Taliban lose their magic

BBC:

...

For a long time the Taliban presented themselves as the lost link to a pure past, a conduit to a simple life and eternal salvation.

Only four weeks ago most Urdu television channels were acting as cheerleaders for the Taliban.

Most Urdu columnists in newspapers were presenting the Pakistani Taliban as the reincarnation of early Muslim warriors.

Now in a rare consensus they are all clamouring for an all-out war against them.

Even the people who were sitting on the fence - or considered the Taliban a localised problem - have suddenly realised that actually the Taliban are out to destroy their way of life.

Every single opinion poll carried out in Pakistan has concluded that the country is a hotbed of anti-Americanism.

But now, faced with a war against the Taliban, the nation seems to have united behind the most American of slogans: they are threatening our way of life.

How did we change our minds so quickly?

More than the government or the media, it is the Pakistani Taliban who are responsible.

This collective change of heart can be traced back to a two-minute flogging video that made headlines around the world.

Everyone knew that the Taliban flog and behead people, and when they want to show their softer side they just shoot them or slice off their ears. But nobody had seen them at work.

In this video men in regulation Taliban dress and beards are holding down a young girl and methodically whipping her.

The girl screams. She asks for forgiveness.

It is never clear what her crime is.

One of the men in the video tells the other one to hold down the girl firmly.

This series of images had more impact on the people's psyche than a thousand theological debates raging on television.

For the first time a young girl's screams silenced the Taliban cheerleaders.

Then the Taliban leaders, in a series of interviews, have been outlining their roadmap for the nation on television.

It was not just the Swat valley they wanted to purge of evils like schools, music, democracy, barbers and the judiciary.

If it was good for Swat, it should be good for the rest of the country.

And later they wanted to impose the same model on the rest of the world. They demanded that the government give them arms to carry out their mission.

It was a spectacular public relations disaster.

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There is much more.

The Pakistanis must have been bathed in willful ignorance for the past ten years or so. The evils of the Taliban were apparent from the funny clothes they made women wear when they were allowed in public at all. Their control freak religious bigotry was enough to make existence under their thumb a hell on earth and these people only recognized it when they saw a girl being beaten. Didn't they see the brutality in the videos coming out of Afghanistan before their downfall?

Well the good news is that the Pakistanis have finally seen the brutal side of the Taliban and want no more of it. Perhaps it was their religious bigotry against the US that took them so long. But my guess is that most of them would have still jumped at a chance to move to the US.