Authors: John Freeman
In this Bermuda Triangle of governance, the one constant is tradition. Kamal sits on
jirgas
that mediate disputes, often involving murder, through the payment of blood money. This may offend Western legal sensibilities but it chimes with the legal core of
Pashtunwali
, which favours the satisfaction of the victim over the punishment of the aggressor. It’s not cheap. The blood price is about $1,000 per death these days, and Kamal has seen poor families driven to the wall, hocking their houses or pawning their gold to end a feud. But there are loopholes: a guilty man may delay
jirga
justice until his enemies have knocked off an equal number of his own relatives, thereby evening up the score. This is what Kamal calls a ‘trick of the trade’.
The preferred method of dispute resolution, however, is the donation of a daughter in marriage. This is good for the peace – such exchanges produce the most durable settlements, Kamal said – but bad for the women, who may be taken as second or third wives and treated little better than servants. Their opinion hardly matters, though. Once the deal has been struck, elders from both sides are enjoined to sit together, slaughter a sheep and swear their peace on the Quran. It’s a system that puts Kamal in league with some rough characters.
We drove out to a shabby little village called Tajori to visit the home of Saadullah Khan, a famous local brigand. About ten men were waiting in a hot, sparsely furnished room (the electricity was off); rifles were propped against the wall. Several of our hosts, all brothers and cousins, were cross-eyed. ‘A very dashing group,’ Kamal whispered in my ear. ‘They must have killed eighteen or nineteen people; five of their own have died. Very hot-headed, always in trouble.’
A gummy old man, folded into a chair in the corner, piped up. This was Saadullah Khan. Seventy-five years old with blazing eyes, he asked Kamal to arrange jobs for his sons as chowkidars – guards – at the local primary school. Kamal nodded. The police had been trying to arrest Saadullah for years, he said; on one occasion Saadullah’s sons seized the cops’ car only to return it days later, peppered with bullet holes.
That night, over supper in his gloomy dining room, I asked Kamal about the contradictions in his life. Was it not strange for an elected official to spend his time shielding outlaws, pardoning murder and instigating small wars? People often asked that, he replied. ‘They say, “You are a law graduate. You consider yourself to be a polished man. So why do you act like a barbarian?” But that is not the point. Certain things are our compulsion. To me, my customs and traditions are more holy than the law of my country. You live with them and you die with them, whether you like it or not.’ In other areas, the
khans
– Pashtun chieftains – had lost touch with their people, he added. But the Marwats, for all their desperate poverty, remained a ‘compact’ tribe. They would stick by him. In his hour of need, rogues like Saadullah Khan and his sons would be by his side.
As a religious man, he conceded, this was problematic. Islam did not sit well with
Pashtunwali
’s obligations to violent revenge. ‘Belief relates to your heart, your prayers;
Pashtunwali
is about traditions, culture, life,’ Kamal said. But, when the two clashed,
Pashtunwali
usually won. He posed a practical dilemma. ‘Suppose your wife elopes with someone else: you are the most disgraced man in society. Can you leave it to Allah that the man will be punished at death? How can you live in society until then?’ He shrugged. ‘Pashtuns are Pashtuns.’
I
f the state was no competition for the magnetic draw of Pashtun tradition, a more potent force was rising in the tribal belt. The first sign came in early 2006. I was at home in Islamabad when a friend from Waziristan arrived with a video he had just bought in a Peshawar bazaar. ‘You need to take a look at this,’ he said.
It had been filmed a few months earlier in Miram Shah, the main town in north Waziristan tribal agency. In the opening scene,
long-haired
, turbaned tribesmen waving AK-47s stood triumphantly before three bodies hanging from electricity poles. A fourth body lay slumped on the ground, a whisky bottle perched in the man’s lap and banknotes stuffed into his mouth – elementary symbols of decadence and disgrace. They had been executed, a fierce figure announced to the camera, for the crimes of kidnapping, banditry and ‘forcing women to remove their veils’. Hundreds of people clustered around him, watching silently. The recording ended with a pickup truck dragging the battered corpses through the grimy streets, yahooing gunmen hanging out the back. ‘This is reality, not fiction,’ read the ticker. ‘Come wage jihad or you will miss the caravan.’
I called the army spokesman, who tried to downplay the incident as an innocent ‘local dispute’. But more sophisticated observers saw it for something else: the seeds of Pakistan’s own home-grown Taliban movement.
The word
talib
means student; the original Taliban were born in the chaos of Afghanistan’s civil war. In 1994, a group of righteous seminary students, many of them schooled in Pakistan, rose from the countryside around Kandahar to challenge the predatory warlords then ripping Afghanistan apart. They were led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, an enigmatic, one-eyed cleric who refused to be photographed. The Taliban’s first act was to hang an accused rapist from the barrel of a tank; that mixture of theatrics and bloody retribution would become their hallmark as they fought their way to power in Kabul in 1996. Accused adulterers were executed, music and kite-flying were banned, and in 2001 the magnificent Buddha statues at Bamiyan were destroyed with rocketfire. They were quietly boosted behind the scenes by the Pakistan military’s
Inter-Services
Intelligence spy agency, which viewed them as useful proxies for influence in Kabul.
Pakistan’s Taliban, on the other hand, was born of the tumult that followed the September 2001 attacks in America. Under pressure from Washington, Pakistan’s army deployed to the tribal belt to flush out hundreds of al-Qaeda militants sheltering there. This greatly irked the local Wazir and Mehsud tribesmen who vigorously defended their foreign guests. This was partly
nanawatai
, the obligation of sanctuary, but was also driven by more earthly considerations. Bin Laden’s Arabs paid for their bed and breakfast with thick wads of US dollars.
By early 2006, when the Miram Shah execution video surfaced, the Taliban had set about establishing a religious mini-state. Militants torched video stores, threatened to kill barbers who shaved men’s beards and patrolled the streets to ensure that shalwar trousers were worn at the appropriate height above the ankle. More profoundly, they attacked the established social order. Disputes were no longer settled in
jirgas
but in Saudi-style sharia courts; the
maliks
– pro-government elders who upheld the old social order – were assassinated or forced to flee. The Taliban justified their brutality by claiming to fight in the name of Islam.
Pashtun have always revered Islam, but until a few decades ago the mullahs enjoyed a tightly defined social standing. They officiated at weddings and funerals, ran small madrasas and were notorious for two things: their love of halwa, a soft dessert that floats in a pool of liquid sugar, and bedding young boys. (They’re not the only ones. One alarming UN-sponsored study in 2001 found that 37 per cent of NWFP respondents felt that sex with boys was either a ‘matter of pride’ or a ‘status symbol’.) Things had changed during the anti-Soviet guerrilla war of the 1980s, when madrasas turned into radicalization and recruitment centres; one US-funded textbook taught children that ‘J is for jihad’ and ‘K is for Kalashnikov’.
The mullahs got another boost under the military ruler Pervez Musharraf. In the 2002 elections, ISI vote-riggers boosted to power a six-party alliance of religious parties known as the Muttahida
Majlis-e-Amal
(MMA) which won control of the NWFP government. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, the mullahs had a province in their hands. In mid-2006, I went to see Muhammad Yousuf Qureshi, chief cleric of the Mohabbat Khan Mosque, a famous,
virgin-white
Moghul structure in the centre of Peshawar. A short, rather fat man with twinkling eyes and a henna-stained beard, Qureshi was famed for his venomous anti-Western sermons. He welcomed me with warm, pillowy hands and offered green tea sprinkled with cardamom. He was troubled: local cinemas wanted to show movies on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. ‘We told them, “If you show the films on that day, we will burn your cinemas,”’ he explained. ‘So they closed them.’ Still, he liked some aspects of Western life: three of his sons lived in America, and until 9/11 he visited them regularly. Now, he complained, the US government refused to issue him a visa. He seemed rather hurt by the rejection.
As Taliban violence started to spill out of the tribal belt and into NWFP, the cleric-led MMA government did not directly aid the militants. But it did little to stop them. This failure was most starkly highlighted in the Swat Valley, a mountain idyll of
fruit-laden
orchards and gurgling brooks once dubbed ‘the Switzerland of South Asia’. In 2007, a mullah named Fazlullah burst on to the scene and briefly turned it into the subcontinental Somalia. A thirty-something, baby-faced cleric, Fazlullah once made his living operating the chairlift that spanned the Swat River; after a stint fighting in Afghanistan he galloped back into the valley on a white steed. His popularity, however, came from pirate radio. A clerical shock-jock, Fazlullah used an illegal radio station to deliver fiery sermons that railed against girls’ schooling and a polio vaccination drive, which he claimed was part of a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslim children. Meanwhile, his foot soldiers – gangly youths waving Kalashnikovs – swaggered through the streets. The MMA’s local administrator stood behind Fazlullah at Friday prayers.
When I visited in late 2007 the mosque was expanding, with construction workers swarming over bamboo scaffolding. Fazlullah’s spokesman, Sirajuddin, a man with piercing cobalt eyes set in a thin face, told me the new mosque would cost $2.5 million. He apologized: his leader was unavailable because the army was chasing him. Besides, he wasn’t keen on Westerners. As a young militant served goblets of Mountain Dew soda from a silver tray, Sirajuddin sketched out their programme. They would Islamize Swat, Pakistan, and then the world, he declared. ‘We want Paradise on Earth,’ he said. ‘And the people want it too.’ He was right: the Taliban’s rhetoric had resonated powerfully with Swat’s dispossessed. Fazlullah promised his poor fighters that he would divide the property of rich men among them. For everyone else there would be justice. Fazlullah vowed to replace the slow and corrupt civil courts with sharia benches that guaranteed swift, moral decisions. On Fridays, up to 15,000 men would gather at Imam Dehri to hear him speak; their wives flung rings and gold bangles at his feet.
A helicopter buzzed outside; a young militant entered and whispered in Sirajuddin’s ear. His gaunt face clouded over. An army offensive had started further up the valley, he said. He had to leave.
Musharraf’s miscalculations played a critical role in the rise of the Taliban. His officials struck a series of disastrous ‘peace deals’ in 2004, 2005 and 2006 that only emboldened the militants. Then, in July 2007, an army-led siege of the extremist Red Mosque in Islamabad led to the deaths of over one hundred people and triggered a ferocious backlash. Taliban suicide bombers launched a firestorm of violence over the following months, killing hundreds of people, including – to widespread shock – ISI officials. The insurgency oozed across the frontier with a viral intensity. Inevitably, it reached Lakki Marwat.
I
n May 2008, three months after the election, Anwar Kamal came to visit in Islamabad. It was one of those rare balmy summer evenings in the capital, when the streets shine with a fresh slick of rain and the suffocating humidity has been mercifully punctured. But the atmosphere was tense. A day earlier, an al-Qaeda suicide bomber had rammed his vehicle into the Danish Embassy, about a mile from my house; plain-clothes security men loitered on street corners toting AK-47s.
To my surprise, Kamal had not retained his seat in the NWFP parliament. He had been nudged out by just forty-four votes, he said, grumbling something about two hundred dead voters who apparently rose from the grave to vote for the brother of his old nemesis, Kabir Khan. But that wasn’t what was bothering him. Pulling out his phone, Kamal flipped past photos of his grandchildren and stopped at a video. It showed a young man lying motionless on the ground – eyes glazed and fixed on the heavens, blood trickling from his temple, one running shoe ripped off. The camera zoomed in. The dead man had Central Asian features, wore a small black turban and had a wispy moustache that suggested he was no older than eighteen. ‘He’s an Uzbek,’ said Kamal. ‘We killed him last week.’
The Taliban were banging on the gates of Lakki Marwat. A week earlier, a gang of armed militants swept out of Waziristan on a mission to kidnap the local
nazim
– mayor – for ransom. As they raced back towards the mountains with their catch, Kamal and his gunmen caught up with them. A shoot-out in a maze of irrigation canals near Tajori ensued, at the end of which six Taliban were killed. Kamal’s young driver Akhtar, now sipping tea in my kitchen, had fired the decisive retort with a rocket-propelled grenade. ‘He’s a dead shot, you see,’ said Kamal proudly.
The Taliban threat came from two sides. To the west lay Waziristan, the nerve centre of the Taliban insurgency. For centuries, Wazir raiders had harassed the Marwat, sweeping on to the plains from their mountain keep to plunder women, gold and livestock. Now the Taliban were seeking hostages to fund their insurgency. A dozen people, mostly officials, had been kidnapped; a
mobile-phone
company paid $50,000 to free two of its engineers. But the danger also came from within. The local Taliban had entirely overrun Shah Hassan Khel, the village in the bandit-infested hills which we had skirted during the election campaign. The militants had gathered behind Maulvi Ashraf Ali, a smooth-talking young cleric who had fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and had now returned to convert his home village into a Taliban statelet. Ali banned sports and television, closed the girls’ school and teamed up with local bandits to rob trucks on the Indus Highway. He mounted roadblocks outside Shah Hassan Khel to search vehicles for government employees. Kamal considered them an isolated group, but was worried that they could link up with the Taliban in Waziristan. ‘This is a war of nerves,’ he told me.