Pakistan: A Hard Country (73 page)

Eventual y, he went to the Taleban, ‘and they sorted it out in a week’.

His erstwhile partner had to pay him Rs500,000. The Taleban asked for 10 per cent of that as a fee for their help, ‘but I thought it wise to give them 15 per cent,’ he said with a rather melancholy twinkle. This kind of thing can sometimes be accompanied by a rough humour which appeals to Pathan sensibilities. Faced with two cousins who had been quarrel ing for many years over some land, an independent Islamist warlord named Mangal Bagh locked them in the same room and told them that they would stay there til they came to an agreement – which they did.

My friend in ceramics said that while the Taleban tax the drugs trade passing through their territories (‘because they don’t care if Westerners take drugs’), they crack down very hard on local drug-dealing, thereby earning much credit in the local population and especial y from parents. So if the Taleban are bandits, they are often what Max Weber cal ed ‘rational bandits’ – and rational banditry in his view was the original basis of taxation and the state.

It is critical y important to remember that in the propaganda of the Pakistani Taleban, and in the view of the majority of Pathans and Punjabis with whom I have spoken, the Pakistani Taleban war is not intended as a war against Pakistan and was not initiated by Beitul ah Mahsud and his al ies but by the Pakistani government and army.

These Pakistanis portray this struggle as a defensive action to protect the legitimate Afghan jihad from a treacherous stab in the back by the Pakistani servants of America, who also ‘massacred innocent Muslims’ at the Red Mosque.

This is not to say that a majority of the people with whom I spoke in Peshawar, Abbotabad and the towns of the Peshawar val ey actively support the Pakistani Taleban – if that were so, then the situation in the region would be much worse than it is. The overwhelming level of sympathy for the Afghan Taleban does not result in similar levels of support for the Pakistani Taleban. Outside the tribal areas, a large majority of the people I met denounced both the harshness of the Taleban’s implementation of the Shariah, and their terrorism and attacks on the Pakistani army and police – even if, as stated, they often qualified this by saying that such attacks are real y the work of Indians or Americans, since ‘Muslims would not do this.’

Rather, the notion of a defensive jihad helps create a sense of moral equivalence between the Pakistani Taleban and the Pakistani army, in which people criticize both sides, and mass support for tough military action against the Pakistani Taleban is undermined to the point where fewer than 20 per cent of the people I surveyed in the NWFP in the summer of 2008 were prepared to support it, with the rest demanding peace talks.

From one point of view the idea that the Pakistani Taleban is acting from purely defensive motives is nonsense, since plots to assassinate Musharraf by militants based in Waziristan predated the army offensive in the region and were partly responsible for that offensive.

Moreover, the propaganda of the Pakistani Taleban also speaks of their goal of creating an Islamist revolution in Pakistan. However, a very large number of ordinary Pakistanis believe that the struggle of the Pakistani Taleban is ‘defensive’, and this has a powerful effect in wrecking their support for military action against them. Again and again, on the streets of Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Faisalabad and Multan, people told me that, in the words of one Lahori shopkeeper, ‘The Taleban are doing some bad things, but you have to remember that they are only doing them in self-defence, because the army took American money to attack them.’

The revolt of the Pakistani Taleban therefore stems in the first instance from the Western presence in Afghanistan and the struggle of the Afghan Taleban against that presence and the Afghan forces it supports. The movement, however, has much deeper and older roots.

These lie in ancient Pathan traditions of religiously justified resistance to outside rule; in the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and the Afghan resistance against that occupation; in the nature of the support given by Pakistan and parts of the Arab world to that resistance; and in social change on the Frontier, which has undermined the old British – Pakistani system for managing the tribes.

THE LINEAGE OF THE PAKISTANI TALEBAN

The marriage of tribal revolt and religious revival is not specific to the Pathans, but is one of the oldest traditions of the Muslim world, including the Maghrib, West Africa and the Arabian peninsula itself. As Ernest Gel ner remarks, echoing the great fifteenth-century Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun:

What would happen if bel icose tribesmen outside the wal s had designs on the city? Most often nothing at al , for these tribal wolves are general y at each other’s throats, and their endless mutual feuds, often fostered by the ruler, neutralize them. They lust after the city anyway, but their internal divisions prevent them from satisfying their desire ... But what would happen if some authoritative cleric, having with some show of plausibility denounced the impiety and immorality of the ruler, thereby also provided a banner, a focus, a measure of unitary leadership for the wolves? What if he went into the wilderness to ponder the corruption of the time, and there encountered, not only God, but also some armed tribesmen, who responded to his message?13

Ibn Khaldun wrote of this coming together of religious purification and plunder in the history of the Bedouin tribes of North Africa: It is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess.

Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances fal s ... When they acquire superiority and royal authority, they have complete power to plunder as they please. There no longer exists any political power to protect property, and civilization is ruined.14

Yet at the same time, in Khaldun’s analysis, when united under the banner of religious puritanism and regeneration, these plundering but courageous tribes are also the force that overthrows corrupt and decadent kingdoms and refounds them – for a while – on a stronger basis. The Wahabis in eighteenth-century Arabia, in al iance with the tribe of Saud, were a late but impressive manifestation of this tradition.

In Gel ner’s words:

The manner in which demanding, puritan unitarianism enters tribal life, and the manner in which tribes are induced on special occasions to accept overal leadership, are the same. The exceptional crisis in the tribal world provides the opening, the opportunity, for that ‘purer’ form of faith which normal y remains latent, respected but not observed.15

Tribal dissidence and religious radicalism have therefore been partners in the Muslim world for many centuries. On the one hand there is the anarchy of the tribes, ordered only by their own traditions: in the Arabic of the Maghrib the bled-es-siba, in the Pathan lands and Iran yaghestan: the land of unrest (or ‘the land of defiance’, as Afghanistan has sometimes been cal ed in both the Persian and Indian traditions): opposed to the bled-es-makhzen or hukumat, the land of government.

A rather gloomy Pathan proverb sums up the disadvantages of both ways of life: ‘Feuding ate up the mountains, and taxes ate up the plains.’

The great majority of the Pathan tribal revolts against the British were orchestrated by religious figures in the name of jihad: al of them, natural y, described by the British as ‘mad’. These included the Akhund of Swat in the 1860s, the Hadda Mul ah, the Manki Mul ah, the Fakir of Buner and the Powindah Mul ah in the 1890s, and in the 1930s the Fakir of Ipi, against whose rebel ion the British deployed two divisions (including my maternal uncle’s Gurkha battalion).

The Fakir of Ipi’s rebel ion took place in Waziristan, later the heartland of Taleban support after 9/11 and the US overthrow of the Taleban. Incidental y, al these revolts were influenced to a greater or lesser extent by news from other parts of the Muslim world (albeit often extremely twisted) about clashes between Muslims and the Christian imperial powers; so the notion that Pakistanis being influenced by developments in Palestine or Iraq marks a new departure is completely wrong.

Waziristan was also the site of major uprisings in the 1890s, and in 1919 when the Wazirs and Mahsuds rose in support of the Afghan invasion of India. It may be noted incidental y that just as at the time of writing the US and Pakistani forces have not yet kil ed or captured much of the top leadership of Al Qaeda or the Taleban, so, despite deploying some 40,000 troops in Waziristan, the British never caught the Fakir of Ipi, who died in his bed in 1960 – by that stage, interestingly enough, preaching Pathan nationalism and an independent Pashtunistan.

Almost forty years before the emergence of the Afghan Taleban, the great anthropologist of the Pathans, Fredrik Barth, wrote the fol owing about the orchestration of revolt in the name of Islam: A more temporary organization [than the regular relationship between a local saint and his fol owers] may be built around persons of less established sanctity, based on the Islamic dogma of the holy war and the blessings awaiting the soldier (ghazi) who figures in one. This line of appeal requires considerable demagogic powers and is mainly adopted by mul ahs. Essential y, it depends for its success on the presence of a fundamental conflict in the area, and the ability to play on ideals of manliness and fearlessness so as to whip up confidence among the warriors of the community.16

The Taleban, however, are a new variation of this old pattern. They are an al iance of newly risen younger mul ahs, rather than single ‘authoritative clerics’ possessing individual baraka. Their chief leaders, like Beitul ah Mahsud and Fazlul ah, emerged to prominence when they were in their late twenties or early thirties. This is not quite such a shift as the Pakistani elites make out. The Pathan tradition in general is far more egalitarian in spirit than those of the other parts of Pakistan, and, within that tradition, those of some of the tribes of the Frontier have always been famous for the unwil ingness of the tribesmen to bow to hereditary chieftains. ‘Traditional y, the dominant characteristic of the Mahsud was his independence – in a sense, every man was his own malik.’17 Leadership has general y been through merit, and especial y courage and skil in fighting. Though of course the leaders of the Pakistani Taleban are very pious Muslims, unlike previous leaders of revolt against the British such as the Mul ah of Hadda they are not regarded as saints by their fol owers, but only as especial y able and tough military commanders.

The Taleban are much more effective than previous religiously led revolts, above al because they have far more organization, discipline and therefore stamina. The revolts against the British arose suddenly and spread rapidly, but were also mostly rather brief. A few bloody defeats and the tribesmen melted back to their vil ages. The Taleban by contrast have gone on absorbing very heavy casualties for many years. As I was told when travel ing with the Afghan Mujahidin in the 1980s, ‘Pashtuns are brave, but not deliberately suicidal.’ That has obviously changed, as far as some of the Taleban fighters are concerned.

Relative Taleban discipline and endurance probably owe a great deal to the unprecedented network of local cadres provided by young local mul ahs. This in turn has been part of a social upheaval in FATA whereby, through the Taleban, members of this previously powerless and even despised class have seized local power from the landowning maliks.

I am reminded of something said by Imam Shamil, the great nineteenth-century Islamist resistance leader in the north Caucasus, after he final y had to surrender to Russia – that the Russians should real y be grateful to him for making their rule possible; because by rigorous implementation of the Shariah he had accustomed the Chechen tribes to government, where previously none had existed.

Shamil’s Islamic state in Chechnya and Daghestan lasted for almost twenty-five years, in a much smal er territory than the Pathan tribal areas, and against far larger numbers of Russian troops than the British ever had to deploy against their rebels – who (like Shamil’s Chechens) were fighting largely to prevent any kind of state being imposed on them.

Unlike many previous leaders, the Taleban leaders also do not derive their prestige from deep Islamic learning, but only from rigorous practice. Rather than simply leading a movement of tribal chieftains, they have replaced those chieftains with their own rule. Inspired in part by the Wahabis, their rule has been far more consistently dogmatic in their insistence on their version of the Shariah than any previous movement among the Pathans.

Previously, while religious figures led tribal revolts in the name of Islam, the struggle was also very much in defence of the tribal customs summed up in the pashtunwali – many of them pre-Islamic. They were certainly not encouraged to try to change those customs in accordance with strict Koranic Islam. The few who tried general y came to a bad end, as with Syed Ahmed Barelvi, abandoned by his fol owers after he interfered with their marriage customs – though in his case, the fact of being a non-Pathan from India doubtless also played a part. In fact, there is a Pathan saying that ‘Pathans are always ready to die for Islam, but find it very difficult to live by Islam.’

Al the same, the Taleban are close enough to Khaldun’s and Gel ner’s picture to make clear that what we are facing among the Pathans is not simply a product of the last thirty or for that matter the past 150 years of Pathan history, but has roots which go back to the very origins of Islam, and have never failed yet to put out new shoots in each new era. In the Frontier territories, this has run together throughout modern history with a determination to maintain tribal independence from outside control. As Sana Haroon writes: This hinterland of successive, contradictory jihads in support of Pakhtun