Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [259]
In May of 2007, thanks to the kind invitation of Professor Taqi Bangash, I spoke with thirty-one history students at the university. Just over half were girls. Eight of them wore the niqab, which half veils the face up to the nose, a bit like a bandit’s mask, three were in full burqas, and four wore headscarves but with faces uncovered. Only one went wholly unveiled, in sharp contrast to old photographs from the 1960s and 1970s I saw in the department, where many of the girls were unveiled.
Despite repeated invitations from me, the women on this occasion played very little part in the conversation. One exquisitely beautiful girl with perfectly chiselled features in a bright pink shelwar kameez and headscarf sat throughout in perfect stillness and silence, so like a rose in every way that I was sorely tempted to giggle. The only voluble and intelligent exception was a visiting student from Iran – another small sign that as far as women’s rights and participation are concerned, the West has not understood the nature of the balance between Iran and the ‘pro-Western’ states of the region.
There were considerable differences among the students concerning the level of their sympathy for the Afghan Taleban and their Pakistani allies; but on two things there was unanimity. I asked them the following: ‘If there are free and fair elections and a democratic government is elected; and if this government agrees with Washington to launch a military operation against the Taleban in FATA, would you support or oppose this?’ The response was, by a show of hands: oppose, twentynine; support, nil. By the same token, all of them supported peace deals between the Pakistani government and the militants; and all said that if the US sent troops into FATA, the Pakistani army should fight them. This group of students included Jamaat and JUI supporters, but also PPP and ANP activists.
There was unanimity too in the loud burst of applause which greeted the words of one of the Islamist students, Gul Ahmed Gul, a handsome young man with a neatly clipped beard, more like an old school left-wing student activist:
When you go back to Washington, please tell the Americans to leave Afghanistan and let us sort out our own problems, because, as long as they are there, people will fight against them. The Americans must pay more attention to what local people want. We do not want more Americans to die, but we also do not agree to Americans coming to this part of the world to kill our fellow Muslims, whatever American reasons for this may be.
With the obvious exception of the Iranian girl, all of the students agreed that ‘We and the Afghans are one people.’
Perhaps because the students spent most of the time asking me questions rather than giving their own views, the conversation on that occasion proceeded along more or less rational lines. In August 2008 I revisited the university and the Islamia College to meet with both students and staff, and I’m afraid that my notebook contains a suggestion of mine for their joint motto: ‘Unity in Idiocy’. This was despite the fact that the Islamia College, as its name suggests, is a hotbed of Jamaat and JUI support, while the Area Studies Centre of the university, where I spoke in the morning, is a leading intellectual centre of the ANP.
The previous day, an acquaintance of mine, the chief political officer at the US Consulate in Peshawar, had been ambushed by Taleban gunmen