Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [228]
Compared to the PPP and Muslim League, however, the ANP’s Pathan nationalism, ostensibly left-wing, populist ideology and deep roots in local society should make the ANP a principal obstacle to the spread of the Taleban among Pakistani Pathans. Indeed, its victory over the Islamist parties in the February 2008 elections was portrayed by most Western observers in precisely this light.
Perhaps, after Western forces leave Afghanistan, the ANP will indeed be able to play this role. So far they have been crippled in this regard by a range of factors. Firstly, the ANP has always been dominated by landowning khans from the Peshawar valley. Of course, this allows them to rely on support from the traditional followers of those khans, but it also puts them at a disadvantage when faced with the egalitarian and even socially revolutionary message of the Taleban. Moreover, while the Taleban can at least appeal to Pathan nationalist feeling in the struggle against the hated American presence in Afghanistan, the ANP’s Pathan nationalism has become an increasingly threadbare rhetorical fiction.
Above all, the ANP were long hindered in confronting the Taleban by the views of the vast majority of their own supporters and activists, who, to judge by my interviews with many of them, regard the US presence in Afghanistan as illegitimate and who see ANP support for a military crackdown on the Taleban as essentially launching a Pathan civil war on the orders of the United States. As Fakhruddin Khan, the son of the ANP General Secretary, said to me, ‘one main reason for sympathy for the Taleban is that every Pashtun has been taught from the cradle that to resist foreign domination is part of what it is to do Pashto’ – in other words, to follow the Pathan Way.
Part of the ANP’s problem in fighting the Taleban is that to be seen to help even indirectly the US military presence in Afghanistan goes against its own deepest instincts, both Pathan nationalist and anticolonialist. The party’s founder, Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890 – 1988), whose grandson leads the party today, was ostensibly a Gandhian pacifist, but his poetry is more reminiscent of the warlike Khattak:
If I die, and lie not bathed in martyr’s blood,
None should this [Pashtun] tongue pollute,
Offering prayers for me.
Oh mother, why should you mourn for me,
If I am not torn to pieces by British guns?7
The history of the origins of the ANP under British rule illustrates both the power of Pathan nationalism and its weakness in the face of appeals which mix nationalism with religion. Thus, remarkably, Abdul Ghaffar Khan was able to found a Pathan mass nationalist movement, the Khudai Khidmatgars, or Servants of God (popularly known as the Red Shirts, from their uniforms), dedicated to alliance with the overwhelmingly Hindu Indian National Congress and, in principle at least, committed to Gandhian principles of non-violence.
No more unlikely product of Pathan culture can easily be imagined. The explanation is, however, obvious. So deeply did most Pathans loathe British rule that they were prepared to ally with the main Indian force struggling against that rule, the Congress. They opposed Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League, which, though made up of fellow Muslims, was regarded quite rightly as much more interested in doing deals with the British in order to safeguard Muslim interests than in seeking to expel the hated alien rulers. This sentiment allowed the Red Shirts and their political allies to dominate NWFP politics in the last fifteen years of British rule, and Ghaffar Khan’s brother, Dr Khan Sahib, became chief minister of the province.
When in 1946 – 7 it became apparent that the British really were preparing to quit, the position of the Khan brothers and their followers quickly collapsed in the face of the religious-based propaganda of the Muslim League in favour of an independent Muslim state of Pakistan. The idea of living in a Hindu-dominated India proved absolutely unacceptable to most Pathans, and the Congress leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, was almost lynched by a