Pakistan: A Hard Country (65 page)
Along similar lines, a retired Pathan officer, Brigadier Saad, described to me how his uncle, an ANP veteran, over dinner one day had cursed the Afghans as savages. ‘How can you say this, Uncle?’, he asked. ‘Haven’t you been saying for years that they are our Pashtun brothers and we should unite with them?’
‘Oh, that wasn’t serious! It’s just a way of frightening those damned Punjabis so that they don’t beat us up.’
In the Pathan highlands, an insurrection is raging against the national government, fed in part by Pathan national sentiment. Yet as with the Scottish rebel ions of 1715 and 1745, the motivation of this rebel ion is not nationalism as such, but a mixture of ancient clan unrest against any government with religious differences; and the stated goal is not Pathan independence, but a change of regime in Pakistan as a whole.
Of course, the paral el is very far from exact. It does not include the crucial importance of developments in neighbouring Afghanistan for the affairs of Pakistan’s Pathans. Equal y importantly, the society of the Pathan areas, and the tribal areas in particular, is rougher by far than that of eighteenth-century Scotland, and this in turn produces a much rougher kind of religious radicalism. Alas, there is no great modern Enlightenment culture to produce a contemporary Pathan Adam Smith or David Hume.
A young, highly educated Pathan woman of my acquaintance, from an elite background, described to me in 2008 how a girlfriend of hers from a similar background had recently cal ed off her arranged marriage at the last moment in order to marry instead a former suitor: ‘There was a terrible scandal of course, but in the end the parents saw that there was nothing to be done, and agreed.’ I said that I found this an encouraging sign of progress, if only at the elite level. ‘Yes,’ she replied, looking aside with an extremely bitter face, ‘but if that had happened in my family there would have been half a dozen deaths by now between us and the other families involved, starting with the girl.’
The provincial office of the Pakistan People’s Party – at the time of writing Pakistan’s ruling party – stands on University Road, Peshawar’s high street, lined with fairly modern-looking shops and offices. Just opposite, a side road leads to the Tehkal quarter – and within a few feet turns into a rutted dusty track, unpaved and lined with filthy-looking shops, barrows with flyblown fruit and vegetables, and concrete shacks roofed with corrugated iron. Every woman on this street when I visited it was wearing a black or blue burqa.
‘You can tel the Afghan girls because they wear a more modern type of burqa than our local women – more fashionable and stylish,’ a Peshawari woman told me; something which one could find tragic, comic or even heroic, according to taste. ‘Was this road ever paved?’ I asked. ‘Once upon a time’, was the answer.
In other words, in trying to create a strict Shariah-based system in the Pathan areas the Taleban are not trying to impose something completely new. They are trying to develop something partly new out of elements that are very old indeed. And the cruelty for which the Taleban are rightly reproached has to be seen in the context of what at the best of times can be a very hard society indeed, especial y as far as women are concerned.
Peshawar itself is a hard enough city, and looks it: a sprawl of dusty grey brick and concrete slums interspersed with the extravagant vil as of the wel -off, shrouded in dust and pol ution; searingly hot in summer and grindingly cold in winter. When I think of the city, I often remember the sign for an angiography centre (heart clinic) at the entrance to the road where my usual guest-house is situated in University Town. In the West, such a sign would probably have featured a handsome elderly man, with some saccharine message about taking care of your heart for the sake of your grandchildren. The sign in Peshawar featured a huge colour photograph of a human heart, streaked with blood and rimmed with glistening fat. One of the great charms of the Pathans, acknowledged by al observers, is that they are nothing if not candid.
After this, when I saw a sign for ‘Brains School, Peshawar’, I half expected it to be accompanied by a picture of a raw brain.
Peshawar’s only grace-notes are the neat and elegant official military cantonment, the beautiful gardens of its schools and col eges, built by the British on Mughal patterns, and the occasional exquisitely shaped minaret, pointing towards a better world than that of Peshawar.
Yet by the standards of the rest of the province, Peshawar is wealthy indeed, with banks, luxury stores, an international hotel, even a halal McDonald’s. Now and then, if you look down a straight street, or over some low roofs, you see the outlines of an even poorer, harder world, which both hates and envies Peshawar – the tawny sentinels of the Frontier mountains, graveyard of armies.
THE MOUNTAINS AND THE PLAINS
I thought of those mountains when I attended a service at St John’s Cathedral, the old British garrison church of Peshawar. My fel ow congregants were not Pathans, but descendants of low-caste Hindus, converted under the British Raj. The memoirs of the Reverend T. L.
Pennel attest to the extreme resistance of the Pathans to any effort to convert them to Christianity. In fact it says a great deal for the spirit of missionaries like Pennel that they made the attempt at al .3
So the noses of the congregation were much flatter than those of the rest of the city’s population, the skins darker, and the bodies shorter. In fact, the whole service made a contrast to the dour face of Pathan public life. After three weeks in the NWFP the sight of the unveiled women in their brightly coloured shelwar kameezes and the occasional sari – though for the most part decorously seated apart from the men – was profoundly refreshing.
Although traditional y an impoverished and despised community, and today an increasingly endangered one, the Christians in Pakistan have done comparatively wel in recent years, thanks to strong community cooperation, help from international Christian groups and, perhaps most importantly, commitment to education. Many of the men had pens clipped to their front pockets as a sign that they were employed in some literate profession.
The cheerful beat of the Anglican hymns, transformed almost out of recognition by India and accompanied by drums and cymbals, had a fine martial air, appropriate to a profoundly embattled and endangered community in an increasingly embattled city. A tiny girl with an enormous grin sat on the altar steps, clapping her hands in time to the music. Fans waved to and fro in a vain effort to reduce the sweltering heat, for it was August and we were in the middle of one of Peshawar’s eternal power cuts, so the giant overhead fans were stil .
Outside, a dozen armed police stood guard against the terrorists who have attacked so many Christian churches (and Shia mosques) in recent years. Reassuring, but, as we have seen again and again, alas, in the face of a real y large-scale assault not enough to do much more than die bravely – which the poor devils have done often enough, usual y unremarked by the Western media.
It was strange to sit in such heat in a red-brick neo-Gothic church below a fine Victorian hammer-beam roof, listening to a fire and brimstone sermon in Urdu; but much stranger to think of the faces that would have fil ed the church sixty years before – the white (or rather also brick-red) faces of the British garrison, administrators and the tiny non-official British community. Outside the main entrance, one of the greatest of the British in India is commemorated by a tal cross and an inscription which stil has the power to move, because it was erected not by a state or government but by a friend, and for no reason save friendship: To Field Marshal Auchinleck, ‘In affection and admiration to the memory of this great gentleman, great soldier and great man.
From his devoted friend General Sher Ali Pataudi, 1984’.
Auchinleck’s comrades and predecessors, whose names adorn the wal s of the cathedral, might wel have been surprised by the congregation and the music, but I doubt that much else that is happening on the Frontier today would have surprised them. The reason is summed up in their memorials: Major Henry MacDonald, Commandant of Fort Michni, ‘cruel y murdered by Afridis, 21st March 1873’; Lt Colonel James Loughan O’Bryen, commanding 31st Punjab Infantry, ‘kil ed in action at the head of his regiment at Agran, Bajaur, 30th September 1897’; Leslie Duncan Best OBE MC IPS, Political Agent Dir, Swat and Chitral, ‘kil ed in action near Loe Agra, 11th April 1935’.
Tablet after tablet of this kind stretch along the cathedral wal s, commemorating a hundred years of British warfare with the Pathan tribes of the North West Frontier and Afghanistan. These ghosts testify that Pathans do not take kindly to an infidel military presence in their territories. Soviet monuments could have told the same story, if a Soviet Union had survived to commemorate its dead in Afghanistan.
The surprising thing, therefore, about the present Taleban insurgency in the Pathan areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan is not that it is happening, but that it was not more widely predicted.
Looking at the attractive, unveiled women in the church, my mind travel ed back twenty years to another city under threat from tribal warriors fighting for Islam: Kabul in the summer of 1989, with the Mujahidin (then anti-Communist ‘freedom fighters’ according to the Western media, but in their own presentation warriors for Islam) beginning to tighten their grip after the Soviet military withdrawal. I visited the university there and, talking to the women students and professors, I remembered what a grizzled, middle-aged mujahid from a ruined vil age in the hil s had told me around a camp fire in Nangrahar a few months earlier, when I asked him what he meant to do when the Communists were defeated and the cities fel . ‘I mean to capture an educated wife,’ he had said.
I remembered the narrowed eyes and lean, hard faces of the Mujahidin as they stared into Ghazni from the hil s around the town. I remembered them again three years later, when I was a journalist stationed in the Soviet Union during its fal , and read what had in fact happened to Afghanistan’s cities and especial y their women when the Mujahidin captured them; and when I returned to Afghanistan after 9/11
and learned at first hand what the Mujahidin victory had meant for the people of Kabul. To be fair to the Taleban, it was precisely because they offered a version of peace and order after the horrors of Mujahidin anarchy that their rule was welcomed by so many Afghan Pathans in the mid-1990s. Yet for the educated classes in the cities, and for many non-Pathans, the cure was even worse than the disease.
THE PATHAN TRADITION AND PATHAN
NATIONALISM
The Taleban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan are as of 2010 first and foremost a Pathan phenomenon, with deep roots in Pathan history and culture. Whenever the tribes rose in the past, whether against the British or Afghan authorities, this was for their tribal freedoms but always in the name of Islam and usual y under the inspiration of local religious figures. For most of Afghan history, the Afghan kings also cal ed their people to war in the name of Islam – in between launching their own ferocious campaigns against dissident mul ahs preaching rebel ion against those same kings. The religious theme has therefore long flowed together with tribal yearning for freedom from authority – any authority, but above al of course alien and infidel domination. Or, as a Pathan saying has it: ‘The Afghans of the Frontier are never at peace except when they are at war.’
The Taleban therefore have a rich seam of instinctive public sympathy to mine in the Pathan areas. So far in both Afghanistan and Pakistan they have, however, drawn on Pathan ethnic sentiment without co-opting it completely and becoming a Pathan nationalist force. Indeed, they have not attempted to take this path. The reasons for this relate to Taleban ideology and ambitions, and also to the complicated geopolitical situation in which the Pathan ethnicity has found itself over the past 150 years.
For according to most standard models of modern nationalism the Pathans, like the Somalis, are a paradox or anomaly. They are an ethno-linguistic group with a very strong consciousness of common ethni c culture and identity, and with an ancient ethnic code of behaviour (the pashtunwali) to which most Pathans stil subscribe, at least rhetorical y. As in Somalia, al the elements would seem to be in place to create a modern ethno-linguistic nation-state; and yet the Pathans like the Somalis have never generated a modern state-building nationalism; and have indeed played a leading part in tearing to pieces whatever states have been created on their territory.
There are thought to be somewhere between 35 and 40 mil ion Pathans in the world today, of whom considerably more than half live in Pakistan. This gives the Pakistani state a vital interest in what happens to the Pathans of Afghanistan. As Pakistani officials and officers have argued to me, it also means that the Pakistani state simply cannot afford to take a line on Afghanistan (for example, actively helping the US presence there) with which a majority of Pathans strongly disagree.
The vagueness of the figures on Pathan numbers il ustrates the fact that no reliable Afghan national census has ever taken place, precisely because the issue of ethnic percentages is so explosive. Thus most educated Afghan (and Pakistani) Pathans with whom I have spoken have put the Pathan proportion of the Afghan population at 60 – 70 per cent. Non-Pathan Afghans have put it at 30 – 40 per cent. A Pakistani Pathan army officer described this to me as ‘statistical genocide’ on the part of the other Afghan nationalities – who say the same thing about Pathan figures.