In discussions on the ongoing war against militant groups in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, representatives of nationalist, progressive and democratic political parties as well as representatives of civil society have been focusing on a new threat: the so-called 'Punjabi Taliban', an entity unheard of until 2007, but now commonly used to describe a variety of Punjab-based militant groups. As Dr Said Alam Mehsud, a leading anti-militancy campaigner in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, said recently, 'Any progress against militancy that we make in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa will be wasted if militants gain strength in Punjab and the government there does not take action.'
This concern was raised weeks before the shocking attack by two suicide bombers on 1 July at the Lahore shrine of Hazrat Ali Hajveri, popularly known as Data Ganj Bakhsh, one of the earliest saints to introduce Sufism and its spirit of egalitarianism in Punjab. The attack, which has been seen as the handiwork of the Punjabi Taliban, left more than 40 devotees and visitors dead and more than a hundred injured. Even as Pakistan lives with the trauma and aftershocks of this ghastly attack, the country's main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, has proposed negotiations with extremist groups, a move many see as a sign of 'weakness'. Sharif´s proposal, however, has been warmly received by the groups themselves.
Defining a new identity
The term 'Punjabi Taliban' originated in Wana, the summer headquarters of South Waziristan, when residents spotted people from Punjab who could not speak the local Pushto language. The local tribesmen began calling them the 'Punjabi Taliban', and the term thus came to represent militants from Punjab, Pakistan´s largest province in terms of population. This umbrella identity, however, was formally ascribed to them by the media and commentators.
During the Taliban rule in Afghanistan (1996-2001), militant groups based in Pakistan sent their recruits to training camps being run near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border by ageing Afghan warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani. After the Taliban ouster in October 2001, these camps shifted first to Waziristan and then to other parts of the tribal belt. Young men from Punjab who were trained in Afghanistan during Taliban rule were also believed to have quietly moved into Waziristan after former president General Pervez Musharraf banned certain militant groups, such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), in 2002, under pressure from the United States.