Swat: why we should care about this faraway war

In quieter times, Taj Mahmad pulls a cart loaded with vegetables for a living. But today’s Washington Post quotes him as saying that he fled government shelling so quickly that he and his wife were forced to leave their son and three-year-old daughter behind. “My wife cried and said the rest of us would be killed if we stayed, so we kept going,” Mr Mahmad says. “I have no idea what happened to them”.

Another refugee, Bakhte Rwan, tells the Associated Press that he found his wife and two sons dead after he’d returned home from prayers at his local mosque.

We have a journalist-cameraman working for us in one of the refugee camps outside Mardan, a town near the Swat valley. He says local villagers are collecting donations for the refugees, as there is not enough to go round.

And he has interviewed an old man who walked to the camp for three days, accompanied by his son, two cows and a goat, only to be told there was no more space. Eventually room was found for him in somebody else’s tent, but what happened to the man’s animals, I don’t know.

The army has been encouraging people to leave during occasional curfew breaks but, judging from the television pictures, many civilians are fleeing the fighting so quickly that they are carrying little more than the clothes on their backs.

Aid agencies are complaining that a humanitarian crisis is in the making because preparations have not been made by local or national government for the care and resettlement of refugees – the UNHCR says 360,000 have fled in the last 12 days, on top of the 500,000 who have fled past offensives.

Today Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told the Pakistani parliament that “all matters pertaining to the internally displaced persons” would be managed and coordinated by the local administration. Is Islamabad both invading the Swat valley and walking away from the invasion’s consequences, then?

Thousands more are still trapped in their homes by the fighting. Eyewitnesses say the Taliban has been firing at soldiers from rooftops and then disappearing, leaving civilians at the mercy of the army’s Cobra helicopter assaults.

So while the Pakistani interior minister today claims that 20 soldiers and 700 militants have been killed in the last 4 days – claims which are impossible for journalists to verify – I am left wondering whether an operation supported by the United States and many in the Pakistani elite will turn out to be a disaster.

By disaster, I mean that if the government shirks its humanitarian responsibilities, it could drive more Pakistanis into the arms of the Taliban; and if the army kills more civilians than militants, that could have precisely the same effect.

This week’s Economist points out that many in Pakistan will see this offensive as “an American-ordained onslaught on fellow Pakistani Muslims”. So if you are American – or British for that matter – and hoping to reverse the tide of Islamist hatred lapping at your shores, you surely have an interest in this faraway war proceeding as humanely as any war can.