The act of killing Akbar Bugti, a secular nationalist rebel in Balochistan who used to keep out the Taliban, allowed the Taliban to turn Quetta, Balochistan's capital, into their stronghold. Quetta, on the border with Iran, is where Mullah Muhammad Omar (remember him?) now lives. Meanwhile Musharraf, who was first forced to retire from the military, and then to resign from his position as president, is planning on collecting big time money on the lecture circuit. Assuredly he will make no mention of the thousands of graves his reckless neglect has created.

The unrest is prevalent in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan especially in Waziristan ever since the operations in Lal Masjid which have led to the redeployment of 100,000 soldiers in Waziristan.
(...) Musharraf's act comes at a time when Pakistan has almost 100,000 troops in the Waziristan region, battling the Taliban.

During this process, the Pakistani Taliban never really merged into the organizationalstructure of the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar; instead, they developed a distinct identity. From their perspective, they intelligently created a space for themselves in Pakistan by engaging in military attacks while at other times cutting deals with the Pakistani government to establish their autonomy in the area.1 By default, they were accepted as a legitimate voice in at least two FATA agencies—South Waziristan and North Waziristan.
(...) The name “Tehrik-i-Taliban” had been used prior to the latest December 14 announcement. An organization with a similar name emerged in FATA’s Orakzai Agency in 1998.2 Some reports also mention a similar organization by the name of Tehrik-i-Tulaba (Movement of Students) also operating in Orakzai Agency that even established an active Shari`a court.3 The name and idea, therefore, is not original.
(...) A shura of 40 senior Taliban leaders established the TTP as an umbrella organization. Militant commander Baitullah Mehsud was appointed as its amir, Maulana Hafiz Gul Bahadur of North Waziristan as senior naib amir (deputy) and Maulana Faqir Muhammad of Bajaur Agency as the third in command.6 The shura not only has representation from all of FATA’s seven tribal agencies, but also from the settled North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) districts of Swat, Bannu, Tank, Lakki Marwat, Dera Ismail Khan, Kohistan, uner and Malakand. This reach demonstrates the TTP’s ambitions. Since its establishment, the TTP through its various demarches have announced the following objectives and principles:

1. Enforce Shari`a, unite against NATO forces in Afghanistan and perform “defensive jihad against the Pakistan army.”7
2. React strongly if military operations are not stopped in Swat District and North Waziristan Agency.
3. Demand the abolishment of all military checkpoints in the FATA area.
4. Demand the release of Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) Imam Abdul Aziz.
5. Refuse future peace deals with the government of Pakistan.

(...) TNSM, another banned terrorist outfit, is led by Maulana Fazlullah and had re-emerged in 2006. The group made headlines for taking control of large areas in the Swat Valley of the NWFP. The army, after a large operation in late 2007, recaptured the district, but TNSM militants (numbering in the hundreds) are still operating in parts of the district. The TTP’s demand for halting government military action in Swat appealed to TNSM members and will predictably lead to more collaboration between the two groups in terms of manpower, logistics and intelligence. TNSM leader Fazlullah is known for the mobile FM radio stations that he managed until recently, on which he would broadcast his radical ideology.
(...) Mehsud came to prominence in February 2005 when he signed a deal with the Pakistani government that it termed as his surrender, although he interpreted it as a peace deal in the interests of the tribal regions as well as Pakistan.18 As part of the deal, he had pledged not to provide any assistance to al- Qa`ida and other militants and not to launch operations against government forces. The deal was short lived, and si ce 2006 he has virtually established an independent zone in parts of South Waziristan Agency which is widely believed to be a sanctuary
for al-Qa`ida and the Taliban.
(...) Maulana Hafiz Gul Bahadur—Belonging to North Waziristan Agency, he has been a member of the local Taliban shura since 2005. He was also a member of the threeman signatory team, representing North Waziristan tribes, that signed the wellknown peace deal between the Pakistani government and North Waziristan in September 2006.21 The deal collapsed in July 2007.
(...) Maulana Faqir Muhammad—The relatively well-profiled 39-year-old Faqir Muhammad
belongs to Mohmand tribe and is known as a facilitator for al-Qa`ida.23 He is a resident of Bajaur Agency, but was educated in the Salafist tradition in various madrasas of the NWFP. This brought him closer to the Arabs operating in the area, which also benefited him financially. This perhaps allows him to afford the personal security team that he is known to have. He came into prominence in 2005 when government forces raided his house in search of some “high-value” Al-Qa`ida operatives. He was a target of a U.S. missile attack in 2006, but he escaped unhurt. He also remained close to TNSM’s founder Maulana Sufi Muhammad, who is currently in jail.

Of the NWFP’s 24 districts, the government of Pakistan has declared eight districts as high security zones, which means that Taliban activities are expanding and the chances of terrorist attacks have increased.1 These districts are Peshawar, Mardan, Kohat, Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan, Nowshera, Abbottabad and Tank. Five of these districts (or their frontier regions) border different FATA agencies (Peshawar: Khyber Agency; Kohat: Orakzai Agency; Bannu: North Waziristan Agency; Dera Ismail Khan: South Waziristan Agency; and Tank: South Waziristan Agency). Clearly, increased disturbances and militancy in FATA is pouring into the neighboring settled districts of the NWFP.
(...) Mangal Bagh, the head of Lashkar-i-Islami, who is essentially a warlord operating in Khyber Agency,22 is introducing his “projects” in Peshawar District apparently without any hindrance.23 He is believed to have sympathizers in the security forces due to his anti-Taliban stance, which at best is a political position because his religious ideals are quite similar to those of the Taliban. For instance, he has asked men to grow beards, wear caps and keep their ankles visible (a very conservative Islamic requirement) to avoid beatings. A large number of people have purchased caps to avoid being killed.
(...) Training and equipping the Frontier Corps is not a substitute for providing adequate resources to the NWFP police.

India’s majoritarian fascists, represented in Parliament by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are in a blue funk. The findings of the “Prime Ministers’ High Level Committee” (set up on March 9, 2005) headed by the former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, Justice Rajindar Sachar, have in its Report submitted to Parliament on November 30, 2006 nailed the long-touted Right-wing disinformation about Indian Muslims as a skein of lies.

Estimates of TTP strength run to over twenty thousand tribesmen, and Mehsud is said to command at least five thousand fighters. He is likely responsible for a rash of suicide bombings throughout Pakistan over the past year. A small contingent of his forces also made headlines when they managed to take hostage over 250 Pakistani soldiers in August 2007. By all appearances, the Pakistani Taliban now represents the greatest threat to security within Pakistan. Significant militant groups other than the TTP include the TNSM in Bajaur Agency, Swat District, and neighboring areas of the NWFP, founded by the pro-Taliban Sufi Mohammad and more recently commanded by his son-in-law, the popular and charismatic “Radio Mullah” Fazlullah. In South Waziristan, a tribal militia under the command of Maulvi Nazir apparently received Pakistani government support in factional fighting against Uzbek militants over the past year. And in Khyber Agency, another radio Mullah, Mangal Bagh Afridi, leads Lashkar-e-Islam (LI), a militant group that has resisted association with the TTP, is active all the way to the outskirts of
Peshawar, and desires Taliban-style government.
(...) Consequently, security and development efforts on the Afghan side of the border take on special urgency. Interdicting the narcotics trade is especially relevant. Without a more effective counternarcotics campaign in Afghanistan, one that stresses shutting down major trafficking rings, militants in Pakistan will continue to enjoy easy access to cash, and, by extension, to foot soldiers, vehicles, and weapons.
(...) In the short run, a temporary work program may also be a useful means to ompete with the Taliban for the many mercenary foot soldiers who only fight for the paycheck. That said, any cash-for-work program that does not lead to stable, sustainable incomes might quickly prove counterproductive by frustrating the mbitions of the men (and their families) it is intended to serve.
(...) The peculiar colonial-era mechanisms for governance in the FATA—its federal administration through the governor and political agents by application of the FCR—must yield to a more representative and transparent political process.

But, so far at least, the tribal militias have been no panacea. Instead, the use of the militias, known as lashkars, has set off a debate over whether such a strategy will contribute to a civil war in the northwest that could engulf all of Pakistan. Yet some tribal leaders say they have little choice but to fight their brothers, cousins and neighbors: The Pakistani military, they say, has threatened to bomb their villages if they do not battle the Taliban.
(...) Feelings of distrust toward the government's strategy are especially high in Bajaur, where, for the past three months, the Pakistani military has pounded suspected insurgent strongholds with artillery fire and air raids. Pakistani military officials say hundreds of fighters have been killed since operations began in August. But they have made little mention of the unknown number of civilians who have also died as a result of the campaign. More than 200,000 people have fled clashes in Bajaur, setting off a humanitarian crisis as the refugees struggle to find food and shelter.

"Some tribal leaders say they have little choice but to fight their brothers, cousins and neighbors," The Washington Post reported on Nov. 11 after touring the carnage in Bajaur. "The Pakistani military, they say, has threatened to bomb their villages if they do not battle the Taliban." The Pakistani military has followed through on these threats on several occasions.
(...) The military has also threatened to destroy homes of the tribes in the Mohmand tribal agency if they fail to expel the Taliban. "We warn the Mohmand tribes to sever ties with Tehreek-e-Taliban’s Abdul Wali group as the government is planning action against the group," the Mohmand Agency administration warned the population in pamphlets, according to a report in Daily Times. "Get all elements of Abdul Wali group out of your homes, otherwise they will be targeted by helicopters and jet bombers."
(...) "But in the long run, Pakistan is alienating the people they are supposed to be protecting. Unless Pakistan is willing to conduct a ruthless, protracted campaign against its own people, like the Russians did in Chechnya, destroying everything and everyone in its path, this will fail," the official said. "And I see no indication Pakistan has the political will to go the way of the Russians in Chechnya."
(...) “The potential for blowback in the tribal areas and beyond is enormous,” said the officer. “We could never have made the Anbar tribes to fight al Qaeda. It was never about guns, money, or power. The Anbar tribes fought for survival. The Pakistani tribes will fight for survival too, but in this case, they likely will see the government as the oppressor.”

The military says more than 1,500 militants have been killed while 73 soldiers have also died in fighting in Bajaur since August, though no independent verification of casualties is available. Unlike past offensives, the military has relied heavily on air power to push back the Islamist guerrillas.

Tribesmen Hazrat Mohammad and Nazir told Daily Times at Torkham border that even their children were unable to sleep due to fighting in the area. Nazir said that security forces could not hit militants, as they were inside their bunkers or on the mountains in the Upper Mohmand Agency and it were the ordinary people who were being caught in the crossfire.

Soon several such lashkars were formed in the nearby Bajaur tribal area, adjacent to Swat, where tribesmen have suffered at both the hands of the Taliban and through successive military operations. A lashkar of 4,000 armed men raised by the Salarzai tribe launched a campaign against the militants, attacked their strongholds and destroyed their houses and so-called “command centers” in the Bajaur tribal region. Lashkar leaders warned local and foreign militants of dire consequences if they did not leave the area. Malik Munasib Khan, who is leading the uprising against the militants, said that the houses destroyed by the volunteers included one belonging to militant leader Naimatullah, who had occupied several government schools and converted them into madrassas (Dawn [Karachi], September 1). Volunteers of the Salarzai tribe set fire to eight Taliban houses in the Aundai area and killed three militants. Under pressure, the Taliban leadership began directing their supporters to trim their beards and long hair (Taliban hallmarks in the tribal areas) to avoid recognition (Daily Times [Lahore], October 5). The lashkars had some gains in Kurram agency as well, where they captured the Bagzai area, a stronghold of the Taliban, with six militants killed and 26 others injured. The local lashkar then retook control of the Char Dewal and Jalmai villages from the Taliban. After further defeats of the Taliban in various parts of the Kurram agency, the tribal volunteers plugged all access points to prevent further entry of unwanted elements into the agency (Geo TV, September 2).

Colonel Muhammad Nauman Saeed, who has 28 years of service, a greying beard and Sandhurst English, explains that, after weeks of operations, the mixed force of 4,000 troops and paramilitaries known as the Frontier Corps has pushed the militants back to positions that will be cut off when the snows come in a few weeks' time. The weather and a force of American and Afghan national army soldiers across the frontier will mean they are boxed in. Originally there were 5,000 militants and we have killed half of them at least,' the colonel said. His troops have lost 84 killed and 320 injured since the operation began.
(...) n Bajaur, local men formed bands around those with guns and access to cash, elbowing aside traditional tribal leaders. Militant leaders include a former teashop owner, a gunman, a known criminal and a minor cleric. One is from the violence-racked Kunar valley in Afghanistan. 'They are men from economically and socially marginalised elements in tribal society,' said a Peshawar-based expert and former senior bureaucrat, Khalid Aziz. The disparate groups based themselves in the village of its chief and, with money and a little military training from al-Qaeda, soon established a miniature version of a hardline Islamist state, preaching jihad, closing girls' schools and DVD shops, and killing tribal leaders who stood in their way. According to Mohammed Shah, a former chief of security in the region, 'they are a loose federation rather than a unified movement'.
(...) A series of similar military operations over recent years has failed to pacify the tribal areas, often resulting in peace agreements controversial in Washington and Kabul. but lessons had been learnt, Khan said. The current operation would be 'the model' for the future. Last week troops started pushing into Mohmand, the next agency to the south.
(...)

from white, "pakistan's islamist frontier," 2008
In and around 2002, for example, observers often made the mistake of reading the MMA hrough the lens of the Afghan Taliban; in doing so they underestimated the degree to which the Pakistani Islamists would be shaped by (even entrapped by) local political interests. Similarly, Observers today often make the mistake of reading the new class of neo-Taliban insurgent groups narrowly through the lens of al Qaeda and the Waziri militant networks; in doing so they again tend to underestimate theways in which these insurgents and their agendas are woven deeply into the fabric of both local and regional politics.
(...) Unlike the JUI, which drew largely from a rural support base and recruited the clerical Classes, the JI sought to recruit technocrats and activists, and drew its support predominantly rom the “devout middle classes” of Pakistan’s urban centers.16 Opposed to the Muslim League, the JI was Mawdudi’s attempt to institutionalize a movement of Islamic renewal among Muslims in India.
(...) Early attempts by the JI and the JUI to give the new state a substantive Islamist character were, on the whole, unsuccessful. Many of their failed efforts, however, set the pattern for future Islamist strategies of political agitation. For example the Tehrik-e-Khatam-e-Nabuwat (Movement for the Finality of the Prophethood), which pressed for the government to declare the Ahmadiyya sect as non-Muslim, was harshly suppressed by the government in 1953; but by 1974, after significant public pressure by Islamist groups, its main objectives had been accommodated in the form of a constitutional amendment.
(...) The Jamaat’s domestic policy during this era was consumed with the question of whether to give precedence to Zia’s program of Islamization, or to hold to the party’s democratic principles and insist on civilian governance. After much internal disagreement, Mawdudi’s successor Mian Tufail decided that the opportunity to do away with Bhutto and institutionalize the shariah program of the Jamaat was too appealing to pass up: the party became a partner with Zia and contributed several cabinet members to his government.
(...) The JUI had a much more limited interaction than the Jamaat with Zia’s government as such; by the early 1980s, the JUI, like the JI, was disillusioned with Zia’s reforms and began agitating for a return to civilian rule. But the Deobandis were ultimately shaped in profound ways during the Zia era through their participation in the Afghan jihad, and by the patronage they received from the state. The jihadi campaign against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, funded by the Americans and Saudis and operated by the Pakistani intelligence services, resulted in the establishment of hundreds of madaris throughout the Frontier.
(...) Both the prestige and the external financing which came with the jihadi vocation began to upend the traditional social order, particularly in the tribal areas. Tribal elders, including those maliks who served as paid liaisons between the tribes and the state’s political agent, found their standing undermined by new groups of entrepreneurial youth. This trend dovetailed with the explosion of remittance income from the Gulf states in the 1970s, which further reshaped in dramatic ways the political economy of the tribal areas.48 The systems of indirect rule which the state had relied upon for over a century began to deteriorate in the face of new regional and economic realities. [in sum, a antiquated system of state patronage for tribal maliks was being undermined by a new class of well-funded clerics]
(...) The Jamaat, though it had played a major role in the IJI’s election campaign, was never entirely comfortable with its place in the pro-military alliance. In 1987 Qazi Hussain Ahmad had taken over leadership of the Jamaat from Mawdudi’s successor,Mian Tufail. As an ethnic Pashtun, Qazi Hussain was the first non-Mohajir to lead the party since it inception in 1941, and was more sympathetic than his predecessors to populist political mobilization.51 Under his leadership the Jamaat retained its ideological focus on Islamization, but broadened its political agenda to include populist agitation and more rhetoric on socio-economic issues. This orientation did not always fit comfortably with the IJI’s political approach.
(...) The JI’s ambivalent relationship with the pro-military block in the post-Zia era was also accelerated by domestic political realignments which were threatening its hold on its traditional base of support among the Mohajir community. Therise of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in Karachi in the late 1980s — a rise engineered in part by Zia and the army to weaken the Jamaat — left the party casting about for new constituencies. Qazi Hussain’s ethnic background and Islamic-themed populism allowed the Jamaat to broaden its base of support among the non-Mohajir middle classes in Punjab and — perhaps most importantly —
into the Pashtun frontier areas.
(...) On account of the extensive links which had been established in the 1980s between the Deobandi political establishment and the Pakistani intelligence services, the JUI by and large had only a muted responseto the military coup in 1999; the party’s investment in the Taliban precluded it from taking a more confrontational approach to the return of military rule.
The Jamaat, by contrast, had considerably less political investment in the Taliban movement and realized that, for all of the state’s support for Taliban and Kashmiri Islamist proxies, Musharraf would be unlikely to make even half-hearted attempts at expanding the reach of Islamist legal or political influence. The partythus conducted protests following the coup; Qazi Hussain was temporarily banned from the NWFP, and party activities were closely monitored by the government to prevent domestic unrest.
(...) The “mullah-military” nexus is, however, a more complicated story than is commonly portrayed. It is a relationship anchored in mutual manipulation, and one which has produced at least as much antagonism as cooperation. The military often used the Islamists for domestic or foreign policy ends: to distract from the unpopularity of a martial government, or antagonize India, or extend its sphere of influence into Afghanistan. But it is also evident that the Islamists were not infrequently at odds with Pakistan’s martial regimes. The religious parties bitterly opposed Ayub Khan. Even during Zia ul-Haq’s martial government, as the mutual manipulation reached its zenith with the army’s instrumentalization of the religious parties for the jihad and the Islamists’ attempts to garner state funds and press for Islamist reforms, the partnership was short-lived. By the mid- 1980s the relationship had soured and groups like the Jamaat were again deeply disillusioned with the martial state.
(...) The early Deobandis, for example, had a long history of interaction with madaris in Afghanistan and the tribal areas, but the movement did not begin as one dominated by ethnic Pashtuns. The Afghan jihad accelerated the process of “Pashtunization” among the Deobandi parties in Pakistan — a process which has resulted in the emergence of JUI factions which often put greater emphasis on ethnic and regional issues than on the broader implementation of Islamic revivalism throughout Pakistan. The Jamaat too has seen dramatic changes to its constituent base since Partition. Founded on an appeal to Punjabi and Mohajir urban religiosity, the party was weakened by the rise of the MQM in Karachi in the 1980s, which cut into its voter base. The selection of Qazi Hussain as amir in 1987 and the party’s efforts to broaden its appeal to a Pashtun constituency subsequently realigned the Jamaat’s approach to mobilizing its political base. Most notably, it increased its focus on issues relating to foreign influence in Afghanistan, and played off of gender issues (e.g., condemning gender-integrated events) in a way that was likely to appeal to the socially conservative Pashtun population.
(...) The reality is more multifaceted. Even the two major Islamic political blocs, the Jamaat and the JUI-F, have distinctly different visions of an Islamic state and society, and have often been at odds with one another. The parties, for example, had notably different views on the Taliban.71 The JI’s outlook is deeply ideological, modernist, and pan-Islamic. Its urban middle-class constituents are primarily concerned with restructuring the legal and political order. The JUI-F, by contrast, is a relatively pragmatic party with a rural, clerical constituency whose objectives are to protect the madrassah system from state interference and promote a conservative interpretation of Pashtun social values which they defend as Islamic. It should come as no surprise that these two movements have often found themselves on different sides of the political space in Pakistan and, prior to 2002, did not join together in any meaningful way to
advance a common agenda.
(...) These general patterns change somewhat at the local level, particularly in areas which have a history of tribal governance, such as the FATA and present-day Swat. In these regions, Islamist political behavior is often less related to ideology or patronage concerns than it is to established patterns of group conflict which appear in segmentary lineage tribal systems. These are patterns in which small tribes or factions partner with the state or with other small factions to take on a dominant faction in their own area. This kind of perpetual balancing, and the highly provisional alliances which make it possible, are regular features of religious politics in the tribal areas, and ones which are integral to understanding Islamism in the contemporary Frontier. It is important, for example, to realize that when Islamist groups in the tribal areas ally with
the state, they usually do so in the pursuit of political advantage vis-à-vis local rivals rather than in allegiance to state authority or shared political ends.
(...) Segmentation also, however, provides a secondary advantage to the religious parties: both the JUI and the Jamaat have learned to leverage their positions as political organizations in order to serve as middlemen between the state and the various militant factions to which they are linked. In this respect, the Deobandi parties have focused their efforts on the western (Afghan) front, positioning themselves as occasional brokers between the government and Taliban groups in the tribal areas. The Jamaat’s linkages, by contrast, have proven particularly useful to the state in support of anti-Indian incursions on the eastern (Kashmiri) front.74 Often these parties are asked to serve as interlocutors in secret negotiations; but just as often, they take up the cause of militant groups in public fora, either to rally their own political base or to express by proxy certain strategic interests of the state which cannot be expressed on an official basis.

----

(...) First, even though the religious parties are no longer in a governing role, and no longer command the influence they did even several years ago, the relationship between mainstream “democratic Islamists” and the new insurgent movements is a critical dynamic in understanding Islamism in the Frontier. The promises and demands of groups such as Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP), the TNSM in Swat, and the Lashkar-e-Islami (LI) in Khyber are not very far removed from those of the MMA six years ago. The tactics and organization of such groups, to
be sure, differ in profound ways from those of the MMA. But the continuities are equally important. Absent the historical backdrop of the MMA’s tenure, it would be easy to miss the quasi-political nature of groups like the TNSM and LI. It would also be easy to misconstrue the complex relationships between the “democratic Islamists” and the new insurgent groups — relationships which may figure prominently in the ability of the state to eventually bring insurgents into the political mainstream.
(...) The rise of the Islamist alliance in 2002 cannot be understood apart from the American invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, which immediately became the cause célèbre of the religious parties, and gave them an electoral issue with strong regional, ethnic, and religious appeal. Not surprisingly, it was Pashtun religious politicians such as Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the JUI-F, Maulana Sami ul-Haq of the JUI-S, and Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the JI who were best positioned to make use of “Islamic rage” in the wake of American operations against the Pashtun Taliban in Afghanistan.
(...) This change agenda was not only reactive, but also sweepingly proactive. The MMA promised the institution of a true Islamic system in the Frontier, including the prohibition of “obscene” material on cable television, the provision of Islamic banking, and the conversion of the provincial assembly into an “Islamic jirga.”12 Other pledges were considerably more vague, such as the curtailing of un-Islamic work by NGOs and foreign elements, the enforcement of “Islamic justice,” the imposition of the shariah into the provincial framework of law, and the promotion of policies designed to encourage the use of head coverings. Much as Mufti Mahmud had done in 1970, the MMA wove this Islamic reform agenda together with a rhetoric of populist
governance, an approach which in many ways echoed the language of the PPP.13 Drawing on its lower- and middle-class roots, the religious alliance put forward a strikingly populist campaign that equated Islamic political reforms with a pro-poor agenda.14 The MMA’s plan for its first hundred days promised the creation of a halfmillion new jobs, free education through the secondary level, interest-free loans for low-cost housing, cheap medications, and old-age allowances.
(...) If the Afghan situation had sufficient explanatory power to describe the election results, then why did the MMA make such surprising inroads into non-Pashtun Hazara division, an area in which there is minimal concern among the electorate about Afghan issues? Or why did the MMA lose in district Tank (adjacent to Waziristan), where there is a widespread affinity for the Afghan Taliban? The Afghan situation, along with the political interference by the ruling elites designed
to capitalize upon it, were necessary but not sufficient factors to explain the ascent of political Islam in the Frontier in 2002. Acute anti-establishment feeling was a significant driver of the electoral shift, as was the success of the MMA’s own populist agenda and its drive to implement a new kind of politics oriented around “Islamic values” and religio-political motifs.
(...) A more complete assessment, however, accounting for the MMA’s full fiveyear
tenure, reveals a decidedly more benign outcome: while the MMA certainly introduced or reinforced several troubling socio-political trends, it did not bring about widespread change in the Frontier, and neither did it demonstrate the means or the will to carry out more than a superficial program of Islamization. The story of the MMA’s gradual adaptation to the exigencies of governance begins with this first, tumultuous year in power.
(...) But it is clear in retrospect that late 2003 represented a critical inflectio
point at which the MMA leadership began pivoting toward an Islamism that was decidedly more populist, and more practical.
(...) It was clear after the MMA’s tumultuous first year in office that the substance of its Islamization agenda had largely stalled. Even so, the alliance continued to promote its program through informal channels. At the most basic level, the MMA did this through its use of Islamic rhetoric, which it used to shore up its credentials among the electorate; deflect attention from local problems; and generally distinguish itself from the mainstream and nationalist opposition, both of which were afraid of appearing un-Islamic in comparison to the ulema. Such was the MMA’s use of religious language that even political rivals in the ANP and PPP were often forced in provincial assembly sessions to show their support for “Islamicized” resolutions with which they disagreed in substance, for fear that they would be politically outmaneuvered by the MMA.
(...) Opponents claimed that the MMA leadership was often reluctant to take action against insurgent groups, or even against clerics who were causing trouble for local authorities. By and large, this was true: the Islamists frequently found themselves boxed in by their own religious rhetoric, such that they could not afford to confront any individual or group which carried out activities in the name of religion, lest they be seen as undermining their own message.
(...) But with the rise of the TNSM and neo-Taliban–linked bombings in 2006 and 2007, the MMA’s hesitance in confronting religious insurgents began to have tangible and adverse implications for the province. By the spring and early summer of 2007, the religious parties were coming under severe criticism for their indecisive response to the TNSM’s militancy in Swat, and
to a wave of bombings which had penetrated into the settled areas of the province.36 Politicians from the religious parties unconvincingly blamed the federal government and its security services, rather than the Taliban groups, for fomenting instability in the Frontier to destabilize the MMA government (though in private they acknowledged the spread of dangerous militant organizations into the settled areas).37 The situation in NWFP further deteriorated in the summer of 2007 following retaliations by militant groups after the siege of the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad. The MMA government put off any kind of action against the TNSM until the final weeks of its rule, when the JUI-F chief minister quietly agreed to an expanded security presence in the Swat valley.38 Even then, the JUI-F did so reluctantly and in the face of
internal opposition by the Jamaat, and later denied that it had ever acceded to allowing military action in Swat.
(...) It is an overstatement to suggest, as some observers have, that the rise in militancy in 2006 and 2007 in NWFP was a result of the MMA provincial government; as is noted below, the religious parties were often at odds with the new insurgent movements, and upset about their expanding influence. At the same time, however, the MMA clearly played an indirect role in facilitating the spread of the insurgency by virtue of its inaction. While the alliance performed decently well in carrying out its law and order obligations under relatively peaceful conditions, the rising tide of insurgency eventually exposed the MMA’s political limitations in being able to take action against other self-described “religious” movements.
(...) (Anecdotal evidence suggests that the most problematic aspect of the madrassah system is not its curriculum as such, but its narrow pedagogy and openness to itinerant recruiters affiliated with sectarian or militant organizations.) One of the largely unexamined questions of the MMA’s tenure in NWFP is the degree to which the Islamist parties in general, and the JUI-F in particular, leveraged their position in government to benefit the madaris. Not since the Afghan jihad had the Deobandi parties been granted such extensive access to state resources, and it
was clear that for the JUI-F — as one up-and-coming party leader noted — “the madaris are our number-one priorities.”40 Given their important social welfare function, the flow of government resources to religious organizations is not prima facie a cause for concern. Still, there are legitimate fears that some of these madaris may have had linkages with the neo-Taliban movements now active in the Frontier.
(...) It is impossible to reliably assess the net impact of the MMA’s patronage of the madaris. It is clear that substantial funds were channeled to religious institutions during the Islamists’ tenure; but it is also clear that many of these funds were provided in-kind, and to institutions which served important social as well as religious functions.
(...) Statements by MMA leaders seemed to indicate that this emphasis on female education was due in part to a desire “to quash western propaganda that Islam did not guarantee women’s rights.”49 Regardless of the rationale, however, the MMA did eventually convince skeptical donors that they were serious about educating women.50 “I do believe now,” said one World Bank education advisor in 2007, “that they want women’s education. I don’t question that anymore.” Female enrollment figures reflected the province’s investment in girls’ education,
with some o f the most striking gains coming from the most conservative areas dominated by the MMA. Over two years, Bannu saw a 38% increase in female primary enrollment; in Dir, 22%; in Buner, 40%; and in Dera Ismail Khan, 85%.51 Middle and secondary school female enrollments also increased, sometimes dramatically: in poor districts like Buner and Hangu, girls’ enrollments were up over 50%; in Dir, 39%; and in Shangla, Mahsehra and Lakki Marwat, over 20%.52 Overall, between 2001/02 and 2006/07, the gross female enrollment ratio in public primary schools increased from 48% to 57%.
(...) Critics were quick to point out, however, that they were much
less supportive of expanding opportunities for women’s employment which might
absorb the newly-educated female population.
(...) The MMA government’s record on health and social welfare issues was much the same: the alliance, lacking a clear agenda tying health to its Islamization mandate, deferred almost entirely to the advice of the provincial bureaucracy and the international donors. Most outside experts agree that the Islamist government adopted responsible health policies which differed little from those of previous governments, and interacted in a professional manner with domestic and foreign institutions.
(...) In spite of the MMA’s views on the role of women in public life, its impact on the gender policies of the province, and on the norms of the society at large, were relatively modest. Aside from a few abortive attempts to mandate the wearing of head coverings for female students, the alliance’s education and health policies basically supported the status quo on gender issues. Any greater ambitions to institutionalize enforcement of gender norms died with the repeated failure of the Hisbah bill. On a social level, the MMA did exert informal influence (e.g., people noticed more women observing purdah in local markets), but even here the change was not dramatic.
(...) There is no question that the MMA leadership was uncomfortable with gender reforms. “Deep down,” admitted a party advisor in the Frontier, “the JUI does not want to give a free role to women. They think that free mixing is not Islamic.”65 This did not mean, however, that the religious parties tacitly supported a Taliban-like agenda on gender issues.66 In reality, many of the most troubling and high-profile actions which set back women’s rights in the NWFP, such as the forcible closing of girls’ schools, were not sanctioned by the alliance’s leadership, and actually ran counter to the MMA’s political and institutional interests. The religious parties, for
examle, received a great deal of criticism for the closing of girls’ schools in the northern districts of NWFP beginning in 2007, when in fact that activity was carried out almost entirely by the TNSM and affiliated neo-Taliban groups, in contravention to the MMA’s own program of expanding female primary education.67
(...) Beyond the explicitly religious content of the MMA’s agenda, the Islamists also brought with them a unique style of governance and a distinctive political culture. These remain important even in the post-MMA era, as they shaped the political landscape of the Frontier and helped to redefine the boundaries of Pashtun nationalist discourse. Echoes of the MMA’s “Islamic populism” can be seen in the style of the ANP-led government which followed, and also in the ad hoc forms of Islamist governance established by the neo-Taliban in both the settled and tribal areas.
(...) Unlike any previous ruling party in the Frontier, the MMA brought to its exercise of governance a unique lower- and middle-class sensibility. The JUI-F drew its base of support predominantly from the underdeveloped southern districts, and the Jamaat relied on support from the so-called “devout middle classes” in the Peshawar valley and the poor districts in the north. Appealing to these constituents, MMA parliamentarians often spoke at length about wanting to help small farmers, shopkeepers, transport workers, and the young berozgar (unemployed) class, including madrassah graduates. Party workers from the PML-N, ANP, and PPP, by contrast, would often begin their criticism of the MMA by critiquing the Islamists’ ineffective industrial policy, or their lack of commitment to large-scale irrigation projects of the kind favored by the landed elites.
(...) The MMA’s style of Islamic populism was undoubtedly a form of political posturing, but it also points to the way in which the Islamists sought to articulate a vision of an Islamic welfare state which equated religious values with populist reforms likely to appeal to lower-class voters. It is, for example, remarkable to note the extent to which the MMA’s published manifesto focused not on the enactment of shariah legislation or the curbing of un-Islamic acts, but on promises to curb corruption, ensure provision of “bread, clothes, shelter, education, jobs and marriage expenses” (an effective play on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s famous promise of roti, kapra aur makan), ensure speedy justice, promote literacy through free education, and “[take] care of backward areas and classes.”88 In this sense, the language of Islamic populism was a rhetorical bridge which joined the MMA’s concern for Islamization and religious symbolism with its
efforts yo expand a patronage base among its lower-class constituency.
(...) The portrait which emerges above is that of the MMA as a right-of-center but
essentially status quo political force. And indeed, as early as 2004 it had become obvious
that the Islamist parties would not be a radical Talibanizing influence in the Frontier.
While their policies and rhetoric continued to trouble many observers, the religious
parties were clearly unwilling or unable to press for dramatic Islamist reforms. It is easy
to forget that this trend-line toward moderate politics, while apparent in retrospect, was not at all obvious even in 2003. [four factors given below: internal tensions in the alliance which stymied radical action, constitutent pressures (i.e., most people didn't really want it), the role of the international community via necessary development funding, and the role of the state in the formation of its politics)
(...) One of the most salient factors which limited the MMA’s ability to implement its Islamist agenda was the lack of enthusiasm for real reform within sectors of the MMA’s own constituency. An overwhelming majority of Pakistanis, when surveyed, express support for “implementing strict shariah law” in Pakistan.95 Actual implementation of strict regulations ostensibly deriving from the shariah is decidedly less popular.96 Even the relatively modest changes implemented by the MMA in NWFP provoked grumbling — and not just among “liberal-minded” Pashtuns.
(...) Beginning with the MMA’s victory in the NWFP, in which the state itself had a hand, there were profound pressures on the provincial Islamist government to comply with the interests
of the martial regime in Islamabad... In the end, the federal structure of Pakistan, the central government’s fiscal and bureaucratic leverage, the ability of the security services to fragment the religious alliance, and the MMA’s unique role as a “loyal opposition” to the Musharraf government kept the Islamists in Peshawar vulnerable to manipulation by the state.113 The MMA did not have wide berth to pursue a rigorous Islamization agenda even if it had wanted to, and nor did it have the autonomy to pursue policies which ran counter to significant state interests.
(...) Finally, as will be argued below, it is worth noting a lesson that should not be drawn from the decline of the MMA: religious politics is not going away in the Frontier. If anything, it is more relevant than ever. There is a striking resonance between the rhetoric, promises, complaints, and hot-button issues of the MMA in 2002, and the language of neo-Taliban groups in the Frontier today: injustice, corruption, obscenity, government inaction, and foreign intervention, to name a few. The locus of this “discussion,” to be sure, has gradually moved outside the bounds of formal electoral politics and into the realm of vigilantism, militancy, and insurgency — but it may yet come back. If and when it does, the religious parties are likely to again play an important role, and the lessons from the MMA’s tenure may again be relevant in responding to the religious politics of the Frontier.

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(...) This new movement, known as the neo-Taliban, is distinct from both the Afghan Taliban and from mainstream Pakistani Islamists such as the MMA, though it has critical linkages with both groups.2 “Neo-Taliban” is itself a term of convenience, and refers not to a coherent operational entity but rather to a loose collection of selfdefined Taliban groups which share a number of common features.
(...) Groups with close ties to al Qaeda, such as some Taliban organizations in Waziristan and Bajaur, are more likely to have a transnational Islamist outlook and clear ideological reasons for rejecting the legitimacy of the Pakistani state. Other more locally-oriented movements, such those which emerged in Swat district and Khyber agency, tend toward a language of vigilante Islamism, in which they accept the state’s role in theory, but legitimize violence on the basis of its ostensible failings.
(...) Third, the movement is often linked to criminal networks and the illegal economy. This was, and remains, true for the Afghan Taliban, which is intimately linked to the opium trade. In the Pakistani context, it is becoming increasingly clear — even to the public at large — that the groups which call themselves Taliban are often no more than armed gangs which use religious symbolism to gain a foothold in local communities.6 Whereas mainstream religious parties such as the JUI-F historically maintained side interests in local transport networks, the neo-Taliban groups have explicitly sought to dominate local services and industries, particularly in FATA and
PATA region. The timber mafia in Swat was reportedly a key backer of the TNSM insurgency, and local leaders in Khyber agency such as Mangal Bagh rose to prominence through their control of transport networks used for smuggling goods across the Durand Line.7 Some observers have suggested that the neo-Taliban may eventually go the way of the FARC in Colombia, becoming over time less ideological and more criminal in nature.
(...)The creation of Tehrik-e-
Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP) in late 2007 merely formalized what had become a franchise-oriented model of insurgency. And while the Tehrik eventually took on a coordinating role among the various Taliban groups, it succeeded as a brand more than as an organization. TTP’s branding strategy sought to portray the movement as cohesive, and affiliate it with a simple platform of religious and political values. This aggregation function served the TTP leadership in Waziristan by amplifying its voice and reach, but also served the local affiliates by providing them with access to resources, and by discouraging local communities from pushing back against outsiders who claimed to be part of the umbrella organization. Despite this strategy, the TTP remains a loose alliance of convenience; local commanders still play a critical role in the decision-making of these groups, andsome localized movements — like that of Mangal Bagh in Khyber — have ought to triangulate their position vis-à-vis the state by staying out of TTP and instead pursuing a parallel Taliban-like agenda.
(...) the Taliban groups have proven to be adept at co-opting the state at the local level. Their expansion has often followed a predictable pattern: well-armed groups of young men enter an area with Kalashnikovs and white pickup trucks, calling themselves Taliban; they win the favor of the community by taking on local criminal elements and prohibiting certain un-Islamic behaviors; they establish qazi courts for the quick adjudication of disputes; and, having garnered some measure of local support, they set about solidifying their control by marginalizing or killing local notables and government officials, enacting even stricter Islamist measures, and establishing environments conducive to their own criminal networks.8 By playing off of local discontentment with the judicial system, policing, and other state services, the insurgents are able to gain a foothold which they then use to reinforce their local position.
(...) At a macro level, the neo-Taliban movement is indisputably a Pashtundominated insurgency. Disputes within the movement often fall along predictable tribal lines; and just as often, local tribal blocs leverage Taliban influence in order to compete against traditional rivals. But at the same time, the insurgents are threatening established norms by killing tribal elders, carrying out suicide bombings, and attacking jirgas. Other aspects of Pashtun culture (particularly those which have come under conservative Deobandi influence over the last several decades) are amplified perversely by the militants: the destruction of girls’ schools, barber shops, and music stores sit uncomfortably with most Pashtuns living in the conservative southern districts of the NWFP.
(...) Even before the government’s operation against the madrassah students in July, dissenters within the JUI-F (many of whom were from the Balochistan wing of the party) had argued that they needed to come out strongly in favor of the Taliban groups.10 Fazlur Rehman and most senior JUI-F party members from the NWFP demurred, in part because they were more dependent upon the state for patronage in the Frontier, but also because they were more directly threatened by the insurgent expansion in the southern part of the province. After the operation, the conflict burst into the open, and the JUI-F leadership wrestled for several months with internal dissenters who insisted that the party was obligated to support the madaris and the Islamization agenda of the neo-Taliban.
(...) The TNSM and its Waziri allies came to develop a similarly bleak view of the religious parties. The TNSM leadership, including Maulana Fazlullah, had close ties with the Jamaat, but also with JUI ulema from the Swat valley. Several of these ulema went to Fazlullah with the intent of persuading him to moderate his opposition to polio prevention campaigns and girls’ schools, but ultimately failed.17 Fazlullah did not strongly oppose the MMA — particularly so long as the alliance took a hands-off approach to the TNSM — but his supporters from Waziristan reportedly pushed the movement into a more hard-line posture.18 As the TTP patrons” from Waziristan became more and more dominant over their TNSM clients in Swat in 2008, the movement eventually took a harder line against the state, and against politically-active religious elements.
(...) Even secular observers interviewed in Peshawar in 2007 and 2008 expressed concern that the religious political establishment — leaders like Fazlur Rehman and Qazi Hussain — might lose their ability to draw young activists into the formal political space rather than see them join militant organizations. (The JUI-F has, in making its case to foreigners, also framed its role in this way: arguing that it is a “wall” holding back the tide of militant influence in the tribal areas.19) The religious parties relish the opportunity to play the part of intermediaries between the militants and the state, and will likely continue to do so. Their views on the legitimacy of violence and vigilantism are also apt to prove important means by which they distinguish themselves from more militant Islamist efforts.
(...) By and large, the government of Pakistan has been slow to respond to the gradual expansion of neo-Taliban influence in the Frontier. In Waziristan it undertook deals in 2004 and again in 2006, both of which failed to quell local violence and resulted in an increase in cross-border attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan.21 In Swat, the provincial government responded haltingly to the return of the TNSM under Maulana Fazlullah. After considerable delay, it carried out relatively successful army operations in October 2007, which appear to have been spurred by attacks on military targets in the area, capture by insurgents of tactically important sites such as the Saidu Sharif airport, and growing embarrassment that the militant groups were operating
openly in defiance of the state. Following the collapse of the May 2008 peace deals, the army again took on the TNSM and their Waziri patrons in Swat, prompted in part by concern over the compromise of critical lines of communication, including the Shangla Pass in northern NWFP.22 The military also carried out limited (and mostly cosmetic) operations under the aegis of the Frontier Corps in Khyber agency in the summer of 2008, ostensibly to disrupt the activity of Mangal Bagh’s Lashkar-e- Islami; and a large-scale campaign in Bajaur and Mohmand agencies, which included both ground and air operations and resulted in the displacement of several hundred thousand refugees into the settled areas of the NWFP.23 While recent actions, such as those in Bajaur, suggest the adoption of a more aggressive posture by the military in the Frontier, the overall pattern of the state’s response has been quite tentative in the past years. The case of Darra Adam Khel is broadly illustrative of the ways in which the government has attempted to deal with the emergence of the neo-Taliban, and serves as a microcosm for nderstanding the interaction between insurgents and the state.
(...) The rise of militant influence in Darra illustrates a number of the neo-Taliban characteristics described above. The local militant movement, by most accounts, emerged in an ad hoc way and only later established linkages with other networks in the Frontier. It built goodwill by targeting local criminals, but soon engendered resentment for its own criminality and brutality. It took advantage of the poor governmental oversight of the FR areas, and co-opted elected officials into its camp, thus allowing it to frame its agenda in terms of local development and not simply Islamization or power politics.41 It used religious parties and local tribesmen as intermediaries,
while recognizing that the government lacked the capacity and the will to follow through with sustained paramilitary or military operations. And it fostered relationships with outside groups, including Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Punjabi sectarian organizations whose members reportedly established militant training camps near Darra.4
(...) The response of the state to the violence in Darra was also illustrative of the broader challenges it faces in the Frontier. The government repeatedly negotiated with neo-Taliban militants, usually through jirgas, and these negotiations repeatedly failed. One basic problem was the lack of credible state capacity to enforce its agreements. The system of managing the FR areas relies heavily on indirect rule by the political agent through the tribal leaders, and is ill-equipped to deal with a robust militant movement like that of the neo-Taliban. The state was able to displace the militants for a short while, but had no robust system of local governance through which to maintain order.
(...) In the Frontier the results appeared to tell a different, but related, story. The MMA was defeated soundly by its rivals, garnering only 10% of provincial assembly seats (down from about 50% in 2002). The Pashtun nationalist ANP delivered the strongest showing, with 32% of seats, followed by independent candidates with 23%, and the PPP with 18%.44 The PPP-S, PML-N, and PML-Q each polled about 5%. Despite widespread fears of terrorism, overall turnout appeared to be comparable to that of the 2002 election. (Participation was somewhat depressed in Malakand division due to fears about Taliban presence, and somewhat inflated in the areas around Bannu due to Taliban ballot-stuffing.45)
(...) The electoral success of the ANP and PPP brought about a flood of news reports hailing the rise of secularism and the rejection of religious politics and “Talibanization” in the Frontier. While this narrative captured one important dynamic of the poll results, it did not tell the entire story. The religious parties’ defeat was due to a number of factors. Public anger over American action in Afghanistan was no longer a driving force as it had been in the 2002 elections, and anti-Western sentiment was no longer the province only of the religious parties. Moreover, the MMA’s standing had been weakened by rifts within the alliance over the extent of its cooperation with Musharraf ’s military government, and following the imposition if the Emergency in late 2007, the JI had decided to boycott the elections. (While it is doubtful that the Jamaat would have returned a strong showing in the polls, its participation might have cut somewhat into the ANP’s success in urban areas, and districts such as Upper and Lower Dir.) The mainstream and nationalist parties were also given much wider latitude to contest the elections than in 2002, and there was by all accounts significantly less government interference in the election process.
(...) The movement traces its roots to the Khudai Khidmatgars (Servants of God) who, led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, launched a non-violent campaign against the British in 1929. Known as the Red Shirts, these Pashtuns later later allied themselves with the Indian National Congress, with Khan dubbed the “Frontier Gandhi.” On account of their affiliation with the Congress, the Red Shirts were sidelined after the creation of Pakistan in 1947 and intermittently banned until the early 1970s. The movement nominally continued during this period under the leadership of Khan’s son Wali Khan, who joined the leftist National Awami Party (NAP). The NAP, as noted above, formed a coalition government in NWFP in 1972 with Mufti Mahmud of
the JUI, but this alliance was short-lived.49 Wali Khan’s NAP was banned during the latter years of Bhutto’s rule, and he eventually took up the leadership of the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 1984, which in turn merged into the Awami National Party (ANP) in 1986.
(...) The party also brings with it notable weaknesses. It does not have significant influence in many of the areas which have come under insurgent threat, such as the southern settled districts, or FATA agencies outside of Khyber and parts of Mohmand and Bajaur. It has a history of vicious infighting, manifested in ongoing disputes between Asfandyar Wali Khan (son of Wali Khan, and uncle of the current chief minister) and the Bilours, a long-established Hindko-speaking political family from Peshawar. Its leadership is often uncomfortable and ineffective in using Islamic language that appeals to the religiously conservative population, particularly outside of the Peshawar valley. (Although, in its efforts to promote the Nizam-e-Adl Act in Malakand division, it has been more proactive in enacting religious legislation than the MMA government.) And its pro-Karzai policy is deeply unpopular throughout the Frontier,
where Karzai is widely ridiculed to as a “fake Pashtun.
(...) The ANP’s nationalist agenda, while generally consonant with U.S. interests in the near-term, is therefore more complex than it is often portrayed. The party has spoken out strongly against American strikes in the FATA, and has pushed, against U.S. pressure, for peace deals in Swat. Taking the long view, the ANP’s enthusiasm for Western military intervention in Afghanistan is also likely to be contingent. This support, as one party leader has argued, is based on the premise that “the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan are not as dangerous as Persians and Punjabis.”56 To the ANP, the American support for Karzai is, on the one hand, a check on Tajik (i.e., Darispeaking Afghan) influence and, on the other, a check on Pakistani state hegemony
over the Pak-Afghan frontier areas. This perspective suggests that the ANP will continue to be viewed with suspicion by the military-bureaucratic elites in Islamabad. It also suggests that any substantive attempt by the international community (together with the government of Pakistan) to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan may put the party in the awkward position of having to weigh its its support for Pashtun dominance of Afghan politics against its secular political orientation and its abiding fear of a “Punjabi” proxy in eastern Afghanistan.

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(...) Most actions undertaken by the FC, however, should not be confused with actual counterinsurgency activities. Any review of the literature on insurgency will suggest that successful counterinsurgency efforts are fundamentally about a political contestation over the legitimacy of a given government. Absent a strategic program of coordinated political reforms in the FATA, there is essentially no government in the tribal areas to contest. FC activities, while useful, are maneuver-oriented and tactical rather than politically-oriented and strategic.
Counterinsurgency activity in the FATA — whether by the FC or the army — will not achieve overall political objectives until and unless the government begins to conduct such activities in the context of a coordinated program of governance reform, such as the one outlined below.
(...) Citizen mobilization programs which raise lashkars against local militants might represent a very effective counterinsurgency model in the Frontier, since most communities have both the legitimating mechanisms (jirgas) and means (small arms) to mobilize quickly. Almost by definition, the state cannot direct these lashkars, but it can encourage and support them. In some areas and in some cases, consistent and timely state support of lashkars has the potential to induce a cascading effect in encouraging other communities to take up arms against militant organizations.
(...) Neo-Taliban groups which have established a foothold in the Frontier have often proven to be unpopular on account of their brutality and their seizure of local assets. One key area, however, in which these insurgents have effectively played on local discontent is on matters of justice. The judicial system in the Frontier, inherited from the British, comes under nearly constant criticism for its partiality, corruption, and slow processing of cases.53 Taliban groups have proven adept at exploiting frustration over the judicial process by establishing qazi courts which adjudicate disputes and award punitive judgments on the spot. These courts have blossomed in almost every Pashtun-majority part of the Frontier — including the tribal agencies,
PATA regions, the Swat valley, and even in Peshawar district itself. According to reliable reports, “the Taliban have been campaigning in the Tribal Areas and asking locals to submit their complaints in the Qazi courts rather than the country’s courts if they want ‘quick and easy’ justice.”54 The use of qazi courts by Islamist movements as a means by which to bypass or challenge the writ of the state is long-established in the Frontier, particularly in areas such as Swat.
(...) Observers who trace the rise of extremism in the Frontier tend to focus on exogenous factors, such as the Afghan jihad and the American war in Afghanistan following 9/11. These are of course critical events. But comparatively less attention has been paid to the internal, structural weaknesses of the state which have facilitated the rise of radical Islamist movements. This section and the one which follows examine these weaknesses and the crises of governance in the settled and tribal areas, respectively.
(...) The Local Government Ordinance (LGO),
commonly known as the Devolution plan, devolved powers from a class of elite deputy commissioners — each of whom oversaw several administrative districts, and wielded broad discretionary authority — to a class of local elected officials. The reforms were intended to encourage local ownership and decision-making; boost delivery of health, education, and other government services; buttress the military’s democratic credentials; and bypass the provincial government so that elites in Islamabad could exert direct political influence on local government.
(...) The Frontier today is a complex patchwork of governance systems — of settled districts, provincially administered tribal areas, frontier regions, and federally administered tribal areas. Each of these has its own unique history and logic. But the amalgam of frameworks has also made it difficult to manage anything resembling a coordinated counterinsurgency response to the growing radicalization of the Frontier. Prior to the Devolution system, the provincial home secretary in Peshawar served as the link between the settled areas, the PATA, and the FATA. This critical link was broken in 2002 when, following the promulgation of the LGO, the government began transferring administrative oversight of the FATA from a special cell in the provincial government to a new FATA Secretariat in Peshawar.
(...) There are four reasons behind the advocacy for FATA reform. First, the region is rightly seen by security planners as an “ungoverned” space conducive to the development and perpetuation of insurgent and terrorist safe havens.82 Following the reestablishment of al Qaeda
operations from FATA, this has become a preeminent national security issue for the United States. Second, the Pakistan army’s failed intervention in Waziristan in 2004, combined with actions taken by the neo-Taliban insurgents targeting political agents and tribal maliks, has resulted in the collapse of the political agent system in several of the southern tribal agencies.83 There is a recognition among some military and civilian leaders that it may be more profitable to move forward with FCR reforms than to attempt a reinvigoration of the now-discredited political
agent system. Third, civil society advocates have proposed FCR reforms in order to bring FATA
governance into conformity with international civil and human rights norms.84 The FCR system lacks basic civil protections; allows for collective punishment of individual crimes; and places extraordinary discretionary powers in the hands of the political agent, who often faces perverse incentives to collude with tribal elders for their mutual financial gain.85 And finally, there are political pressures behind the current agitation for reform: the ANP would like to see the FATA integrated into the NWFP, as it believes that integration will serve both its ideological aspirations (for pan-Pashtunism), and electoral prospects.
(...) The U.S. should support extension of the Political Parties Act to the FATA. This legal change would be largely symbolic, but nonetheless politically meaningful. The current political environment, in which party activity is formally suppressed, favors parties such as the JUI-F which can mobilize via madrassah networks. Allowing formal party activity would send an important signal to residents of the FATA about their political rights and their place in the larger Pakistani polity, and would provide incremental benefits to mainstream and nationalist parties seeking to compete for votes in the tribal areas.
(...) But the most critical reforms are those which focus on institutions of governance. Aside from the office of the political agent, and the relatively moribund “agency councils,” the FATA lacks institutions through which political power and state resources can be channeled. Absent institutional development, FATA reforms will have little effect in integrating the tribal areas into the Pakistani mainstream, or addressing the governance vacuum which has proven to be so advantageous to neo-Taliban groups. The U.S. should strongly promote the development of institution-oriented reform plans. These might include the establishment of local government structures (directly or indirectly elected) which feed into a FATA Council on the model of a provincial assembly; courts which establish a right of appeal to Peshawar or Islamabad; and modest civil institutions through which to coordinate development programs.88 Of these, a local
elected government is perhaps the most important. Such a system need not mirror the local government system in the settled areas, but at the very least the state should begin a process by which to establish a baseline set of government functions, and build up institutions which, over time, can constitute legitimate alternative centers of local power.
(...) The cultural reductionists contribute an important word of caution to the debate over FATA reforms, but ultimately fail to account for the dynamism and adaptability which Pashtun society has demonstrated over the last three decades.

The origins of republican America were addressed above - to create a nominally democratic government Adam Smith said should be "instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor." The nation's founders achieved mightily, handing down their legacy to succeeding generations of leaders always mindful of who gave them power and who they had to serve. At the nation's birth, only adult white male property owners could vote; blacks were commodities, not people; and women were childbearing and homemaking appendages of their husbands. Religious prerequisites existed until 1810, and all adult white males couldn't vote until property and tax requirements were dropped in 1850. States elected senators until the 17th amendment in 1913 gave citizen voters that right, and Native Americans had no franchise in their own land until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act gave them back what no one had the right to take away in the first place. Women's suffrage wasn't achieved until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 after nearly 100 years of struggling for it. The 1865 13th Amendment freed black slaves, the 1870 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote, but it wasn't until passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws, that blacks could vote, in fact, like the Constitution said they could decades earlier. Today those rights are gravely weakened for all through unfair laws still in force and a nation growing more repressive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary working people and the nation's least advantaged. The limited high-water mark of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has steadily eroded since in loss of civil liberties and essential social benefits.

Trains were shifted from electric to diesel engines. Sometimes, they were simply done away with and replaced by buses and then cars. Together with Big Oil, Big Auto converted electric transit systems to fuel-based bus systems. In one estimate: In 1935, electric train engines outnumbered diesel train engines 7 to 1. "By 1970, diesel train engines outnumbered electric ones 100 to 1. And GM made 60 per cent of the diesel locomotives." The electric rail system in and around Los Angeles was almost erased.
(...) By 2001, that goal was achieved, beyond belief. Some 90 per cent of Americans drove to work by that year. The findings of the 2001 National Household Travel Survey are striking. Only 8 per cent households reported not having a vehicle available for regular use. The survey showed that "that daily travel in the United States totalled about 4 trillion miles, an average of 14,500 miles per person." Trips by transit and by school bus each made up just 2 per cent of daily trips taken in 2001.
(...) An average American family in 2004 spent up to a fifth of its income on transportation. That's against 13 per cent on food. In "automobile dependent neighbourhoods," according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, that could go up to 25 per cent. In bigger cities, the traffic only gets worse, never better. There were over 135 million passenger cars in 2006. Overall, registered vehicles clocked in at more than 250 million. Imagine the centrality of oil, autos and private vehicles to just about everything. This is the very model our own Indian elite seek to transplant. Private automobiles at the cost of public transport. Never mind the latter is a lot cleaner and creates large numbers of jobs. And so we add thousands of such vehicles to the roads each week.
(...) Each car that GM puts out carries a health care cost of around $1600. For Chrysler, that's $1500. But for Toyota, that cost is under $300 per car. Japan has a far superior public health system. In the corporate-media of the United States, this does not lead to calls for a good health system. Or for making health access cheaper. It leads to calls for doing away with the union contracts that guaranteed auto workers health benefits for life. For retirees, the pullback has already begun.

This is why you won't hear Barack Obama's progressive and educated supporters saying much about the interesting fact that Obama was recently selected by Association of National Advertisers (ANA) as the "Marketer of the Year." According to ANA trade journal Advertising Age two weeks before the presidential election, "Sen. Barack Obama has shown he's already won over the nation's brand builders."

The auto workers and their union did not cause the crisis of the auto industry -- after all, they had no control over the corporations' policies. True, the union in its heyday fought for and won higher wages and benefits, gains which between the 1940s and the 1970s spread throughout the economy to other unions and workers, raising living standards for us all. But workers and the UAW did not "price themselves out of the market" or "kill the goose that laid the golden egg" -- no, they challenged employers for a greater share of the profits and won. We all owe auto workers of that era for the living standards that workers achieved in this country. What the union failed to do, however, was develop a broader vision of workers' power. When confronted with other corporations competing in the market by using more modern plants and lower wages, the union had no plan. The UAW, like other unions, failed to build a genuine international labor movement to raise auto workers' wages in other countries. Nor did the union build a political movement in the United States to challenge the power of capital and to restrain competition. Nor did the UAW join with other unions to organize the great majority of unorganized U.S. workers.

Extra-judicial killings are indefensible, morally abhorrent, and illegal under international laws and norms. Article 23b of the 1907 Hague Regulations prohibits "assassination, proscription, or outlawry of an enemy, or putting a price upon an enemy's head, as well as offering a reward for any enemy 'dead or alive.' "

notes on capital
part five: the production of absolute and relative surplus-value
chapter 16: absolute and relative surplus-value
chapter 17: changes of magnitude in the price of labor-power and in surplus-value
chapter 18: different formulae for the rate of surplus-value
part six: wages
chapter 19: the transformation of the value (and respectively the price) of labor-power into wages
chapter 20: time-wages
chapter 21: piece-wages
chapter 22: national differences in wages
part seven: the process of accumulation of capital
chapter 23: simple reproduction
chapter 24: the transformation of surplus-value into capital

(643): marx is tracking the "hostile antagonism" between mental and manual labor, which he suggests arises as the individual labor becomes replaced by the "collective"--in other words, the many become appendages, the few remain the brains. the question, of course, is simple (quite aside from raymond williams' attempts to complicate the binaries): how does a socialist society manage the collective divison of labor, such that the sovereignty of each individual's mental expression becomes a reality once more?

(647): here he clarifies that the productive base of human society has little to do with "nature," at least in the ahistorical sense (e.g., geoffery sachs, jared diamond). rather, it is again a question of interrogating (from the theses) "sensuous, real-practical life" as it unfolds through history; "the existing productivity of labour...is a gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries." again, a welcome rebuke to non-radical social science, which sees the barriers of nature where marxists recognize, instead, the relativity (and contingency) of limits. (and then, on 648, he immediately contradicts this with apparent nonsense on 'natural' impediments to advance--on england and india, of course; see though, FN 7 on 666, where marx addresses malthus and attempts to explain 'over-population' by recourse to the eternal laws of nature).

(651): i suppose the above can be reconciled, dialectically, through committing to incorporate 'natural' explanations into the dynamics of marxist explanations. in that sense, the putative invariance of 'nature' is impermissible, forcing a return to history of nature as a source of explanation. marx is doing this here, as he discusses the role of social compulsion in accounting for the division of working lives into necessary and surplus labor (i.e., he's clarifying that this disjuncture has its roots not in nature).

(659): "class struggle" over the spoils of productivity

(659): increasing productivity, marx seems to be suggesting, facilitates greater concentrations of wealth--as the value of labor-power falls, more time can be devoted to the production of surplus-value, all of which makes its way into the hands of capitalists. (imagine their glee at the last 30 years: rising productivity, static wages, cheap imports from china, and easy credit for workers!). there is room, in his analysis, for the place of class struggle in stemming this advance (and it's necessary, given observed patterns in the golden age. yet the fact of this "abyss" is indisputable to observers of the developed economies in the last thirty years.

(664): this attentiveness to time is critical, as it foregrounds an aspect of class conflict long since under-emphasized in analysis of american capitalism: namely, that, as workers are compelled to work longer and longer hours (with less vacation time, more intense work-days), the cost of reproducing them increases (i.e., the value of their labor-power goes up). in this sense, the flattening of the real wage is only part of the story of the assault on living standards in the US. (see also 683)

(667): here, in prefiguring what stands to follow the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, marx notes that not even socialism will limit the working day to necessary labor. the reasoning, i suggest, contains the seeds of the perversion that separates socialism, as aspiration, from socialism as it actually existed. on the one hand, he proceeds from the workers' aspirations to speak of an improvement in his conditions of life--in other words, an extension of what is considered necesary labor. and, on the other hand (and this is, of course, not any less desirable, but nonetheless telling), he speaks of the socialization of appropriation; in other words, surplus labor will exist insofar as some labor will be "necessary for the formation of a social fund." here, of course, we might remember the indignities of bureaucrats gleefully bleeding labor in the name of bold slogans of workers' liberation. again, none of this is intrinsic to the idea of taxation and government; it is simply to make, with hindsight, a point about the need to guard against co-option.

(667): more prefiguring, and no less interesting. capitalism, if defined by the ability of one social stratum to reproduce itself on the basis of another's labor, will only be eclipsed when labor--as in work itself--is universalized. if we accept this, we must confront also the fact of our own parasitism. the life of the university, as it exists under capitalism, could not be a better example of how one social stratum reserves, for itself, all possibilities for "free intellectual and social activity," while another squanders itself to reproduce these kings and queens. the anatomy of the university, in other words, is indistinguishable from the anatomy of the capitalist society which creates and sustains it. this is why, i suggest, battles over the living-wage (and, more ambitiously, visions of re-structuring the university, as workplace) have symbolic importance. until socialism demands that professors clean up their own shit (or, even better, others' shit), and janitors lead classes, we need to remember that we remain far from the world that we hold in our hearts.

(680): capitalism obscuring its mechanism of exploitation in the alleged "equality" of the wage-form; a perversion feudalism could not accomplish, as there surplus labor was "demarcated very clearly both in space and time." this suppression of the awareness of exploitation by folding both the spatial and temporal dimensions of surplus-value production into the factory (and into necessary labor)--the site where has interesting implications, again, for questions of the utility of bourgeois legality (and wars over it).

(680): this anger over bourgeois mystification via the notion of the value of labor (as against value of labor-power) is understandable; think of the behavior of the neoclassicals in living-wage debates, which seeks to naturalize (and de-historicize) a "fair" level of remuneration for labor--an endeavor which obfuscates the fundamental fact of surplus-value creation as a necessary feature of capitalist production. (there is, still, an uneasy question about how this plays out in the service sector--but i need to keep remembering that surplus-value has naught to do with the content of the labor process under consideration, but rather with the anatomy of the production process that mediates it).

(682): there is a latent question about what exactly "science" means for marx, especially as it corresponds to what it has meant for marxists. might we suggest that a critical genealogy of the word could help recover the marx of dynamism and dialectics, as against the vulgarization of his work by the positivists?

(703): this methodical investigation of differences in wages (in addition to the careful attempt to track the development of the "value of labor" in its various wage-forms) gives the lies to attempt to read, from the communist manifesto, a marxist position on "absolute immiseration." it is quite clear that marx was fully aware that this entire question is highly complicated, contingent, and impossible to resolve outside of history.

(709): in this introduction to the process of capital accumulation, two points stand out. first, marx seems to define the act of accumulation as something relentlessly productive--that is, as soon as a capitalist opts to take the fruits of accumulation outside of the cycle of capital circulation, he/she no longer "accumulates." in this sense, accumulation seems tied to the commitment to productively re-invest surplus. second, the fragmentation of the fruits of accumulation (into profit, interest, rent, etc.)--all this offers, perhaps, a good way to theorize the parasitic origins of financial capital. of course, there is more to the story, in the sense that finance, especially when disciplined, opens the circulation of capital, rather than just emerging as a consequence (in that sense, the temporality is reversed, perhaps). even still, at the most fundamental level, the fact of dependence on the real economy can hardly be disputed--ultimately, the accumulation of capital requires the production process.

(712): marx here, in his "accounting," lays the foundation for worker-control, insofar as it clarifies the contradiction immanent in the asymmetries of capitalist production--the worker is at once free from the capitalist (in that he is responsible for his own reproduction), and at once subordinate (in the morphologies of the factory floor). this surely qualifies as one of these "legendary" contradictions, whose resolution presents itself in the dreams of laborers everywhere: collective ownership of the means of production.

(713): here, i think, there's room to explore (or, rather, to clarify) marx's admittedly complicated thoughts on the relationship between material relationships and the ideal forms that interpret the former. the argument is simple: in arguing that the "transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the product and the money-form of the commmodity," he's quite clearly claiming that certain concepts serve to legitimize actually-existing social relations (in this case, the commodity-form, which prioritizes the process of selling over and above production, and the money-form, which empowers those seeking to transform M into C into M', the capitalist, at the expense of those who earn money only in order to consume). in sum, the heavenly, bourgeois mist that coheres around dirty earthy realities obfuscates the nature of capitalist exploitation. to extend his argument, we might add that his earlier stress on the incessant character of this process is critical, as it speaks to what barbara fields highlights, namely the importance of living and re-living these facts-of-life to the formation of ideal apparatuses that rationalize them. taken even further, against the dogmatists, i think we can recover an almost gramscian notion of hegemony in this presentation of "legitimation"--it is the fact that the laborer receives a wage, week-in, week-out (with which he purchases a "basket of goods"), that cements, ideally, his subjugation to capital, which appears here as his provider. (the abiding question, still, is whether emancipation from this subjugation is primarily ideal--as in, does the worker learn "marxist economic theory" in order to be free--or, primarily material--as in, it requires the overthrow of said material relationships). as with most questions, i think the anticipated answer is likely too simplistic. fields' argument lends itself to a more pessimistic reading (as in one needs to reject the source at which these ideas are reproduced), whereas the dogmatists and parties, of course, invest their faith in the notion of emancipation through "scientific education." we need not review the absurdities of the latter, though we might want to interrogate the limitations of the latter (particularly, in the diagnosis of "hegemony"--is anything so clean, after all? at the very least, we need to re-introduce fanon's notion of hegemony-never-consolidated)

(716): a mutual dependence between capitalist and wage-laborer (insofar as the worker constantly produces "objective wealth," in the form of capital; and insofar as the capitalist "just as constantly produces labour-power...produces the worker as a wage-laborer") obscures the sovereignty of labor (insofar as labor-power is the incessant (though not necessarily original) source of capital's valorization), even while the actual dynamics are inverted in order to crown the capitalist (insofar as the capitalist buys labor-power, and thus reserves the right to dispose of it as he will).

(718): this claim, that the individual consumption of the worker forms an indispensable part of the process of production, is critical, for at least two reasons: (1) it further highlights the myriad ways in which, even in those spheres which he/she might be considered "free" and "autonomous," capital seeps into the non-working life of the worker. in the fact that this "maintenance and reproduction of the working-class remains a necessary condition for the reproduction of capital," we again see the dialectics of mutual dependence and subjugation. (2) it is within this capillary form of domination, i think, that one must situate analysis of the more overt forms of capital's intrusions (advertising, the company store, credit cards, etc.).

(718-719): implicit in marx's unveiling of the notions of "productive" and "unproductive" consumption is the same claim about the "irrational character of capitalist rationality"--namely, the notion that productivity, efficiency, output, etc., all are measured in relation to the process of valorization. once we break with these limited metrics, however, the massive irrationalities become clearer. to put it more succinctly, the rhetoric of rationality is tied to class. none of this is very distinct from what weber, foucault, or the frankfurt schoool wanted to emphasize--the notion that a prodigiously productive, efficient apparatus was deployed to deplorable, irrational ends.

(720-721): the british cotton industry, calling for a bailout in the aftermath of the blockade of the american south--some things never change! (here, more importantly, marx is relating capital's awareness of its (and society's) dependence on labor.

(722): the desire to restrict freedom of movement of labor reveals, again, the sinister asymmetry at the heart of the dual freedom of the wage-laborer: 'free' to dispose of himself as he will (i.e., not work and starve), but simultaneously 'free' to be disposed of as the capitalist would like. here, as always, "between equal rights, force [is deciding]."

(725-726): i take this opportunity to stress what is argued throughout these sections on accumulation, namely that capital accumulation proceeds only insofar as capital is incessantly deployed and re-deployed--insofar as the cycle of capital's circulation is unbroken. in that sense, latin american elites buying second homes in the US represent the failure of that indigenous bourgeoisie to fulfill its historical vocation. in other words, the unproductive consumption of the capitalist class, though significant, in a historical sense, when assessing third world development, is not marx's concern. again, he takes bourgeois intellectual's at their word when critiquing their "creation." (to review: failed capital accumulation, in marx's terms, is described as "simple reproduction"). (see also 738-739).

(727): in tracing how simple reproduction becomes "a spiral," marx makes room for, within his analysis, the fact of the rising standard of living of the working-class. as he has established, capitalist's are invariably critically dependent on the existence of a laboring population--indeed, the "autonomous" reproduction of wage-labor is part of the cycle of capital's circulation. in this sense, quite apart from that theory of crisis which identifies the contradiction latent in capital's dual relationship to labor (as its workers, but also as its consumers), marx is suggesting that capital cannot avoid the imperative to provide an increasingly larger absolute social product to workers in order that they may reproduce themselves in ever greater numbers. note, he has dwelt carefully on the imperfections, and further contradictions in this process--how this is unsteady, unwilling, and often untrue. and that holistic analysis is really the lesson of this book.

(729-730): an excellent passage, requiring little explication: bourgeois legality mystifies the content of the capitalist's appropriation by presenting in the form of the equal exchange. in other words, the legal framework that regulates exchange enshrines a principle utterly hostile to the equality it purports--namely, the parasitism of capital and the subjugation of labor that ensues. (an interesting additional issue, which is evident from marx's presentation, is the fleeting legality of this relationship. rather than understanding bourgeois legality as incomplete, ideally, in other words, he seems to be presenting it as partial because it is temporary. when we confine ourselves to the act of exchange (the interaction between capital as buyer and wage-laborer as seller), all is well. it is when we move beyond this that we must also move beyond the mist of bourgeois social science).

(731): something also needs to be said about the curious character of labour-power as commodity. as marx notes, while the wage-laborer alienates it in his contract with the capitalist, this alienation is temporary (after the act of exchange, he's free(/condemned) to do this again). in a sense, the entire tragedy of the proletarian resides in his inability to detach himself from what he sells--he must follow his commodity to work, as that commodity is his body, his-self. with this in mind, one can even begin to argue that drugs, religion, whatever else, represent an alienation in response to this fundamental alienation--as he is alienated in following his body to work (ah, the dualists return!), he responds by leaving the factory in order to find god, football, or everything in between. "apathy," then, is only a feature of this underlying injustice.

(733): a need to think this through--"to the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own immanent laws, undergoes a further development into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production must undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become laws of capitalist appropriation."

(740-741): here, marx is telling a story about the capitalist class becoming progressively less "capitalist" (as vocation), as capitalism advances, insofar as they "accumulate" less and "splurge" more. this chronology of increasnig 'lax-ness', i think, seems resoundingly true--though what is needed to make the narrative more robust is specifics rooted in history (note, marx also complicates this significantly--speaking, for example, of the occasional necessity of capital representing itself through luxury). for example, in the US the recent story is well-known, hinging on the neoliberal revolution (de-industrialization, financialization, and macro- and micro-economic indebtedness).

(742): in this brief allusion to the notion that the capitalist, too, is merely a 'machine' means to the end of valorization, there's room to assert, with marcuse and the others, the more total undesirability of modern industrial society. indeed, it is precisely this process of means incessantly and permanently becoming ends-in-themselves that those thinkers foreground as the madness of modernity. of course, no one needs the zerzanite reaction.

(747): "in the chapters on the production of surplus-value we constantly assumed that wages were at least equal to the value of labor-power. but the forcible reduction of the wage of labor beneath its value plays too important a role in the practical movement of affairs for us not to stay with this phenomenon for a moment."

(748): again, in this essay on the english worker of the 18th century lamenting the cheapness of french labor, we confront again the morphological timelessness of the capitalist economy.

(756): here, the fetishism of the commodity re-appears in the fetishism of capital: "all the powers of labor project themselves as powers of capital, just as the value-forms of the commodity do as forms of money." to review, the productive forces of labor--both as it preserves the value of dead labor, and also adds new value to the product--appear as the features of capital's ability to self-valorize. in the case of money, though i need to clarify the argument, money (as universal equivalent) expresses individual properties of specific commodities as general qualities of itself (appropriating, in a sense, their functions to itself).

(758-759, fn 51): marx on bentham, that "soberly pedantic and heavy-footed oracle..."--priceless!

notes on capital
chapter 15: machinery and large-scale industry
sections 6-10

(566): nominibus mollire licet mala -- "it is proper to lighten evils with words" (ovid)

(568-569): in this critique of the bourgeois economists, marx alludes to an understanding of machinery as emancipatory, providing that its implementation is not overseen by capitalism. this does, though, leave open many questions about how a socialist society implements machinery. is it gradual? if it's gradual how does it remain competitive? how is it not alienating? etc., etc.

(571): the advent of cotton-spinning "promote[d], as if in a hot house, the growing of cotton in the United States, and with it the African Slave Trade." an example, if one was needed, of the way in which capitalism intensified slavery, rather than simply succeeding it. (in 1790, 697,000 slaves in US; in 1861, four million).

(571-572): a bit about the demands of the wool industry and the consequent conversion of arable land into pasture for sheep, which is critical precisely because, as sayre argued, it demonstrates that little is 'natural' (as in, outside of history). or, better put, nature has to be understood historically; in this case, the relation of man to land (in this case, the de-population of rural areas) cannot be understood outside of technological advance and new systems of production. in other words, man, in england and ireland, did not meet natural limits, but limits imposed upon nature by specific histories of 'progress'.

(574): in essence, section 6 responds to those apologists who see in machinery the means by which more and more employment will be made available to laboreres (as, in short, machinery stimulates general economic growth). marx's response is unequivocal: by and large, this stimulation is negligible. there will be further growth, he admits, but this will be insignificant in relation to the general impact of machinery on labor, as well as itself being prey to the later impact of machinery (as in, if machine implementation in one branch of industry stimulates another, we can still expect it to be a matter of time before machinery pervades the latter). he ends, then, with an interesting summary of recent, contemporary growth of the servant class in industrial britain, which has relevance for third world nations today, of course. for if it truly is the case that machinery requires a "larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively," (can we think of the service sector in these terms?) then it is impossible to understand the plight of the current servant classes of the third world without recourse to 'labor-saving' technology. in other words, marx's attentiveness to this question of the relationship between technology and labor absorption should make us critically aware in the present: is it possible to imagine a way to limit technological advance so as to deal with the far more relatively numerous masses in the homes and kitchens of the indigenous bourgeoisie in the third world? how will this be accomplished, while still being competitive to the extent of being sustainable? are these the right questions?

(577): "finally, we have considered this question entirely apart from the fact that everywhere, except in the metallurgical industries, young persons (under 18), women and children form by far the most preponderant element in the factory personnel"--this is the critical 'other side' of the story of the industrial revolution, and neglected, i think, in accounts of women's liberation that give explanatory power to WWII. what did this mean for women's liberation? specifically, why was it the case that this large-scale employment of women did not result, in england, in a consciousness of liberation in the way that it did in america during WW2? of course there's a lot of history that i have yet to learn about both... (namely, what is the story of the english women's movement and its relation to industrial capitalism? what was the role of women in the US industrial revolution (the mills in massachusetts, for example)?)

(578): once more, a martial metaphor to explain industrial competition.

(579): marx, again, was fully aware of the gutting of india's handicraft cotton production, and its conversion into a site for producing raw material (cotton, wool, hemp, jute, indigo).

(579-580): quite standard development of underdevelopment narrative; in other words, quite clearly a dialectical (not linear) narrative of how capitalism advances.

(582): here, marx draws a link between the global extension of capitalism and the frequency of crisis. in other words, there seems to be a link between the scope of the capitalist market--the space over which it has expanded--and the frequency (and clarity) of the crises that afflict it. this, no doubt, is properly theorized in harvey and others. but we can add that it is probably not so much the fact that space is a source of new contradictions (indeed, harvey suggests that expansion into as-yet virgin areas is often the 'fix'), but rather that it is a vehicle for the consolidation of market relations (which clarifies, in a real sense, the dynamics producing crisis).

(588, fn 67): something made clear throughout this chapter is that the fact that the decreasing rate of surplus value must be compensated by absolute increases in capitalist production (by increases in the mass of surplus value) gives capitalism its relentlessly expansive character. innovation must happen, but alongside expansion. both are, simultaneously, survival strategies for individual and system.

(588-589): marx comments here on the way in which specific technical innovations undo certain divisions of labor pioneered in the manufacturing/handicraft era. he uses the example of adam smith, and his example of ten men making sewing-needles. the general importance of this passage, i suggest, is that it raises again the question of how machinery imposes objective requirements on the organization of production, which are of a quite different nature from the divisions of labor that preceded them. in other words, it is wrong to see, as feldstein via smith implied, that the progressively more extensive division of labor is the driver of increased productivity--rather, machinery intervenes in a quite decisive way, disrupting what is a very alluring linear story to reveal contradictions (advances with retreats). (see also 590, where marx writes about how the 'new division of labor' requires exclusively 'cheap labor' (i.e., women and children), quite in contrast to the 'old division of labor' in the handicrafts and even manufacture).

(593): "they become rough, foulmouthed boys, before Nature has taught them that they are women"--i suppose this is excusable, given context and intent.

(596): again, an explicit critique of the linear liberal.

(597): here, in the employment of child labor, we remember the contingency of the definition of childhood. in other words, appraising the dialectical relationship of environment (i.e., the factory) to the underlying biology is crucial to understanding the mendacity of 'capitalist anthropology'. (see also 599, where sociobiology can make little sense of parents pushing their children into brutal forms of employment).

(601): marx's argument, derived from the calculus he establishes for deciding on the efficacy of machinery, is that, in any given industry, there comes a point when increasing productivity through cheating labor, employing women/children, etc., is no longer viable (largely because demand has become so extensive). instead, capitalists turn to the machine. one question, in response, is how does this match on to the argument that the machine itself facilitates the entrance of women/children (he later clarifies some complexity, in that young children are removed but "the new machine-minders are exclusively girls and young women"? but i think that is a historical question, which requires one only to look more carefully at the chronology of their entry, rather than a theoretical conundrum. secondly, there seems to be an underlying dynamic of capital accumulation involved; in other words, you need a certain amount of capital to be able to invest in whole-scale transformation of production; a amount of disposable capital that may not be available in immature industries.

(601): again, looking to the past to better understand the present: "the fearful increase in death from starvation during the last ten years in london runs parallel with the extension of machine sewing"

(604): an important passage on the unsteadiness governing the transition from pre-factory forms to the factory system. specifically, marx here is arguing that the uneven implementation of the factory system in various branches of industry, affects dramatically (in a way that makes more inhumane) the non-factory forms of production that are linked to this technical advance. in other words, much like capitalism seizes on pre-capitalist forms and transforms them, here the factory form of production exacerbates the madness of pre-factory forms. in this way, the ascent of the factory system is accompanied by "a totally changed and disorganized" series of non-factory forms of production, which themselves "overdo all the horrors of the factory system." there is a lingering question about how to judge this transition, as marx seems to be arguing that the transitional forms are "worst" (not unlike slavery under capitalism, i suppose).

(604-605): argument here is fairly straightforward, yet important for legislation to check the excesses of contemporary capitalisms in the third world. in essence, marx is suggesting that the factory acts hastened the mechanization of production, insofar as they prohibited manufacture/domestic industry from the quick fixes of "unlimited exploitation of cheap labor-power." to compete, they had to raise productivity by the books. this has interesting consequences, when extrapolated to the case of child labor in the third world; insofar as it is true that more smaller factories/workplaces sustain these practices than larger ones (how true?), one can imagine proper legislation facilitating the concentration of capital in the hands of larger-scale industry (made explicit by marx in a passage on page 607). this dynamic, of course, has its own consequences. (anyway i think all this requires more empirical investigation, before it can be applied to explain today).

(607): a need to discipline the worker--to wean him from his "irregular habits"

(608): this is important, precisely because it prefigures what is done far too infrequently when studying "booms & busts"--namely, looking at crises from the eyes of labor, and assessing their consequences thusly.

(612): the earlier point about bourgeois legality being unable to regulate the internal order of a factory here resurfaces (and this quite aside from questions of autocracy at work). here marx offers an example of the impossibility of regulating the architecture of production: the factory acts could not re-organize the spatial structures of production, lest they "strike at the very roots of the capitalist mode of production," which is really it's freedom to purchase and consume labor-power in whatever way it pleases. put differently, the spatiality of this freedom here becomes important, insofar as it seems "impossible to impose [any] rule on capital" in this regard. in a sense, the contradiction immanent in the dual freedom of labor (the freedom to dispose of him/herself, but also the freeing of him/her from the means of production) here reappears as a contradiction in the legality of productive activity: the bourgeoisie claim the latter in the form of their property rights, yet thereby expose the fallacy of the former, insofar labor is revealed to be thoroughly subordinate to capital's will. "between equal rights, force decides."

(617): there's a dynamism to modern industry, marx is arguing, that is not present in all previous modes of production. whereas those were "essentially conservative," modern industry cannot survive without constantly "transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process." this is of course important to the chronological questions of early industrial britain (progressive de-skilling, for example), aside from being wholly true with respect to the madness of contemporary capitalism. again, dialectics, not linearity. BUT, critically, marx here, in one of those rare moments, hints at what socialist harnessing of large-scale industry would achieve. at the bottom, he writes of how capitalism channels the dynamism required by industry (the "fluidity of functions, the mobility of the worker") into a form that does away with "all fixity and security" for the worker. the challenge for socialism, then, is this: how to organize production in large-scale industry such that the mobility is emancipating, rather than exploitative (there is, of course, the ecological challenge, but that's quite separate). all this is made explicit on page 618, where marx writes directly (well, almost) of the "partially developed individual" being replaced by "the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions [required by large-scale industry] are different modes of activity he takes up in turn."

(619): more of the same attempt to prefigure socialist organization of production--and indeed, a making explicit of the dialectical approach: no necessary connection, in other words, between industry and alienation. in fact, it proves, on this account, a necessary condition for emancipation.

(620): quoting children's employment comission of 1866 (for the sociobiologists): "against no persons do the children of both sexes so much require protection as against their parents."

(621): toward a "higher form of the family:" again, an excellent explication of a concrete issue in which we can both lament the loss of all that is "fixed and frozen" (as is critical) without fearing the future (as is necessary).

(621): "since here the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker."

(621): clarifying chronology: factory acts enable general transition to machine-system, simultaneously heightening (in a real sense) the misery of those branches of industry left unregulated (domestic industry, manufacture, handicrafts).

(625-626): of course, in noting the disjuncture between what's enshrined in the letter of the law and what applies, marx (or engels, in this case) registers the classic contradiction of battles over the integrity of laws. indeed, we need to look no further than the UN declaration of human rights.

(635): a key passage, especially as regards the question of the revolutionary potential of the informal working-class. because here marx is tracing the increasing revolutionary capacities of the industrial working-class to the obliteration of spatially isolated small-scale workshops (those "ancient and transitional forms"). as this concentration of workers replaces the prevailing "partially hidden dominion of capital" with an awareness of what exactly workers ought to hold against this world, it "generalizes the direct struggle." it should be clear, though, that none of these conditions exist in the contemporary third world in any significant capacity. in that sense, fanon's command to concentrate on the peasantry needs to be re-issued, today, in the form of a demand to understand and organize the informal sector (the lumpen sectors). what remains to be studied, of course, are the imperfections of this general narrative; are there any ways in which the modern conjuncture opens up as-yet-unforseen possibilities of revolt? or is it really true that davis' pessimism prevails? why not study this, for god's sake?

(637-638): marx's first systematic presentation of the industrialization of agricultural production is lacking, of course, but is interesting in ways that orthodox reproductions don't account for. for example, there is the emphasis on the spatial distribution of laborers as an explanation for the possibility of resistance--indeed, the way he traces the chronology of agglomeration, it might be argued that even the peasantry, if crowded appropriately, could be revolutionary. (yet, on second thought, there's much more to this issue than simply space--it is, of course, to marxism's credit that it has a more robust explanation for what makes the urban working-class revolutionary (i.e,. the utterly inhuman (and painfully clear) hierarchies of the factory floor, and the invariably collective character of the demands that follow)). yet, even still, there remains room for playing with this aspect of the passage. secondly, even more interestingly, marx here introduces the concept of the 'metabolic rift,' emphasized by bellamy-foster. he hints at its future resolution, but all that he writes otherwise clarifies his interest in ecology, and capitalism's unavoidable irrationality in this respect. all this, it scarcely needs to be said, is a critical rejoinder to soviet developmentalism.