Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [246]
From one point of view the idea that the Pakistani Taleban is acting from purely defensive motives is nonsense, since plots to assassinate Musharraf by militants based in Waziristan predated the army offensive in the region and were partly responsible for that offensive. Moreover, the propaganda of the Pakistani Taleban also speaks of their goal of creating an Islamist revolution in Pakistan. However, a very large number of ordinary Pakistanis believe that the struggle of the Pakistani Taleban is ‘defensive’, and this has a powerful effect in wrecking their support for military action against them. Again and again, on the streets of Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Faisalabad and Multan, people told me that, in the words of one Lahori shopkeeper, ‘The Taleban are doing some bad things, but you have to remember that they are only doing them in self-defence, because the army took American money to attack them.’
The revolt of the Pakistani Taleban therefore stems in the first instance from the Western presence in Afghanistan and the struggle of the Afghan Taleban against that presence and the Afghan forces it supports. The movement, however, has much deeper and older roots. These lie in ancient Pathan traditions of religiously justified resistance to outside rule; in the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and the Afghan resistance against that occupation; in the nature of the support given by Pakistan and parts of the Arab world to that resistance; and in social change on the Frontier, which has undermined the old British – Pakistani system for managing the tribes.
THE LINEAGE OF THE PAKISTANI TALEBAN
The marriage of tribal revolt and religious revival is not specific to the Pathans, but is one of the oldest traditions of the Muslim world, including the Maghrib, West Africa and the Arabian peninsula itself. As Ernest Gellner remarks, echoing the great fifteenth-century Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldun:
What would happen if bellicose tribesmen outside the walls had designs on the city? Most often nothing at all, for these tribal wolves are generally at each other’s throats, and their endless mutual feuds, often fostered by the ruler, neutralize them. They lust after the city anyway, but their internal divisions prevent them from satisfying their desire ... But what would happen if some authoritative cleric, having with some show of plausibility denounced the impiety and immorality of the ruler, thereby also provided a banner, a focus, a measure of unitary leadership for the wolves? What if he went into the wilderness to ponder the corruption of the time, and there encountered, not only God, but also some armed tribesmen, who responded to his message?13
Ibn Khaldun wrote of this coming together of religious purification and plunder in the history of the Bedouin tribes of North Africa:
It is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess. Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls ... When they acquire superiority and royal authority, they have complete power to plunder as they please. There no longer exists any political power to protect property, and civilization is ruined.14
Yet at the same time, in Khaldun’s analysis, when united under the banner of religious puritanism and regeneration, these plundering but courageous tribes are also the force that overthrows corrupt and decadent kingdoms and refounds them – for a while – on a stronger basis. The Wahabis in eighteenth-century Arabia, in alliance with the tribe of Saud, were a late but impressive manifestation of this tradition. In Gellner’s words:
The manner in which demanding, puritan unitarianism enters tribal life, and the manner in which tribes are induced on special occasions to accept overall leadership, are the same. The exceptional crisis in the tribal world provides the opening, the opportunity, for that ‘purer’ form of faith which normally remains latent, respected but not observed.15