The second day of campaigning took us into the low, stubbly hills of southern Lakki District. ‘Bandit country,’ said Kamal. Criminals sheltered here, some resident in caves; one village, Shah Hassan Khel, was filled with local Taliban sympathizers. We didn’t stop there. ‘We leave them alone. They don’t touch us,’ Kamal said. As the light faded we rolled up to a whitewashed compound buried deep in a valley. The setting had a serene quality: the first stars glittered overhead; a black camel stacked with reeds was tethered in the corner; the low wail of infants drifted from the women’s quarters. The headman handed a wish list to Kamal, who laughed. They wanted a school, an electricity connection and, rather ambitiously, a hospital. ‘These people actually come from that village,’ he said, pointing to a cluster of buildings a mile distant, ‘but they migrated years ago due to an enmity. There have been five, six murders on each side. So now no man dares go outside without his gun.’
Inevitably we were presented with food. My stomach clenched: it must have been our twentieth five-minute feast of the day; I couldn’t face another bite. But the tribesmen were watching and Kamal, speaking under his normal voice, issued a soft rebuke. ‘If you can eat, eat. If not, just touch it,’ he muttered. ‘These people get heavily annoyed if you don’t take anything.’ I reached for a chicken leg.
Roasting hospitality, smouldering pride, cold and clinical revenge – thus it has always been among the Pashtun. Down the centuries they have stirred poets, produced legendary warriors and frustrated mighty empires. From Alexander the Great to the Moghuls, from the British to the Soviet Union, all have swept through these lands, welcomed at first but ultimately hounded out, departing with the bitter-sweet sensation of having encountered men who do not compromise – at least, not for long.
The Pashtun homeland is a diagonal swathe of rock, soil and sand that straddles Pakistan’s 1,600-mile-long border with Afghanistan. On the Pakistani side, it stretches from the searing red deserts of Baluchistan to the twinkling, snow-dusted peaks of Chitral in the Hindu Kush. British colonists in pith helmets and pressed shorts shaped the boundaries of this land more than a century ago; today they still exert a powerful – and often undue – influence over our understanding of the people who live there.
The Pashtun united in 1747 under Ahmad Shah Durrani, forming a powerful tribal confederacy headquartered in Kandahar; Victorian imperialists wrenched them apart. In 1893 the British, fretful about creeping Russian influence from the north, negotiated the Durand Line, a boundary that separated the northern territories of British India (now Pakistan) from Afghanistan and split the Pashtun in two. Other British legacies have also endured. The Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force drawn from the tribes and founded in 1907, is leading the fight against Taliban militants. The old railway still runs up to the Khyber Pass, although it has fallen into disuse. Then there is the literature.
Hardly a modern article on the frontier is complete without a reference to the fading diaries of some overheated officer dispensing bitter wisdom about the ‘noble savages’. British ministers and American generals alike are fond of invoking Churchill, who as a young man served a few adventurous years on the frontier, or Kipling, whose poem ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ captured the savagery of battle against mountain warriors. Not all colonial writing revolved around bloodshed; some was written with a lyrical pen. In his oft-quoted book, The Pathans, the last British governor of the frontier, Sir Olaf Caroe, wrote:
The weft and warp of this tapestry is woven into the souls and bodies of the men who move before it. Much is harsh, but all is drawn in strong tones that catch the breath, and at times bring tears, almost of pain.
These days, though, it is perhaps wiser to leave the misty-eyed colonials on the shelf. Things have changed too much in recent decades, mostly, alas, for the worse.
Pakistan’s ‘frontier’, home to most of the country’s 28 million Pashtun, is composed of two parts – Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the smallest of Pakistan’s four provinces, which was called North West Frontier Province (NWFP) until early this year, and the tribal belt, a constellation of seven tribal agencies nestled along the Afghan border and known officially as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Incredibly, the FATA is still ruled under a draconian colonial-era instrument called the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) which strips tribals of their constitutional rights and is repugnant to every tenet of modern governance.
Getting to the frontier is deceptively easy. The old route curled through Attock, where a 400-year-old Moghul fort towers over the swirling confluence of the Kabul and Indus rivers. These days the visitor sweeps in on a slick, six-lane motorway from Islamabad, two hours to the east. The provincial capital, Peshawar – thought to derive from the Sanskrit for ‘city of men’ – squats at the foot of the Khyber Pass, thrumming with nervous energy. Parts retain the romantic exoticism of Kipling’s verse. Blind beggars roam the spice bazaars of the old city; veiled women dart between glittering jewellery shops; peacocks strut on the preened lawns of the governor’s colonial-era mansion. Everywhere else, though, there are garish splashes of modernity – chromed plazas selling mobile phones; tacky American fast-food joints; giant billboards advertising remedies for male baldness; and ‘slimming academies’ for women. Cheap Chinese rickshaws swarm through the raucous traffic.
A pungent cloud of intrigue overlays everything. This is largely a legacy of the 1980s, when Peshawar was the cockpit of the ‘jihad’, the guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The leaders of the mujahideen factions at the forefront of the resistance were based here; so were the American and Saudi spies who funded the war to the tune of at least $6 billion between 1979 and 1989.
These days the tempest of Taliban violence ripping across the frontier has shaken Peshawar to its core. Suicide bombers ravage bustling markets; politicians are gunned down outside their homes; trucks carrying Nato supplies are plundered as they trundle up the Khyber Pass towards Afghanistan. Nobody is safe, not even the American spooks huddling inside their prison-like consulate, which was attacked last April. The violence has receded this year, following a tough army counteroffensive. But the city remains rattled. Cinemas and music halls are closed, police checkpoints clog the streets and factories are shuttered. Business is booming, however, in the smugglers’ bazaar at the edge of the city, where thick-bearded traders offer stolen US uniforms, boxes of counterfeit Viagra (with pictures of topless women), and DVDs of the speeches of Osama bin Laden, who once lived in a pine-shaded house in the upmarket University Town neighbourhood and founded al-Qaeda here in 1988.
Still, there’s fun to be had. One night I was invited to dinner with a group of Peshawar professionals – old university pals, now in their late thirties, working as bankers, aid workers and civil servants. We sat in a circle in a small garden in the old city. To my right was a pudgy malik, or tribal elder, from Dara Adam Khel, a lawless town about fifteen miles away famed for its gunsmiths and their knock-off AK-47s. To my left was a shy man with a long beard whom the others teasingly called ‘Mullah Omar’, after the Taliban leader. He was in charge of rolling the joints.
The promised meal never materialized; instead we drank and smoked. Bottles of cheap whisky circled in one direction; the hashish went in the other. The conversation was lively, full of politics and rude jokes, but after three hours I was having trouble keeping up. My head started to spin; then I felt something rub against my foot. The malik had nudged his foot close to mine and was stroking my toes. Unsure whether this was a sign of friendship or something more purposeful – jokes about Pashtun men and buggery are rife in Pakistan – I discreetly curled my toes inwards, safely out of stroking distance.
Finally, at half past midnight, the call went up – food. The group staggered out of the garden and into three small cars that made a dash for the city centre, the occupants roaring and cheering like teenage joyriders. In my car a small dashboard screen showed a bikini-clad dancer writhing to a roaring Bollywood sound track; veiled female shoppers bl
urred past in the street outside. It felt surreal. Reaching the restaurant, supper was consumed with a minimum of ceremony: my new friends wolfed down plates of chicken, said their farewells, and parted ways. Back in my guest house I flopped on to the bed, exhausted, inebriated and exhilarated.
The origins of the Pashtun are lost in a genealogical fog. Some consider themselves the ‘lost Jews’ – descendants of Qais, an Afghan convert to Islam who was descended from Saul, king of the Israelites. It is an odd theory, given the vicious anti-Semitism of many Pakistanis, but it has been embraced by Israel. In the 1950s, the country’s second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, publicly supported the notion that the Pashtun were among the ‘ten lost tribes’ of Israel. Scholars are sceptical of this link, though, and many Pashtun prefer to see their roots among the other ancient powers that have passed through: Arabs, Persians, Central Asians and Greeks. Simply being a Pashtun, however, is a less complicated matter. There are two requirements. The first is to speak Pashto, an ergative language considered trickier than Urdu. Two dialects are spoken – Pukhto, the hard-tongued variety of the Peshawar Valley, and Pashto, the softer version spoken south of an invisible line that runs between Kohat in Pakistan and Paktika in Afghanistan.
The second requirement is to observe Pashtunwali – literally, ‘the way of the Pashtun’ – the famous code of conduct. Its bedrock is nang, or honour. A Pashtun without nang is considered worthless; in fact he is no longer a Pashtun. Honour faces a multitude of threats – a murdered relative, a philandering wife, perhaps just a casual insult – but has one fail-safe remedy: badal, or revenge. Hence the profusion of blood feuds in places like Lakki Marwat. But bloodshed is not compulsory: Pashtunwali also has noble tenets that promote compassion and conciliation. Under nanawatai, the law of sanctuary, a man can go to his enemy’s house and beg forgiveness. And melmastia, hospitality, is practised with great seriousness. After the devastating 2005 earthquake, I climbed for hours to a Pashtun village untouched by rescuers or aid. There I found families huddled in the rubble, their food stocks precariously low. Yet they insisted I share a meal. ‘You are our guest,’ they said.
Educated Pashtun see the image of the trigger-happy tribal, tethered to tradition and blind belief in a bloodthirsty God, as a simplistic orientalist cliché. They have a point. Pashtun form the second-largest ethnic group in Pakistan’s army and crowd the upper echelons of its powerful bureaucracy. There are Pashtun pilots and pop stars, sports icons and tycoons. Shahid Afridi, a showy batsman, until recently captained the national cricket team; Zebunnisa Bangash and Haniya Aslam, two Pashtun women, are among the country’s hottest music acts. There have even been Pashtun dictators – General Ayub Khan, who seized power in 1958, hailed from Haripur.
Pashtunwali has been diluted in urban areas where the writ of the police is strong, which makes blood feuds trickier to prosecute. Anyway, educated Pashtun consider a shoot-out with the neighbours to be a drain on their time, and have much to lose from a tangle with the law. Consequently most disputes are entrusted to the courts, crooked as they may be.
Yet while urbanites have tailored Pashtunwali to the modern world, this is not true of everyone. Large swathes of the frontier are neither modern nor urban. Here, tradition retains its grip and people observe the laws of Islamabad more in the breach than in the observance – which, in turn, can place unusual demands on their elected representatives.
There are, by his own admission, two Anwar Kamals. One is the ‘polished gent’ of Peshawar, a leading member of the Pashtun elite with a taste for frontier bling. His pied-à-terre is a spacious house in Hayatabad, the city’s best suburb, where he frequently dines with his three university-educated sons. He drives an imposing white Japanese jeep with dashboard television (and prayer counter for Islamic recitations), carries the latest mobile phone and, being a qualified pilot, keeps a small plane at the local aerodrome. Some years back he imported a pair of greyhounds from England for the purpose of hunting boar on the family lands. A fading portrait of a serious-looking man on his living-room wall is testimony to his rich political pedigree. Khan Habibullah Khan, Kamal’s father, was a minor star in the early decades of Pakistan, serving as Home Minister in the 1960s and chairman of the Senate in the 1970s. At one point he was Acting President of the country. Kamal has had a less prominent, yet also distinguished, career in public service. He was a provincial minister twice and a national senator once; in 1990 he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, during which time he lodged at the luxury Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.
The second Anwar Kamal emerges when he jumps into his jeep and heads for Lakki Marwat, a bumpy four-hour ride to the south. Lakki is his constituency, but also his land, his power, his identity. Here, Kamal sleeps with a rocket launcher under his wooden-framed bed, in a sprawling, draughty fortress guarded by dozens of tribesmen, spends his time in lengthy confabulation with bearded elders and generally acts in a manner that seems to contradict everything the other Anwar Kamal stands for.
The first time we met, in June 2007, we were sitting in his living room in Peshawar, which is adorned with pinkish, flowery wallpaper. On the table between us was a photo album, the sort that might contain snaps of foreign holidays or grinning grandchildren. Instead it was a gallery of war: dozens of images of fierce-looking tribesmen, bristling with weapons, against a harsh backdrop of arid hills. Kamal featured in several of the pictures; in one he sat at the controls of a long, menacing weapon. It was an ack-ack, he explained: a 12.8cm anti-aircraft gun of the kind used by the British to fend off German bombers during the Second World War. A most satisfying weapon, he added, recounting its most recent use.
‘You see, we were being fired on from three sides by some individuals who were hiding in a burj,’ he said in his gravelly voice. ‘So I called up my driver, Akhtar’ – a smiling young chap I’d met earlier – ‘and I said, “Bastard! Get that ack-ack and fire back!” So he grabbed it and gave it a burst of seven or eight rounds. What a noise – the whole ground started shaking! The bullets went right through that burj, killing two of those individuals who were sitting there.’
He paused for effect, then chuckled.
‘Within a split of a second there was absolute silence. Everyone was calm and cool.’
This dramatic exchange had taken place in 2004 at the height of some particular aggravation with the Bhittanis, the Marwats’ nearest neighbours and oldest rivals. A row had erupted and for the next year hotheads from both sides engaged in the usual needle tactics – tit-for-tat shootings, kidnappings, hostage executions – when things got out of hand. In a brash upping of the ante, the Bhittanis snatched two Marwat women. Kamal was outraged. ‘Now, kidnapping men we don’t mind. That is usual. But taking our ladies – that was totally unprecedented!’
In retaliation, first the Marwats kidnapped six Bhittani women and three children. Then they roused a lashkar – a tribal fighting force – with the aim of sweeping into the Bhittani lair, retrieving the abducted damsels and teaching their insolent neighbours a sharp lesson. Kamal led from the front, binoculars in one hand and pistol in the other. It was, by several accounts, a messy affair. The Pakistan Army, which was conducting operations in the nearby tribal belt, mistook the tribesmen for al-Qaeda fugitives and fired a few artillery rounds at them. ‘A genuine misunderstanding,’ said Kamal.
Combat was sporadic. The most dramatic confrontation occurred when Kamal’s guards shot dead a pair of Bhittanis racing towards them on a motorbike. ‘Two hundred bullets in each!’ he recalled with relish. And the hostages were less lucky. One of the abducted women was burned alive with lamp oil (some said it was suicide, others murder); the second was spirited deep into the tribal belt. When the matter was finally resolved a year later, an inter-tribal jirga ordered the Marwats to pay 16 million rupees – about $260,000 – in blood money. It was expensive, Kamal admitted as we polished off our tea, but worth every cent. ‘It’s not about money. The question is: “Did you restore your honour?” And we did.’
I stayed in Kamal’s guest quarters that evening, rising early the following morning to travel to Lakki. I found him after dawn in his bedroom, alone, watching the National Geographic channel on television, an AK-47 propped against the bed. His wife, a hepatitis sufferer, had died in tragic circumstances a year earlier. They had travelled to China for a liver transplant, but she died of complications after the operation. Kamal flew home with her body. He spoke about the episode quietly and sparingly; it seemed to pain him.
After a breakfast of eggs and greasy paratha bread, we plunged into the belching Peshawar traffic and left the city. The road swept past Dara Adam Khel, the storied village of gunsmiths, then descended on to the rock-strewn plains of the southern frontier. Halting for tea at a grubby truckers’ cafe, we sat outside on a cluster of rope beds. Kamal pointed to one of his bodyguards: Mina, a stocky fifty-five-year-old with creased skin and gleaming eyes, now contentedly slurping his tea. ‘A complete and utter outlaw,’ he said. He wasn’t exaggerating. Eighteen years earlier, as part of a blood feud, Mina had chased a man across Sindh and Punjab provinces. He finally cornered his quarry after nine months in a dusty Punjabi backwater. Whipping out his pistol, he shot the man repeatedly – the coup de grâce, Kamal said, was a bullet to the temple – then picked up his bicycle and fled back to Lakki Marwat via the Indus (where he forced a boatman to carry him across). Some time later, Kamal gave him a job. He slapped my knee and chortled. ‘We may have licensed weapons, but we don’t have licensed individuals!’ The guards laughed along.
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