Pakistan: A Hard Country (47 page)
This was the ‘Wonder House’ of Kipling’s Kim, which famously begins with Kim perched on the great cannon, Zam Zama, in the road outside the museum, of which Kipling’s father was the curator. Kipling worked for a Lahore newspaper, and some of his finest stories are set in Lahore, as are those of many of Pakistan’s greatest writers and poets. Lahore is a city of the imagination, in a way that bureaucratic Islamabad and dour, impoverished Peshawar cannot be, and Karachi has not yet had the time to become (though writers like Kamila Shamsie are working on it).The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) is in parts at least the best university not only in Pakistan, but in South Asia.
Most unusual y for Pakistan, which as a society exemplifies the principle of ‘private affluence and public squalor’, Lahore, although it contains some fairly awful slums, also has some fine public gardens, though admittedly ones bequeathed by the Mughals in the case of the Shalamar Gardens, and the British in the case of the Lawrence Gardens (now Jinnah Bagh). Strol ing through the Jinnah Bagh in September 2008 on my way from breakfast with friends in a stylish and charming café cal ed ‘Coffee Tea and Company’ to visit a modern art gal ery, past uniformed schoolchildren, girls in brightly coloured shelwar kameezes like parrots tossing bal s to each other, and neatly dressed middle-class couples, I reflected on the idiocy of portraying Pakistan as a ‘failed state’. It was hardly a scene reminiscent of Grozny or Mogadishu.
The contrast was al the greater with Peshawar, which I had just left, and where the sense of threat from the Pakistani Taleban was palpable. Indeed, it was sometimes difficult to remember that Peshawar and Lahore were in the same country. I remember my shock – and then amusement at my shock – on seeing what I first took to be a fattish Pathan boy in a Pathan cap and jeans on the back of a motorcycle in Lahore – only to realize that it was in fact a girl; which in Peshawar would be a truly dangerous combination, and in other Pathan areas a potential y fatal one.
Then again, you could say that my reflections on the success and stability of Lahore were only the result of my becoming lahorized (or perhaps lahorified, to rhyme with glorified), because this is very much the way that the Lahore elites feel, and for many years it led them into a very dangerous complacency vis-à-vis the militant threat.
With the exception of some journalists, most of my Lahore elite friends did indeed treat developments in the Pathan areas as if they were happening in a different country a long way off. This was stil apparent even in January 2009, despite serious terrorist attacks in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. By July 2009, however, this complacency had been shattered by major attacks in Lahore itself, on the Sri Lankan cricket team and the police academy. Many more have fol owed.
However, as this book has been at pains to point out, terrorism and insurgency are two very different things. Terrorist attacks can do great damage to Pakistan, but to overthrow the state would require an immense spread of the rebel ions which broke out in some of the Pathan areas between 2001 and 2009. Above al , to seize power in Pakistan, Islamist militancy would have to seize Lahore.
During my visits to Lahore in 2007 – 2009, I was deeply worried by the lack of support among the mass of the population for tough action against the Pakistani Taleban – even in July 2009, by which time opinion in the elites had shifted very significantly. On the other hand, I could not find much significant support on the streets for the Taleban’s actual programme of Islamist revolution, even among the poor and the lower middle classes, the social heartland of Islamist radicalism in Punjab.
In January 2009, during the holiday which marks the festival of Moharram, I strol ed across the park surrounding the Minar-e-Pakistan, the monument to Pakistan’s independence next to the Old City, mingling with the crowds and talking to people of different classes (from rickshaw drivers to members of the middle classes, but excluding the elite) about their views of their government, the economic situation, the Pakistani Taleban, the war in Afghanistan and anything else that they wanted to talk to me about.
This was a time when anti-Western feeling in Pakistan was running even higher than usual, owing to the Israeli attack on Gaza; and, as I have remarked elsewhere in this book, while it is difficult enough to argue with anti-Western Pakistanis when they are in the wrong, it is even more difficult to do so when they are in the right. So as might have been expected, I came in for a great deal of impassioned and radical-sounding rhetoric. Support for a military offensive against the Pakistani Taleban was extremely weak, and sympathy for the Afghan Taleban’s fight against the ‘US occupation’ of Afghanistan was universal.
Habib, an old scooter-driver, declared to murmurs of approval from the other drivers that,
The military should stop fighting against the Taleban in Swat and Bajaur. We are al Muslims after al . The Taleban are just trying to spread real Islam and bring peace and justice, and I don’t know why the army is trying to stop them. Al over the world Muslims are under attack from the Jews and Americans, in Palestine, Afghanistan, everywhere. The Taleban are right to fight them.
Every single person I spoke with opposed Pakistani help to America in Afghanistan. Asghar, an educated, English-speaking youth in a basebal cap, declared, to the applause of his friends: We have two opinions in our society: the government, which is for America, and the people, who are against America. How can any Muslim support US policies when they are helping Israel kil innocent Muslims? That is why the Taleban are carrying out terrorism in Pakistan, because of this gap between the government and the people. So we al think that the government should negotiate with the Taleban to end this conflict.
That said, a couple of serious qualifications need to be entered. The first is that in the great majority of cases people only started talking about the Taleban and the fight against them when I mentioned these themes (this was one thing which had changed by July, when Lahore had already come in for terrorist attacks). If I only asked what they were most concerned about, the overwhelming majority started talking about inflation and jobs.
The other thing worth pointing out is that at no stage in the course of that morning did I feel the slightest concern for my own safety, except from the cricket bal s, which were whizzing in al directions from the dozens of informal and anarchical cricket matches that were going on and that clearly interested most of the young men present far more than my questions. Even when one group of kids started chanting Taleban slogans, there was an air of clowning for the camera about the proceedings, and the chanting was accompanied by an offer of a soft drink ‘because you are our guest and it is so dusty here’. By contrast, in a crowd like that in some of the Pathan areas, I would have had real reason to worry that I might have been beheaded and my head used as the bal .
If there is no revolutionary mood among the masses in the heartland of Punjab, revolution also seems highly unlikely in the face of the power of Punjab’s entwined landowning, business, military and bureaucratic elites, and the deep traditionalism of most of the population.
Nevertheless, Punjab has also long been home to very strong strains of Islamic revivalism. The headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat, the world’s greatest Muslim preaching organization, is in Raiwind, 20
miles to the south-west of Lahore. The Tabligh have always stressed their peaceful and apolitical nature; but 10 miles to the north-west of Lahore is Muridke, the headquarters of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, mother organization to the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which played a leading role in the jihad against India in Kashmir, and carried out the November 2008
terrorist attacks on Mumbai.
For reasons that have deep roots in history, militant groups – and especial y LeT/JuD – do have widespread support in Punjab, at least when they attack the Indians in Kashmir or the West in Afghanistan.
Their popularity has been one factor in discouraging the Pakistani state from attacking them in turn, lest they join with the Pakistani Taleban. From 2008 on, some of these groups did just that, and started to launch terrorist attacks in the very heart of Pakistan. These attacks are unlikely to destroy the Pakistani state, but they can do terrible damage, and perhaps force the state either to compromise with the militants, or to adopt ferocious measures of repression in order to crush them.
PUNJABI HISTORY AND THE IMPACT OF
MIGRATION
Punjab is panch aab, the ‘Land of the Five Rivers’: the Indus, and its four great tributaries, the Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej and Beas. As its name suggests, the northern parts of the province at least have a degree of geographic and historical unity, reflected in the Punjabi language. The southern parts of Punjab were converted to Islam, beginning more than 1,000 years ago (largely by Sufi preachers). Thereafter the region was usual y ruled by Muslim rulers based elsewhere, mostly in Delhi, but sometimes in Afghanistan or even Persia.
The only Punjabi state to rule over the whole of Punjab was that of the Sikhs, a radical movement within Hinduism that (although heavily influenced by both Islamic monotheism and local Muslim Sufi traditions) arose in reaction against Muslim rule in the late sixteenth century. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Sikhs conquered more and more of Punjab from the decaying Mughal empire, and under their greatest ruler, Ranjit Singh (ruled 1801 – 1839), united the whole of Punjab, including Multan to the south, in one state. However, some 60 per cent of Ranjit Singh’s subjects were Muslims.
After Ranjit Singh’s death, the British conquered Punjab in two wars in the 1840s. These saw some of the hardest-fought battles the British ever had to undertake in India; yet, by a curious paradox, the Punjab was to become the heartland of British military recruitment in the Indian empire, with results for the state and society that have profoundly shaped the whole of Pakistan to this day, and provide some of the foundations for military power in Pakistan.
As related in Chapter 5 on the military, the British created a powerful synthesis of modern Western military organization with local traditions, and underpinned this with a system of land grants to reward loyal soldiers and recruiters. The British military system was entwined with the vast irrigation projects started in central Punjab by the British; the new ‘canal colonies’, in what had formerly been wasteland, were intended not only greatly to increase food production (which they did) but to provide both men and horses to the British Indian army.
1. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan 2. Field Marshal Mohammed Ayub Khan, military ruler 1958 – 69
3. Surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, Dhaka, 16
December 1971
4. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister 1971 – 77
5. General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, military ruler 1977 – 88
6. Pakistani soldiers on the Siachen Glacier, Kashmir, August 2002
7. Asif Ali Zardari ( left) and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, with the portrait of the late Benazir Bhutto (2007)
8. Benazir Bhutto (1989)
9. Poster of the Bhutto-Zardari family (2010) 10. Nawaz Sharif (left) and Shahbaz Sharif (2008) 11. General Pervez Musharraf (right), military ruler 1999 – 2008, with US Vice-President Dick Cheney, Islamabad, 26 February 2007
12. General Ashfaq Kayani, Chief of the Army Staff, November 2007
13. President Asif Ali Zardari with President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad (centre) of Iran and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan (left), Tehran, 24 May 2009
14. MQM women activists with pictures of Altaf Hussain (2007) 15. MQM Ral y in Karachi (2007)
16. The aftermath of the suicide attack by the Pakistani Taleban on the Lahore High Court, 10 January 2008
17. A demonstrator with a placard of Osama bin Laden, Karachi, 7
October 2001
18. A demonstration in support of the Afghan Taleban, Karachi, 26
October 2001
19. Jamaat Islami demonstrating in Peshawar against US drone attacks, 16 May 2008
20. Mahsud tribesmen meet for a jirga to discuss US drone attacks, Tank, 20 April 2009
21. Pakistani soldiers in South Waziristan, October 2009
22. A terrorist attack in Peshawar, 5 December 2008
23. Destruction caused by the floods in Azalkhel, NWFP, 9 August 2010
24. A terrorist attack by Lashkar-e-Taiba in Mumbai, India, November 2008: the aftermath of the attack on the railway station 25. Muslim Khan, Pakistani Taleban spokesman, Swat, 28 March 2009
26. Pakistani Taleban supporters celebrate promulgation of the Nizam-e-Adl agreement, Swat, 16 April 2009
27. A Taleban patrol in Swat, April 2009
28. Pakistani soldiers on guard in Swat, September 2009
29. Hakimul ah Mahsud, Amir (leader) of the Pakistani Taleban, Orakzai Tribal Agency, 9 February 2010
30. A victim of a suicide bombing, Kohat, 7 September 2010
The development of electoral politics from the 1880s led to political mobilization along religious lines. There were periodic explosions of communal violence, such as the riots in Rawalpindi in 1926 over the building of a cinema next to a mosque. However, British patronage, common agrarian interests and fear of communal violence meant that until the very last years of British rule, Punjab politics was dominated by the Unionist Party, which brought together Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landowners and their rural fol owers.