As an Indian, who believes that all organised religions are criminal gangs, i am quite concerned about this development in Pakistan, even though i am shunned from the ground realities.

The last piece refereed in this write up by Fiaz Zafar is born clearly out of helplessness than it being a proposition for the Taliban.
How come showing Islamic Channels will increase awareness in world affairs?

So what will India do now? Will they guard their territory with a Israeli type of wall to protect them from these elements?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/world/asia/25drones.html?_r=1&ref=world

Aside: the Bollywood fan/student in me cannot but remark upon the subversive potential of the Hindi film song; no other aspect of India, Indianness, etc., merits any mention in Zafar’s piece, not even the Kashmir issue (and, I submit, the Pakistani government’s decision to allow screening of Bollywood movies in theaters in Pakistan did more than many other measures to “normalize” relations; I fear that measure too has fallen casualty to the post-Mumbai attack sabre-rattling).

Recognizing the danger in twinning different situations, nevertheless other examples from the region might offer useful examples:

1. Most accounts focus on the military counter-insurgency operations in Punjab in defeating the pro-Khalistan forces, but one should also spare a thought to good ol’ co-optation. i.e. once the Akali Dal was itself normalized as a regional party analogous to other regional parties in India, to an extent the Khalistan movement always risked being coopted by the Indian state.

2. In retrospect, the death of Tamil separatism in India was the victory of the Dravidian parties in the 1967 state elections (and the permanent eclipse of the Congress in that state after those elections). From the Dravidian movement’s perspective, the state was in fact different under the DMK than it had been under the Congress; that difference is undeniable, but equally, the “insurgent” parties themselves acquired an undeniable stake in the system — making them necessarily less insurgent.

I stress that these are just provisional thoughts that don’t have anything to say about Swat — but they might offer scope for thinking about the nature of cooptation (as Zakaria seems to have).

Overall, while I found this a useful piece, I was a bit disturbed by Zakaria’s suggestion that Taliban control of Swat is actually a strategy to make the population anti-Taliban in response to the oppression everyone knows will follow. This seems cold (i.e. that someone might make this calculation doesn’t surprise me; but why isn’t Zakaria outraged by this cynicism?)