The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  David Frost

  Bikini Line

  Chemist

  Gym

  Ring Parmesh – dress for Vogue

  Such are the concerns of the rich and famous.

  At that moment Imran finally emerged from the bathroom, wearing his best salwar. While the photographer re-arranged him in a chair, trying to persuade him to prop his head on his knuckles in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, I asked him what Jemima thought of his entry in to politics.

  ‘She understood the dilemma I was facing,’ said Imran. ‘I never particularly wanted to go in to politics. But the country was quite literally on the verge of collapse. Every day, people would come to me and say, “You’ve got to do something.” Now I’m going to try to get Pakistan out of this mess. If I fail, at least I’ll know I’ve given it my best shot.’

  But was Jemima not horrified by the dangers, I asked. I hardly needed to remind him that the life expectancy of senior politicians in South Asia was not very high. On the day he had announced that he was planning to stand for election, a bomb had exploded in his cancer hospital, timed to coincide with his arrival at the building. Had he not been detained and arrived late, he would now be dead.

  ‘Of course there is a danger,’ he replied. ‘Everyone in my party is worried I will be assassinated. If you take on the political mafia, this is something you must expect.’

  Later I discovered from his friend Yusouf Salahuddin that many years before, when he was still a young cricketer, Imran had visited a renowned fortune-teller in Spain. She had told him that he would live to a happy old age. Only one thing troubled her. ‘Do not ever go in to politics,’ she said, ‘for if you do, you will be killed.’ Imran at this stage had never for one minute considered entering politics. But according to Yusouf he had never forgotten the prophecy, and in due course it had made him hesitate for several years before he finally decided to go ahead and take the risk.

  ‘Then again, I could die this evening in a car crash,’ continued Imran. ‘Or tomorrow, from cancer. Anything can happen. It’s not really worth worrying about. Fear is the biggest barrier in anyone’s life. Fear makes you a small person. Faith gives you courage. In the end, you die when you die,’ he said, nonchalantly shrugging his shoulders. ‘There’s nothing to be done about it. Such things are in the hands of the Almighty.’

  Postscript

  In the event, Imran was not assassinated, but nor did he or any of his nominees win a single seat in the election. Indeed, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf was so disorganised that Imran discovered he was not even eligible to vote, as no one had bothered to register him. As the Pakistani pundits had predicted, the crowds at the rallies did not translate in to votes, and the better-organised political parties made electoral mincemeat of the Justice Movement.

  When the votes had all been counted, Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League stormed home to a stunning victory, with one of the largest majorities in Pakistan’s history – much to the bemusement of the British press, which by and large had presented the election as a two-horse contest between Imran and Benazir, and which had almost totally ignored Nawaz. A few months later, in the British general election, Imran’s failure was closely reproduced by his father-in-law Sir James Goldsmith, whose Referendum Party gained almost as much publicity as Imran’s Justice Movement, and to equally little effect.

  The Tehrik-e-Insaaf remains in existence, albeit on the very margins of Pakistani politics. Despite the virtual meltdown of Benazir’s PPP, the prospects for Imran’s political future remain fairly modest. His party has, however, succeeded in putting the issue of corruption in to the centre of Pakistani political debate, no small achievement in a country which has become so inured to the dishonesty and venality of its politicians that before Imran’s intervention, corruption was considered as much a part of everyday political life as addressing rallies or attending parliament.

  On the Frontier

  PESHAWAR, 1989

  Violence is to the North-West Frontier what religion is to the Vatican. It is a raison d’être, a way of life, an obsession, a philosophy. Bandoliers hang over the people’s shoulders, grenades are tucked in to their pockets. Status symbols here are not Mercedes or Savile Row suits; in Peshawar you know you’ve arrived when you can drive to work in a captured Russian T-72 tank.

  The pathological frame of mind of the frontier people is partly derived from the harshness of the landscape. It is hard, barren, dry country, drained of colour, warmth and softness. The mountainsides are grey and sheer, covered with sharp mica schist, the tedium relieved only at the valley bottoms with windbreaks of poplar and ashok. There is no snow here – it is too dry – but the winds from the snow peaks sweep down the slopes and the scarred valley sides and brush the streets clear of people. The sky is grey and the air is grey and the greyness seeps in to the ground and the stones and the buildings. The only colours are the red and yellow silk flags flying over the new graves in the graveyards. As you wander past, you can feel winter lying like a curled dragon across the land.

  The people here are as cold and hard as the schist. Blank, stony faces with long, drawn features look out from blank forests of facial hair. The sub-zero temperature makes them withdraw in to themselves, both mentally and physically. They lift up their knees to their chins and wrap their heavy Kashmiri shawls around both. On top, their heads are covered with woollen rollmop caps. You see only the dark eyes peering out in to the cold. Eighty per cent are illiterate. Yet they are proud. They sneer through their moustaches, eyes levelled straight, in contempt as much as in curiosity.

  These people – the Pathans – have never been conquered, at least not since the time of Alexander the Great. They have seen off centuries of invaders – Persians, Arabs, Turks, Moghuls, Sikhs, British, Russians – and they retain the mixture of arrogance and suspicion that this history has produced in their character. History has also left them with a curious political status. Although most Pathans are technically within Pakistan, the writ of Pakistan law does not carry in to the heartland of their territories.

  These segregated areas are in effect private tribal states, out of the control of the Pakistan government. They are an inheritance from the days of the Raj: the British were quite happy to let the Pathans act as a buffer zone on the edge of the Empire, and they did not try to extend their authority in to the hills. Where the British led, the modern Pakistani authorities have followed. Beyond the checkpoints on the edge of Peshawar, tribal law – based on the institutions of the tribal council and the blood feud – rules unchallenged and unchanged since its origins long before the birth of Christ.

  The tribal areas are officially closed to all foreigners, as their safety cannot be guaranteed by the Pakistan government: kidnapping and murder are so frequent here that they are virtually cottage industries. To visit you have to smuggle yourself quietly across the tribal border, ideally in the company of some tribal elder. It is not difficult to do this, but it does require a little care and preparation.

  In the shops in the bazaar in Darra Adam Khel, just over the border in the tribal territories, lines of high-explosive warheads sit in glass cupboards facing on to the street as innocently as jars of humbugs in an English village store. The stacked mortar shells and the anti-tank ammunition are available over the counter, for cash, as if they were tins of Heinz baked beans. Nearby the belts of machine-gun bullets are hung up like strings of onions. Outside, left lying around in the streets like so much discarded gardening equipment, can be found heavy machine-guns, rocket-launchers and field-guns. There is a fantastic, almost surreal feel to the place: here we go round the arms bazaar, half a pound of tuppenny shells, five green gasmasks sitting on a wall.

  Mohammed Rafiq, prop., Khyber Military Supplies, (Pvt) Ltd, is a serious man with thick black glasses, a pinstripe waistcoat and a tall Astrakhan hat. He serves cardamom tea in delicate porcelain bowls and moans about the end of the Afghan war.

  ‘Sahib, I am telling you the truth,’ he said, sipping at his bowl. ‘Five year ago we we
re selling forty or fifty Kalashnikovs a day, no problem. Now business is not good. Occasionally we are selling some anti-aircraft missiles, now and then an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. But the Afghan war is over. Now it is only our tribesmen who are buying.’

  This thought appeared to depress Mohammed Rafiq. But his assistant Abdul Qadir was more optimistic.

  ‘Our tribesmen are still good customers,’ he said, wobbling his head from side to side in the Indian manner. ‘Everyone is still wanting many guns.’

  Mohammed Rafiq nodded in agreement. ‘Our people are liking too much these arms. In the tribal areas you do not need permit, not even for tank.’

  ‘Take middle-rank man,’ said Abdul Qadir philosophically. ‘He does not have the comforts of life. But he has gun and pistol and rifle, maybe two: one Lee Enfield for tradition-sake, one Kalashnikov for killing people.’

  ‘If he is big man – a malik – he may have rocket-launcher and anti-aircraft gun. Too many gun. Is good business.’

  ‘And they actually use these guns?’ I asked.

  ‘Often they are using.’

  ‘On who?’

  ‘On each other.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the assistant proudly. ‘Our tribal people are having these enemies and they are having to kill them. All the people of the North-West Frontier are gunfighters.’

  As we spoke, the wail of a muezzin pierced the air from a loudspeaker outside.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mohammed Rafiq. ‘This is the time of our prayer.’

  The two partners got out strips of carpet from under a heavy machine-gun and laid them down behind the desk. Intoning their prayers, they began rising and falling so that all you could see was two Astrakhan hats bobbing up and down between the telephone and the stapler on the desk.

  On the way back to Peshawar I called on Khan Abdul Wali Khan, once one of the great landlords and politicians of the area, now a frail and half-blind old man. We sat in his summer house in the middle of his irrigated garden, beneath great jungles of climbing bougainvillaea, looking out on his flowerbeds full of yellow narcissi, roses and chrysanthemums. There was a sound of birdsong and running water. The Khan poured jasmine tea and gestured at the bowls of walnuts, dates and raisins on the table. I told him what I had seen at the Darra arms bazaar.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There are now more than one million Kalashnikovs in this province alone. It has got completely out of control.’

  He shook his head sadly.

  ‘I feel,’ he said, ‘as if I’m living on an ammunition dump.’

  The bazaar in Peshawar is the great meeting place of the tribes. It is here that the region’s produce is brought to be sold, here that goods smuggled over the Afghan border pass in to Pakistan, here that news and gossip is passed on and exchanged. Appropriately enough, the main street of the bazaar is known as the Qissa Khawani, the Street of the Storytellers.

  It is only here, as you wander through the bazaar, that you realise the great diversity of racial types that the different invasions have left behind them. The genes of a hundred different races meet here and intermingle. The passage of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes has elongated many eyes and turned to silky down the normally thick beard of a Pathan chin. Bright Aryan-blue eyes flash beneath mountainous turbans, calling to mind the old tales of Alexander’s lost legions left stranded in these mountains – and also the taste for British memsahibs that the Pathans developed over the century following 1840. Curly hair and Semitic noses remind one of the (admittedly slightly far-fetched) legends which maintain that the Pathans are a lost tribe of Israel – those who got separated from Moses during the forty years wandering in the desert and mistakenly stumbled in to the Hindu Kush while looking for the way back to Egypt.

  The contents of the bazaar are as diverse as the people within it. Along with the rugs and sheepskin coats, the karakul caps and the Chitrali cloaks, the pavements of Peshawar appear to be the end of the line for many of the knitted woollies and discarded trousers proudly donated by tens of thousands of Home Counties grannies to Save the Children or Oxfam. Ten yards further down the street plastic mirrors, broken toy tanks and red waterpistols all appear to have fallen off the back of a lorry en route from Taiwan. The fraudulent Rolexes, brass idols, cassettes of wailing music and garish calendars have been smuggled across the border from India.

  But alongside this small-scale junk business is hidden another much more lucrative trade. In the last few years many of the mud-brick houses in Peshawar have been faced with marble. Goatherds have become millionaires and bazaars boulevards. The same transformation has left the lobby of the Hotel Pearl Continental in Peshawar one of the strangest sights in Pakistan. The Pearl Continental is among the most lavish establishments of its kind in South Asia, but unlike its rivals it is not full of Western tourists and businessmen. The people who dine in its five restaurants and spend in its lavish shopping arcade are wild-looking tribesmen, hung with ammunition belts and weapons, eating with their hands, appearing to the casual observer too poor to be eating anywhere more luxurious than the kebabji of the bazaars. Yet these men have money, and in no small quantity. They pay for their meals in cash, handing out bundles of notes from the sports bags they keep tucked by their sides.

  The source of this money is no mystery to the inhabitants of Peshawar, although it is a matter for some indignation. ‘I am number two in this hotel,’ I was told by Mohammed Riaz, the assistant manager of the Pearl Continental. ‘I work thirteen hours a day and have been working like this for eight years. But in that time how much do I manage to save? Perhaps one hundred thousand rupees [£2,000] in two years. With that I can afford a small motorbike. But I see my classmates: they have beautiful Suzuki jeeps, some even have Mercedes. I ask, “How much do these cost?” They reply, “Seven hundred thousand.” I ask, “Where did you get that money?” They reply, “We have shops.” Shops! Shops do not make this sort of money. Of course it is drugs money. Go to the tribal areas – you will see there bad land and no industry. Everyone there is uneducated and illiterate. But many of the tribesmen are driving around in big BMWs. They are all in it up to their necks.’

  According to US drug enforcement officials, about 30 per cent of all American and perhaps 80 per cent of all British heroin passes through Peshawar. The poppies are grown in the tribal areas and in Mujahedin-held areas of Afghanistan. From there the poppy heads are brought to one of sixty illicit processing laboratories dotted around the Khyber Pass. The processed heroin then passes to Peshawar, where it is loaded on to lorries – or occasionally on to military transports – and taken to Karachi. Then it is shipped to the West. Pakistani customs officers actively encourage the trade. Their monthly salary is equivalent to about £40, but payoffs from the drug mafias are so lucrative that highly skilled graduates compete to bribe their way in to the customs service. A recent survey at Karachi University found the customs service to be the single most popular career.

  Most of the rich men in Peshawar are involved in the drug trade some way, as is much of the Pakistani civil and military establishment: known heroin smugglers sit in parliament. In Pakistan they can buy themselves out of trouble. Only when they venture abroad are they in danger of being arrested: the brother of the Chief Minister of the North-West Frontier and the son of the province’s Governor are currently both in jail near New York on narcotics charges.

  Yet even the Americans have to tread carefully here. Pakistan is a valuable and fragile ally, which cannot be bullied and invaded like Colombia or Panama. Pakistan is a base near the Gulf, a base for the operations in Afghanistan, and a base on the Iranian border. For this reason the Americans put up with the martial law of General Zia, and now they put up with the new and ever-expanding drug culture for the same reason.

  Landi Khotal, at the top of the Khyber, is the nerve centre of the opium trade and home to many of Pakistan’s biggest drug barons. Hiring a guard armed with an American-made automatic rifle, I managed to wangle a pass from the tribal authorities and set off s
oon after dawn in an old Morris Traveller, still in service as a taxi after thirty-five years.

  We passed a clutch of mud-walled Afghan refugee camps and then were out of the town and on to the plain of Peshawar. As we came to the border of the tribal area two ominous signs reared out of the scrub:

  SEEK HELP FROM ALMIGHTY GOD

  and beyond it:

  BETTER ALONE THAN IN BAD COMPANY.

  I looked nervously at the guard. He smiled blankly back.

  We snaked in to the narrow mouth of the Khyber Pass, and rose, past a series of castellated farmsteads, higher and higher in to the barren hills. On one bend we passed a huge marble-faced enclosure surrounded by high-tension electrified wire. Guards holding Kalashnikovs flanked the marble gateway.

  ‘Zakir Afridi – big drugs man,’ explained the guard.

  Every so often we would pass a fort – a succession of bleak, mud-walled fortifications – at least one of which, Kafar Kot, the Fort of the Unbelievers, dates back to the time of Alexander the Great. Few places in the world have seen such a succession of armies pass through them. When Alexander’s generals, Hephaestion and Perdiccas, led their Macedonian legions down the caravan road which threads through this narrow defile, they were already following in the footsteps of Darius and no doubt countless other earlier prehistoric armies. Since then the same snaking road has seen Seljuk, Moghul, Khajar, Afghan and British armies come and go. All have left their mark, but none has managed to hold the Pass for more than a century or two.

  On the outskirts of Landi Khotal we passed the station. When it was built in 1925, in the aftermath of the third Afghan war, it was the last railhead in British India and the terminus of the Khyber Railway, one of the most remarkable – and expensive – engineering projects ever undertaken by the British in India. Costing more than £2 million to complete, it wound its way up fifteen miles of impossible gradients through thirty-four tunnels and over ninety-two bridges and culverts. But since 1985 the railway has been closed. ‘The tribesmen were firing Stinger missiles at it,’ I was told by a friend in Peshawar. ‘It was the drugs barons that were behind it: it was crossing their territory so they closed it down.’