Pakistan: A Hard Country (75 page)

The great tribal rising of 1897 was led in these parts by the Mul ah of Hada, whose religious authority extended to both sides of the line, and who was imprisoned by the Amir of Afghanistan just as he was pursued by the British. For a long time, trade on the roads was taxed not by the two states but by the clans themselves – just as, today, it is taxed by the local militias making up the Pakistani Taleban, and the occasional independent warlord like Mangal Bagh Afridi (who, however, also acts in the name of Islam).

Between the British arrival in the region in the 1840s and the creation of the Durand Line, in the words of the British official W. R. H.

Merk, ‘by the tacit consent of the governments concerned, those of [British] India and of Kabul, a modus vivendi was established by which either government dealt with the clans as if the other [government] did not exist.’24 A quaint formulation but, to judge by the experience of recent years, perhaps the only way the Afghan and Pakistani states of today wil ever find to coexist in this region.

I went to the Mohmand Agency to visit a local malik family of my acquaintance, whose father is a senior official in Islamabad but who maintain a house in their ancestral vil age near the town of Shapqadar.

This town itself is a monument to the British Raj, having grown up around the fort which the British built to bar the entrance from the Mohmand territories into the Peshawar val ey.

The vil ages around Shapqadar were founded by rebel ious Mohmands from the hil s, resettled by the British under the guns of the fort, and placed under the regular British Indian legal code, not the Frontier Crimes Regulations. So the area is one of the numerous anomalies of the Frontier – a ‘settled’ part of a tribal agency, but one whose inhabitants retain the legends of their old unsettled past. In 1897 the fort was attacked by the fol owers of the Mul ah of Hada, who left 300 of their number dead before its wal s – part of the campaign described by Winston Churchil in ‘The Malakand Field Force’, which he accompanied as an officer-cum-war correspondent.25

The prestige and wealth of the ‘Akhundzada’ family whom I visited near Shapqadar came original y from their descent from another local ‘Sufi’ religious figure, Akhund Zafar, who led yet another revolt under the banner of jihad against the infidel. ‘His shrine is only thirty minutes’

drive from here, but now it is Taleban territory and too dangerous for us to visit,’ I was told. Like many saints, he is also famous for having cast out demons, and people with psychological y disturbed relatives wil take them to his shrine to be exorcised, a fact mentioned deprecatingly by the family.

As with the Gailanis of Afghanistan, there is an old and familiar irony here: the semi-Westernized noble family whose local influence original y came from an anti-Western struggle, a new version of which is aimed at them and their class, and from ‘superstitious’ beliefs which they now disown, trying to maintain their power in the face of a new wave of ‘fanaticism’, with which their ancestor would probably have been whol y in sympathy.

Shapqadar is stil a barrier to getting out of or into the Mohmand Agency, but now the reasons are the roads and the traffic. Bypass roads are unknown in smal towns in Pakistan and we had made the mistake of travel ing on a market day. Traffic jam doesn’t begin to describe the results – more like a double reef knot. The crossroads in the centre of town was a maelstrom of dust and exhaust fumes, apparently sucking into it cars, buses, trucks, scooter rickshaws, horse-carts, donkey-carts, men pushing carts, men on horseback and one understandably depressed-looking camel, al mixed up with a simply incredible number of people on foot for such a smal town, as if the heavens had opened on a Sunday morning and rained humanity on Shapqadar. Out of the dust-shrouded mêlée the brightly painted lorries with their great carved wooden hoods loomed like war elephants in an ancient battle.

In the middle, two policemen in a state of frenzy were lashing the cars with their sticks as if they were recalcitrant animals, while a third leant exhausted against a column. ‘Sometimes you even have to feel sorry for the police in this country,’ the daughter of my host – an elegant, attractive lady from Islamabad – said with a sigh, adjusting her headscarf against any inquiring glances from the men practical y jammed against our windows.

Everyone is afraid of them but no one actual y listens to them.

They are not real y monsters, they just lash out from frustration at their miserable lives ... As to Shapqadar, you could come back here twenty years from now and nothing wil have changed except that the traffic wil have got even worse. After al , nothing has changed in the past twenty.

It took us almost an hour and a half to get through this insignificant place; a long study of the grim, drab concrete ugliness of most Pakistani urban life. So universal y grey and dust-coated were the buildings that I could not immediately tel a local landmark from the houses on either side – four blackened music and video shops torched by the Taleban a few months before as part of their campaign against vice.

This is a common step in the Taleban campaign to take over a given area, once they feel they have enough local support. Because the video shops often do show pornographic films in their back rooms, even those men who frequent them may be ashamed of the fact and feel obliged to denounce them in public; and, for the same reason, they are also very unpopular with local wives and mothers – who of course never set foot in them but deeply fear the effects on their menfolk.

Half an hour further on, the vil age to which we were travel ing lay snoozing in the baking heat of early September, looking very much on the outside as if it hadn’t changed in twenty years, or even twenty centuries. The khaki colour of its wal s was set off nicely by the rather beautiful y coloured viscous green scum on the stinking stream running through its middle. We swept through a gate – real y more a gap in a mud wal – and were in the family’s compound. A lengthy wait ensued, while the key of the main house was sought – for the rest of the family had not arrived yet – and I had leisure to look around, through the sweat which began to pour down my face as soon as I left the car’s air-conditioning.

The wide outer court had a smal mosque on one side, and on the other sides the hujra (male guest-house or gathering place), and a sort of open pavilion where the family’s workers sprawled on charpoys in the stupefying heat, some attended by their smal sons. The buildings were al whitewashed, or at least had been at some point in their history. In one corner of the court, the shafts of an old broken-down horse-drawn carriage drooped with a melancholy air.

The maliks had not long ago dominated the vil age economical y, but their holdings had been radical y reduced by land reform and repeated divisions between brothers, and now the compound of the elder was only one of several belonging to brothers and cousins on the old family property. The eldest son – whom I was visiting – now held only 180 kanals of land (43 acres), and his influence had presumably also suffered from his being absent most of the time at his job in Islamabad, though on the other hand this also enabled him to use his influence to get some local people jobs.

The main house, in the inner court, bore clear signs of the family being absent much of the time. Much of the furniture was under dust covers, and damp stains stretched down some of the wal s. Rich by the standards of the local peasantry, it was poor and simple by the standards of the urban elites – a reminder once again not to use the word ‘feudal’ as if it implied wal owing in luxury. Power cuts meant that the atmosphere inside was stifling, and that there was nothing cold to drink.

In fact, I was just about to sink hopelessly into slumber when I was jerked awake by the sight of a very familiar acquaintance from another life, or even as it seemed to my superheated brain another planet: a smal tapestry of that absolute staple of the Soviet middle-class household, that emblem of respectable Russian domesticity, Ivan Shishkin’s Morning in a Pine Forest (with mist and bear cubs) – at 100 degrees or so in the shade. This was one of those not infrequent moments in Pakistan when I wondered whether sanity is not a much-overrated attribute which it would be easier simply to abandon.

In the car on the way from Peshawar a certain Russian, or at least Chekhovian-Gogolesque, atmosphere had already begun to grow, as my hostess complained of the rise of the lower classes in the vil age: I loathe these new people. I know it’s wrong but I can’t help it.

They should be shown their place. My father got their sons jobs in the junior civil service, and now that they have made money from bribes they build themselves big brick houses and try to set themselves up as maliks, deciding on local disputes. My father has threatened to have some of them thrown out of those houses – after al , he owns the land they’re built on.

As wil become apparent, he would probably be very unwise to do any such thing.

The Chekhovian impression deepened with the appearance of the family’s steward or general factotum, Shehzad, a scrawny middle-aged individual with a long horse face, greying hair, crooked teeth, a pen clipped to the outside of the breast pocket of his shirt as a mark of status, and a manner which mixed the ingratiating and the overbearing – not, as is usual y the case, when dealing with people of different status, but in talking to a person of higher status; a smal , offbeat sign of Pathan egalitarianism.

No sooner were we out of the car than he began to harass my hostess unmerciful y about a new mobile phone that he said that she had promised him. ‘You gave me your word more than a year ago and stil I am stuck with this rubbish. This is not Muslim behaviour!’ This promised cel -phone hung around for the whole of my stay, emerging every time the conversation threatened to flag. ‘What can I do?’ my hostess asked with an only half-comical sigh, ‘He harasses me unmerciful y, but he has been with my father for ever. We can’t possibly get rid of him.’

Then Shehzad took me out to the hujra to meet the agricultural labourers and tenant farmers, at which point things ceased to be comical, and I was in no danger of fal ing asleep. Just as the impending Russian revolution formed the looming background to Chekhov’s gentry, so it turned out that my hosts – without ful y realizing it themselves – were sitting on the crust of a river of lava.

Shehzad himself, as he told me with complete candour, like the vast majority of the tenants and the vil age in general, is a strong sympathizer of both the Afghan and the Pakistani Taleban – something of which his master and mistress were whol y unaware, but which he revealed to me with no hesitation whatsoever. In fact, he went further than most sympathizers with the Taleban: It is not terrorism when you attack Pakistani government employees like at the Wah factory because they were making weapons so the army can kil their own people. The government is taking American money to do this, and they should be fought.

Ninety-nine per cent of people in this vil age support the Taleban, because the Taleban just want to fight the American occupiers of Afghanistan and bring Islamic Law, and everyone agrees with that.

As we sat there on broken chairs on the verandah of the hujra, more figures drifted up to support these views. The keeper of the hujra – not a very dutiful one, to judge by its appearance – came and sat with us.

Under his thick black beard he had a naive smile and a surprisingly boyish face, almost as if the beard had been stuck on that morning at a vil age fête. He told me that his brother was fighting with the Taleban, ‘maybe in Bajaur against the Pakistani army, maybe in Afghanistan against the Americans. Wherever they send him on jihad, he wil go.’

I asked why his brother had joined the Taleban.

He joined the Taleban because he believes in Islam, and because the Americans attacked Afghanistan without cause.

Afghanistan is an occupied country like Kashmir. He and the other Taleban do not want to fight the Pakistani army, but they have no choice because the army is attacking them on the orders of America. The Taleban would like to make an agreement with the government here so that they can go and fight in Afghanistan. But America doesn’t al ow the government to do that. It wants war in Pakistan so that Muslim wil kil Muslim.

I asked about Taleban pay.

Yes, it is true that the Taleban pay him Rs12,000 a month, and the police only get Rs6,000. That is a reason. For two years he could not find any steady work. Then the Taleban came and offered to take him. Our family are very happy that he went, because he is on jihad against America and everyone here supports that ... It is true that some of our relatives have jobs with the Pakistani state. For example, I have a cousin in the police. But I am not worried about him being kil ed by the Taleban. He is fighting for America, and it is better that he should be kil ed. No one here wants to join the police or army any more.

A tenant farmer, Tazmir Khan, a solid-looking middle-aged man with a sort of universal farmer’s look and huge hands planted on his thighs, joined the conversation. He farms 30 kanals (3.75 acres), 4 kanals of which he rents from the malik, to his unhappiness. ‘I work, work and then I have to pay here.’ Tazmir has been quoted in Chapter 3, on justice, explaining why the Taleban are better than the state courts and police. He added: