Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [217]
10
The Pathans
The very name Pakhtun spells honour and glory,
Lacking that honour what is the Afghan story?
In the sword alone lies our deliverance,
The sword wherein is our predominance,
Whereby in days long past we ruled in Hind;
But concord we know not, and we have sinned.
(Khushal Khan Khattak)1
One way of looking at the Pathans of Pakistan is as eighteenth-century Scots without the alcohol.2 Here we have a people with a proud history of independence, often bitterly resentful of their incorporation in a new state – and yet many of whom at the same time draw tremendous advantages from membership of that state, most of which is much richer than their own stony pastures. The already poor province has been impoverished still further in recent years, first by the war with the Pakistani Taleban, then by the floods of 2010 which hit this region worst of all. A Pakistani Dr Johnson could well say of his Pathan compatriots that ‘the noblest prospect a Pathan ever sees is the high road that leads him to Punjab.’
Not that many Pathans would admit that, even the ones actually living in Punjab. Pathan ethnic pride is notorious. Just as completely integrated Scots in the British establishment have often at heart remained proud and even resentful Scots, so I heard a senior Pakistani civil servant in Peshawar railing against the Punjabis whose industrialists, he said, were sucking the North West Frontier Province dry and who had blocked his own advancement within the central civil service. And yet this man would as soon have wished for an independent Pakhtunkhwa linked to Afghanistan as he would have wished for a union with Pluto. Nor indeed was his own family united on this: his daughter, employed in Islamabad, growled in response, ‘And what have Pashtuns ever done for themselves? They just sit there asking Islamabad for subsidies.’
It should be noted that every single senior civil servant, serving or retired, whom I met in the province was himself an ethnic Pathan, and an attempt has been made to ensure that the most senior military commanders in the province and FATA are also usually ethnic Pathans. This marks a major difference from Balochistan; and from this point of view at least the notion of the NWFP as a Punjabi colony is quite wrong.
On the other hand, at a dinner party in Peshawar, I listened to two members of the Pathan elites, a retired army colonel and a senior local journalist for a Pakistani TV channel, discussing the possibility of Pakistan breaking up into its ethnic regions. Neither of them wanted this outcome, and both would suffer from it very badly indeed; but they were prepared to discuss it with a cool detachment which you would never find among Punjabis of their rank and position.
The complexity of Pathan links to Pakistan is illustrated by an anecdote told me by a leading politician for the nationalist Awami National Party (ANP), Bashir Bilour. The Bilours are strong Pathan nationalists, but have also sided at different times with all Pakistan’s national parties, as part of factional fighting within the ANP. All the same, I was quite surprised to learn that his family has intermarried with that of the late Ghulam Ishaq Khan (1915 – 2006), veteran Pakistani bureaucrat, President from 1988 to 1993 and an ardent Pakistani patriot. Nonetheless, when in 1993 Ghulam Ishaq appealed to Bilour to support him against Nawaz Sharif, he did so with the words, ‘After all, we