Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [218]
Along similar lines, a retired Pathan officer, Brigadier Saad, described to me how his uncle, an ANP veteran, over dinner one day had cursed the Afghans as savages. ‘How can you say this, Uncle?’, he asked. ‘Haven’t you been saying for years that they are our Pashtun brothers and we should unite with them?’
‘Oh, that wasn’t serious! It’s just a way of frightening those damned Punjabis so that they don’t beat us up.’
In the Pathan highlands, an insurrection is raging against the national government, fed in part by Pathan national sentiment. Yet as with the Scottish rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the motivation of this rebellion is not nationalism as such, but a mixture of ancient clan unrest against any government with religious differences; and the stated goal is not Pathan independence, but a change of regime in Pakistan as a whole.
Of course, the parallel is very far from exact. It does not include the crucial importance of developments in neighbouring Afghanistan for the affairs of Pakistan’s Pathans. Equally importantly, the society of the Pathan areas, and the tribal areas in particular, is rougher by far than that of eighteenth-century Scotland, and this in turn produces a much rougher kind of religious radicalism. Alas, there is no great modern Enlightenment culture to produce a contemporary Pathan Adam Smith or David Hume.
A young, highly educated Pathan woman of my acquaintance, from an elite background, described to me in 2008 how a girlfriend of hers from a similar background had recently called off her arranged marriage at the last moment in order to marry instead a former suitor: ‘There was a terrible scandal of course, but in the end the parents saw that there was nothing to be done, and agreed.’ I said that I found this an encouraging sign of progress, if only at the elite level. ‘Yes,’ she replied, looking aside with an extremely bitter face, ‘but if that had happened in my family there would have been half a dozen deaths by now between us and the other families involved, starting with the girl.’
The provincial office of the Pakistan People’s Party – at the time of writing Pakistan’s ruling party – stands on University Road, Peshawar’s high street, lined with fairly modern-looking shops and offices. Just opposite, a side road leads to the Tehkal quarter – and within a few feet turns into a rutted dusty track, unpaved and lined with filthy-looking shops, barrows with flyblown fruit and vegetables, and concrete shacks roofed with corrugated iron. Every woman on this street when I visited it was wearing a black or blue burqa.
‘You can tell the Afghan girls because they wear a more modern type of burqa than our local women – more fashionable and stylish,’ a Peshawari woman told me; something which one could find tragic, comic or even heroic, according to taste. ‘Was this road ever paved?’ I asked. ‘Once upon a time’, was the answer.
In other words, in trying to create a strict Shariah-based system in the Pathan areas the Taleban are not trying to impose something completely new. They are trying to develop something partly new out of elements that are very old indeed. And the cruelty for which the Taleban are rightly reproached has to be seen in the context of what at the best of times can be a very hard society indeed, especially as far as women are concerned.
Peshawar itself is a hard enough city, and looks it: a sprawl of dusty grey brick and concrete slums interspersed with the extravagant villas of the well-off, shrouded in dust and pollution; searingly hot in summer and grindingly cold in winter. When I think of the city, I often remember the sign for an angiography centre (heart clinic) at the entrance to the road where my usual guest-house is situated in University Town. In the West, such a sign would probably have featured a handsome elderly man, with some saccharine message about taking care of your heart for the sake of your grandchildren. The sign in Peshawar featured a huge colour photograph of a human heart, streaked with blood and