Pakistan: A Hard Country (67 page)
We take pride in these things, which in reality should be a cause of shame. Hence the claim of most Pukhtoons: whatever good is found, is there because of us and whatever bad is found in society is the creation of aliens.6
Or as Noman Wazir, CEO of Frontier Foundries, put it with deep bitterness: ‘There is al this talk of helping bring Pashtuns into the twenty-first century, but this is nonsense. It’s too much of a leap. What we need to do is bring them from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.’
Admittedly, he is a steel manufacturer.
The Political Agent rules in FATA – or used to – through the maliks, a term usual y translated as tribal chiefs but better understood as tribal notables. These are not chiefs in a traditional sense, but are chosen by the government, and are very numerous: some 35,000 in al throughout FATA. They include many local religious figures. The theory behind the system is that government would pick men of real moral and political authority in their tribe, but there are many stories of Political Agents appointing men who had bribed them, or even appointing their own servants. Political parties are banned from standing for election in FATA, and ful adult suffrage in national elections was introduced only in the 1990s.
Legal y, the Political Agent governs on the basis of the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), which are themselves drawn chiefly from t he pashtunwali. These differ greatly from the British-derived state code of Pakistan, especial y in providing for col ective punishment of clans and tribes for crimes committed by one of their members. This provision sounds and indeed is harsh, but is also a traditional and logical response to a situation in which ties of tribal solidarity mean that criminals can always be assured of refuge among fel ow tribesmen.
The demolition of the houses of enemies as a reprisal is an old Pathan custom; it degrades the prestige of an enemy but because it does not involve kil ing it does not automatical y lead to blood feuds. In the past, it was widely employed both by the British and by many of the leaders of Islamist revolts against the British. The FCR are often pointed to as a key obstacle to progress and development in the tribal areas, and doubtless this is true; but deciding what to replace them with is another matter. On one thing the great majority of inhabitants of FATA with whom I have spoken are united: they do not want to come under Pakistani state law in its existing form.
PATHAN POLITICAL CULTURE
The political culture of the Pathan areas of Pakistan is related to that of other parts of the country, but with particular local features which are in part bound up with the pashtunwali. The first, especial y marked in FATA, is a much stronger tradition of revolt and war, not just against outside invasion, but against government in general. This is related to the greater role both of religion and of tribes and makes Pathans – even to some degree in the ‘settled areas’ – very different from the much more docile populations of Punjab and Sindh.
It was a Sindhi superintendent of police who told me that the police in the NWFP committed the fewest abuses against the population, and especial y against women, of any of the Pakistani forces, because up there, if you rape a woman she has relatives who wil avenge her with a bul et through your head – not just brothers, but even distant cousins. Whereas in Sindh and even more Punjab, people are far more beaten down, and much more accepting of whatever the police do, and kinship bonds are weaker.
The key cultural importance of clan solidarity and col ective revenge (badal) in the pashtunwali is obviously of key importance here.
The second, closely related feature is the greater egalitarianism and individualism of the Pathans – once again, chiefly in the tribal areas, but to some extent throughout the province. As a friend in the FATA Secretariat told me:
In Balochistan, people owe unconditional obedience to one hereditary Sardar. That has never been true among the Pashtuns. Here, there have always been lots of lesser chiefs within one tribe. Even in the settled areas and Swat, where the power of the khans was traditional y much greater, people could and did often switch al egiance from one khan to another. As for the tribal areas and especial y Waziristan, there have been no longstanding political dynasties, and even the greatest malik was always only a first among equals.
The lesser importance of hereditary loyalty compared to Punjab and Sindh increases the importance of personal prestige (in Pashto, nom, or literal y ‘name’, as in ‘reputation’, or as we would say in English, ‘having a name’ for something), which may initial y be inherited, but which then has to be constantly renewed by the individual leader. This is where the Taleban’s targeting of maliks in FATA and political leaders in the NWFP has been so frighteningly effective. As my FATA acquaintance put it:
So many maliks have been kil ed by the Taleban that they are scared, and with good reason. In public, they denounce military actions against the Taleban, while in private they beg us to continue them. The problem is that everyone knows they are scared, and if you are scared, you cannot be a malik in anything but name. You know how this society values physical courage more than anything else.
The same is true of the politicians in the NWFP, who have to keep running in national or local elections, and therefore to keep appearing at public ral ies. If they have opposed the Taleban, then such appearances are standing invitations to suicide bombers – who have indeed claimed several political victims. The problem is that even if the politicians can afford bul et-proof glass screens like the leading politicians in Pakistan and India, that makes them look scared. I was told that the nom of Asfandyar Wali Khan, leader of the ANP, suffered a terrible blow when, after an assassination attempt against him in Charsadda in October 2008 which kil ed one of his guards, he left town immediately in a helicopter and did not attend the guard’s funeral.
Final y, and related to the individualism of the Pathans, is the even greater fissiparousness of Pathan politics, even within the same family. So universal is rivalry between cousins that it even has a formal na m e : taburwali. In Swat, Fredrik Barth studied how the rigid institutionalization of faction permeated local politics. In the past, and to some degree up to the present, this rivalry often spil ed over into violence, which the pashtunwali acted to mediate and restrain, but never could and never was intended to prevent. The pashtunwali, in other words, is not a code of law, but rather a set of guidelines for regulating what is known in anthropology as ‘ordered anarchy’.
Feuds between families (or, rather, often rival bits of the same family) are not often as violent as in the past, but the possibility is always there. Above al , however, this tradition means that parties in the NWFP are even more likely to split and split again than is the case elsewhere in Pakistan. Several local leaders of the ANP and PPP
whom I visited spent much of the interviews abusing not their party’s opponents, but their own party col eagues.
In Afghanistan in the 1990s, the Taleban succeeded in crushing local feuds with their own harsh and rigid version of the Shariah – though only after these feuds had assumed a real y monstrous character in the wake of the col apse of the Communist state and the triumph of the Mujahidin. If the Taleban in Pakistan can succeed in binding their tribal fol owers together through the discipline of their version of the Shariah, they wil have gained a frightening advantage over their mainstream political opponents in the Pathan territories.
The social and cultural difference between most of the tribal areas on the one hand, and the Peshawar val ey and Swat on the other, can be summed up in the nature of their hujras. This absolutely central Pakistani social, cultural and political institution is hard to translate, having elements of the feudal audience chamber, the men’s club, the vil age hal , the debating society, the barracks for political workers, and the guest-house.
In a sexual y segregated society where it is out of the question for any men but the closest relatives to attend mixed gatherings within houses, the hujras are where the men of a given area meet to discuss everything under the sun. Occasional y they are col ectively maintained, but usual y they are owned by some local big man, and attendance at his hujra is to a greater or lesser extent a sign of al egiance or at least deference to him.
In the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan that I have visited, hujras are general y part of the house itself, though firmly separate from it. As far as I can see from the very few family quarters I have been al owed to visit, the hujras general y do not differ in style from the family quarters: guests and host al sit on carpets on the ground, leaning on cushions arranged in a rectangle round the wal s. Of course the quality of the carpets, the stove and the roof wil differ according to the wealth and power of the host, and everyone there wil know that wealth and power very precisely; but cultural norms dictate an appearance both of equality and of common culture.
It is quite otherwise with the hujras of the big political landlords and bosses in the Peshawar val ey and Swat. These tend to be clearly distanced from the main house, and clearly poorer, and they have broken chairs and sofas, not carpets and cushions. This marks the social, economic and to some extent cultural differentiation of the Pathan elites in the ‘settled areas’ and Swat, which the Taleban have used to increase their support among the poor. Anecdotal evidence suggests that big landlord politicians spend less and less time in their hujras, preferring to stay in the luxury of their family quarters.
This somewhat resembles the process in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries by which first the nobility, then the lesser gentry and final y the bigger farmers ceased to eat in hal s or kitchens, together with their servants and fol owers, and ate instead in their own dining-rooms. However, in those days the English gentry did not need to appeal to their fol owers for votes, and were not faced with a popular revolt against their rule.
THE AWAMI NATIONAL PARTY (ANP)
Hereditary members of the landowning elites dominate the Awami National Party (ANP), the moderate Pathan nationalist party of the region; and class hostility to their dominance has fuel ed support for the Taleban in Swat and elsewhere and may in the long run help to destroy the ANP. The party has alternated in government and opposition since independence, and in 2008 for the first time formed the NWFP government on its own (though with PPP support) after winning the provincial elections of that year. The ANP’s political ancestors came together on the basis of resistance to British rule. It has been led from its beginnings by yet another South Asian political dynasty, the Wali Khans, a landowning family from the Peshawar val ey.
Neither the ANP nor the Islamist JUI can be said to dominate NWFP
politics, because no party has been able to do this. The main national parties – the PPP and Muslim League – also have a strong presence i n the province, and with help and patronage from Islamabad have often been able to lead coalition governments. To judge by my interviews with ordinary people in the NWFP in 2008 – 9, it is possible that the Muslim League, with its greater Islamic identity and dislike of the US, may improve its vote in the Pathan areas, despite its close identification with the province of Punjab. In part this is because it retains a distance from the Pakistani army, on which the ANP now depends for protection.
Al the parties have, however, been plagued by one of the perennial curses of Pakistani politics – an endless tendency to split when particular leaders do not receive enough patronage to reward their kinsmen and supporters, or when they clash with other leaders over issues of status and prestige. Thus the politician who was the mainstay of the Musharraf administration in the province, national Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao, was leader of what had been a famous local PPP political landowning dynasty in the province, and had been chief minister of a PPP-led government in the early 1990s. Sherpao split from the PPP and founded his own PPP (Sherpao) either because he was not rewarded sufficiently by the party during its periods of government in the 1990s, or because he had lost faith in Benazir Bhutto’s leadership, or both. The ANP has also repeatedly split along lines of family al egiance and advantage.
Compared to the PPP and Muslim League, however, the ANP’s Pathan nationalism, ostensibly left-wing, populist ideology and deep roots in local society should make the ANP a principal obstacle to the spread of the Taleban among Pakistani Pathans. Indeed, its victory over the Islamist parties in the February 2008 elections was portrayed by most Western observers in precisely this light.
Perhaps, after Western forces leave Afghanistan, the ANP wil indeed be able to play this role. So far they have been crippled in this regard by a range of factors. Firstly, the ANP has always been dominated by landowning khans from the Peshawar val ey. Of course, this al ows them to rely on support from the traditional fol owers of those khans, but it also puts them at a disadvantage when faced with the egalitarian and even social y revolutionary message of the Taleban. Moreover, while the Taleban can at least appeal to Pathan nationalist feeling in the struggle against the hated American presence in Afghanistan, the ANP’s Pathan nationalism has become an increasingly threadbare rhetorical fiction.
