Ayaz Amir (Pakistan Diary)Those armchair warriors who are wringing their hands over the Swat accord should ask themselves whether the government had any alternative. Necessity, and iron necessity at that, is the mother of this accord. The authorities were left with no other option because the Swat Taleban under the command of Maulana Fazlullah had fought the army to a standstill.
In Pakistan, as indeed elsewhere, sending in the army is the option of last resort. We had tried this option in Swat and it hadn't worked. In fact the Taleban, far from being defeated, were in the ascendant, their grip on Swat tighter than before the operation began. The army was there, as it still is, taking distant artillery shots at the Taleban, and occasionally sending in helicopter gunships, but for all that confined largely to its bunkers.
Guerrilla insurgencies are not defeated by such long-range or long-distance tactics. So what was the ANP government in Peshawar to do?
It impressed upon the federal government and the army the need for declaring some kind of Shariah law for the Malakand division (of which Swat is a part) so as to take the wind out of the sails of the insurgency. This was the demand of Sufi Muhammad----Fazlullah's father-in-law and the founder of the Tanzim Nifaz-e-Shariat-i-Muhammadi (Movement for the imposition of Shariah)--- and if it was accepted Sufi Muhammad could be induced to call upon the Taleban to lay down their arms, something he is already trying to do.