Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [275]
I met Afzal Khan in his ancestral village of Doroshkhel. Afzal Khan is not in fact the staunch ANP loyalist that ANP propaganda since 2008 has tried to make out. Like so many Pathan landowning politicians, he has repeatedly moved between parties, and sometimes stood as an independent, depending on circumstances and personal and family advantage. In 2009, a nephew was a minister in the ANP government in Peshawar and other relatives were scattered through the national and provincial assemblies.
Long before I visited Swat, ANP leaders whom I met in Peshawar were presenting Afzal Khan as an iconic ANP figure, for one reason and one reason only: he had stood his ground in the face of the Taleban, when most of the ANP and other politicians in the area had been driven out by them. This flight was very understandable in view of the number of politicians killed by the Taleban, but in a culture which has traditionally prized physical courage above any other virtue, it has nonetheless done them and the ANP terrible damage.
Afzal Khan’s reputation for courage was not undeserved. It is true that his village and the compound of his extended family were defended not only by his own followers but by the Pakistani army; but it is also true that this determined eighty-two-year-old great-grandfather stayed on leading his men after he had been wounded in an ambush in which two of his guards and his nephew were killed. It probably helps his public image that he certainly looks the part of a chieftain. The garden of his home in Doroshkhel could have been an English garden, on an English summer afternoon – if you can imagine an English garden with a machinegun nest in one corner, and sitting in the other an owner who bears a strong resemblance to a giant bald-headed eagle.
Pathan features are often on a large scale (and the noses of ANP politicians sometimes seem to be growing in sympathetic if hopeless emulation of the epic hereditary protuberances of their ruling dynasty, the Wali Khans), but whether in reality, or because of his rather overwhelming character, Afzal Khan’s nose, ears and eyebrows seemed truly enormous. I must also say, however, that if set of eyes and shape of mouth are anything to go by, like many a chieftain Afzal Khan owes his leadership not only to his courage and determination but to a very considerable capacity for ruthlessness.
This was indeed his reputation in Swat long before the TNSM began their rebellion, and it brings me to one key element in the Taleban’s appeal, which seems especially marked in Swat: that of class resentment and even of class war. This was of course fervently denied by Afzal Khan and other politicians with whom I spoke, but I heard it from a great many other sources, including Pakistani army officers. Since the end of Swat state, as agriculture has become more commercialized, so certain landowning khans have used their power to encroach on the lands of weaker neighbours. This also helped to increase loathing of the Pakistani judicial system.
As I was told:
A khan politician would use his gunmen to seize some poor farmer’s land and his political connections to stop the administration doing anything about it. Then he would say to the farmer, ‘Sure, take me to court. You will pay everything you have in bribes, you will wait thirty years for a verdict, and the verdict will still be for me. So what are you going to do about it?’ Well, when the TNSM came up, that farmer could do something about it. He joined them.
Such behaviour was by no means true of all or even most khans, but it was widespread enough to cause great resentment.
The TNSM/Taleban never adopted land reform as a formal part of their programme, but they used their power to redress local grievances like the one just described, recover seized