Authors: Adrian Levy
The Meadow (7 page)
These two employees seemed credible and likeable, and they gave John numbers for local contacts: guides, hotels and taxi drivers, many of whom they were related to and said they trusted completely. Eventually, even the cautious John was persuaded, and he arranged a six-day excursion through his hotel. Taking account of flight connections, that would give him four days’ trekking, which was just about enough. ‘In life, you go to many places and you have to make many judgements about your own safety,’ he said. ‘And my judgement at that moment in time was that Kashmir would be OK.’
As their plane approached Srinagar airport on 26 June, Jane Schelly and Don Hutchings had heart-stopping glimpses of the Himalayas bursting through the clouds, and a lattice of orchards, conifers and villages sprinkled across the dun-coloured Kashmir Valley. After bumping down on the runway, the plane rumbled past rows of Indian Air Force fighter jets, military transporters and camouflaged helicopters. Here were gun emplacements and corrugated-iron hangars, all of them draped in olive-green netting. Sentries in foxholes, machine-gunners in pillboxes, zoomed in on the plane. Jane and Don
immediately forgot the reassuring news they had just read in the paper: US Ambassador Frank Wisner, accompanied by his daughter, had returned from a fly-fishing trip to Pahalgam. This place looked like a war zone.
But as they stepped down onto the tarmac, the cool air was a joy after New Delhi. Up ahead, beyond the exit barrier, what looked like a thousand sombre male faces, many of them bearded, most of them smoking, eyed them. Aquiline noses, cat-green eyes, skin so fair that many seemed more Aryan than Don or Jane – some Kashmiris could have passed as Europeans. The noise was overwhelming: a helicopter whumping somewhere above them, tour guides shouting to get their attention.
As Jane and Don stood by the ancient, flaking luggage carousel, a police official sought them out and took their names, passport details and notes on their itinerary. ‘Foreigner registration,’ he said by way of explanation, tapping a laminated label on his clipboard. ‘What a madhouse,’ Jane recalled. ‘It was an absolute nightmare … I had to open and taste my sealed pack of Western Trail mix to show it wasn’t poison or a bomb. The absolute bizarreness of the whole process almost made it entertaining.’
Outside, the full scale of the Indian military operation in Kashmir hit them: a chaotic jumble of sandbags, concrete barriers and barbed wire, the roads jammed with armoured vehicles of all descriptions: trucks, pickups, tanks, around which scores of heavily armed soldiers milled. It took an hour to get through the checkpoints encircling the airport. Barrelling into town, their taxi passed yet more bunkers and pickets, out of which dark-skinned Indian soldiers peered, their guns aimed at Kashmiri men and women who walked solemnly along the broken pavements, heads cast downwards.
Gigantic piles of decomposing trash were everywhere, with sleeping pi-dogs lying on top of them. Not a windowpane seemed intact. Shops were barricaded or boarded up. Long avenues lined by trees were choked by every kind of machine of war imaginable. At one point the driver slammed on his brakes to avoid an oncoming army convoy, a vast column of khaki lorries with soldiers riding atop them,
their faces obscured by black bandanas, who beat canes on the side of the taxi, drumming everyone out of their way. ‘Welcome to Kashmir,’ he muttered under his breath. Jane and Don said nothing. ‘We hadn’t expected things to be this bad, no way,’ Jane said.
Then she and Don caught a glimpse of the mountains ringing the city, and the hairs rose on her arms.
For most of his working life, Master Allah Baksh Sabir Alvi had been a teacher of religious studies at a government school in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, lecturing indifferent boys in what had once been the influential capital of a Rajputana princely state, a glittering city lorded over by a Muslim
nawab
and his entourage. Nowadays Bahawalpur was a chaotic sprawl of back-street mosques, low-lying mud-brick compounds and potholed roads, on the banks of the Sutlej River. Deep in the heart of the scorched southern Punjab, it was encircled by fields of cotton, sugarcane and corn, and these days it was ruled by a small circle of feudal landowners or
zamindars
, industrialists and entrepreneurs, who squeezed all they could out of the impoverished majority.
The only thing everyone had was faith. Here and there, down traffic-choked streets and back alleys, was a multitude of mosques and
madrassas
(religious schools). When Master Alvi was growing up there had been a few dozen
madrassas
in the city, and perhaps only two hundred throughout Pakistan. By the time he retired there were twenty thousand across the country, some consisting only of breeze-block classrooms, others gathered around the marble apron of grand mosques. Like most people in Bahawalpur, whether by profession or dint of the especially charged atmosphere of religiosity, Master Alvi spent his days praying, reading and discussing the Koran.
Most Bahawalpuris were conservative Sunni Muslims, their faith shaped by Deobandism, an austere revivalist sect that had emanated more than a hundred years earlier from Deoband, a town over the
border in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Many living in Bahawalpur today originated there, but were forced to flee India at Partition in 1947. Millions of Muslims had abandoned their ancestral homes in the central plains of India and its former princely states as stories spread that the new India would welcome only Hindus. Families were torn apart, villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands massacred, former friends and neighbours killing each other, sending thousands of trains speeding east and west, carrying a tide of people to an uncertain future. In the years that followed, while India flourished, life in the new nation of Pakistan became ever harder. Supporters there of Deoband became increasingly sectarian, their tone and demeanour echoing that of the oasis-dwelling Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, who championed a return to the medieval life described in the Koran.
Master Alvi and his circle were as literal-minded as you could get. Known among more liberal neighbours as the ‘no-doubters’, they were certain about everything, especially matters ecumenical. Alvi and his followers believed that every form and facet of Islam that was not of the Deobandi-infused Sunni school was contemptible. These opinions were passed down through the family like a gold watch. But while the Alvis sought security and comfort in an age that no longer existed, the world outside Bahawalpur was changing fast. And in the summer of 1995, Master Alvi confided in his friends that for the first time since Partition, nothing seemed certain.
He had read how Islam was under attack in many places around the world. In former Yugoslavia, Serbs were massacring Bosnian Muslims in a genocidal onslaught. In the Caucasus, Russia had launched a war against Chechen Muslims, leaving many thousands dead. Most distressing, as it was nearer and involved a people he regarded as his closest brothers and sisters, was the Muslim uprising over the border in Indian Kashmir, which was being put down by hundreds of thousands of Indian security forces, turning the Kashmir Valley, once regarded as a jewel, into one of the most heavily militarised regions in the world.
Master Alvi had more personal worries concerning Kashmir, too. The ‘rock’ of Kausar Colony, as he was known to his neighbours in the
comparatively well-to-do community where he lived, by whom he was regarded as a matchmaker, troubleshooter, arbitrator, religious pundit and general go-between, a man who was trusted, loathed and envied in equal measure (like all big religious fish in small barrels), Alvi had a serious problem that needed fixing. One of his sons, his favourite, Masood Azhar, the third boy of eleven children, had gone missing in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Although Master Alvi still thought of him as his ‘golden child’, Masood was actually twenty-seven, short-sighted and a squat five foot two inches tall. Sporting an oversized pair of aviator shades and a luxuriant beard, Masood had, much to his father’s delight, embraced the family business of ‘no doubting’ with great enthusiasm, becoming the scourge of all
kufrs
, or unbelievers, including Muslims who did not adhere to the Deobandi way, such as Shias, whom he once described in a pamphlet as ‘cockroaches’. Masood was not handsome or charming – his siblings teased him for being a ‘little fatty’, according to a relative. One brother joked, in an aside that was passed around Kausar Colony, that with his head swathed in an Arab
keffiyeh
and his body robed in a white cotton shawl over traditional white
kurta
pyjamas, Masood looked like a ‘fundamentalist pupae’. But when he opened his mouth, something happened. Elaborate bursts of English, Urdu, Persian and Arabic flew out, arpeggios of assertions that, despite his somewhat high-pitched delivery, stopped people in their tracks.
Masood had the gift of the gab, something that had first been noticed at the age of four, when he recited lengthy tracts of the Koran at the local
maktab
(Islamic elementary school). After winning prizes for public speaking, he had caught the eye of a relative who taught at Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town, a wealthy mosque and
madrassa
a short bus ride from downtown Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, five hundred miles south of Bahawalpur, on the Arabian Sea. One of the largest religious seminaries in Pakistan, Binori Town was widely recognised as among the world’s most influential centres of Deobandi ideology.
To Deobandis, Binori Town, with its vast, sprawling campus, dusky pink towers, delicate, white-topped minarets and grand gateway, was
Paris
. Since its foundation in the 1950s by the religious scholar Yusuf Binori, members of every faction of the biggest Sunni religious-political party in Pakistan, the Assembly of Islamic Clergy, had vied to study there. Having one’s son among its 3,500 students was considered a blessing that would markedly raise one’s standing in the community.
In 1981, a year after twelve-year-old Masood had been enrolled and Master Alvi had received the necessary plaudits, the
madrassa
began taking its students down a new path, one that would transform the course of Masood’s life. Exciting dispatches had begun arriving from Afghanistan, sent by three recent Binori Town graduates who, styling themselves ‘The Companions of the Afghan People’, had headed up to Peshawar, in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province, a gateway to neighbouring Afghanistan, where they had joined the
mujahideen
fighting against the Soviet Red Army that had occupied Kabul eighteen months previously. This anti-Soviet campaign was being secretly funded by the US government through the CIA, and run on the ground by its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency was a secretive organisation, with enormous resources, whose skilled agents, never publicly identified, were universally feared for spying on, abducting, torturing and executing Pakistanis, as well as ruthlessly meddling in the affairs of the country’s neighbours. Now in Afghanistan, knee-deep in America’s battle to temper Moscow’s regional ambitions, the ISI made sure that it got a grip on the recruitment and training of those Pakistanis who went there to fight, as well as on the Afghani tribes being trained to mount resistance.
The three graduates from Binori Town had undergone basic training, supervised by military instructors borrowed from the Pakistan armed forces and the ISI, and paid for by the CIA, before being sent through the Khyber Pass to do battle with the Red Army. Stories of the Companions’ bravery in Khost and Kandahar were read aloud at
Binori Town after Friday prayers, entrancing many students, including Masood Azhar.
By the time Masood was fifteen, in 1983, one of the three Binori Town graduates had been martyred in Afghanistan, another had vanished, presumed dead, while the third had become a famed warrior with the
nom de guerre
‘Saifullah’, or Sword of Islam. Reports of his continuing exploits spurred on a second generation of graduates from his old alma mater, who streamed up from Karachi to the Afghan border by bus, lorry and cart. Some of them joined Harkat ul-Mujahideen – the Order of Holy Warriors – a movement of Afghanistan-bound
mujahids
that had been established by Binori Town scholar Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil.
With his belly-quivering rhetoric, Maulana Khalil rang the bell for
jihad
so loudly that thousands volunteered for battle from the Karachi mosque complex; with Master Alvi’s help, many more came from
madrassas
across the southern Punjab. Soon Maulana Khalil and Master Alvi’s efforts had drawn the attention of the ISI, which noted that the Holy Warriors were making a significant contribution to their Afghan operation. According to the indiscreet Alvi himself, the ISI began to finance the Order. A former student claimed that cash stuffed inside jute rice sacks was delivered to the main canteen at Binori Town mosque. Convalescent centres for wounded fighters were opened nearby. Some of the ISI money was used to extend the large network of affiliated
madrassas
all over Pakistan, especially in the lawless tribal areas of the north-west, where Pashtun tribesmen liked to say they had been ‘born to fight’. Money aside, the system was soon self-sustaining. Those who survived Afghanistan, coming back to Karachi as
ghazis
, or returning war heroes, gave inspiring speeches to students during lessons and at Friday prayers, priming the next generation for a holy
jihad
, while Binori Town was guaranteed a steady stream of willing new pupils from across Pakistan, most of whom arrived as six-year-olds who were then steeped in a deeply conservative curriculum tinged by the ethos of the Dark Ages.
Among the thousands of students, Masood Azhar stood out. He quickly gained a reputation for his oratory prowess and religious fervour. Maulana Khalil, who visited Binori Town regularly, came to hear of him. ‘He thought I had talents that needed growing,’ Masood later reflected solemnly, when, at the tender age of twenty-five, he put pen to paper and wrote down his life story for other students to read. ‘Had this not been my path since I was a child?’