Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [229]
Thereafter, the relations of Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his movement with the Pakistani state were naturally deeply troubled, since that state and army had good reason to doubt their loyalty. He and his leading followers spent many years in Pakistani jails, with their party banned, under both military and civilian governments, including that of the PPP in the 1970s. In part because of the rigging of elections against them, they never succeeded before 2008 in forming the provincial government of the NWFP, though they several times took a share in government.
The links of the ANP and its predecessor parties to Afghanistan, though dictated by their Pathan nationalism, have also over the years proved a disastrous liability. Afghanistan proved enough of a threat to Pakistan to terrify the Pakistani security establishment and deepen their opposition to enhanced Pathan autonomy within Pakistan; but not remotely enough of an attractive force to win over large numbers of Pakistani Pathans to union with Afghanistan; and from the late 1970s the ANP also became in part hostage to the dreadfully radical and violent swings of the Afghan domestic spectrum.
First, in the 1950s, Ghaffar Khan and his followers became associated with the campaign of the Afghan Prime Minister (and later President) Sardar Daud Khan to mobilize Pathan nationalism so as to bring about the union of the NWFP and FATA with Afghanistan – a campaign which included providing funds and armed support for tribal rebels against Pakistan. Then, after 1979, Abdul Ghaffar Khan became closely tied to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and its Afghan Communist allies. He lived in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation and is buried in the Afghan city of Jalalabad. Because of the ANP’s anti-British legacy, and because the Pakistani state and military had generally been allied with the United States, ANP ideology took on an anti-American cast.
Today, this mutual hostility between the ANP and Washington has of necessity greatly diminished, and the US of course greatly welcomes ANP ties to the Afghan administration of Hamid Karzai. The problem is that – to judge by my own interviews with Pakistani Pathans – Karzai is despised by most of the ANP’s own activists and voters as a US colonial stooge, and the association with him does nothing for ANP prestige among Pakistani Pathans, and weakens the party vis-à-vis the Taleban.
The ANP shares certain features with its main political rival within the province, the Islamist Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). Both are ostensibly radical anti-establishment parties which nonetheless have involvements in electoral politics stretching back decades, and have often formed part of coalition governments. Both are deeply integrated into Pakistan’s system of political patronage and corruption. Yet both only formed their own governments in the NWFP very recently: the JUI as part of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (United Action Council) Islamist coalition which won the elections of 2002 in the Frontier; the ANP as a result of the crushing defeat of the MMA in the elections of 2008.
In both cases, the victories were hailed as crucial political turning points, for good or evil. In neither case does this appear to have been true. To judge by my own interviews with ordinary voters in the NWFP, the truth was closer to what Sikander Khan Sherpao (a member of the Provincial Assembly and son of the aforementioned Aftab Sherpao), told me in August 2008:
The people who say that the religious parties have been smashed for good and the moderate parties have triumphed are wrong. If you look at the issues on which the MMA got their votes in 2002 and the ANP this year, the most important ones are the same. This year, people voted for the ANP because they were against Musharraf, and too much of the MMA was seen as pro-Musharraf. And they voted for the ANP because, like the MMA before,