Pakistan: Taliban Goes After Media Publishers receive death threats; many blame U.S. for troubles
September 19, 2008
Jugnu Mohsin and her husband Najam Sethi are Pakistan’s most powerful media couple. Between them, they edit three newspapers, four magazines, and run a television production company. A few months ago, they began receiving threatening letters signed by the Taliban. The letters accused Sethi of being an anti-Islam American agent. They warned him that all his reports published in both his English-language papers The Friday Times and The Daily Times had been read and rejected by the forces of Islam. He was told that unless he repented for his sins and changed his editorial policy immediately, he would be executed like all the other un-Islamic American agents in the country. A picture attached to one letter showed a Pakistani journalist alleged to be an agent of America with his throat cut. As a precaution, Mohsin and Sethi cut back their engagements, hired armed security guards and sent their children out of the country. The Taliban has already beheaded scores of people under one pretext or another so the couple could not take the threats lightly. Five years ago, when I interviewed Mohsin for FRONTLINE/World, she was optimistic about her country’s future and confident that the Taliban could be defeated. But when I visited her office in Lahore last week, she described Pakistan in far more bleak terms.
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| The Friday Times is a prominent liberal newspaper in Pakistan. The Taliban has begun sending death threats to the newspaper’s editors. |
“The Taliban are not only in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), they are able to make inroads into cities with impunity,” Mohsin told me. “They have the media and the populace enthralled. They are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the people.” It is a battle, she believes, the United States is losing. The Taliban has strengthened its propaganda machine. The group regularly releases videos in which members parade dead bodies of civilian women and children it claims have been killed by the hand of “Zionist America and its Pakistani counterpart, the Army.” Taliban leaders hold press conferences where they demand to know why Pakistan is fighting America’s war. They suggest that they have thousands of well-equipped young men ready to lay down their lives in the name of Islam. This war, they say, will end when the United States stops using the Pakistan Army to kill innocent Muslims.
In a largely illiterate country, these tactics are working – now more than ever. Last week, U.S. Special Forces landed on Pakistani soil for the first time since the war on terror began. Helicopters carried U.S. and Afghan commandos deep into the tribal belt targeting a Taliban hideout. In the last month alone, newspapers here have reported that the U.S. has attacked inside Pakistan six times with missiles fired from unmanned aircrafts. On the streets here, anti-U.S. sentiment is at an all-time high. Just two days ago, a powerful suicide bomb ripped through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing 53 people and injuring more than 200. Two Americans were killed in the bombing, which experts say bears the hallmark of an Al Qaeda attack. In the aftermath, many people I interviewed on the streets repeated what the Taliban propaganda machine has been saying, “Innocent people are being killed because we support America.” There is virtually no blame attributed to the Taliban. When The New York Times reported last week that President Bush had signed a secret order approving the deployment of U.S. forces in Pakistan, the administration did not deny the report.
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| Newspaper publisher Jugnu Mohsin has received death threats from the Taliban for her publications’ editorial policies |
The impact of that decision is already being felt in Pakistan. There are signs that moderate tribal leaders living in the tribal belt may join forces with the Taliban if these incursions do not end. Just in the past few days, tribesmen aligned with the government have issued a statement confirming that they will retaliate if any more U.S. strikes take place. By taking direct military action in Pakistan, the U.S. has raised the stakes for the Pakistan government. But Mohsin believes that the U.S. presidential election in November and a change in the White House will help improve Pakistani public opinion. “By selecting Barack Obama as their presidential candidate, the Democrats have already rehabilitated the image of America as a country where anything and everything is possible,” she said. “Where there are opportunities alike for black people, for brown people, for white people, for immigrants… it is an America that people had forgotten in the last eight years.”
Yet it was Senator Obama who said in a speech outlining his foreign policy last year, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” More recently, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has taken on a more conciliatory tone. After his forceful statement last year that he would chase Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell if necessary, McCain told CNN’s Larry King in August that he would respect Pakistan’s sovereignty and would not send in U.S. forces, even though many believe high-value figures such as Bin Laden are operating freely there. Threatened newspaper editors such as Mohsin believe that recent U.S. military intervention is only adding to the crisis and playing into the Taliban’s hands. “This is our war,” Mohsin told me, “and we have to fight this on our own terms. If everybody turns against America, the Pakistani government will no longer be in a position to support the war on terror.”