Pakistan: A Hard Country (66 page)
Pathans have always regarded Afghanistan as an essential y Pathan state, and they have some reason. The dynasty which created the Afghan state was indisputably Pathan, and ‘Afghan’ is simply the Persian word for ‘Pathan’. As Tajuddin Khan, General Secretary of the ANP, put it, ‘Every Pakhtun is an Afghan, though not every Afghan is a Pakhtun.’ Throughout modern Afghan history, until the overthrow of the Communists in 1992, the central state and army were almost always dominated by Pathans – and the shock of the four years from 1992 – 6
when non-Pathans dominated Kabul was indeed one factor in generating mass support for the Taleban among Pathans.
And yet the Pathan claim to Afghanistan was always shot through with ambiguities, which have helped cripple Pathan nationalism as a state-building force. The Pathan ruling dynasty in fact spoke a dialect of Persian (Dari), as did the army and bureaucracy. Dari, not Pashto (or Pakhto), was the lingua franca of Afghanistan both formal y and informal y. As far as the great majority of rural Pathans (i.e. the great majority of Pathans in general) were concerned, loyalty to family, clan and tribe always took precedence over loyalty to the Afghan state.
The tribes could be ral ied for a time behind jihads against alien invaders of Afghanistan (or earlier, behind campaigns to conquer and plunder parts of India or Iran); but equal y, Pathan tribes repeatedly rose in revolt against Pathan rulers of Afghanistan in the name of Islam and tribal freedom, and those rulers in response carried out some of their most savage repressions in Pathan areas.
Above al , from the early nineteenth century on, the Afghan monarchy never came anywhere near making good its claim to rule over al or even most Pathans. This was due first and foremost to the way in which first the Sikh rulers of Punjab in the first half of the nineteenth century, and then their British successors, had conquered extensive Pathan territories (and especial y the most fertile and heavily populated of them al , the Peshawar val ey).
It is also because Afghanistan has always been much poorer either than British India or than Pakistan, and since the late 1970s has also been racked with incessant warfare. Or, as an ANP activist admitted to me after a few drinks, ‘Our old programme of union with Afghanistan is dead and everyone knows it, because no one in their senses wants to become part of Afghanistan, today or for al the future that we can see. Pakistan is bad, but Afghanistan is a nightmare, and has been for a generation.’
Until the nineteenth century, the Pathans had also never been united under one effective state, but had rather owed a vague and qualified al egiance to a variety of different dynasties, ruling from India, Kabul and sometimes Iran. Equal y, however, they had never been divided between different effective states with real frontiers, let alone ruled by non-Muslim infidels. That began to change with the rise of Sikh power in Punjab in succession to the col apsing Mughal empire, and the fal of Peshawar to the Sikhs in 1823.
In the late 1830s the British appeared on the scene. In an effort to create an Afghan client state to resist Russian expansion in Central Asia, the government of British India sent a military expedition to overthrow the then Afghan ruler and replace him with a British puppet.
This led to the memorable Afghan victory of 1842, when a British army attempting to retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad in midwinter was completely destroyed. The memory of Sir Alexander Burnes, a British official whose arrogance was held by both Afghans and British to have contributed to the disaster (and who paid for it with his life), is stil commemorated in a Pathan phrase used to someone who is getting above himself: ‘Who do you think you are, Lati [Lord] Barness?’
After a second costly war in Afghanistan in 1878 – 80, the British gave up any ambition to establish a permanent military presence in Afghanistan. Instead, they chose to build up a former Afghan enemy from the Durrani clan, Abdurrahman Khan, as Emir of Afghanistan and bulwark against Russia. A mixture of Abdurrahman’s ruthless ability and British guns and money then consolidated a rudimentary modern Afghan state within the borders Afghanistan occupies today – borders imposed by and agreed between the British and Russian empires.
Meanwhile, the British defeated the Sikhs and incorporated their territories into the Indian empire, and then gradual y pushed forward their military power into the Pathan territories lying between Afghanistan and British India. After a variety of experiments (some of them bloody failures), the British opted for a dual approach. The Peshawar val ey and certain other ‘settled’ areas were incorporated into districts of British India. In 1901 the Pathan districts of Punjab were grouped in a chief commissioner’s division; and in 1932 this was separated from the province of Punjab and turned into the new North West Frontier Province (NWFP). This province was placed under regular British Indian administration and law. Until 2010, when it was renamed Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the province retained its British geographical name, much to the irritation of Pathan nationalists.
Today, the NWFP covers 29,000 square miles and has a population of some 21 mil ion, some 13 per cent of Pakistan’s total population.
Apart from the 3 mil ion or so Hazara (who speak Hindko, a language more closely related to Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu), the great majority are Pathan and Sunni. Peshawar city has ancient minorities of Shia and Hindko speakers, though these have been greatly reduced in terms of proportion over the past generation by the influx of Sunni refugees from Afghanistan. Ethnic divisions are in any case somewhat blurred compared to religious and tribal ones. Many Hindko-speakers in Abbotabad are descendants of Pathans who adopted the language after they migrated to the area, while in other parts tribes original y believed to be Hindko-speaking adopted Pashto.
Other Pathans live in the territories which after Pakistani independence became the province of Balochistan, the northern parts of which are overwhelmingly Pathan and which overal may be as much as 40 per cent Pathan in population. It is here that much of the leadership of the Afghan Taleban is thought to have based itself since 2001. Balochistan is Pakistan’s poorest province, and the NWFP the second poorest, with much lower rates of literacy and health care than in Punjab. As recorded in Chapter 8 on Sindh, a Pathan community thought to number between 1 and 3 mil ion lives in Karachi, making that city the third largest Pathan city in the world.
Smal er Pathan communities are scattered across Pakistan, with members often employed in some branch of the transport industry or as security guards. In addition, a number of important tribes of north-western Punjab are Pathans, though they now mostly speak Punjabi.
The family of the famous cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan comes from one of these tribes, the Niazis, settled around the Punjabi town of Mianwali. He is an MP from Mianwali, but his Pathan origins and condemnation of the US presence in Afghanistan gives him some popularity in the NWFP as wel . As of 2010, however, this has not led to his party, the Tehriq-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) being able to make any serious progress against the long-established parties of the province – because, as many ordinary people who admire him but wil not vote for him have told me candidly, they do not think that he wil ever have any favours to distribute.
After partition in 1947 some Pathans moved to Pakistan from territories in India, such as Rohilkand, which their ancestors had conquered centuries before. These, however, though very proud of their Pathan origins, speak Urdu at home and are mostly to be found in Punjab or Karachi. They include the famous Pakistani Foreign Minister under Zia and Benazir Bhutto, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan.
In addition, there were the three Pathan princely states of Chitral, Dir and Swat, whose princes owed al egiance to the British but otherwise ruled their territories independently, in accordance with a mixture of local custom and personal whim. These three states were incorporated into the NWFP in the late 1960s as ‘provincial y administered tribal areas’. The judicial system in these territories has never been definitively settled, and the Pakistani system has never been ful y accepted as legitimate by the population. This has helped provide fertile soil in recent decades for Islamist groups demanding the ful implementation of the Shariah.
In the case of Swat, the personality of the last ruler Miangul Jahanzeb was so impressive that the memory of his rule continues to undermine Pakistani rule to this day, and to boost support for the Taleban. The past remoteness of these areas is also worth remarking.
The beautiful Swat val ey in the 1960s and 1970s was a famous hippy destination, and since then developed as a holiday spot for the Pakistani elites; and yet the first European had set foot in Swat fewer than eighty years before. In 1858 and again in the 1890s, Swat and the adjoining areas were the sites of major tribal jihads against the approach of the British Raj to their borders.
THE FEDERALLY ADMINISTERED TRIBAL
AREAS (FATA)
Swat and Chitral apart, the focus of armed Islamist revolt in British days, as since 9/11, has always been in the tribal areas of the mountains along the border with Afghanistan. The tribes living between British India and Afghanistan were formal y cut off from Afghanistan in the 1890s by the frontier drawn by Sir Mortimer Durand, and named after him. In the British conception, however, this was meant to be a good deal less than a regular international frontier with Afghanistan, and that is stil how the tribes themselves see it. In the words of a British report on Waziristan of 1901, ‘The Durand Line partitions the sphere of influence [my italics] of the two governments concerned, and is not intended to interfere in any way with the proprietary and grazing rights of the tribes on either side.’4
The tribes of the frontier were considered by the British to be too heavily armed, too independent-minded, and too inaccessible in their steep and entangled mountains to be placed under regular administration. Instead, the British introduced a system of indirect rule, which was inherited by Pakistan and remains official y in force today in the seven Federal y Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – though in practice it has largely col apsed in the face of the Taleban insurgency.
Limited administrative and judicial authority is stil exercised by the local Political Agent and his subordinates. The PA is appointed by the government, and rules largely through local councils (jirgas) of tribal notables (maliks).
This system was intended not to govern, but to manage the tribes, and contain both their internal feuds and any potential rebel ion against the central government. The British usual y responded to tribal rebel ions and raids not with attempts at permanent conquest, but by a strategy cynical y described by British officers as ‘butcher and bolt’, or ‘burn and scuttle’; punitive expeditions would enter a given territory, burn down vil ages and the forts of maliks and religious figures held to be responsible for the attacks, kil any tribesmen who resisted, distribute subsidies to al ies, and then return again to their bases.
Some British officials denounced this in favour of an intensified ‘forward policy’ of extending direct British rule up to the Afghan border; but in general ‘the issue on which almost al administrators and soldiers agreed was that a permanent military presence inside tribal territory was not a feasible option.’5
In 1947 – 8, the new state of Pakistan, believing that the Muslim tribes would not revolt against a Muslim state, withdrew regular troops from the tribal areas. Security there was left to the local y recruited Frontier Corps, a system that remained general y in place until the launch of the campaign against the Afghan Taleban in Waziristan in 2004. The new Pakistani state felt that the tribes had demonstrated their loyalty by the enthusiasm with which many, and especial y the Mahsuds of Waziristan, had joined in the ‘jihad’ in Kashmir in the autumn of 1947.
The population of FATA is overwhelmingly Pathan with a few Hindko-speakers. Apart from the Turi tribe in the Kurram Agency, who are Shia, the whole population of FATA are Sunni Muslims. FATA covers 10,500 square miles, and has a population of some 3.5 mil ion.
Its development indices are far lower even than those of the NWFP, with only 30 per cent male literacy and 3 per cent female. These miserable figures have been widely blamed on FATA’s peculiar system of government (or non-government) – which is doubtless true; but they can also be attributed to the inaccessible nature of the territory and the intense conservatism and xenophobia of its people.
An ANP dissident, Juma Khan Sufi, summed up the problem for FATA and Pathans more widely in words which are harsh but which are also a necessary antidote to the endless self-pity, self-praise and paranoid conspiracy theories that I heard during my time on the Frontier:
Pukhtoons are happy with their archaic tribal culture. A large part of our society is content living in its tribal particularism, which people cherish as freedom ... The attitude of the ordinary Pukhtoon does not at al tal y with the modern world. Il iteracy and poverty are common. Most of us don’t send our children to school. Female education is stil disliked by a majority of Pukhtoons ... The empowerment of women is anathema. They have no rights in their society. During elections, vil age elders belonging to opposing parties try to reach a consensus on not al owing womenfolk to exercise their right to vote ...