

The problem is that only 10 per cent of the refugees have arrived at UN-established camps, while the rest have sought shelter with families and friends, making looking after them much more difficult.

Last week in Mardan, the second-largest city in the North West Frontier Province, where more than one million refugees have arrived, I watched thousands of families who are camped out in schools, mosques, people's homes, gardens and fields receive food rations from the WFP.

"We will go home only when the army kills all the Taliban leaders and we can once again feel safe,'' Shahena Begum, a housewife who had fled Swat, told me.

This crisis is most alarming because it comes at a crucial point in Pakistan's troubled relationship with the Taliban.

For too long the powerful army, which ruled the country until last year, had ignored the threat posed by the Pakistani Taliban and their allies, as they gathered strength and recruits, first in the mountainous regions bordering Afghanistan, where the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda leadership is based, and then in Swat.

And for too long the public, fed on a mixture of Right-wing propaganda and Islamist views in the media, had come to believe that the Taliban were the creation of India, Afghanistan or Israel — Pakistan's proverbial enemies — rather than local boys gone bad.

The government and the army had been in a state of denial that the Taliban posed any threat.

Suddenly in May, the Taliban in Swat, bolstered by a controversial peace deal with the
government, poured out of the valley and began to march south to Islamabad.

There was panic in Islamabad, London and Washington.

Three actions have come together that have helped turn things around.

First, the US administration piled extraordinary pressure on the army to retaliate in Swat, while pledging large quantities of military and economic aid.

Then the government and the opposition, which had been at loggerheads for the past year, united to condemn the Taliban.

Lastly and most important of all, the public mood suddenly shifted as people began to demand why the army had been sitting still for so long.

The army's old excuses that India and not the Taliban were the major security threat to the country sounded hollow.

Now housewives and students from Lahore and Karachi — hundreds of miles from Swat — are on TV demanding that the Taliban be finished off.

There is mounting public pressure for the army to go after the headquarters of the Taliban and al Qaeda in the tribal areas.

The US and Britain are demanding the same thing, because of the escalating war in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the Afghan Taliban have stepped up their offensive against US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, in anticipation of the arrival of 20,000 extra US marines sent by President Obama.

The Afghan Taliban get most of their supplies and many of their recruits from Pakistan's border regions.

For years the US has been trying to get the Pakistan army to go in and take out the nests of Afghan Taliban. Now that may be about to happen.

Yet the rest of the world, especially the EU, remains stunningly indifferent to the plight of those made refugees by Pakistan's new war.

The US has given $310 million towards relief efforts but there has been virtually no aid from any European country — not even a sack of flour, say UN officials.

Last week Obama's special envoy for the region, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, visited the refugee camps and appealed to Europe and the Muslim world to be more generous.

If the refugees are not properly looked after, Pakistan's public mood could once again turn: people could again demand a ceasefire with the Taliban.

That would set back any hopes of eliminating the Taliban in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Europe now needs to step up to the plate and help the growing number of refugees in Pakistan.

If it does not, Pakistan may stumble in its new-found zeal to take on the Taliban — and that could be disastrous both for the allied war in Afghanistan and for this vital drive to tackle the crucible of jihadist terror.

Ahmed Rashid's book Descent into Chaos: The World's Most Unstable Region and the Threat to Global Security, is now out in paperback (Penguin).