Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [226]
So many maliks have been killed by the Taleban that they are scared, and with good reason. In public, they denounce military actions against the Taleban, while in private they beg us to continue them. The problem is that everyone knows they are scared, and if you are scared, you cannot be a malik in anything but name. You know how this society values physical courage more than anything else.
The same is true of the politicians in the NWFP, who have to keep running in national or local elections, and therefore to keep appearing at public rallies. If they have opposed the Taleban, then such appearances are standing invitations to suicide bombers – who have indeed claimed several political victims. The problem is that even if the politicians can afford bullet-proof glass screens like the leading politicians in Pakistan and India, that makes them look scared. I was told that the nom of Asfandyar Wali Khan, leader of the ANP, suffered a terrible blow when, after an assassination attempt against him in Charsadda in October 2008 which killed one of his guards, he left town immediately in a helicopter and did not attend the guard’s funeral.
Finally, and related to the individualism of the Pathans, is the even greater fissiparousness of Pathan politics, even within the same family. So universal is rivalry between cousins that it even has a formal name: taburwali. In Swat, Fredrik Barth studied how the rigid institutionalization of faction permeated local politics. In the past, and to some degree up to the present, this rivalry often spilled over into violence, which the pashtunwali acted to mediate and restrain, but never could and never was intended to prevent. The pashtunwali, in other words, is not a code of law, but rather a set of guidelines for regulating what is known in anthropology as ‘ordered anarchy’.
Feuds between families (or, rather, often rival bits of the same family) are not often as violent as in the past, but the possibility is always there. Above all, however, this tradition means that parties in the NWFP are even more likely to split and split again than is the case elsewhere in Pakistan. Several local leaders of the ANP and PPP whom I visited spent much of the interviews abusing not their party’s opponents, but their own party colleagues.
In Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taleban succeeded in crushing local feuds with their own harsh and rigid version of the Shariah – though only after these feuds had assumed a really monstrous character in the wake of the collapse of the Communist state and the triumph of the Mujahidin. If the Taleban in Pakistan can succeed in binding their tribal followers together through the discipline of their version of the Shariah, they will have gained a frightening advantage over their mainstream political opponents in the Pathan territories.
The social and cultural difference between most of the tribal areas on the one hand, and the Peshawar valley and Swat on the other, can be summed up in the nature of their hujras. This absolutely central Pakistani social, cultural and political institution is hard to translate, having elements of the feudal audience chamber, the men’s club, the village hall, the debating society, the barracks for political workers, and the guest-house.
In a sexually segregated society where it is out of the question for any men but the closest relatives to attend mixed gatherings within houses, the hujras are where the men of a given area meet to discuss everything under the sun. Occasionally they are collectively maintained, but usually they are owned by some local big man, and attendance at his hujra is to a greater or lesser extent a sign of allegiance or at least deference to him.
In the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan