B005OWFTDW EBOK (23 page)

To steel those nerves, Kamal convened a
qaumi jirga
– a grand meeting of the Marwat sub-tribes. On a sweltering summer morning, about three hundred tribesmen, agreeing to shelve their internecine feuds temporarily, gathered under a stand of trees. The police stood by an armoured vehicle parked a short distance away, watching impotently. Kamal held centre stage, fanned by a bodyguard as he addressed the men squatting around him. He turned on his heel and jabbed the air. ‘If the government will do nothing, then we must take matters into our own hands,’ he thundered. ‘Now is the time for action!’ The tribesmen roared their approval.

Afterwards, about twenty senior elders adjourned to a small police building. Suddenly, a young man with greasy black hair, a glittering prayer cap and a bandolier of bullets across his chest appeared at the door. Seeing me, he refused to shake my hand. He was a member of the local Taliban. He spoke briefly. The Taliban had no beef with the Marwats, he declared; their principal interest was to fight American soldiers in Afghanistan. Then the cocky young fighter tucked his pistol into its holster and walked out.

A
s Taliban violence engulfed the frontier, the conflict started to have an impact on Kamal’s life. Fighting near Peshawar forced him to take a circuitous detour when travelling to Lakki. He left his aeroplane in its hangar, fearing it might be attacked if he flew home. Rockets fell on Bannu, a town to the north. After failing to show up for supper in Islamabad one evening, he sent me a text. ‘Sorry. On my way to Peshawar. One of my friends died in a suicide attack today.’

Initially, Kamal favoured containment. He warned the Shah Hassan Khel militants to curb their ambitions; he organized patrols to fend off raiders from Waziristan. But then the army deployed five hundred soldiers, who camped on the lawns of Lakki Hospital, and Kamal was forced to tip his hand. He cooperated with the army and told the local clerics not to help the insurgents. ‘I warned them that if I bleed, then so will you,’ he told me on a visit to Islamabad. ‘We do not fight holy wars in the settled areas.’

The Marwats’ defiance brought them to the attention of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader holed up in the mountains of nearby south Waziristan, and Pakistan’s most wanted man. A former bodybuilder, Mehsud had risen from humble origins to become a ruthlessly innovative guerrilla leader. He pioneered the use of suicide bombers; the ISI and CIA blamed him for the assassination of opposition icon Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. He had a gift for gun politics – dozens of smaller groups, such as Fazlullah’s in Swat, had united under the umbrella of his Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) group. But Lakki Marwat refused to bend before him. In January 2009, Mehsud demanded to meet the people who dared defy his advance. After some prevarication, they agreed.

The meeting was a highly secretive and carefully choreographed affair. Kamal denied to the local press that it had taken place, fearing retribution from the authorities. Piecing together accounts from several Marwat elders, I learned what had happened.

At midnight, a force of one hundred Marwat fighters rumbled into Jandola, on the border of Waziristan, to the agreed meeting place on a mountain slope; an equal-sized Taliban force was waiting for them. Guided by the light of their mobile phones, the Marwat elders stumbled through the dark, finding Mehsud perched against a rock, being tended to by a doctor. The Taliban emir was said to suffer from kidney disease, or diabetes, and required regular medical attention.

A Thermos flask with tea and a packet of biscuits were produced, and the two sides sat in a circle. They began to talk. Mehsud complained that the Marwats’ obstinate resistance was preventing him from attacking the police and army in Lakki. ‘You must permit me, I am at war with the government,’ he said. Kamal parried that Mehsud’s targets – the police, but also the health workers and teachers – were Marwats. Should they be killed or kidnapped,
Pashtunwali
would oblige Kamal to retaliate. ‘You have your compulsions, I have mine,’ one witness recalled him saying. ‘As a Pashtun I cannot deviate from my tradition.’

It was effectively a debate between two visions of the frontier – Kamal representing the old traditions, Mehsud as the harbinger of a new order framed around a lumpen version of sharia law. There could be no agreement. ‘It’s very simple,’ Kamal reportedly told him. ‘You kill two of my people; I will kill ten of yours.’

After a few hours the two sides rose, shook hands and departed. Kamal returned to the sandy plains of Lakki, where his tribesmen would redouble their fortifications; Mehsud slunk back into the inky mountains of Waziristan.

O
n 1 January 2010, I was on holiday in the west of Ireland when the radio brought news of a suicide bombing in Pakistan. Of itself, this was nothing new. Over 8,500 people had died violently in the northwest over the previous year, many in suicide attacks. But this one had an unusual twist: the bomber had targeted a volleyball game. Then the newsreader said something that riveted my attention: Lakki Marwat.

I phoned Kamal. He was fine, he said, but the situation in the dilapidated local hospital was dire: about two hundred people had been watching the volleyball in an enclosed courtyard when the bomber struck; at least half were dead and most of the others badly injured. I thought back to the game I had seen during the election campaign, and imagined the devastation of a blast in such a tiny space. The attack had taken place, Kamal added, in Shah Hassan Khel, the hillbilly village long controlled by the Taliban.

A month later, back in Pakistan, I went down to Lakki with Kamal. The journey was tense. Entering the district, we passed a culvert where a roadside bomb had killed the deputy police chief six months earlier. Further along was the rubble of a madrasa, destroyed by the army. As we neared Lakki town, a car with a single occupant crossed our convoy twice. Kamal’s bodyguard, Mina, phoned from the lead vehicle. He worried it was a suicide bomber. If he saw the mystery car again, he said, he would open fire. Kamal grunted his assent. Mercifully, the vehicle didn’t reappear.

Kamal’s house was ringed with concrete barriers and protected by gunmen; regular traffic was not allowed to approach. That night we had supper with a senior security official. He arrived in secretive circumstances after dark, travelling in an unmarked car and wearing civilian clothes. He had reason to be cautious: the Lakki police chief had recently quit after the Taliban threatened to kill his children. ‘The man got shit-scared,’ said Kamal. ‘Once that happens, you can’t expect him to do any good.’ The security official had just returned from United Nations duty in Liberia, where he taught best practice to local police. The reality at home was more messy. After supper two tribesmen joined us. The tall one was clean-shaven and wore a neat waistcoat and a crafty smile. Speaking English, Kamal explained they were Lakki’s leading criminals wanted for a string of robberies and killings. But instead of arresting them, he proposed a deal: in return for a temporary amnesty from the law, the criminals would help patrol the hills against Taliban encroachment. ‘You need criminals like this. They know where a Talib gets his food, where he sleeps, who are his friends,’ he explained. The security official agreed. ‘I’m turning a blind eye, for now,’ he told me after they left. ‘I told them, “You go and kill those terrorists, and we won’t do anything against you.”’

The elders of Shah Hassan Khel were also mobilizing. The following morning the so-called village ‘peace committee’ – a dozen grim men slinging Kalashnikovs – trooped into Kamal’s courtyard. They were led by Mushtaq Ahmed, a bony-faced man with quivering hands. He explained the events leading up to the volleyball atrocity.

At first, he said, some villagers had supported the Taliban in Shah Hassan Khel. They were drawn to the charismatic young commander, Maulvi Ashraf Ali, and his flowery speeches about the beauty of sharia law and the decadence of Western culture. Youngsters were captivated by his dramatic yarns of fighting the infidel Americans in Afghanistan. But then the Taliban’s popularity eroded. People didn’t appreciate the ban on girls’ schooling and volleyball. They realized the Taliban had another agenda. ‘Ashraf Ali talked about sharia. What he really wanted was power,’ one man said.

Then the Pakistan Army forced them to take sides. In mid-2009, troops surrounded Shah Hassan Khel and warned the villagers to flee. Then they began pounding the houses with artillery and sent helicopter gunships after the Taliban. A wounded Ashraf Ali was carted away in a wheelbarrow; his men slipped off to Waziristan. But they weren’t safe: months later, seventeen Marwat Taliban died in a CIA drone strike near Mir Ali; the Taliban threatened to return. But the villagers were standing behind Kamal. ‘Enmity went to the maximum level,’ Kamal said.

The villagers celebrated New Year’s Day with a game of volleyball, which the Taliban had previously banned. Ahmed’s face darkened as he described what followed. The bomber, who was driving an explosives-laden jeep, was a local lad – a misguided nineteen-year-old who had fallen for the Taliban’s tales. He careened into the volleyball crowd, crushing several people before detonating his payload. After the explosion, Ahmed found two relatives among the rubble and charred bodies. Everyone lost somebody, even the bomber: his own stepbrother was among the dead. Now, Ahmed said, the village had a gargantuan blood feud to settle – ninety-seven confirmed deaths. ‘We are Pashtun and we want revenge,’ he said in a quiet, cool voice. ‘We will track them down. We will capture them. And we will kill them, one by one.’

But how? Kamal huddled with the ‘peace committee’, plotting to send fighters into Waziristan to hunt down Ashraf Ali. It seemed quixotic: the Marwats were a small tribe with limited means and Waziristan was crawling with ruthless Taliban. And the enemy had already scored a symbolic victory: the volleyball court in Shah Hassan Khel was empty, Ahmed said, since most of the players were dead.

On the way back to Peshawar, Kamal predicted that the Taliban wouldn’t last. They were the ‘rejected people’, he said – the dregs of society, incapable of delivering on their promises. ‘We have a saying,’ he said in his gravelly voice, as Lakki disappeared behind us, ‘If a man with a bald head grows nails, then tomorrow he will injure himself.’ In other words: give power to foolish men and they will eventually destroy themselves.

He is right, to a degree. The Taliban revolution is faltering. In Swat, Taliban promises of redistributed wealth gave way to arbitrary violence that alienated ordinary people. Behind the showy Islamist rhetoric, the Taliban lack a viable political plan for delivering the promised revolution. Marxist revolutionaries they are not. The Taliban’s military limits are also becoming clear. Overblown predictions of militants marching on Peshawar, made as recently as 2008, are rapidly receding. A sweeping army operation in summer 2009 drove the Taliban from Swat, although their leaders remain at large. Fazlullah slipped into Afghanistan; the last I heard, his spokesman Sirajuddin was on the run. Last October the military operations extended to south Waziristan; a few months earlier, in August, an American drone killed Baitullah Mehsud outside a relative’s house. The last thing the CIA operative saw, before the missile obliterated Mehsud, was an image of a sick man, lying on a rope bed, hooked up to a drip.

Yet there is no denying it: the Taliban have shaken Pashtun society to its core. The revolt exposed the folly of the 1980s jihad, when north-west Pakistan became a laboratory for a dangerous experiment in religious and violent indoctrination. Seeds planted then, watered by America’s post-9/11 policies, are sprouting into cancerous plants. Recently, two young Pashtun men, one from Afghanistan and the other from Peshawar, were implicated in plots to bomb the New York subway and Times Square. The Pakistani, Faisal Shahzad, is the son of a senior airforce officer. The revolt has laid bare other failings: the chronic neglect of the tribal belt; the foolish jihadist meddling of the Pakistani Army; the deep inequalities in Pashtun society; and perhaps, even, the limitations of centuries-old
Pashtunwali
.

Almost 125 years ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’. Today that arithmetic is altered. Army offensives may kill the Taliban militants; Anwar Kamal vows never to give in to them. But the fault lines they have exposed are here to stay.

Translated by Sher Zaman Taizi