Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  The Afghan town of Khost stands on the border, a few miles from Pakistan. The Taliban are ‘active’ in Paktia province so I share a taxi to Khost–the journalists have told me this is safest–with three other Afghans: an old woman in a burqa, her incontinent husband, and a silent young man in a woollen cap, also a lone traveller. At the top of a mountain pass, the old man pees on the seat, and the young man in the hat stops the car to pick herbs from the roadside. He tucks a bunch under the rim of his cap and holds the rest delicately to his nose. Two hours later, as we clatter along a stony river valley, we stop again so that he can pick up a small lump of firewood from the roadside. ‘Wood is expensive in Khost,’ the driver says, in reply to my quizzical look.

  That afternoon, I visit Khost’s head of police intelligence in his mud-daubed office. He proclaims Pakistan the centre of world terrorism; then tells me to return tomorrow to meet his ‘reformed Taliban’ protégés. The government has recently extended amnesty to Taliban commanders and soldiers, and those who turn themselves in, give up their weapons and warring pretensions, have a chance of being employed in Karzai’s government.

  The next morning, a turncoat Mufti is sitting quietly in the office, wearing a gold watch, spotless shalwar kameez and crisp silk turban. He is a serious man–an alumnus of Sami ul-Huq’s infamous madrassah near the Indus–who despises Mullah Omar for his ignorance but admires Bin Laden. Now he just looks smug; he has been tipped to become one of the government’s new Islamic judges.

  Sitting close to him on the couch is the young man in the woollen cap from the taxi yesterday. We stare at each other in surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, and explain to the policeman: ‘We shared a taxi from Gardez.’ ‘And he is an ex-Taliban who has come from Gardez to turn himself in,’ the policeman says. He twiddles a pen from the marble holder on his desk and declares: ‘The Americans had a bounty of thousands of dollars on his head but I arranged his amnesty.’

  The young man was the Mufti’s bodyguard during the Taliban years, and a Pakistan-based jihadist once the Americans landed. He has spent the last four years across the border in Waziristan; he has a smattering of Islamic education picked up in Pakistani madrassahs; and he is fully trained to shoot the American soldiers who have invaded his country. ‘It was good money,’ he says a little regretfully. ‘Far better than what I could have earned in this country. My wife thought I was working in Kabul.’ ‘My jihadi name,’ he says later, ‘was Flowing Locks.’ Outside in the sunshine he fluffs out his hair when I take his photo.

  It is midday when I say goodbye to Flowing Locks, the Policeman and the Mufti. The Mufti gives me his mobile number; Flowing Locks offers to escort me back to Kabul; and the Policeman tells me to look up his son if I ever go to Moscow. I don’t tell them that I am driving south-east from Khost, over the border to Pakistan that very afternoon.

  My companions on this trip are two anxious young Afghan men, Najib and Hamid, whom I met the previous evening. As we sat on the roof of the house where I was staying, discussing my plan of crossing the porous border, they had shocked me only by their response to my polite, routine question to Najib: ‘What is your wife’s name?’ But he replied: ‘I can’t tell you.’ Why not? And Hamid explained: ‘You might tell some other man, and then he will call out the name of Najib’s wife as she is passing in the street, and then all the neighbours will think she is…’ He gestured helplessly. A fallen woman? (How the other man would know it was Najib’s wife, given her likely burqa, I didn’t know.)

  Perhaps because of the seriousness with which they tried to explain their culture to me, they struck me as sincere, and I trusted them. Our strategy, then, on the afternoon I leave the Policeman’s office, is this: Najib will drive us as far as the Durand Line–the de facto border between Afghanistan and British India, drawn on the map in 1893. There, at the Pakistani checkpoint, Najib will turn back, and Hamid and I will cross the border together, following Sultan Mahmud’s route (and without, it so happens, the need for passports). Hamid’s mother and siblings live as refugees near Bannu, the conservative Pakistani cantonment town just beyond Waziristan in the ‘settled areas’. This is where we will spend the night.

  South of Khost, habitation quickly falls away. The river valley is dry: I can see why Flowing Locks stopped to pick up wood; nothing grows here. In the 1980s and 90s, Khost was the headquarters of Bin Laden’s training camps, and the ancient orchards and irrigation systems were decimated by Soviet tanks. Now there isn’t even a shrub for a goat to chew on. We drive up into the hills for an hour, two hours, three, through a desert landscape of yellow rock, striated, layered, crumbling like halwa.

  At last we pass three soldiers, standing in the shade of a cliff and smoking: the Afghan checkpoint, I realize afterwards. The car rounds the corner of a hillside and there it is. ‘Pakistan,’ says Hamid. There is a tent in the distance. One truck. Four soldiers. We draw up at the so-called border. I smile, greet the soldiers in Urdu, hand them my passport. They look surprised, but I explain: I am writing about Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, he came this way in 1001. ‘The one who fought the Indians,’ I hear a soldier tell his partner. ‘All right,’ announces the man in charge. ‘You can go.’ ‘But I need a stamp,’ I say, ‘an entry stamp.’ (I was warned by a suspicious guard at Torkham that an entry stamp is ‘essential’ ‘didn’t you notice our new electronic checking system?’) But the ethereality of this border crossing still hasn’t dawned on me. ‘A stamp?’ the soldiers say. ‘We don’t have a stamp.’ ‘Can’t you write something in my passport?’ The soldier walks over to the tent to ring up the Colonel in Miram Shah. He doesn’t come back for half an hour.

  When he returns, he is looking stern. He calls me over. ‘The Colonel says you must return the way you came. This crossing is dangerous and not permitted for foreigners. But–’ he cuts through my objections, ‘as this would be very hard for you’ (he glances distastefully towards Afghanistan) ‘I am going to let you go.’ He leans towards me and whispers, ‘Put on your burqa. Don’t say a word. Don’t laugh. Don’t cry. Not a sound until you get to Bannu.’ He shakes my hand. ‘Good luck. May God be with you.’

  I bought my burqa in Pakistan–after I discovered that there were all sorts of places in the Frontier that it was impossible to get into without one. I tried on three–a black Arab-style gown with more ties than a bondage suit; a twee embroidered beige costume; and finally a white shuttlecock, with its grid of tiny eyeholes. ‘Too old-fashioned,’ said my Pashtun companion, but what did he know. I fitted it on to my head in the back of the tiny store and swished the folds around me: its potential was immediately apparent. It was roomy, sun-reflecting, and forbiddingly austere. I could have worn nothing but my knickers beneath its folds and nobody would have known. Visibility was twenty per cent; but diplomatic immunity was instantaneous and total. I pull on this garment now, over my gaudy pink shalwar kameez–and it carries me safely through the most dangerous district of Pakistan, the badlands of Waziristan.

  Imagine wearing a mesh of white. I peer out at the desert landscape through four blurred bars. As the teenage Waziri driver (he looks about fourteen) screeches round the hairpin bends of the Tochi river valley, I grip the edges of the eyepiece, press my nose against the burqa and stare out at the world. I see a young man with a pink rose tucked behind his ear sitting on a boulder, his AK47 lovingly upholstered in blue and pink stickers. I see sand-coloured fortresses, the sky cloudless blue behind them. I see graveyard after graveyard fluttering with the flags of jihadi martyrs. I see a gun on every male shoulder. And I see no women at all–not grannies in burqas, not even a little girl.

  The taxi drops us in the small capital of north Warizistan, Miram Shah, where we have to take public transport to Bannu. At the bus station I sit, immobile in the empty minibus, as Hamid goes into the bazaar to buy us cold drinks. I clasp my hands together under my burqa, hoping that Hamid will come back soon, that my instincts about him were right, that the van will not start without him, that I will not have to
choose between travelling on alone to Bannu or drawing attention to myself, the only woman out in public between Khost and Bannu. Twenty minutes later Hamid returns, the minibus fills up with male passengers, and as the afternoon begins to cast long shadows along the town’s sandy streets, we travel on.

  I spend that night with Hamid’s family in a village just outside Bannu. There is a pink bougainvillea in the courtyard, and I strip off my sweat-drenched clothes and wash under the stars in the open-air bathroom. The next morning I leave as I came, under my burqa.

  It is difficult for single women to meet single men in Bannu. When I first arrived in NWFP, friends in Peshawar tried to dissuade me from visiting the town. ‘It is the most conservative place in Pakistan,’ said one, ‘and a bastion of terrorist activity.’ ‘Women never leave the house. The men do all the shopping,’ said another. ‘Men don’t like women there,’ said a third, a little ominously; ‘the place has been totally hijacked by the mullahs.’

  The rise of the mullah–ignorant, corrupt, socially inferior–is a constant complaint in the Frontier. Since the time of Khushal Khan Khattak’s poetic attacks on the pious Emperor Aurangzeb, Pashtuns have scorned the minister of religion. The twentieth-century poet, Ghani Khan, combined both religious irreverence and sensual expression in a verse that every Pashtun knows how to sing: ‘The azan sounds and I think of my Beloved.’ (Or, as an acquaintance in Peshawar puts it somewhat bluntly: ‘When I hear the call to prayer, I want to fuck girls.’) And so the mullah was kept in his place–until the creation of Pakistan.

  The Pakistan movement inadvertently gave mullahs a voice by pushing religion to the centre stage of politics. The military dictator, General Zia, who ruled from 1977 till his death in 1988, gave them money, weapons and a heroic cause: the anti-Soviet jihad. President-General Musharraf gave them political power in order that he could tinker with the Constitution–and so remain dictator. Thanks to Pakistani state support, covert CIA funds during the Mujahideen days and Arab money today, the former underclass is now the elite. With foreign bank accounts, children at university in America, and votes in the polling box, mullahs have outfoxed the traditional ruling class; their triumph is nothing less than a social revolution.

  While I was in Peshawar, the religious parties launched a purification drive by banning music in public places, and ordered a blackout of images of women–thus on a huge billboard of a young boy and girl eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in central Peshawar, the girl’s prepubescent face had been obscured with black tape. Then they proposed a return of the Hisba, or Islamic Morality Police. The last time that muhtasib (ombudsmen) roamed the streets of Peshawar was in the seventeenth century, when Aurangzeb empowered them to banish dancing girls and destroy temples. Now, as then, the muhtasib’s proposed duties include the discouragement of ‘unIslamic customs’ and the ‘regulation of weights and measures’. Aurangzeb would have been delighted.

  It is one of history’s neat ironies that the base camp of mullahdom itself is Akora Khattak, a village near Attock–once better known as the birthplace of mullah-hating, woman-loving Khushal Khan Khattak. Maulana Sami ul-Huq, a small man with a badly dyed brown beard, spent the end of the last century with a Kalashnikov in one hand and the Holy Qur’an in the other (I see a photograph to prove this, hanging in his guesthouse). The madrassah that Sami runs in Akora Khattak produced, according to its own estimate, 95 per cent of the Taliban leadership; when Mullah Omar needed soldiers, Maulana Sami would close down the school and send the boys across the border. After September 2001–after the Taliban were defeated and Sami went into politics–the rhetoric had to change, along with the curriculum. ‘The foreign students have been sent home,’ he tells me in his almost incomprehensible, heavily Arabicized Urdu (his jean-clad grandsons have to translate back into the bazaar Urdu I speak), ‘the militant training camp was closed, and the AK47s have been taken out of the classrooms.’ ‘But there was nothing wrong with the Taliban,’ he adds. Politicians from Sami ul-Huq’s religious coalition repeatedly voice the same sentiment. ‘The only bad thing was that they didn’t go far enough,’ a shaven-lipped Senator tells me. ‘First the Arab and Uzbek fighters interfered, then the Americans.’ (As in Babur’s day, immigrant Uzbeks and local Pashtuns have an uneasy relationship in this Frontier region.)

  But to assume that these public decrees of religious conformity are the only face of Pashtun society is to ignore the Frontier’s wholly unIslamic private customs. ‘Bey pardeh ma shey,’ Pashtuns say to each other: May you never be uncovered. Sharam, shame, applies only to the public exposure of a sin; whatever takes place in private carries no stigma. And thus, as the saying also goes, ‘A Pashtun has one foot in heaven and one in hell.’ Heaven is the mosque; hell the hujra, the communal guesthouse.

  Hujras are places where men receive their male guests. They are situated outside the main compound of the house–and wives and daughters never enter them. In the closed, gender-segregated world of the Frontier, older men have always taken younger boyfriends. Homosexuality, like other aspects of Arab culture, was condemned by the Prophet (perhaps inspired by Leviticus), and is still illegal in modern Pakistan (and indeed in India), both of which inherited the colonial British Penal Code. But while women in Pakistan are enthusiastically and mistakenly punished every year for adultery under General Zia’s 1979 Zina Ordinance, there has never been a prosecution in Pakistan for sodomy under Section 377. Male-male sex is simply accepted as a necessity and a norm.

  Of course, one can distinguish between legitimate close male friendships, even love, and physical relationships between men, which are illegal. Emperor Babur–who had to be pushed into bed with his wife by his mother–fell passionately in love with ‘a boy in the camp bazaar’. It was a courtly, homoerotic, poetry-mediated obsession, and it remained, so Babur implied, strictly non-physical. Babur wrote in censorious terms of his relatives who took young boys as ‘catamites’. Such ‘vice and debauchery’, he implied, made very poor kings of those who practised it.

  But many did, and still do. For numerous British imperialists, the whole of the Frontier (and to an extent the whole of the Muslim world) was a homosexual paradise. In the army, ‘Up the Khyber (pass)’ was rhyming slang for ‘up the arse’. After the British conquered Sindh, Richard Burton, then a soldier, was commissioned by Napier to investigate Karachi’s numerous boy brothels, and his exhaustive report landed him in trouble after Napier retired, for it was assumed by the new administrators that he must have sampled the wares. Later still, Burton argued with lurid exaggeration that the Afghans only rose up against the British in 1841 because they were affronted by the ‘frantic debauchery’ of their women–who, overjoyed at meeting men ‘who were not pederasts’, threw themselves at the British invaders.

  Whatever the truth of this, Afghans certainly like their parties camp. In Kabul’s Medina Bazaar, I am shown a DVD of teenage boys in sequinned dresses dancing for Afghan warlords. (In Ghazni, the baby-faced US Intelligence officer was wearing a gold wedding ring in a dismal attempt to dissuade male Afghan suitors.) In Pakistan, too, as Burton found, opportunities for gay sex are abundant, cheap to come by–and far less hazardous than heterosexual adultery. Transvestite prostitutes charge barely more than the price of a cup of chai for their services and thus, as Ayesha, the hijra in Karachi, pointed out, ‘Many of my clients are sexually frustrated male students.’ Mullahs, meanwhile, despite the power they now wield under the army dispensation, have not shed their reputation for preying on their male students. (Naturally, Maulana Sami vigorously condemned homosexuality, when I asked him.)

  Bannu’s own reputation as a town of sodomites crystallized in the past decade. There was the case of a policeman who raped a young boy; there was the man from Bannu who claimed that John Walker Lindh (the ‘American Taliban’) was his lover; and there was the poor beleaguered researcher who wrote a report for UNICEF describing how, for Pashtuns, ‘the real sex is hot and dry’ and ‘keeping boys is an absolute addiction.’ ‘When I visited Bannu after
that, they put me in jail,’ the researcher tells me when we meet for tea in Peshawar. He gives me the number of some colleagues in Bannu. ‘But you should proceed with intensive care,’ he says as I leave. ‘The first thing you must do is buy a burqa.’

  Later, the friend I stay with in Bannu argues indignantly that ‘It is all propaganda. Maybe a generation ago warlords were baccha khush [fond of young boys], but now all that has changed. It is the foreign NGOs–the ones from Peshawar–who are making a fuss about nothing. Why Bannu rather than any other town in Pakistan?’

  He has a point. I think about his words as I wait in Bannu for my Waziri acquaintance Abdullah. Our rendezvous is a tiny, dirty room opposite a cinema where they are advertising a film starring a busty blonde actress in lacy black lingerie (scenes from Basic Instinct, it is rumoured, interspliced with naked Pashtun dancing). Sitting on the ground, hunched under my now grubby white burqa, I remember what a friend in Kabul told me. ‘The only unaccompanied women wearing burqas in this town,’ he said, ‘are prostitutes.’

  Abdullah, when he arrives, has a paranoid air and overexcited manner. ‘Al-Qaeda travel at night through Waziristan, in cars with blacked out windows,’ he says. ‘They pay ten times the going rate for a room. They move to a new location every night.’ He is trying to persuade me to stay in his village in Waziristan, otherwise known as Taliban Central. Last month, he says, a letter from Al-Qaeda was dropped into his courtyard. The note, typed in Pashto, read ‘Death to NGO workers’ enclosed in the paper was 700 rupees, to buy his coffin. The army is in north Waziristan for the first time since Pakistan’s creation, and I have found it difficult to persuade Waziris to meet me. Noor Khan, the cousin of a Waziri friend in Kabul, whispers down the phone that his neighbour has just been killed by the Arabs for being an army informer. But Abdullah says, ‘I’ll drive you as far as Razmak. We’ll go to Wana.’ ‘Are you mad?’ I say. ‘They will kill us.’ ‘Nobody speaks to Pashtun women,’ he says, ‘it will be perfectly safe. You can pretend to be my wife.’ I think for a moment: ‘But then we will have to share a room.’ Abdullah smiles. ‘I am applying for asylum in Norway,’ he explains, ‘but I would rather go to England.’ ‘You are pagal [mad],’ I say.