Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [248]
The Taleban are much more effective than previous religiously led revolts, above all because they have far more organization, discipline and therefore stamina. The revolts against the British arose suddenly and spread rapidly, but were also mostly rather brief. A few bloody defeats and the tribesmen melted back to their villages. The Taleban by contrast have gone on absorbing very heavy casualties for many years. As I was told when travelling with the Afghan Mujahidin in the 1980s, ‘Pashtuns are brave, but not deliberately suicidal.’ That has obviously changed, as far as some of the Taleban fighters are concerned.
Relative Taleban discipline and endurance probably owe a great deal to the unprecedented network of local cadres provided by young local mullahs. This in turn has been part of a social upheaval in FATA whereby, through the Taleban, members of this previously powerless and even despised class have seized local power from the landowning maliks.
I am reminded of something said by Imam Shamil, the great nineteenth-century Islamist resistance leader in the north Caucasus, after he finally had to surrender to Russia – that the Russians should really be grateful to him for making their rule possible; because by rigorous implementation of the Shariah he had accustomed the Chechen tribes to government, where previously none had existed. Shamil’s Islamic state in Chechnya and Daghestan lasted for almost twenty-five years, in a much smaller territory than the Pathan tribal areas, and against far larger numbers of Russian troops than the British ever had to deploy against their rebels – who (like Shamil’s Chechens) were fighting largely to prevent any kind of state being imposed on them.
Unlike many previous leaders, the Taleban leaders also do not derive their prestige from deep Islamic learning, but only from rigorous practice. Rather than simply leading a movement of tribal chieftains, they have replaced those chieftains with their own rule. Inspired in part by the Wahabis, their rule has been far more consistently dogmatic in their insistence on their version of the Shariah than any previous movement among the Pathans.
Previously, while religious figures led tribal revolts in the name of Islam, the struggle was also very much in defence of the tribal customs summed up in the pashtunwali – many of them pre-Islamic. They were certainly not encouraged to try to change those customs in accordance with strict Koranic Islam. The few who tried generally came to a bad end, as with Syed Ahmed Barelvi, abandoned by his followers after he interfered with their marriage customs – though in his case, the fact of being a non-Pathan from India doubtless also played a part. In fact, there is a Pathan saying that ‘Pathans are always ready to die for Islam, but find it very difficult to live by Islam.’
All the same, the Taleban are close enough to Khaldun’s and Gellner’s picture to make clear that what we are facing among the Pathans is not simply a product of the last thirty or for that matter the past 150 years of Pathan history, but has roots which go back to the very origins of Islam, and have never failed yet to put out new shoots in each new era. In the Frontier territories, this has run together throughout modern history with a determination to maintain tribal independence from outside control. As Sana Haroon writes:
This hinterland of successive, contradictory jihads in support of Pakhtun ethnicism, anti-colonial nationalism, Pakistani territorialism, religious revivalism and anti-American imperialism generated, in turn, fluid and fluctuating political allegiances within the Tribal Areas. Only the claim to autonomy persisted unchanged and uncompromised, and within that claim the functional role of religious leaders as social moderators and ideological guides was preserved. From outside, patrons recognized and supported that claim, reliant in their own ways on the possibilities that the autonomous Tribal Areas and its mullas afforded.18
These possibilities were quickly recognized by the US, Pakistani and Arab backers of the