Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [49]
I agree that she should have been killed, because she had committed crimes, and after all hundreds of people are being killed in this fighting every day. But not the way they did it, by cutting her nose and eyes. That is against the Koran and the Shariah.
However, he added that he too supported the Taleban because they bring quick and fair justice, even if it is often rough:
The Taleban’s work in our area has been good. If you have a problem you can go to them and they will decide your case justly in three days. If you go to the police station, they will take all your money and decide the case in twenty years. In Pakistan, only the rich get justice. So people are coming here from Charsadda and even further to get justice from the Taleban.3
From this, it can be gathered that the harshness of Taleban justice, so often denounced in the West and by Pakistani liberals, does not necessarily repel local people, whose local traditions of justice are themselves often very harsh indeed, especially as far as women are concerned. As the mullah pointed out, the punishment of the prostitute and her husband was closer to the pashtunwali (the traditional ethnic code of the Pathans) than to the Shariah. Even clearer was the entire local population’s absolute loathing for the state judicial system; and this was an attitude which I found among ordinary people across Pakistan.
However, it would be wrong to see the Pakistani population simply as innocent victims of a vicious judicial system run from above for the benefit of the elites. Rather, justice in Pakistan is an extension of politics by other means, and everyone with the slightest power to do so tries to corrupt and twist the judicial system to their advantage in every way possible.
Thus cases brought before the state judicial system are key weapons in the hands of individuals and groups fighting for national and local power; and in both the state and the traditional systems of justice, outcomes are determined largely by political considerations. That means kinship, wealth, influence and armed force, but also sometimes and to some extent the ability to win over public opinion in general. The means to do this have changed over time, with the modern media now playing an important role in some cases.
In the various traditional systems of justice, the powerful always had colossal advantages, albeit occasionally qualified by considerations of religious morality expressed through the influence of the Shariah. In the Pakistani state judicial system derived from the British, to this builtin bias against the poor and weak is added the appalling slowness and complexity of the system, and the ruinous costs extracted by a largely predatory judiciary and police.
All of this is well known to every Pakistani, and fear and even hatred of the state judicial system is general among the mass of the population – even among those who are exploiting the system assiduously to attack their enemies. As an Urdu couplet (with parallels in many languages round the world) has it,
The day a lawyer was born Satan said with joy,
‘Allah has made me today the father of a boy.’4
Yet at the same time, whether stemming from the teachings of Islam or from innate and universal human cravings, there exists among Pakistanis a deeply felt desire for a better form of justice. This has led to admiration in the educated classes for courageous human rights lawyers such as Asma Jehangir, and to the (alas, exaggerated) hopes attached to the Lawyers’ Movement which began in 2007 against President Musharraf and has continued in a lower key against President Zardari.
For many ordinary Pakistanis, however, this hunger for justice focuses on the Islamic code of Shariah; and as subsequent chapters will describe, at least up to the spring of 2009, the Taleban’s claim to spread Islamic justice was central to the growth of their popularity in the Pathan areas, and to the unwillingness of most Pakistanis elsewhere to support military action against them.
In the words of Imran Aslam, president of Geo TV:
Ask ordinary