Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [251]
In this respect, however, the Taleban do seem to represent something new. Western writing likes to dwell on their internal divisions, but by the standards of any previous Pathan jihad – our own Mujahidin of the 1980s included – they have so far displayed formidable unity and stamina. One explanation for this would seem to be that while certain Pathan cultural and ideological traditions have continued little changed, Pathan society has in some respects changed quite radically.
In particular, the power of the greatest traditional source of Pathan fragmentation – the tribes and their chieftains – has been greatly diminished as a result of thirty years of war in Afghanistan and its overspill in Pakistan. With the power of the maliks greatly reduced, the local mullah is really the only available semi-educated leader of local society – unless you count the drugs lords, of course. So, politically incorrect though it may be to say it, the Western and Pakistani official policy of trying to re-energize the tribes and tribal chieftains, and of creating tribal lashkars under traditional command, actually represents a step backwards in historical terms, compared to Taleban organization.
These changes in Pathan society have also produced a new feature of the Taleban, which marks them out from the old jihads. They are an alliance not of a handful of prominent religious figures from Sayyid backgrounds and allied chieftains, but of many ordinary local mullahs and religious students from poor and simple backgrounds. Speaking of another ostensibly Islamist warlord on the borders of Peshawar, Mangal Bagh Afridi, again and again educated people in Peshawar would ask me rhetorically, ‘Who on earth can respect a former bus conductor as a leader?’ Those readers who have not already guessed the answer can turn to the next paragraph for the solution – one which had never occurred to my educated Peshawari interlocutors.
The answer of course is another bus conductor. In other words, it is precisely the lowly origins of the Taleban and related figures which endear them to the Pathan masses. A strong though mainly unstated element of class feeling has therefore also entered into the struggle. By contrast, all the non-Islamist parties in the Frontier – the ANP, the different branches of the PPP and Muslim League, and Imran Khan’s followers – are overwhelmingly dominated by khans and maliks, and the JUI is linked to this class in many ways. Because so many of the Pakistani elites – even in the Frontier – are so obviously Westernized, as well as being deeply corrupt, a certain feeling exists in the population, as in Iran in the 1970s, that ‘it is the poor who are Muslims’.
THE MOHMAND AGENCY
At least in Peshawar a large majority of the ordinary people with whom I spoke on the street and in the bazaars denounced terrorism, and said that although they supported the rule of the Shariah in principle, they opposed Taleban attempts to impose it by force. It was very different in the part of FATA that I visited. On what seemed to me to be reasonable grounds of self-preservation, I did not go to those tribal agencies like Waziristan, where the Pakistani Taleban have been in effective control for several years.
A visit to a relatively peaceful part of the Mohmand Agency in September 2008 was quite alarming enough, in terms not of any visibly direct threat to me (though, on this one occasion, I did have a sense that such a threat would have appeared if I had stayed for a few days), but of the opinions of the people. Following the Red Mosque battle in July 2007, the Taleban in the agency had come into the open and established a headquarters at Kandhura and a number of training