Is This Your First War?

by Michael Petrou

  “Two hundred rupees,” he said, and everyone in and on the jeep laughed. “I’m only joking. Get in.”

  There was no room to get in. Instead, we stood on the bumper, squeezed between two other young men, and hung on as the jeep careened down the mountain. I tried not to look at the drop below us every time we rounded a sharp corner. One of the men clinging to the bumper filmed everything with his one free hand. The other beside me, who had large eyes, a clean-shaven face, and curly black hair, shouted in my ear over the wind and the rumble of the engine.

  “We are going to wedding,” he said.

  “Who’s getting married?”

  He pointed to a man in the passenger seat, not yet old enough to grow more than a wisp of a moustache, who wore white and had a large feather in his rolled woollen cap. A wide grin split his face.

  “He is,” the man beside me shouted. “He is king for a day.”

  It wasn’t until we left the Hunza Valley and made our way farther south, away from the company of the Ismaili and Shia Muslims who live in Pakistan’s most northern mountains and toward the more conservative, Sunni, and increasingly Pashtun areas of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, that the atmosphere around us seemed to shift — subtly at first, and then more noticeably.

  The easiest means of travel around northern Pakistan, at least for those on a limited budget, is minibuses that can be flagged down and boarded pretty much anywhere. Adam and I usually rode on the roofs of these buses — the view was better, it wasn’t crowded up there, and it avoided the seat-shuffling that went on when a woman boarded the bus so that an unrelated man wouldn’t have to sit beside her. On one leg of our trip, however, we sat inside. Adam made the mistake of reaching his hand over the shoulder of a burka-clad woman to hand our fare over to the driver in front of her. Her husband exploded in anger, grabbing Adam’s forearm and hurling it away from his wife.

  We left the main road south from China in Besham, a dusty, predominantly Pashtun town that serves as a gateway to the Swat Valley farther west. It was full of trucks, buses, and a sprinkling of gun shops. Many of the elderly men loitering on white plastic chairs in the dust outside the shops and teahouses sported beards dyed with henna to a garish shade of reddish orange. We climbed onto the roof of one of the many buses whose drivers were hustling for customers and settled ourselves among some loose furniture, the bags of the passengers below, and a box of explosives. When the driver had filled every available seat, the bus lurched forward and began rolling out of town, following the course of a river that gushed in torrents from the rounded mountains to our west. As we gained altitude, the temperature dropped and the air sweetened. Soon we were swaying through switchbacks that cut through pine forests. Long-haul transport trucks decorated like parade floats passed us on the narrow road with only inches to spare. But traffic was sparse, and the predominant odour in the air was not diesel fumes but moss and rotting leaves from the forests around us. At 2,100 metres, we passed through the Shangla Pass and into the Swat Valley. A sweeping expanse of green lay spread out below us.

  In April 2009 a video clip emerged from the Swat Valley village of Matta. It shows two turbaned men holding a seventeen-year-old girl face down on the ground, while a third thrashes her backside with a short and stiff whip. She screams and whimpers. “Please! Enough! Enough! I am repenting, my father is repenting what I have done, my grandmother is repenting what I have done….” The girl struggles to protect herself and place a hand between her backside and the whip. The man beating her admonishes his colleague: “Hold her tightly so she doesn’t move.”

  The girl was being abused according to the version of sharia, or Islamic law, that Pakistani Taliban who had taken over her village were administering. She had supposedly had an affair with a married man, though villagers reported her real crime was to have refused a marriage proposal made by a local Taliban commander, who then ordered her punishment. Such scenes were common throughout the Swat Valley since 2007, when a wing of the Pakistani Taliban, led by Maulana Fazlullah, took over much of the district, torching schools and beheading government officials.

  The Pakistani state had long been willing to tolerate the presence of Taliban on its frontier. Such groups acted as proxy forces for Pakistan in Afghanistan, and the army was slow to move against them. But Taliban control spread ever closer to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. They launched waves of suicide attacks and bombings after a bloody confrontation between the Pakistani army and Islamist students and militants at Islamabad’s Red Mosque. They are believed to have been responsible for the December 2007 murder of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister who had returned to Pakistan to contest the 2008 general election.

  “For the first time, senior Pakistani officials told me, the army’s corps commanders accepted that the situation had radically changed and the state was under threat from Islamic extremism,” Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid writes in his 2008 book, Descent into Chaos. He described the situation as a civil war.

  Even then the response of the Pakistani army was sluggish. The Taliban negotiated a series of peace deals or truces, which they promptly ignored and used to push deeper into Swat, clashing with the Pakistani army and driving its soldiers out of the district. The government faced a choice of finally striking back in force, or ceding growing swaths of its country to insurgents. It was clear that the Taliban were no longer content to limit their influence to the fringes of Pakistani territory. The video of the girl being viciously whipped swung public opinion behind the need for a confrontation. The month after the video aired, the army moved into Swat in large numbers. A three-month campaign followed that killed hundreds and displaced some two million people but ultimately brought the now shattered Swat district back under government control. The Taliban who had controlled it were pushed back into the Tribal Areas, where, as long as they directed their fury at NATO and Afghan forces across the border, the Pakistani military gave them free rein.

  When Adam and I first saw Swat, however, this was still part of an unimaginable future. Our minibus crested a final hill and the valley opened up before us — an expanse of green framed by mountains. Adam’s body swayed from side to side as he tried to keep his balance atop the lurching and over-packed vehicle. He looked back at me and grinned. “It’s beautiful,” he shouted over the sound of the wind and the shifting gears. It was.

  We began our descent toward the town of Khwazakhela, which would be the scene of heavy fighting between the Taliban and Pakistan forces in 2007. The bus stopped at a depot where a few men sold bread and patties of ground beef fried in large cylindrical cauldrons of oil. We disentangled our stiff limbs from the furniture and box of explosives on the roof of the bus, grabbed our packs, and climbed down. There were few women in the streets, and many of the men again had henna-dyed beards and wore tightly woven woollen blankets draped over their shoulders in the Afghan fashion. Some, sitting on their heels outside street-side market stalls, pulled their blankets over their heads to ward off the autumn chill and stared out at us beneath these improvised hoods. It didn’t seem like a welcoming place.

  But then, minutes after we walked into a call centre in an attempt to check in with family back home, Mohammad Hayat, a middle-aged man with a shop nearby, ushered us into his shop’s backroom, served us tea, and insisted we stay for lunch. Newspapers were spread out on the floor, and on these were placed plates of rice, bowls of yoghurt and milk, chapatti, raw onions, and chicken kahari. Hayat’s friends and members of his family joined us, sitting down on mats and more newspapers spread over his shop’s dirty floor. We ate and drank everything from communal bowls, using our fingers to pick up pieces of chicken and bread or lifting bowls to our lips to drink yoghurt.

  “The people we love and respect the most we feed like this,” he said. “With Muslims this is the most important thing — to be hospitable.”

  Hayat had not been to Canada but mentioned a friend who had tried to visit the United States. He was denied a visa.

  “T
hey think we are all terrorists. In fact, we are not.”

  When lunch was over, Ahmed, one of Hayat’s friends, led us through a labyrinth of alleys and passageways behind their shops to reach another bus stand where convoys of Suzukis were idling, their drivers waiting for passengers to take farther north into Swat. Ahmed found us a willing driver, negotiated a fare, and sent us on our way. This time we squeezed inside the bus rather than climbing on the roof. The passengers switched seats to keep a female rider from sitting next to us.

  “You’ve come thirty years too late, man,” said Ali when we checked into his guesthouse in the Swat village of Madyan a few hours later. Madyan, tucked between the Swat River and a trout-filled tributary, was once a favourite stop for Western hippies trekking from Europe to India. Some were so overcome by the beauty of the place that they stayed for months, making Ali, then a young inn owner, briefly rich and very happy. Decades later, his beard flecked with white, Ali’s English vernacular was still frozen in another era.

  “A lot of beautiful women were here, man,” Ali said, sitting later with us on plastic lawn chairs in front of his guesthouse. The sun was dipping toward the hills that rose above the valley and the river that ran through it. We were breaking apart and eating a kind of bright orange and impossibly sweet fruit I hadn’t seen before. Our hands were sticky. Ali was feeling nostalgic.

  “They would play music. We’d smoke pot together. My favourites were the German women. They were all laid back, blonde, good-looking. Peace and love. They were the best, but all the women were nice, their boyfriends too. They loved it here. And they loved this guesthouse. They said it was like Shangri-La.” He smiled and shook his head then rolled a piece of gummy hash into a hand-rolled cigarette. The paper stuck to his juice-stained fingers. He inhaled deeply and tilted his head back, puckering his lips to blow the smoke away from his face in a tight stream.

  “Do you play the guitar?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “I have one inside. A Dutch man, long hair, he left it here as a present. All the strings are broken.”

  “Did you learn to play?”

  “Not really. The girls would try to teach me.”

  Ali tried to blow hashish smoke rings and coughed loudly. “You two are the first guests I’ve had in months,” he said.

  When the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution in Iran blocked overland routes to Pakistan from Europe, the flow of liberal-minded young tourists to Ali’s guesthouse dried up.

  “I was a businessman in Europe for a while,” Ali said. “More of a salesman, really.”

  “What did you sell?”

  “Gems. Precious stones. Rubies, that sort of thing.”

  “How did that go?”

  “Not very well. I was arrested and jailed in France for two years.”

  “A salesman?”

  “They said I was a smuggler.”

  Ali returned to Pakistan, reopened his guesthouse, and waited for the tourists to come back. They didn’t. “I’d like to immigrate to Australia,” he said.

  Madyan fell to the Taliban in 2007. Scores died fighting in the area when Pakistani security forces fought to take it back two years later. I don’t know what happened to Ali, whether he ever made it to Australia or was purged by the Taliban because of his love of Western women and music. We said goodbye and caught a minibus south to Peshawar and the ungoverned Tribal Areas west of the city, where even in 2000 the Taliban’s influence was strong and growing.

  Peshawar’s history has been shaped by its geography. It lies at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, connecting Central Asia with the Indian subcontinent, and for centuries every explorer, spy, smuggler, bandit, and conquering army crossing between Europe and Asia had little choice but to pass this way. Alexander led his near-mutinous army through the pass more than two thousand years ago. The British occupied Peshawar in the 1800s and from there sent armies and secret agents into Afghanistan and beyond. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the city became the home base of the Afghan mujahideen resistance and their allies, who included Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, the CIA, and Muslim freelance volunteers from around world.

  Osama bin Laden, then little more than the son of a wealthy Yemeni construction tycoon in Saudi Arabia, showed up at this time. He set up an office in the University Town neighbourhood of the city to organize the flow of Arab volunteers hoping to get a crack at the infidel Soviets or to martyr themselves in the attempt. Bin Laden gained some fame as a cash cow but wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to cross the border and fight. He established a mountain base inside Afghanistan for several dozen Arab volunteers under his command. These so-called Afghan Arabs were brave but incompetent. Afghans fighting with them recoiled from their suicidal zeal, and the military exploits of bin Laden’s foreign volunteers were of negligible impact. But when the Russians were finally driven out, they convinced themselves that they had helped defeat a superpower. Muslim piety had triumphed over the godless might of the Soviet Union. A myth was born.

  It was during this period that al-Qaeda took shape. Founded by bin Laden and an Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, along with a small band of Arabs who had come to Afghanistan, the group’s goal was to support jihads against insufficiently Islamic regimes around the world. The United States was not an initial target but became one when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the Saudi royal family called on U.S. troops for protection. Bin Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia and offered to field an army of Arab veterans of Afghanistan to defend the country. The Saudi royal family turned him down. For bin Laden, the shame of an infidel army protecting the land of Mecca and Medina was too much to bear. Three years later, in 1993, al-Qaeda graduates bombed the World Trade Center in New York.

  Meanwhile, the civil war that erupted in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal was steadily consuming the country. Once again Peshawar cast its long shadow. In 1994, a movement of radical Islamists, calling themselves Taliban, or students, emerged in Kandahar province with the stated goal of restoring order and bringing Islamic law to Afghanistan. Many had lived in Peshawar and had studied in its madrassahs. They were led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, a one-eyed sheik from a poor family near Kandahar. Afghan refugees from the sprawling camps outside Peshawar swelled their ranks. Their base grew out of Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt and spread north. In 1996 they captured Kabul. Mullah Omar declared that Afghanistan was an Islamic emirate. He donned a cloak thought to have belonged to the prophet Mohammad and dubbed himself “Commander of the Faithful.”

  Pakistan, through its ISI spy agency, had armed and funded the Taliban since its inception. It was one of only three countries in the world to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s legitimate rulers. Having a friendly regime next door provided the Pakistani government with “strategic depth” as it faced off against its main rival, India, ensuring Pakistan could never be threatened from the west. And the Taliban’s training camps for jihadists provided recruits for the ISI to infiltrate into Kashmir and hit India there. The Taliban were Pakistan’s pawns and Afghanistan a client province to be exploited.

  Some in Afghanistan initially welcomed the Taliban. Road travel was safer. Men who raped children were punished. But the Taliban also imposed a brutal and atavistic version of Islam. They treated women like animals, forbidding them even to leave their homes unless they were covered in a bedsheet-like burka, let alone work or go to school. It is little exaggeration to say that fun itself was forbidden. Music, dancing, flying kites, all were banned as un-Islamic. On occasion the Taliban massacred those they considered ethnically or religiously impure. In 1998 they slaughtered some 6,000 Shia Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif.

  Their most serious opposition came in the form of the predominantly Tajik Northern Alliance, which held out in northern Afghanistan and in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. Here, during the 1980s, their leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, earned his nickname “Lion of Panjshir” and th
e affection of millions of Afghans because of his steadfast resistance against Soviet troops, who tried innumerable times to dislodge him and could not.

  Osama bin Laden watched the Taliban’s rise from Sudan, where he had moved in 1992 along with his al-Qaeda jihadist cohorts and was wearing out his welcome. The Saudi government had persuaded his family to cut off his multi-million-dollar allowance, and Egypt, the United States, and Saudi Arabia were all pressuring Sudan to kick him out. In 1996 he chartered a jet and returned to Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his fellow Arabs found accommodating hosts in Mullah Omar and the Taliban. It was in Afghanistan that bin Laden formally declared war against the United States and Israel or, as he put it, crusaders and Jews. He wasn’t bluffing. Al-Qaeda operatives bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, murdering hundreds, and two years later the group attacked the American navy destroyer USS Cole while it was harboured in the Yemeni port city of Aden.

  When we arrived in November 2000, a month after al-Qaeda’s attack on the Cole, Peshawar felt like the edge of a frontier. Energy oozed from every crowded nook. Swarms of kids loudly peddled sugarcane and men on exhaust-belching motorcycles roared past pastry shops that sold rice pudding out of steel vats in their front windows. But when night fell, the streets emptied and it didn’t seem safe to linger outdoors. Just outside the city was a large smugglers’ bazaar for those who needed to stock up on supplies that weren’t readily available in regular stores. Officially, as a large sign and armed guard made clear, the bazaar was closed to foreigners. But by this time both Adam and I were wearing Pakistani-style shalwar kamiz trousers and tops, and I, being a little darker than Adam, was able to sneak past the guard to see what was for sale along the market’s main drag. Vendors on one side of the dusty street specialized in opium and hashish — huge blocks of which were displayed in storefront windows. The vendors opposite boasted equally prominent displays of automatic weapons.