Pakistan: A Hard Country (74 page)

ethnicism,

anticolonial

nationalism,

Pakistani

territorialism,

religious

revivalism

and

anti-American

imperialism generated, in turn, fluid and fluctuating political al egiances within the Tribal Areas. Only the claim to autonomy persisted unchanged and uncompromised, and within that claim the functional role of religious leaders as social moderators and ideological guides was preserved. From outside, patrons recognized and supported that claim, reliant in their own ways on the possibilities that the autonomous Tribal Areas and its mul as afforded.18

These possibilities were quickly recognized by the US, Pakistani and Arab backers of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets after 1979. The tribal areas of Pakistan, and to some extent the Pathan areas in general, became the safe havens of the Afghan Mujahidin, just as they are the safe havens of the Taleban today. The distinction between the Pathans on different sides of the Afghan – Pakistan border – never very strong – was blurred as more than 3 mil ion (mainly Pathan) refugees from Afghanistan fled into Pakistan. In these areas the Mujahidin were housed, armed and trained by the Pakistanis, Saudis and Americans.

The training was both military and ideological, as thousands of young Afghans studied alongside Pakistanis and Arabs in Deobandi madrasahs in the Pathan areas of Pakistan, funded by Arab money and, in consequence, increasingly influenced by Wahabi thought and culture. The first leader of revolt in Waziristan, Nek Mohammed, was the product of such a madrasah, and had fought with the Mujahidin in the 1980s and the Taleban in the 1990s.

The importance of the Afghan jihad of the 1980s for subsequent history cannot be exaggerated. The Frontier was flooded with international arms, many of which, lovingly preserved, are stil in use by the Taleban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After decades in which the Pakistani state had tried to build up a Pakistani Pathan identity separate from Afghanistan, young Pakistani Pathans were now told that Afghanistan’s war was their war, and that it was their religious and ethnic duty to fight alongside their Afghan brothers.

Today, many Pakistani Taleban fighters did not original y intend to fight in Pakistan, but volunteered to fight with the Taleban in Afghanistan – with the ful support of their communities, and the tacit acquiescence of the Pakistani authorities. But, of course, they came home radicalized, and deeply bitter at the Pakistani government for, as they see it, stabbing the Taleban and their jihad in the back.

Because of the prestige they earned as ‘Mujahidin’, they are now used by the Pakistani Taleban as the first-line cadres when it comes to spreading propaganda and influence in their home areas of the Frontier. From the propaganda point of view, the dead are just as important as the living. In the years after 2001, the funerals of ‘martyrs’

(shahids) kil ed in Afghanistan became important and wel -attended events in FATA and the NWFP, and in some cases their tombs have become places of pilgrimage. This is a tradition which goes back through the war with India in Kashmir in 1947 – 8 and to revolts against the British, but which also received a tremendous boost from the Pakistanis who fought and died in the war against the Soviets, when of course their public funerals received ful state support and approval.

Final y, the local mul ahs of the region not only were radicalized by their exposure to Wahabi influences and Arab Wahabi volunteers such as Osama bin Laden and his comrades, but saw their social prestige – hitherto usual y very low – greatly increased by their association with the jihad in Afghanistan. Many younger ones actual y fought with the radical Mujahidin in Afghanistan, alongside the Arabs. This change coincided with wider social changes in FATA as traditional tribal structures of authority were undermined by the influx of new money both from the Afghan jihad and the drugs trade.

One aspect of the Pathan tradition on which the Taleban have built with great success is the role of religious figures in resolving or limiting disputes and, on occasions, uniting the tribes in jihad. The absence of any other authority over the tribes meant that ‘it was almost impossible for opposing factions to approach each other through any other means than mul a-led arbitration’.19

The British administrator W. R. H. Merk wrote: Mians and Mul ahs fulfil much the same secular purposes as the monks of Europe did in the middle ages; they act as trustees and custodians of property, as the protectors of women and children committed to their charge, and are the mediators of messengers in family or tribal strife. Their intimate cohesion and the ramifications of their class through the tribes makes them an admirable instrument for organizing a popular movement.20

The line you often hear from the Pathan upper classes, that traditional y mul ahs had little prestige in Pathan society, being little better than common vil age servants, paid in kind to perform prayers at marriages and funerals, is therefore only partial y correct.

Or rather, it is correct enough as far as the lowly vil age mul ah is concerned. As with your average Catholic parish priest in the Mediterranean in the past – semi-literate, venal and living in sin with his ‘housekeeper’ – the population needs their sacred services, but not their advice. They are in fact regarded rather like a service caste, one step above the potters and plumbers (or how plumbers would be regarded if there were any plumbing). This is especial y true because, as in the vil ages of traditional Catholic Europe, the population knows very wel not only al the mul ah’s personal failings, but also how much he is under the thumb of the local landlords. ‘You wife of a mul ah’ is a common Pathan insult. Or as another saying has it, ‘The mul ah should have his milk, be it from a bitch or a donkey.’

As with medieval Catholic Europe, however, this ironical attitude to the local priest in no way implies mockery of the sacred as such, or blocks admiration for figures who seem to have a direct relationship with the sacred. In the Pathan lands, as elsewhere, this is associated original y with a successful claim to be a Sayyid, or descendant of the Prophet. Such figures never become vil age mul ahs, or ‘imams’ of local mosques – this is far beneath them. Sayyids have always played an immensely important and prestigious role in local society.

According to Barth:

The status of saints makes them particularly suited to the role of mediator or arbitrator ... In making political use of their role as peacemakers, saints must take numerous variables into account and in fact be rather clever. In the words of one prominent saint, ‘I look like a simple man; I live simply – but oh!

The things I do!’ The settlements which a saint proposes must be justified by reference to some rule or ideal. They must also take cognizance of de facto situations, and the saint must be skil ed in inventing compromises and face-saving devices ...

But without some force to back them, such manipulations sooner or later fal to the ground. The necessary force derives from several sources, but if the saint himself disposes of some military power, however little, this greatly enlarges his field of manoeuvre.21

One last element must be mentioned in the historical genealogy of jihad on the Frontier. This is the role of non-Pathan Islamists from elsewhere, who move to the region partly to find safe havens, and partly to mobilize the warlike Pathans to join in wider international struggles and agendas. From the early nineteenth century, radical Islamists in India intermittently moved to the tribal areas, as the only unconquered areas of the Indian subcontinent, and home to famously warlike people who might be inspired to join in jihad, first against the Sikhs, then against the British. A century later, in the wake of the First World War, another Islamist, Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madni, wrote of his group’s anti-British strategy: Without violence, evicting the angrez from Hindustan was impossible. For this, a centre, weapons and mujahidin were necessary. Hence it was thought that arrangements for weapons and recruitment of soldiers should be conducted in the area of the ‘free tribes’.22

The veteran Frontier political agent and last British governor of the NWFP, Sir Olaf Caroe, wrote that such forces from outside, as wel as the Pathans’ own religious leaders, were unable to sustain jihad for long:

A leader appears, and unites tribal sentiment in a surge of enthusiasm that carries al before it. For a while internal jealousies are laid aside, and an enthusiastic loyalty is forthcoming. Individuals are found ready to face death for a cause, and no one counts the cost. The idea of sacrifice is in the air. The crest of the wave bursts over the barrier, and the victory seems won. Then the leader gives way to vainglory, the stimulus which gave unity fails, envy and malice show their heads. The effort, steady and sustained, which is needed to maintain the position won proves to be beyond the tribal reach.

The ground won is lost, and the leader forfeits confidence and is discarded.23

In this respect, however, the Taleban do seem to represent something new. Western writing likes to dwel on their internal divisions, but by the standards of any previous Pathan jihad – our own Mujahidin of the 1980s included – they have so far displayed formidable unity and stamina. One explanation for this would seem to be that while certain Pathan cultural and ideological traditions have continued little changed, Pathan society has in some respects changed quite radical y.

In particular, the power of the greatest traditional source of Pathan fragmentation – the tribes and their chieftains – has been greatly diminished as a result of thirty years of war in Afghanistan and its overspil in Pakistan. With the power of the maliks greatly reduced, the local mul ah is real y the only available semi-educated leader of local society – unless you count the drugs lords, of course. So, political y incorrect though it may be to say it, the Western and Pakistani official policy of trying to re-energize the tribes and tribal chieftains, and of creating tribal lashkars under traditional command, actual y represents a step backwards in historical terms, compared to Taleban organization.

These changes in Pathan society have also produced a new feature of the Taleban, which marks them out from the old jihads. They are an al iance not of a handful of prominent religious figures from Sayyid backgrounds and al ied chieftains, but of many ordinary local mul ahs and religious students from poor and simple backgrounds. Speaking of another ostensibly Islamist warlord on the borders of Peshawar, Mangal Bagh Afridi, again and again educated people in Peshawar would ask me rhetorical y, ‘Who on earth can respect a former bus conductor as a leader?’ Those readers who have not already guessed the answer can turn to the next paragraph for the solution – one which had never occurred to my educated Peshawari interlocutors.

The answer of course is another bus conductor. In other words, it is precisely the lowly origins of the Taleban and related figures which endear them to the Pathan masses. A strong though mainly unstated element of class feeling has therefore also entered into the struggle.

By contrast, al the non-Islamist parties in the Frontier – the ANP, the different branches of the PPP and Muslim League, and Imran Khan’s fol owers – are overwhelmingly dominated by khans and maliks, and the JUI is linked to this class in many ways. Because so many of the Pakistani elites – even in the Frontier – are so obviously Westernized, as wel as being deeply corrupt, a certain feeling exists in the population, as in Iran in the 1970s, that ‘it is the poor who are Muslims’.

THE MOHMAND AGENCY

At least in Peshawar a large majority of the ordinary people with whom I spoke on the street and in the bazaars denounced terrorism, and said that although they supported the rule of the Shariah in principle, they opposed Taleban attempts to impose it by force. It was very different in the part of FATA that I visited. On what seemed to me to be reasonable grounds of self-preservation, I did not go to those tribal agencies like Waziristan, where the Pakistani Taleban have been in effective control for several years.

A visit to a relatively peaceful part of the Mohmand Agency in September 2008 was quite alarming enough, in terms not of any visibly direct threat to me (though, on this one occasion, I did have a sense that such a threat would have appeared if I had stayed for a few days), but of the opinions of the people. Fol owing the Red Mosque battle in July 2007, the Taleban in the agency had come into the open and established a headquarters at Kandhura and a number of training camps in parts of the agency closer to Bajaur in the north and the Afghan border in the west. These areas had seen repeated clashes with the army and the Frontier Corps, in which sometimes one side and sometimes the other had got the upper hand, but the areas closer to the Peshawar val ey were stil supposedly under fairly firm government control.

That many Mohmands sympathize with the Taleban would, once again, not have come as a surprise to those British officials who were once responsible for keeping them in hand. The Durand Line cut the tribe in half, but failed as elsewhere to cut tribal ties of sympathy with the Mohmands of Afghanistan. Nor, as elsewhere, did it create anything like a regular international frontier. Throughout the years fol owing 2001, the mountainous parts of the Mohmand Agency have been an important route for Taleban infiltration into north-eastern Afghanistan.