Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  As I waited for the huge door to open and swallow me up, I could not help noticing the anti-aircraft gun mounted on one of the four watchtowers. Over warm Russian champagne, my host explained that his family had a long-standing feud with another tribe since his cousin had abducted one of their women. The score on revenge killings was now four all.

  It seemed reasonable. Only that morning, my friend Amjad, the regional manager of an agricultural credit bank, had told me about the difficulties of ensuring that field officers were not posted to areas where they might be shot as part of a feud.

  Feuds and smuggling are a way of life in the tribal areas of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, but the spillover of sophisticated weaponry and Soviet booty from Afghanistan has heightened the stakes. My smuggler friend complained wistfully: ‘It was far more fun in the old days when enemies often had to be stalked for years with a Lee-Enfield. Now, with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers, whole families can be wiped out in minutes.’

  Often, they are. Shootouts in which eight to ten people are killed rate only an inside paragraph in the local press.

  He insisted that ‘an eye for an eye’ was an ‘excellent’ system. The previous week he had burned down his best friend’s fort after the man’s son had stolen a car. Now the son had apologised and my friend was helping him rebuild it.

  It is not just for security reasons that tribal smugglers like my host dwell in forts. Inside the high mud walls were piles of Soviet refrigerators and microwaves, smuggled from Kabul.

  Prices of smuggled Russian goods have undercut the once-popular Japanese items by so much that these are now rarely seen in Pakistan’s bazaars. Few homes are without a Soviet air conditioner. And despite the Islamic prohibition on alcohol, a roaring trade is done in the Russian vodka known fondly as ‘Gorbachev’.

  In the smugglers’ bazaar just outside Peshawar, you can buy anything from Chinese toilet paper to Bulgarian beer, Scotch whisky to Mothercare baby lotion, Black Sea caviar to Marks & Spencer mumsy knickers. Indeed, smuggling has become a complex business. No longer can a self-respecting operator rely on a few mules laden with Afghan cigarettes. These days, garishly painted government trucks fight it out on the highway between Kabul and Peshawar, piled high with all sorts of luxury goods.

  Several resistance commanders inside Afghanistan have struck deals with the Kabul regime not to block off the road so that they can continue to levy ‘taxes’ on such vehicles. And some of the heaviest infighting between resistance groups has been on the main route between Kabul and the Soviet Union, which each group wants to control so it can hijack trucks full of goodies destined for Russian officers in the capital.

  Similarly, many of the weapons given to Afghan commanders are sold off in frontier arms markets en route.

  Aid organisations such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) take smuggling so seriously they are hesitant about sending mules to Afghanistan to replace the estimated half a million oxen killed there in the war. Last year, a consignment of Texas mules intended to be used by the Afghan resistance fighters were swapped for

  scrawnier Pakistani specimens long before reaching their destination.

  It is not always easy being a smuggler despite the high returns – my friend would not deal in anything that gave him less than a 500 per cent profit. Ironically, his main complaint is over the widespread corruption, which means he must pay many bribes. As a practising Muslim with a weakness for alcohol, he claims most of his countrymen are hypocrites. ‘Ten years ago,’ he says, ‘each village had a tiny mosque with a handful of people praying. Now, there are mosques everywhere full of prostrate people, yet corruption is far worse.’

  A sizeable portion of the smuggler’s takings is earmarked for Customs officials who turn a blind eye. Being a Customs man has become highly lucrative; in a recent survey at Karachi University, the majority of students listed it as their most sought-after career.

  The other major consideration for aspiring smugglers is the difficulty in turning black money into white. My host has, among other things, an estate in the United States, a yacht in the south of France and a Swiss bank account. If he gets stuck with too much cash, he legitimises some by buying winning government lottery tickets at several times their surrender value.

  Pakistan was an astonishingly hospitable place where it was easy to get passed on from one friend to another, catching a lift from one or sleeping on cushions on the floor of another. Like this, I managed to travel all the way south to the old city of Mojendaro then far north up the Karakoram Highway for the world’s highest polo match between Chitral and Gilgit, up among the peaks of the Hindu Kush. I camped on a green plateau between two lakes that for much of the year is cut off by snow.

  But its most intriguing place lay at its western extreme. Baluchistan was Pakistan’s most backward province, bordering Afghanistan and Iran and stretching down to the Arabian Sea. It was a strange toffee-colour land of arid desert and rugged mountains that roasted in summer and shivered in snowy winters, and where men with black-rimmed eyes and jewel-studded high-heeled sandals walked hand in hand in the bazaar. Foreigners rarely went there, though I did once see one of those double-decker overland buses that had come all the way from Marble Arch.

  Although it was one and a half times the size of England, Baluchistan had just 4 million people and had been completely neglected until the Russian invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 1979 made it strategically important.

  Not only was it huge and hard to defend but extremely tribal. In years to come it would be the perfect sanctuary for Taliban launching raids across the border into Helmand and Kandahar.

  Where medieval ways die hard

  Financial Times, 5 August 1989

  THE 14-YEAR-OLD BOY looked a bit confused by it all. A week earlier, he had been sitting in uniform in his public school reciting English verbs. Now, bedecked with shawls and an elaborate headdress, he was sitting on a gaily decorated stage and being crowned sardar, the most powerful man in the 20,000-strong Tareen tribe.

  Tribal chiefs in flowing turbans whose daring raids on the British had made them his childhood heroes had arrived from all over Baluchistan for the coronation. Most agreed the boy would be the last of the sardars. His grandfather had died the previous week and his father, in delicate health, passed the title to his oldest son. From now on Mohammad Qaddafi Khan Tareen will control the destinies of the 20,000 Tareens. On his say they live, die, prosper or starve.

  The celebratory lunch for a mere 5,000 resembled the court of Henry VIII with row upon row of chiefs sitting cross-legged and munching great hunks of meat, tossing the bones carelessly over their shoulders. Some 172 sheep and 18 cows had been slaughtered for the occasion and an entire room was piled high with 10,000 pieces of naan, flat unleavened bread.

  There may be no more such occasions. Each of Baluchistan’s tribes is ruled by a sardar whose authority until recently was rarely questioned. But with development bringing roads and exposure to the outside world, the sardars seem to be losing power. ‘We are becoming figureheads like the Queen of England,’ said one. They will not go without a fight, though.

  The heyday of the sardars was during the days of the Raj. When the British took over the region in 1846 they followed a policy known as ‘masterly inactivity’. This meant dividing it into settled areas that were British-governed; an independent state known as Kalat ruled by a khan; and tribal zones which British administrators were forbidden to enter. But the tribes relied on continually looting and raiding the settled areas, knowing the British were powerless to follow them.

  Matters came to a head in 1867 when 1,500 armed raiders struck at the frontier district of Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab. Britain’s Deputy Commissioner there, Robert Sandemann, raised a force of local tribesmen and drove them off, killing 120 and taking 200 prisoners. Later he concluded a treaty under which the sardars promised not to raid his district. To discourage looting he provided the tribesmen with employment. By 1877 inter-tri
bal warfare had almost stopped.

  After Indian independence in 1947, the Baluch – along with the Khan of Kalat – were reluctant to become part of the newly created Pakistan. But, in 1948, the army moved in to ‘persuade’ them. At first they were allowed to keep their old tribal ways but, in 1958, President Ayub ordered the surrender of unlicensed firearms.

  The furious Baluch, feeling their identity under threat, refused to give up the weapons that are part of their dress, and revolted. Many sardars were imprisoned. There was a second rebellion from 1973–7; some 80,000 Pakistani soldiers were sent in, razing villages, while the Baluch People’s Liberation Front attacked army convoys. Leaders of the rebels were arrested and thousands were killed. After General Zia imposed martial law in 1977, the jailed leaders were released and went into exile.

  All that changed with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. With Baluchistan’s strategic location between Iran, Afghanistan and the Arabian Sea, the West feared a Russian push, supported by disgruntled tribesmen, and began pouring so much aid into the province that, by last year, it amounted to $1,000 per head. According to a top Baluch official: ‘All usual restrictions were relaxed to give us far more aid than we could absorb. We could not provide enough proposals but the World Bank even gave $40 million for irrigation schemes they have never seen.’

  But leading sardars were determined to prevent the spread of education and communications, knowing that bringing their tribesmen into contact with the outside world could weaken their base further. Even today in these areas, a radio is a novelty and inhabitants are governed by medieval laws. Criminals are tried by walking across burning coals; if their feet burn, they are guilty.

  The tribal system is weakening nonetheless and more and more sardars are realising that the only way to retain support is to bring in development themselves. Perhaps the most progressive are the Magsis, whose area – like 64 per cent of Baluchistan – is still under tribal laws, with no police or government.

  In the 1930s, the Magsi chief made education compulsory and built the area’s first school, imposing jail sentences on fathers who failed to send their sons there. According to Tariq Magsi, one of the present sardar’s family: ‘Now, there are more educated Magsis than uneducated. Many have gone abroad, there are 25,000 working in the Gulf, and many have government jobs.’

  Even in the Magsi lands, however, tribal customs still reign supreme. Tariq Magsi says the big problem is killings caused by feuds over women, land, guns and cattle. Blood must be avenged by blood – if the offender is absent, then his nearest relation is slain; if he is from a different tribe, then a section of that tribe must be killed. With the influx of sophisticated arms from Afghanistan, there can be hundreds of deaths.

  Most influential of all the sardars is Nawab Bugti* who is known as the Tiger of the Baluch. With his striking demeanour and white handlebar moustache, he has been described as looking like Sean Connery playing a tribal chief. An Oxford graduate, he talks in a clipped public school accent quite matter-of-factly about killing his first man at the age of 12. ‘Two years ago,’ he said, ‘I sorted out a feud in which 250 people had died in thirty years and people kept cutting each other’s ears off.’

  Today, even he has come round to allowing developments that he blocked in the past. The discovery of Asia’s largest gas field at Sui, in the Bugti area, brought money into the district, making the tribesmen less bound to old allegiances. But when the government tried to carry out a development programme, the bulldozers were seized and the workers chased out of the province. Nawab Bugti takes the line that if there is any development to be done, he is the one to do it.

  Although tribesmen still fall at their feet and rush to touch the hems of their shirts, today’s generation of sardars has little desire to return to the ways of the past when they were mini-gods. Now they are more likely to be watching Michael Jackson videos and eating French fries than slaying foes in the mountains. ‘We are the pragmatic sardars,’ says one.

  I had long dreamt of writing a novel, always scribbling ideas in notebooks, thinking once I had saved up enough money from my articles, I would rent a garret somewhere. But in Pakistan it had become clear to me that real life was often far stranger than fiction. Everyone I met seemed to have a story. Besides, I was growing addicted to journalism.

  * A new armed struggle was launched by the Baluch in 2004 and Bugti was shot dead by the Pakistan army in August 2006.

  How Many Wars Have You Covered?

  Afghanistan 1988–1990

  Oh for a hero!

  Financial Times, 9 July 1988

  THE PHONE CALL warning me to be ready came in the dead of night in the Pakistani town of Quetta. I had booked a trip into Afghanistan with ‘Resistance Tours Limited’, one of seven Peshawar-based mujahideen groups to offer the ultimate war-zone trekking trips for journalists, soldiers of fortune, and public schoolboys eager for adventure.

  Several nail-biting hours after slipping into my Afghan disguise and packing a rucksack as instructed, my guide arrived. The jeep was impossibly full of elaborately turbaned Kalashnikov-wielding mujahideen, who could have stepped out of a Hollywood rent-a-crew.

  Dressed as an Afghan refugee in a huge shroud they call a burqa, I thought I could not go wrong. My guide thought differently. Clicking his tongue, he pointed out my pink socks and newish sneakers peering out from beneath my walking tent. Quickly I swapped them for a pair of old flip-flops. This time I passed inspection, and was solemnly presented with my Mujahideen Survival Kit – a packet containing a few boiled sweets, some oral dehydration powders, a small plaster and two antibiotic pills.

  Inside the burqa, life was reduced to a series of bumps in the road and fragments of passing scenery seen through a small embroidered grille which seemed to correspond more with my nose than my eyes. As dawn broke it was already 40°C and, for eight hours, I was enclosed inside the most effective sauna I have ever experienced.

  After travelling all day, we reached our guesthouse, a mud-baked fort piled high with Kalashnikovs and Stinger missiles, used as a staging post from which commanders deep inside Afghanistan receive reinforcements. We soon got into the spirit of things, dribbling greasy goat stew as we struggled to remember which hand one is supposed to eat with and which is for less savoury purposes. After dinner, during which fellow journalists compared insurgencies they had known, it was war games. As strategy was discussed, using matchboxes and an ashtray made from the cover of a Stinger, it became clear that no one had a clue quite what we were to do. I began to understand why, in nine years, the mujahideen had been unable to capture a major town.

  The next morning, dressed as a mujahid in baggy shirt and trousers and flat Chitrali cap of prickly wool, I was raring to go. My fellow muj, however, seemed reluctant to move. A strangely effeminate fighting force, they sat around preening themselves in the pocket mirrors that seem an essential part of their uniform, drawing on eyeliner and fixing down their moustaches with Nivea.

  Eventually, some of them were persuaded to take us to the outskirts of the town of Spin Boldak – although only after we had agreed to hire a taxi.

  The last thing I expected to find in Afghanistan was a taxi service, although it came complete with six Kalashnikov-toting bodyguards. It also had something called a Computer Laser Disco that emitted flashing lights at not quite the same speed as the discordant music.

  When the road ran out, I was given a mule. I have never got on with mules and their ilk since a donkey bit me at an early age at a circus. This particular mule was laden with Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers and mortars, and so was hardly a comfortable ride. Finally, somewhat bruised, we reached the next staging post.

  We were supposed to depart the next morning at 6 a.m. At 8.15, I awoke to find myself surrounded by still-sleeping muj, who did not

  want to move. All sorts of excuses were proffered – the route was mined, they were tired, and finally, incredibly, that they might get hurt. Eventually, I shamed them into leaving. Grudgingly, we were ta
ken up a few hills from where, with the aid of high-powered binoculars, I could just make out Spin Boldak, where a few guerrillas were firing on a tank.

  Back at base, more reporters had arrived. There was even a television camera, so the guerrillas felt compelled to lay something on. We were taken to a launch pad where they shot several rockets after borrowing a journalist’s penknife to cut off the end of the detonator. We all took pictures and looked suitably impressed and the television reporter did a dramatic piece to camera.

  I returned to Quetta, relieved to have suffered nothing worse than a sunburnt nose, but knowing I had seen little of the real war where heroes – not media stars – are made.

  ‘How many wars have you covered?’ drawled the American with the sunburnt face and a web of lines around his eyes. A row of men in those war-correspondent khaki vests with multiple pockets slowly spun round on their bar stools to look the newcomer wearily up and down.

  ‘None,’ I replied, smiling nervously, and watched most of them spin back to their Johnnie Walkers and cigarettes. I noticed that some of the khaki backs had dried bloodstains and one appeared to have a bullet hole.

  It was my first introduction to the American Club in Peshawar.

  As the only place in town where you could drink alcohol, sooner or later most foreigners in Peshawar ended up in the American Club. It was a squat two-storey building in a compound of trees and flowers in University Town, the area where almost all the aid agencies were based – as was a certain Osama bin Laden, though in those days none of us had heard of him. The club’s clientele was basically spies, aid workers, journalists, diplomats and soldiers of fortune. Many of the Americans were Vietnam veterans and still bore the grudge. As they often reminded us, the US had lost 58,000 men in Vietnam and they seemed determined that the Russians would lose as many in Afghanistan (they lost 15,000).