Pakistan: A Hard Country (77 page)
Next door is the Islamia Col ege, from which the university original y grew, a magnificent complex of British buildings in neo-Mughal style, set in even more beautiful gardens under the shade of giant chenars (oriental plane trees). The whole represents a successful attempt by the British to blend Oxford or Cambridge with the lost glories of Peshawar before the Sikh conquest, glories stil lamented by Peshawaris. A successful attempt architectural y, that is – not, alas, intel ectual y. I visited the university and Islamia Col ege twice, in May 2007 and August 2008, and if things did not seem to have got much worse between those two dates as far as student and faculty opinion was concerned, that was only because they were so bad already.
In May of 2007, thanks to the kind invitation of Professor Taqi Bangash, I spoke with thirty-one history students at the university. Just over half were girls. Eight of them wore the niqab, which half veils the face up to the nose, a bit like a bandit’s mask, three were in ful burqas, and four wore headscarves but with faces uncovered. Only one went whol y unveiled, in sharp contrast to old photographs from the 1960s and 1970s I saw in the department, where many of the girls were unveiled.
Despite repeated invitations from me, the women on this occasion played very little part in the conversation. One exquisitely beautiful girl with perfectly chisel ed features in a bright pink shelwar kameez and headscarf sat throughout in perfect stil ness and silence, so like a rose in every way that I was sorely tempted to giggle. The only voluble and intel igent exception was a visiting student from Iran – another smal sign that as far as women’s rights and participation are concerned, the West has not understood the nature of the balance between Iran and the ‘pro-Western’ states of the region.
There were considerable differences among the students concerning the level of their sympathy for the Afghan Taleban and their Pakistani al ies; but on two things there was unanimity. I asked them the fol owing: ‘If there are free and fair elections and a democratic government is elected; and if this government agrees with Washington to launch a military operation against the Taleban in FATA, would you support or oppose this?’ The response was, by a show of hands: oppose, twentynine; support, nil. By the same token, al of them supported peace deals between the Pakistani government and the militants; and al said that if the US sent troops into FATA, the Pakistani army should fight them. This group of students included Jamaat and JUI supporters, but also PPP and ANP activists.
There was unanimity too in the loud burst of applause which greeted the words of one of the Islamist students, Gul Ahmed Gul, a handsome young man with a neatly clipped beard, more like an old school left-wing student activist: When you go back to Washington, please tel the Americans to leave Afghanistan and let us sort out our own problems, because, as long as they are there, people wil fight against them. The Americans must pay more attention to what local people want. We do not want more Americans to die, but we also do not agree to Americans coming to this part of the world to kil our fel ow Muslims, whatever American reasons for this may be.
With the obvious exception of the Iranian girl, al of the students agreed that ‘We and the Afghans are one people.’
Perhaps because the students spent most of the time asking me questions rather than giving their own views, the conversation on that occasion proceeded along more or less rational lines. In August 2008 I revisited the university and the Islamia Col ege to meet with both students and staff, and I’m afraid that my notebook contains a suggestion of mine for their joint motto: ‘Unity in Idiocy’. This was despite the fact that the Islamia Col ege, as its name suggests, is a hotbed of Jamaat and JUI support, while the Area Studies Centre of the university, where I spoke in the morning, is a leading intel ectual centre of the ANP.
The previous day, an acquaintance of mine, the chief political officer at the US Consulate in Peshawar, had been ambushed by Taleban gunmen on the same street as my guest-house in University Town, and saved by her armoured limousine. I can’t say that my patience during the discussions at the Centre was improved by hearing in the opening remarks by the Centre’s head, Professor Azmat Hayat Khan, that, ‘Of course, the Americans carried out that attack themselves so as to give themselves an excuse to invade Pakistan.’ To approving murmurs from his col eagues, he added:
Four thousand American mercenaries are operating in FATA.
They are the ones carrying out the ruthless kil ings there, not the Taleban. We have proof of this. Four days ago, eighteen bodies of Americans were brought to the morgue in Peshawar.
We know that they are not Taleban or Muslim because they are not circumcised. Russians, Chinese, Iranians are al supporting the Taleban against us, for their own reasons. As for Britain and the US, Professor Lawrence Freedman predicted that it is their policy to cause anarchy in Pakistan so as to achieve their goals.2
It was easy to check on this, since Sir Lawrence happens to be the vice-principal of my col ege in London. There was of course no truth in it – but then, there was no truth in the morgue story either. As to the American mercenaries, if Peshawari opinion is to be believed, FATA must be getting pretty crowded, since people there think that thousands of Indian Sikhs and Israeli agents are also there pretending to be Taleban, alongside the Russians, Chinese and Iranians. I also heard stories to the effect that the entire battle between the Pakistani military and the Taleban was faked and that all terrorist attacks were in fact being carried out by the ISI – and the people who told me this included not just uneducated people on the street but a lawyer and member of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission!
In fact, to my considerable chagrin as a British subject, the only major country not accused in my presence of sending its troops to pretend to be Taleban was Britain. I’d hoped that this was the result of Pathan hospitality and unwil ingness to offend a guest, but I’m sorry to say that when I asked a Pathan friend about this he replied that ‘I’m afraid that it’s real y that people here now see America and Britain as the same thing.’
That afternoon, I got another dose of conspiracy theory from someone at the other end of the political spectrum, Syed Zahir Shah, Professor of Botany at the Islamia Col ege, a charming old man with a silken white beard, who his students told me is a member of the Jamaat party. To the same murmur of approval from col eagues as at the Area Studies Centre, he told me: The Pakistani Taleban were created by the big powers, the US, Russia, Israel and India, so as to destroy Pakistan. It is not Pakistanis who are carrying out these terrorist attacks. It was the same with Benazir Bhutto. No Pakistani or Muslim kil ed her. She was kil ed because she was a strong political leader, and India, Israel and other foreign forces don’t want Pakistan to be stable.
Like many other people in Peshawar he produced for me ‘proof’ of a secret plan by the Bush administration to partition Pakistan. This turned out to be a map published by Ralph Peters, a retired US lt-colonel who writes a column for the New York Post, a tabloid, who has held no official position in any US administration. When I pointed out to the professor that the Pakistani Taleban had in fact taken public responsibility for the terrorist attack on the Pakistani munitions factory at Wah the previous week, which had kil ed almost 100 ordinary Pakistani workers, he changed tack and declared: ‘Yes, but they have their reasons. Their women and children have been kil ed by Pakistani bombs dropped on the orders of America.’
If these were the views and the intel ectual standards of professors from both the secular and the Islamist parties, then it is hardly surprising that much of the general public also had much sympathy for the Taleban and none at al for the US, and that the entire public discourse in the NWFP is so sodden with ludicrous conspiracy theories as often to be barely minimal y rational.
In part these conspiracy theories are the work of the army itself, which (so I have been told by senior officers in private) has been spreading the line about India’s role in an effort to discredit the Pakistani Taleban. This, however, seems to have backfired badly, in that so many people can now blame Taleban terrorism on ‘foreign hands’, and thereby continue to believe in the ‘good’ Taleban which does not do such things. Echoing similar views from a great many ordinary people, the correspondent for the Nation newspaper in Faisalabad, Ahmed Jamal Nizami, told me in January 2009: Al the suicide bombings in Pakistan are the result of operations in which Pakistani or US forces kil women and children; and some of them like the Marriott were carried out by RAW [the Indian government’s Research and Analysis Wing –
i.e.
the Indian intel igence service]. Pakistani agencies have proof that the truck came from the Indian embassy.3
This sort of attitude was very widespread among Pakistani journalists with whom I talked in 2008 – 9, and was obviously reflected or at least hinted at in their reports and analyses – with disastrous results for the wil ingness of their audiences to support military action against the Taleban. This explains why the army’s action after April 2009 in getting a grip on the Pakistani media was so important to the struggle against the Pakistani Taleban.
THE ANP AND THE TALEBAN
Responding to the views of its own fol owers, and of the Pathan and indeed Pakistani electorate in general, the ANP therefore stood in the elections of February 2008 on a platform of negotiating peace with the Taleban. This corresponded to the ANP’s Pathan nationalism, and horror at the thought of conducting what would amount to a Pathan civil war within Pakistan. The ANP was also influenced by its traditional hostility to both the United States and the Pakistani army, and its unwil ingness to launch such a war in al iance with these forces.
These attitudes were so deeply rooted that they persisted for more than a year after ANP politicians in Swat and elsewhere began to be kil ed by the Taleban in large numbers. From their election to the NWFP government in February 2008 to the counter-offensive in Swat in May 2009 the ANP’s policy towards the Taleban therefore presented a picture of utter confusion, of cal ing for tougher military action while bitterly condemning every action that caused civilian casualties, and of attacking the military for covert links to the Taleban while continuing to pursue talks with the Taleban themselves. In the end, for political and cultural reasons that I wil describe, this approach turned out much better than might have been expected; but in the summer of 2008 it contributed greatly to the mood of paralysis and pessimism gripping Peshawar.
This was very apparent from a debate on the conflict in Swat on 19
August 2008 in the Provincial Assembly in Peshawar that I attended.
The building itself is splendid but also somewhat confusing, as so often in the former colonial territories of the Muslim world: gleaming white neo-classical columns support an ornate neo-Mughal roof covered with Urdu cal igraphy. Somewhat to my alarm, my British passport and white face led to my car being waved through the security checkpoint with no search for explosives or weapons.
Speaker after speaker, from government and opposition alike, rose to lament the situation in Swat. The only things that almost al agreed on were that the Americans should withdraw from Afghanistan; that within Pakistan, the central government and above al the army were to blame, either for causing col ateral damage, or for secretly helping the Taleban, or both; and that the Pakistani justice system needed radical reform, including through the extension of the Shariah.
Abdul Akbar Khan, the leader of the PPP in the assembly, took the strongest anti-military line of al – though he was the man who in theory should have been representing the central government, which had declared its desire for the closest cooperation with the military. In fact, though, as I sensed from Abdul Akbar, and as I found openly in talking to other PPP deputies, as wel as PPP activists on the street, their loathing of Zardari was such that they no longer real y saw themselves as linked to the central government, and they certainly tried to play this link down in private.
Abdul Akbar even hinted that it was the army itself, and not the Taleban, who were destroying girls’ schools in Swat (despite the fact that the Taleban had publicly taken responsibility, and in a number of cases had expel ed the pupils and seized the schools as headquarters instead of destroying them). This was a charge which an ANP leader had made explicitly to me in private the previous week. ‘Why are the schools being destroyed not during the day, but in the night when there is a curfew and only the military can move freely?’ he had asked. ‘Isn’t the answer obvious?’
Perhaps the most striking example of the extremely complex ANP
attitude to the Taleban and the army came in an interview I had in January 2009 with Bushra Gohar, an ANP member of the national parliament in Islamabad and a distinguished Pakistani feminist. Here, if anywhere, I expected to find a real y tough approach to dealing with the Taleban, given their own savage hatred of everything that she represented.
Ms Gohar is indeed a striking individual, with an intel igent, humorous face, short iron-grey hair and a general style that reminded me somewhat of my younger sister, a barrister in London. Burbles and hoots from a smal relative in the background were a cheerful descant to our rather grim discussion. For the first half hour we spoke about women’s issues, and she displayed a most impressive mixture of intel igence, commitment and pragmatism.