The 9/11 Wars (63 page)

But Sharif was also able to attract a new constituency. Though his wealth was inherited or earned during his years in power, he had the image of a self-made man, which appealed to the expanding lower middle classes. His taste for Punjabi home cooking was well known or at least well advertised, giving him an authentic image that may have been spurious but nonetheless convinced. His hesitancy in English reinforced his popular appeal. His nationalist rhetoric echoed the views of the Urdu-language papers and their tens of millions of readers.
⁸⁵
Then there was the appeal of the image of Sharif as a social conservative and, at least ostensibly, a pious Muslim. Though not members of Jamaat Islami, the Sharifs were naturally close in culture and worldview to the Islamist party. In the second of his prime ministerial terms Sharif had attempted to force through a raft of legislation enhancing the weight of religious law in Pakistan and even tried to have himself named
amir-ul momineen
, leader of the faithful.
⁸⁶
Even if in reality he was far from personally devout, such acts clearly had an impact. So too did the time Sharif had spent in Saudi Arabia and his apparent personal relationship with the kingdom’s rulers.
⁸⁷
‘The common man sees himself in Nawaz,’ said Khwaja Asif, a major businessman and a senior PML figure.
⁸⁸

The final group lobbying for power was that connected to the Bhutto dynasty and the Pakistan People’s Party. On her death, Bhutto’s young son Bilawal, a student at Oxford University, had been dubbed heir to the family political fortune. However, it was her widely reviled husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who took charge of the political organization she had led. When Musharraf was forced out of office in August 2008 under the threat of impeachment, Bhutto’s widower displayed political skill that few had suspected he possessed to secure the presidency. The former playboy, prisoner and consort inherited the presidential apartments in the palace at the foot of the Margalla hills and some of the most intractable problems faced by any leader in any theatre of the 9/11 Wars. Zardari was not known as an intellectual. This was not a problem, associates said, explaining: ‘You don’t necessarily need to be a bookworm type to be president of Pakistan.’
⁸⁹

14
Another Country: FATA

FATA

On the north-western border of Pakistan lies another country, not Afghanistan, but FATA, the seven ‘Federally Administered Tribal Agencies’. With a total population of between 3 and 4 million and a landmass of 10,500 square miles, somewhere between the size of Belgium and Israel, the FATA is a land apart. In the summer of 2008, this land hosted five main armed groups, factions or coalitions: the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda and various international militant groups, a range of tribal militia and the Pakistani army.

The roots of militancy in the FATA run back centuries. They had been created by the British in 1901 as a buffer zone along the western frontier of their south Asian dominions, adjacent to the border agreed with the Afghan monarch Abdur Rahman Khan eight years previously; the tribes there had long been known as reactionary, restive and independent. Indeed, the very establishment of such a zone was in part an admission by the British that, despite their superior weaponry and resources, continued campaigning against the Wazirs, the Mehsuds, the Afridis and the others was unlikely to definitively quell the repeated rebellions. Raj administrators agreed with local tribes that the legal reach of the authorities of India in the border zone would be limited to the towns and the roads (along with a strip of land 100 yards wide on either side) beyond which communities were allowed to police themselves, seek justice from their traditional assemblies, or
jirga
, and carry weapons. The British did, however, retain the right to mount punitive campaigns if, for example, the tribes raided the lowlands or otherwise disturbed the peace of the frontier. They were also careful to impose a system of officials known as political agents who, with their extensive powers of patronage and ability to call on significant military resources, were theoretically equipped with sufficient carrots and a big enough stick to keep order. Though the system broadly worked well, it occasionally broke down, necessitating large and lengthy deployments of troops to put down uprisings. Most of these were mobilized under the flag of revivalist Islam, even if the grievances which sparked them tended to be more banal. Often such revolts had motives that were strikingly similar to those cited by their counterparts a century or so later. Sometimes the local Pashtun tribes were simply pushing back against the authority of the Raj.
¹
Sometimes the fighting was conceived of as a defence of culture and identity. ‘The Turangzai Baba [local tribal leader and cleric] would say: “The donkeys [whites] are coming and we should stop them by force as he is destroying Islam and he is destroying our laws,” ’ remembered one elderly veteran of fighting in the 1930s.
²
Often the insurgents had projects of their own. In the 1920s, Deobandi clerics had led a group called the Jamaat-e-Mujahideen in a bid to establish a ‘pure Islamic’ state on the land between the Indus river and Kabul – exactly the same zone of conflict being fought over eighty years later.
³
Decades before the Afghan Taliban had created a religious police, tribes on the frontier had formed their own ‘movement for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice’. Reformist Islamic ideas had begun to erode more ‘folksy’ Sufi-influenced forms of religious practice by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
⁴

The British campaigns on the frontier spawned a body of literature and a set of romanticized myths in the West about the proud, honourable and warlike Pashtun, a worthy opponent for the Victorians and their successors, which proved to be both remarkably durable and remarkably inaccurate. Works of fiction, such as those of Kipling, and of questionable and highly politicized anthropology from the early twentieth century were still being quoted by Western analysts a century later despite the fact that society in the FATA, as anywhere else in the world, had changed enormously in the intervening period. This did not help those trying to formulate effective policy. As in Afghanistan and Pakistan more generally, the problem with the FATA was not that it was caught in some kind of time warp but the opposite.

How the FATA became the rear base for the Afghan
mujahideen
as well as a relatively small number of international, largely Arab volunteers is well known. However gripping the tale of spies, Saudi tycoons and Cold War manoeuvres may be, the story of the process of accelerated, violent and unmanaged social change in the FATA that was triggered by the instability of the 1970s and the wars of the 1980s and 1990s in neighbouring Afghanistan is of equal if not greater importance, though somewhat less picturesque. Traditional society on the frontier had been structured for many decades, if not centuries, by the major tribal groupings with their manifold subdivisions and by the carefully maintained balance between the religious scholars, or
ulema
, the major quasi-feudal landowners, or
khans
, and the senior tribal elders, or
maliks
, who often received substantial government patronage in return for representing the interests of the distant administration. Central too to order in the region was the harsh code of values and customs, the famous and often misunderstood
pashtunwali
, or ‘way of the Pashtuns’. Together, these elements constituted a flexible, resilient and effective system of governance.
⁵
Each of the components of the system was, however, degraded severely during the 1970s and 1980s. Most obviously, there was the massive influx of Afghan refugees from the mid 1970s onwards who, having been forced out of traditional settlements and occupations and into packed camps where aid was the primary source of resources, rapidly lost their traditional identities, allegiances and hierarchies and thus became susceptible to the call of radical Islamist groups such as Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, which had previously struggled to recruit in Pashtun rural communities. Then there was the rapid expansion of rigorous neo-traditional Deobandi Islam, propagated by
medressas
built with donations from Middle Eastern countries now flush with oil money or with cash from General Zia’s official religious funds discussed in the previous chapter.
⁶
Their teachings naturally reinforced conservative and revivalist forms of Islam that already existed in the FATA and gave the narrative of resistance to ‘moral corruption’, outsiders and ‘unbelievers’ that was a strong part of the local collective memory and identity a new and more contemporary dimension. In the north of the FATA it was the Ahl-e-Hadith or ‘Wahhabi’ strands, which became very powerful, again through the establishment of scores of
medressas
and an influx of foreign money. As in Afghanistan, the expansion of these more rigorous strands of Islam meant that the more tolerant and mystical Sufi-influenced strands were further weakened. This new radical conservatism inevitably threatened the position of many of the more traditional local clergy, who could not match the resources, spiritual or material, offered by their new competitors. It also consolidated the shared identity, clerical hierarchy, culture and worldview of the Pashtun population along the frontier zone, developing further a single common set of values, norms and worldview.

Then there was the new wealth flowing into the region. This had an equally destructive effect on local culture. With many Pashtuns working in the Gulf following the boom of the 1970s, unprecedented amounts of money had been reaching individual families in the FATA for some time. However, it was the 1980s, and the war against the Soviets, with the flow of massive aid funds and the opening up of extensive opportunities for illicit and lucrative activities such as manufacturing and trading weapons and growing, processing and trafficking opium, hashish and heroin, that saw the real collapse of the FATA’s social system. If the rising power of rigorous and highly politicized forms of Islam was challenging the power of traditional clerics, so new sources of wealth challenged the position of the
khans
and the
maliks
. Local hierarchies that had been based on patronage and resource distribution simply became redundant, with traditional landlords unable to compete with those who had access to the vast sums being generated through drugs, guns or Saudi, American and Pakistani aid. Nor, evidently, could they match their new competitors for firepower. The same was true for the political agents, the bureaucrats on whom the system for governing the FATA, barely changed since the days of the British, still depended. They too saw their powers of patronage eclipsed by new competitors and their powers of coercion rendered ineffectual against bands of heavily armed fighters or criminals.

Add a growing sectarian conflict which was in part a proxy war between major Sunni Muslim states in the Middle East and Iran, the broad rise of Islamist identities and ideologies across the Islamic world in the period and the continuing presence of hundreds of international militants in and around the FATA through the early 1990s and it is unsurprising that the region, as it had done so often over the previous decades at moments of crisis, saw the rise of a series of radical revivalist and reformist religious movements. Some were on a significant scale – such as that in Dir and Malakand to the north of Bajaur which campaigned, relatively successfully, for Shariat law in the mid 1990s. Others were more disorganized, such as the various bands responsible for what by 1998 or 1999 was being called the ‘Talibanization’ of the FATA. These groups often coalesced around veterans of the fighting in Afghanistan during the 1980s or early 1990s and led vigilante actions against DVD or music shops, hairdressers and other targets deemed responsible for the ‘moral corruption’ that local hardliners associated with ‘Westernization’.
⁷
They also enforced a new version of traditional local honour codes and punishments just as the Afghan Taliban were doing on the other side of the porous border. As the decade ended, the radicalization had intensified. In 1998 or 1999 it was still possible for a Western journalist to travel in the FATA – the author even spent an afternoon at a
dastarbandi
, or graduation ceremony, at one
medressa
near Miram Shah, eating chicken cooked with oranges as successive diners arrived and stacked their Kalashnikovs in a corner – but such trips rapidly became risky. The 9/11 attacks thus came at a critical time. As was so often the case, the new conflict they triggered only aggravated and accelerated existing trends. In 2001, the memory of the earlier wars was certainly very present. In the Khyber Pass a month after the bombing of Afghanistan had started, young men from the local Afridi tribe were very clear about what the coming conflict meant for them. ‘Our fathers, their fathers and their fathers’ fathers fought jihad,’ one said on a starry night in a compound a few miles short of the Afghan frontier. ‘Now it is our turn. We will go to war.’
⁸

THE AFGHAN TALIBAN IN THE FATA

Within twenty-four hours of the 9/11 attacks, Maleeha Lodhi, the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, had been summoned to meet the American deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage to be asked if Pakistan was ‘with or against America’. Lodhi was accompanied by Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, the ISI chief who had tried to convince his MI6 counterpart only months before that the Taliban should be diplomatically recognized by Britain.
⁹
When Ahmed tried to tell Armitage that Pakistan had always been a friend of the USA, he was cut short and was told bluntly that it was what happened now and what was going to happen in the future that was important. ‘History began today,’ the American said.
¹⁰
Within a few weeks President Musharraf had purged the ISI of the most obvious sympathizers with extremism. Ahmed was one of those forced out, and Western intelligence services took his departure as a sign that the ‘bad old days’ of Pakistan’s sponsorship of violent proxies were over. Yet Musharraf had repeatedly made clear that he acted in what he felt were Pakistan’s best interests, not for any greater international good. It was safe, therefore, to conclude that any backing for America’s War on Terror was entirely pragmatic. Active support for the Taliban may indeed have been halted as the Americans had demanded, but that did not by any means signify that the Pakistanis would not aggressively pursue what were felt to be their national security priorities.
¹¹
The ISI, which had initially resisted cutting off support to the Afghan Taliban, had been very active during the campaign of 2001. Sometimes the agency had worked with Western security services. Sometimes it had pursued its own agenda. But in either case, the ISI’s institutional vision of Pakistan’s strategic interests had always come first.