Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [220]
Tablet after tablet of this kind stretch along the cathedral walls, commemorating a hundred years of British warfare with the Pathan tribes of the North West Frontier and Afghanistan. These ghosts testify that Pathans do not take kindly to an infidel military presence in their territories. Soviet monuments could have told the same story, if a Soviet Union had survived to commemorate its dead in Afghanistan. The surprising thing, therefore, about the present Taleban insurgency in the Pathan areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan is not that it is happening, but that it was not more widely predicted.
Looking at the attractive, unveiled women in the church, my mind travelled back twenty years to another city under threat from tribal warriors fighting for Islam: Kabul in the summer of 1989, with the Mujahidin (then anti-Communist ‘freedom fighters’ according to the Western media, but in their own presentation warriors for Islam) beginning to tighten their grip after the Soviet military withdrawal. I visited the university there and, talking to the women students and professors, I remembered what a grizzled, middle-aged mujahid from a ruined village in the hills had told me around a camp fire in Nangrahar a few months earlier, when I asked him what he meant to do when the Communists were defeated and the cities fell. ‘I mean to capture an educated wife,’ he had said.
I remembered the narrowed eyes and lean, hard faces of the Mujahidin as they stared into Ghazni from the hills around the town. I remembered them again three years later, when I was a journalist stationed in the Soviet Union during its fall, and read what had in fact happened to Afghanistan’s cities and especially their women when the Mujahidin captured them; and when I returned to Afghanistan after 9/11 and learned at first hand what the Mujahidin victory had meant for the people of Kabul. To be fair to the Taleban, it was precisely because they offered a version of peace and order after the horrors of Mujahidin anarchy that their rule was welcomed by so many Afghan Pathans in the mid-1990s. Yet for the educated classes in the cities, and for many non-Pathans, the cure was even worse than the disease.
THE PATHAN TRADITION AND PATHAN NATIONALISM
The Taleban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan are as of 2010 first and foremost a Pathan phenomenon, with deep roots in Pathan history and culture. Whenever the tribes rose in the past, whether against the British or Afghan authorities, this was for their tribal freedoms but always in the name of Islam and usually under the inspiration of local religious figures. For most of Afghan history, the Afghan kings also called their people to war in the name of Islam – in between launching their own ferocious campaigns against dissident mullahs preaching rebellion against those same kings. The religious theme has therefore long flowed together with tribal yearning for freedom from authority – any authority, but above all of course alien and infidel domination. Or, as a Pathan saying has it: ‘The Afghans of the Frontier are never at peace except when they are at war.’
The Taleban therefore have a rich seam of instinctive public sympathy to mine in the Pathan areas. So far in both Afghanistan and Pakistan they have, however, drawn on Pathan ethnic sentiment without co-opting it completely and becoming a Pathan nationalist force. Indeed, they have not attempted to take this path. The reasons for this