S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 0
Atlantic Monthly
The Lawless Frontier
The tribal lands of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border reveal
the future of conflict in the Subcontinent, along with the dark side of globalization
by Robert D. Kaplan
Baluchistan
THIS past April in Quetta, the bleached-gray,
drought-stricken capital of the Pakistani border province of Baluchistan, I awoke to
explosions and gunfire. In search of the violence, my translator, Jamil, and I jumped into
a four-wheel-drive Toyota and raced through the section of town inhabited by Pashtoon
tribesmen. Suddenly we were surrounded by Pakistani soldiers, who forced us out of the car
and pointed assault rifles in our faces. While they searched us, I saw two other soldiers
with automatic weapons run along a high wall a few feet from where we stood. Shots rang
out from inside the adjacent compound. By 11:00 a.m. five people had been killed and
twenty wounded, and a large cache of weapons had been confiscated in a raid on the
Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami (Pashtoon National People's Party), a group supporting an
independent "Pashtoonistan" created out of Pakistani territory. The party stood
accused of murders and kidnapping. Security forces claimed victory, but reports later
circulated that party members had filtered back into the area with weapons.
Quetta's mainly Pashtoon shop owners called a strike to
protest the raid. It was the second strike that week against the recently installed
military regime of General Pervez Musharraf. For the previous two days owners had shut
their businesses to protest the regime's plan to tax the cross-border smuggling of
computer parts, fuel, automatic weapons, and much other contraband on which the province's
economy depends -- as it depends on the heroin trade. The week I was in Quetta, there was
also a series of bomb blasts in government buildings, relating to the arrests of a hundred
members of an ethnic-Baluch clan who were wanted in connection with the murder of a judge.
A few weeks before that two bombs had gone off inside army bases in Quetta. Musharraf's
regime was trying to extend taxation and the rule of law to this tribal area hard by
Afghanistan, and it was encountering stiff resistance. Chiefs here were nervous about
Musharraf's plan to hold local elections, which could threaten their power.
"The government wants to destroy the tribal system,
but there are no institutions to replace it," the head of the Raisani tribe,
Nawabzada Mir Lashkari Raisani, told me inside his walled compound, which was protected by
white-turbaned bodyguards armed with Kalashnikovs. "Much of my time is spent deciding
cases that in another country would be handled by family courts," he said, as we
devoured mounds of rice and spicy grilled meats laid out on a carpet in his residence.
"The tribes are large social-welfare networks. The government wants us to stop
smuggling, and that will cause huge social distress."
The Raisanis, numbering some 20,000, speak a Dravidian
language of southern India -- unlike the Turco-Iranian Baluchis and the Indo-Aryan
Pashtoons, whose languages borrow heavily from Persian. The Raisanis are traditional
enemies of the Bugtis, an ethnic-Baluch tribe. "I will not disarm, because I do not
trust the government to protect me," Mir Lashkari told me. He added, "Only the
army needs Pakistan." The tribes and ethnic groups, he said, can defend themselves
without the state. Indeed, the international arms bazaar and the unrestricted flow of
drugs and electronic goods have increased the tribes' autonomy. Inside Mir
Lashkari's compound, surrounded by a sandpaper desert and bare saw-toothed escarpments, it
occurred to me that a topographical map would explain, at least partially, why both
military and democratic governments in Pakistan have failed, even as India's democracy has
gone more than half a century without a coup -- and why, I believe, Pakistan and its
problems will for the next few years generate headlines.
Pakistan, in fact, could be a Yugoslavia in the making, but
with nuclear weapons. In the Balkans the collapse of both communist authoritarianism and
the Cold War security structure unleashed disintegrative tribal forces. But in South Asia
globalization itself could bring collapse. South Asia illustrates that globalization is
not a uniform coat of paint. It can lead to war and chaos as easily as to prosperity and
human rights. Just as the media's fascination with Poland, Hungary, and the rest of
Central Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall obscured for a time the dissolution
that had already begun in Yugoslavia, the current consternation over the extremist
government in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, and the fighting in Kashmir obscures the core
issue of South Asia: the institutional meltdown of Pakistan. And as was true of
Yugoslavia, it is the bewildering complexity of ethnic and religious divisions that makes
Pakistan so fragile. My comparison to 1980s Yugoslavia, a place that I also saw firsthand,
is not casual. In both cases it was the very accumulation of disorder and irrationality
that was so striking and that must be described in detail -- not merely stated -- to be
understood.
PAKISTAN covers the desert frontier of the Subcontinent.
British civil administration extended only to Lahore, in the fertile Punjab, near
Pakistan's eastern border with India; its Mogul architecture, gardens, and rich bazaars
give Lahore a closer resemblance to the Indian cities of New Delhi and Calcutta than to
any other place in Pakistan. But the rest of Pakistan -- the rugged Afghan-border regions
of Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, the alkaline wasteland of Sind, and
the Hindu Kush and Karakoram Mountains embracing Kashmir -- has never been subdued by the
British or anyone else. This area was grossly underdeveloped compared with British India;
the few entrepreneurs were Hindus, who fled after Partition, in 1947. Even Karachi, now
Pakistan's business center and a city of 14 million riddled by sectarian violence, was
only an isolated settlement on the Arabian Sea when the British departed. Karachi's lack
of the prideful identity and civilizing urbanity found in Lahore and the great cities of
India helps to explain its current unrest. Islamabad, Pakistan's sterile capital, with its
vast, empty avenues lined with Mogul-cum-Stalinist structures, was not built until the
1960s.
When seven million Muslim refugees, fleeing India, created
Pakistan, the role of the military became paramount, by necessity. The refugees were
consumed by the need to manage enormous and unruly borderlands and by fear of their much
larger, Hindu-dominated neighbor. Furthermore, with local tribal and ethnic identities so
strong, civilian politics became a bureaucratic forum for revenge and unsavory tradeoffs.
In the ancient tribal and feudal cultures of the region leaders bartered water wells and
tracts of desert; in the new state they bartered flour mills, electricity grids, and
transport systems.
Thinking purely in terms of blood and territory comes
naturally in Quetta, a cinder-block jumble of shops whose outskirts are composed of walled
tribal compounds and Afghan refugee camps. Since Afghanistan erupted into war, in the late
1970s, and refugees poured across the border, Quetta has increasingly become an Afghan
city inside Pakistan. Cheap, Western-style polyesters have taken over much of the Third
World, but in Quetta nearly everyone still wears traditional shalwar kameez: baggy cotton
pants and a long, flowing shirt, with a blanket over the shoulder for praying and
sleeping. The Baluch are identified by their grandiose white turbans, the Pashtoons from
southern Afghanistan by smaller, darker ones, and the Pashtoons from northern Afghanistan
by flat woolen caps called pakols. In addition there are Asian-looking Uzbeks and Shia
Hazaras -- descendants of Genghis Khan's Mongols who settled in central Afghanistan before
becoming refugees here.
I had last visited Quetta in 1988, when it was a clean,
relatively quiet place of fewer than 500,000 people. Now it was noisy and dirty, crowded
with beggars and drug addicts, and its population was unofficially estimated at 1.2
million. A three-year drought afflicting southern Asia from Afghanistan to India had
provoked an exodus from the surrounding desert into the city. The delightful water
channels I remembered from the 1980s are now dry and filled with crud. Traveling outside
Quetta, I saw empty riverbeds and dam catchments. Desperate men equipped with nothing but
shovels dug ninety-foot-deep wells in the 110? heat, searching for water near Hanna Lake,
which was once beautiful and full, and is now brown and diminished. With irrigation canals
dry, aquifers are being depleted by overuse.
Agriculture is in decline because of the water shortage,
with cultivation reduced in many areas by 70 percent. Political disorder and mismanagement
have blocked new industry and investment. Pakistan's Afghan-border region -- 1,000
miles long and 100 miles wide -- is a deathly volcanic landscape of crags and winding
canyons where the tropical floor of the Subcontinent pushes upward into the high, shaved
wastes of Central Asia, and where desert and mountain tribesmen replace the darker-skinned
people in the cities. From Baluchistan north through the "tribal agencies" of
Waziristan, Kurram, Orakzai, Khyber, Mohmand, and Bajaur -- near Peshawar, the destitute
capital of the North-West Frontier Province -- one finds an anarchic realm of highwaymen,
religious and tribal violence, heroin laboratories, and weapons smuggling.
Here the religious extremism and disorder begot by two
decades of war in Afghanistan merge with the troubles in Pakistan. With 148 million
people, Pakistan is the world's seventh largest nation, and its annual population-growth
rate of 2.6 percent will make it the third most populous nation by 2050, behind India and
China -- if it still exists.
Afghanistan and Pakistan should be seen as one political
unit. This is a result of Pakistan's heavy involvement in the Afghan guerrilla struggle
against Soviet occupation forces in the 1980s and in the rise of Afghanistan's Taliban
extremists afterward. But geography and British colonial history are factors too.
No border here could be natural. The transition from the
steamy lowlands of the Subcontinent to the high moonscapes of Central Asia is gradual. The
Pashtoons controlling the frontier zone of eastern and southern Afghanistan have never
accepted the arbitrary boundary between Afghanistan and colonial India drawn in 1893 by
the British envoy, Sir Mortimer Durand. Moreover, the British bequeathed to the
Pakistanis the belt of anarchic territories they called tribal agencies, which lie to the
east of the Durand Line. This had the effect of further confusing the boundary between
settled land and the chaos of Afghanistan. Pakistani governments have always felt besieged
-- not only by India but also by Afghan tribesmen. In order to fight India, in the
Pakistani view, it is necessary to dominate Afghanistan. But this Pakistan has never been
able to accomplish. The story of the lawless frontier, and of its emerging importance as a
crisis point, is the story of failure: the failure of a sophisticated people from the
industrial and agricultural plain of Punjab -- the Pakistani military and political elite
-- to dominate an unreconstructed tribal people of the high desert.
The Taliban WHEN the explosions and gunfire awakened me in
Quetta, I was staying at the home of a friend, Hamed Karzai, who from 1992 to 1994 had
been Afghanistan's first deputy foreign minister. At that time Afghanistan was governed by
the mujahideen, the "holy warriors" who had defeated the Soviets. That was
before the emergence of the radical Taliban ("Knowledge Seekers"), of whom
Karzai is now an outspoken opponent. Not only was the iron gate outside his home bolted at
night, with an armed Afghan on duty, but Karzai insisted that a former mujahideen
commander guard the door of my room. I forgave Karzai his anxiety on my behalf. In July of
last year his father was assassinated while walking home from evening prayers at a nearby
mosque; the gunman escaped on a waiting motorbike. The murder, together with many others
in Pakistan's borderland, was attributed to the Taliban.
Karzai, forty-two, is Afghan royalty. He is tall and
olive-complexioned, with a clipped salt-and-pepper beard and a starched shalwar kameez.
The slope of his bald head and nose gives him the look of an eagle. After the murder of
his father Karzai inherited the title khan ("head") of the 500,000-strong
Popolzai -- the Pashtoon clan of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Persian army commander who
conquered the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and in 1747 became the first king of
Afghanistan. Because tribal position is of great importance in Afghan society, the
mujahideen always trusted the Westernized and moderate Karzai. The same went for the
Taliban, who sought him out long before they seized power and later offered him the post
of United Nations ambassador.
"The Taliban were good, honest people," Karzai
told me over green Afghan tea and almonds. "They were connected to the madrassas
[Islamic academies] in Quetta and Peshawar, and were my friends from the jihad [holy war]
against the Soviets. They came to me in May, 1994, saying, 'Hamed, we must do something
about the situation in Kandahar. It is unbearable.' I had no reservations about helping
them. I had a lot of money and weapons left over from the jihad. I also helped them with
political legitimacy. It was only in September of 1994 that others began to appear at the
meetings -- silent ones I did not recognize, people who took over the Taliban movement.
That was the hidden hand of Pakistani intelligence."
I heard versions of this story from several former
commanders of the jihad, who told me how they had supported the Taliban only to be
deceived by the Pakistani intelligence agents who were behind the movement. These
incomplete and somewhat self-serving accounts encapsulated much complicated history. By
early 1994 Afghanistan was in disarray. The mujahideen who warred against the Soviets had
been a motley collection of seven Pakistan-based resistance groups, divided by region,
clan, politics, and religious ideology. Worse, the resistance commanders inside
Afghanistan had only the loosest of links to the seven groups. For them, party affiliation
was merely a matter of access to weaponry -- the groups were awash in guns and money,
provided by the CIA through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. Thus when the
Soviet-backed Afghan regime collapsed in Kabul, the capital, in 1992, Afghanistan became a
writhing nest of petty warlords who fought and negotiated with one another for small
chunks of territory. Girls and young boys were raped and traded between commanders. The
situation was especially bad in Kandahar. The road leading to it from Quetta was shared by
at least twenty factions, each of which put a chain across the road and demanded tolls.
But there were also honest commanders, backwoodsmen who
lived by a primitive creed called Pashtoonwali -- "the way of the Pashtoons," a
code more severe even than Koranic law. While emphasizing hospitality and chivalry,
Pashtoonwali demands blood vengeance on fellow Muslims for killing and punishes adultery
based on hearsay alone. In addition to these commanders there were hordes of young boys
who had grown up in crowded refugee camps in Quetta and Peshawar, where they were educated
in madrassas supported by Saudi Arabia. The schools taught a more ideological and austere
brand of Islam than the ones practiced in the mountains of Afghanistan, where before the
Soviet occupation religion had been a natural outgrowth of rural life. (In the mountains
women need not always wear veils, for example, because in the course of a day the only
males they encounter are their relatives.) In the urban anonymity of Pakistani cities and
adjacent refugee camps religion was reinvented in harsher form, to preserve values
suddenly under attack.
The communist ideology brought to Afghanistan by the Soviet
occupation had required an equally harsh response, and throughout the 1980s and early
1990s the madrassas for Afghan refugees in Pakistan provided it. The fierce brand of Islam
they taught was not just a reaction to urban conditions but also a result of evolving and
intertwining Saudi and Pakistani philosophies. In the Afghan refugee academies Saudi
Wahabism merged (as it did nowhere else) with the Deobandism of the Subcontinent. Wahabism
arose in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century with the teachings of Muhammad
ibn Abdul Wahab, who led a puritanical reaction against what he considered lax observance.
Deobandism takes its name from the village of Deoband, outside New Delhi, where in the
nineteenth century an Islamic academy developed an orthodox pan-Islam in reaction against
British rule. When the Muslim state of Pakistan was created, Deobandism was further
radicalized by an Islamic theorist named Abdul A'la Maududi, who propagated a form of
Islam with striking resemblances to totalitarianism. Maududi believed that the Koran had
to be accepted in full and that many Muslims had corrupted Islam by letting themselves be
influenced by the liberal West. Islam is perfect, Maududi asserted, and requires no
judgment on the part of the believer. It should override all other laws of the state.
There is no contradiction between the radical Islamists'
hatred for the Russians in Chechnya and their hatred for the Americans everywhere else:
both are reactions to a challenge from an impure West that is more proximate than ever
before, because of technology.
As Afghanistan fell apart in an orgy of banditry, madrassa
students in Pakistan came into contact with uncorrupted backwoodsmen inside Afghanistan;
together they filled the vacuum in authority. One of the backwoodsmen was Mullah Mohammed
Omar, a mujahideen commander who is said to have ignited the Taliban revolt, in early
1994, by leading a small force in Kandahar that captured and hanged from the barrel of a
tank a fellow commander guilty of raping two girls.
The Taliban rose and swept across late-twentieth-century
Afghanistan much as Islam itself had swept across seventh-century Arabia and North Africa,
filling the void left by the anarchy and decadence of waning Byzantine rule. In the
process of overrunning 80 percent of the country, the Taliban captured Kabul, in 1996.
There they carried out amputations and stonings and seized the Soviet puppet ruler of
Afghanistan, Najibullah, from a United Nations compound, castrating and jeep-dragging him
before hanging him from a traffic post.
The atrocities demonstrated the Taliban obsession with the
notion that the city, with its foreign influences, is the root of all evil. In the
recently published Taliban the journalist Ahmed Rashid writes that because many of the
Taliban are orphans of war, who have never known the company of women, they have retreated
into a male brotherhood reminiscent of the Crusaders. Indeed, the most dangerous movements
are often composed of war orphans, who, being unsocialized, are exceptionally brutal (the
Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, and the Revolutionary United Front, in Sierra Leone, are two
examples). Of course, the longer wars go on, the more orphans are created.
The Taliban embody a lethal combination: a primitive tribal
creed, a fierce religious ideology, and the sheer incompetence, naivete, and cruelty that
are begot by isolation from the outside world and growing up amid war without parents.
They are also an example of globalization, influenced by imported pan-Islamic ideologies
and supported economically by both Osama bin Laden's worldwide terrorist network (for whom
they provide a base) and a multibillion-dollar smuggling industry in which ships and
trucks bring consumer goods from the wealthy Arabian Gulf emirate of Dubai (less a state
than the world's largest shopping mall) through Iran and Afghanistan and on to Quetta and
Karachi.
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan also relied on crucial
help from Pakistan. By 1994 Pakistan was tiring of its Afghan mujahideen puppet, Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s its Inter-Services Intelligence had
channeled more arms and money from the CIA to Hekmatyar's radical-fundamentalist faction
than to any of the more moderate mujahideen groups. Hekmatyar was young, charismatic,
highly educated, and power-hungry. Yet his attraction for the ISI lay in the fact that he
had little grassroots support inside Afghanistan itself and was thus beholden to the
Pakistanis. The continuing anarchy in Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviets
showed the fundamental flaw in the ISI's policy. Hekmatyar could never consolidate power
to the extent Pakistan required in order to safeguard its land routes to the new oil
states of Central Asia -- routes that would create a bulwark of Muslim states that could
confront India.
It was a democratically elected Prime Minister, Benazir
Bhutto, along with her Interior Minister, the retired general Naseerullah Babar, who
conceived of the Taliban as a solution to Pakistan's problem. Through the ISI the Bhutto
government began to provide the Taliban with money, fuel, subsidized wheat, vehicles,
weapons, and volunteers from Pakistan's madrassas. It also linked Afghanistan to
Pakistan's telephone grid.
But the Taliban won't play the role of puppet. And
Afghanistan's religious extremism is accelerating Pakistan's, through the network of
madrassas. Furthermore, the future of the Taliban themselves is uncertain. They have
restored security in Afghanistan by disarming much of the countryside, but they have built
no institutions to sustain their rule -- and 70 percent of working-age Afghans are
jobless. Just as the Taliban rose and spread like Islam itself, they could also descend
into disorderly power struggles, much like the medieval Muslim rulers who followed the
prophet Mohammed.
Ultimately, the Taliban are tribal Pashtoons from the
southern and eastern Afghan borderlands -- an anarchic mountain people who have ground up
one foreign invader after another, defying attempts by the Moguls, the Sikhs, the British,
the Soviets, and the Pakistanis to control them. As Mahauddin, a white-robed Pashtoon
cleric from southwestern Afghanistan, told me in Karzai's home, "We are thirsty for a
pure Afghan government, a loya jirga [grand council of tribal chiefs] without Russia or
the ISI to influence us."
In fact, with mujahideen field commanders no longer getting
CIA money and weapons through the ISI, power in Afghanistan is inexorably gravitating back
to the tribal heads. For example, commanders of Popolzai descent who were loyal to
Hekmatyar and the other mujahideen party leaders have returned to Karzai's fold, which is
why he is so troublesome to the Taliban and their Pakistani backers -- and why Quetta is
dangerous for Karzai.
The North-West Frontier EVERAL hundred miles north of
Quetta lies Peshawar, at the eastern end of the Khyber Pass -- the fabled gateway
connecting Central Asia to the Subcontinent, which in our day means connecting Afghanistan
to Pakistan. Here the religious disputes that run parallel to tribal divides come more
clearly into focus. In the late 1970s Peshawar went from being a quaint backwater whose
bazaars were interspersed with stately lawns and red-brick mansions in Anglo-Indian Gothic
style to becoming a geopolitical fault line. Afghan refugees poured through the Khyber
Pass by the millions, escaping the Soviet invasion. At the same time, the Iranian
revolution closed off an important route for drug smugglers, who began transporting
locally produced heroin eastward through the Khyber Pass and down to the port of Karachi.
Peshawar's population doubled to a million. Throughout the 1980s war, crime, and
urbanization generated an intolerant religiosity.
Returning to Peshawar for the first time in more than a
decade, I found an even more crowded, poor, and polluted city than the one I remembered.
It was also more Afghan. In the 1980s Peshawar's Afghan population consisted of refugees
from the rural hinterlands. But from 1992 to 1994, when a civil war among the mujahideen
destroyed Kabul with mortar fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the sophisticated
urbanites of the Afghan capital migrated to Peshawar. Unlike the rural refugees, these
people had an exportable cosmopolitan culture, and this added another layer of change to
Peshawar. Now there are many more Afghan restaurants and carpet shops and nightclubs for
Afghan music -- especially owing to the Taliban ban on music in Kabul. There are also many
Afghan prostitutes, fairer-skinned and reputed to be more compliant than their Pakistani
counterparts. The presence of educated Afghans made me realize that the very element of
the population most averse to Taliban rule was now absent from Afghanistan, reducing the
likelihood of an uprising.
In the 1980s traveling outside Peshawar into the tribal
agencies of the North-West Frontier Province was easy for journalists, because the
Pakistani regime encouraged news coverage of the mujahideen struggle against the Soviets
in Afghanistan. This time it took me several days to get a permit to travel from Peshawar
into the Orakzai and Kurram tribal agencies, which in recent years have been plagued by
communal violence between members of the Sunni and Shia sects of Islam. The permit was
valid only provided that I was accompanied by an armed escort of local tribal militia.
The road south and west of Peshawar runs past squalid
mud-brick and wattle stalls crowded with bearded and turbaned Pashtoon men; the women,
concealed under burkas, resemble moving tents. The sky is polluted by a greasy haze of
black smoke from tire-fed fires, used to bake mud bricks. The odor in each town is a rich
mixture of dung, hashish, grilled meat, and diesel oil -- and also cordite in Darra Adam
Khel, where Pashtoons work at foot-powered lathes producing local copies of Kalashnikovs
and other assault rifles.
In one shop, whose glass cases were filled with rifles,
pistols, and bullet magazines, I met Haji Mohammed Zaman Khan, a local tribal leader. Haji
Zaman wore a bulbous red cloth hat with an ostentatious bow around it -- the signature of
the Afridi, a branch of the Pashtoons thought to be descended from Greek soldiers of
Alexander the Great's army, which came down the Khyber Pass. Here, as in Quetta, all the
stores had been closed in protest against the military government's plan to tax the
smuggling trade. Haji Zaman explained, "The government tries to stop production of
opium poppies, our only cash crop. It wants to ban the transport of guns, which will make
thousands jobless. Smuggling is the only means of survival we have left. Why doesn't the
government raise money from the corrupt? When we see that the corrupt are being punished,
then maybe we will trust the government."
By "the corrupt," Zaman meant officials of
previous democratic governments who are under investigation for taking billions of dollars
in bribes and depositing them in foreign bank accounts. Throughout Baluchistan and the
North-West Frontier, I heard calls for revenge against those officials. No one with whom I
spoke voiced any interest in national elections, which are very tentatively scheduled to
take place in three years; political analysts in Islamabad call them a dead issue among
the masses, though only for now.
Beyond Darra Adam Khel the landscape consisted of naked
rock, heat, and haze. High temperatures had come a month early, with 110? common by early
May, and there had been no seasonal rains to cool the ground. I saw women in burkas
searching for water trickling through otherwise dry gravel beds. Low-walled fortresses of
red brick were scarred with graffiti that read, in English and Urdu, LONG LIVE OSAMA BIN
LADEN and WE WANT ISLAMIC LAW. Throughout the tribal lands of Pakistan people are naming
their newborns Osama. To these people, Bin Laden represents an Islamic David against a
global American Goliath. It is the American government's promotion of Bin Laden as a
formidable enemy that helps to give him credibility here. To the poor, he embodies the
idea that only strict Islam has the power to vanquish the advancing materialism of the
West. In the nearby tribal agency of Waziristan, Pakistani members of the Taliban have
been destroying television sets, videos, and other reminders of the West. Bin Laden's
terrorist organization, with operatives on several continents, is both a symptom of and a
reaction against globalization.
Parachinar, the largest town in the Kurram tribal agency,
was a small market center twelve years ago. Now it is a crowded city of 300,000,
characterized by brutal concrete, electricity outages, water shortages, battles over
property rights, and terrorism powered by guns that are filtering back into Pakistan from
Afghanistan. When I asked the assistant political agent for Kurram, Massoud Urrahma, if
military rule had made a difference, he replied dismissively, "Whether the government
in Islamabad is military or democratic doesn't matter. We have no civil law here -- only
Pashtoon tribal law."
The Pashtoon population of Kurram is split between Sunnis
and Shias. In September of 1996 a gun battle among teenage members of the two rival Muslim
sects escalated into a communal war in which more than 200 people were killed and women
and children were kidnapped. A paramilitary official said that the atrocities were out of
"the Stone Age"; militants even executed out-of-towners who were staying at a
local hotel.
Now the situation in Parachinar is peaceful but extremely
tense. Paramilitaries guard the streets around the Sunni and Shia mosques, which stand
nearly side by side, their minarets scarred by bullet holes. Only a few weeks before my
visit seventeen people had been killed in violence between Sunnis and Shias in another
tribal region of the North-West Frontier.
"The Shias are eighty percent of the Kurram
agency,"the Shia leader in Parachinar, Mohammed Anwar, told me. "The problems
have all been caused by Afghan refugees who support the Sunnis."Yet the Sunni leader,
Haji Asghar Din, claims that 75 percent of the local population is Sunni. He told me that
Sunnis cannot buy land from Shias -- "so how can we consider them our brothers?"
The only certainty is that Parachinar, hemmed in by the Safed Koh Mountains on the Afghan
border, has little more room to expand. A high birth rate and a flood of Afghan refugees
have intensified the property conflicts. Population growth has also weakened the power of
tribal elders and created extremist youth factions. The lack of water and electricity has
increased anger. Meanwhile, the government schools are abysmal -- often without teachers,
books, and roofs. The poor, who form the overwhelming majority, cannot afford the private
academies, so they send their children to Sunni and Shia madrassas, where students are
well cared for and indoctrinated with sectarian beliefs.
Every person I interviewed was sullen and reticent. One day
a crowd of men surrounded me and led me to the back of a pharmacy, where they took turns
denouncing America and telling me that the Taliban were good because they had restored
security to Afghanistan, ending mujahideen lawlessness. The "external hand of
India" was to blame for the local troubles between Sunnis and Shias here, I was told.
Conspiracy theories, I have noticed, are inflamed by illiteracy: people who can't read
rely on hearsay. In Pakistan the adult literacy rate is below 33 percent. In the tribal
areas it is below that. As for the percentage of women in Parachinar who can read, I heard
figures as low as two percent; nobody really knows.
Karachi RIBAL and religious unrest in Pakistan is
aggravated by terrible living conditions and divisive nationalisms. These are most clearly
seen in Karachi, far to the south, on the Arabian Sea. Traditionless, dysfunctional, and
unstable, Karachi is an unfortunately apt metaphor for Pakistan's general condition. Only
a quarter of the 14 million residents are native to Sind, the region around Karachi, and
are themselves migrants from the drought-stricken interior. The rest are immigrants from
elsewhere on the Subcontinent. At least a quarter of the populace lives in katchiabaadis,
"temporary houses" built haphazardly of corrugated iron, cinder blocks, wattle,
burlap, and cardboard, with stones and tires anchoring their rattling roofs. Vistas of
these houses go on for miles. Some katchiabaadi neighborhoods have existed for decades;
they have shops, teahouses, and makeshift playgrounds. Goats wander everywhere. Children
and adults sift through mounds of garbage in search of items to recycle. "The water
situation is getting worse; electricity and other infrastructure are hopeless," a
foreign expert told me. "The entire foundation of life here is imploding -- except,
of course, in the neighborhoods where people have lots of money."
Most Third World cities manifest dramatic contrasts between
rich and poor. But in no other place have I seen rich and poor live in such close and
hostile proximity as in Karachi. On one street a grimy warren of katchiabaadis lay to my
right, and a high wall guarding luxury villas and a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet lay to
my left. Karachi's villas look like embassies, with guards, barbed wire, iron grilles, and
beautiful bougainvillaea and jacaranda trees adorning stucco ramparts. The villas, with
their satellite dishes for watching CNN, MTV, and other international channels, symbolize
a high-end kind of globalization; the katchiabaadis -- so much like the slums I have seen
throughout the developing world -- a low-end kind.
During the week that I was in Karachi in May, seven
vehicles, including a bus, were set afire by rampaging youths, who also broke windows at a
McDonald's and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Seven other vehicles were carjacked. Bombs
exploded near a police station and in the central business district, killing one person
and injuring six others. Three people were murdered by unidentified assailants. As in
Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, political, ethnic, and religious reasons
are given for the violence. But the evidence is often murky. Seeing how people lived in
Karachi, I wondered if sheer rage might have much to do with it. I consider it a triumph
of the human spirit, in fact, that there is not more violence here: the day that the
youths went rampaging was the tenth in succession without water for part of the city. The
wealthy have their own private water tanks, water-distribution network, and generators.
More than 4,000 people have been killed and more than
10,000 wounded in Karachi since the mid-1980s, when the city began to overflow with
weapons from the Afghan war and communal fighting broke out between Pashtoons and two
generations of mohajirs, Muslim refugees from India. In the late 1980s and the 1990s
mohajirs and Sindhis fought each other here and elsewhere in Sind. In the first ten months
of 1998 there were 629 murders in Karachi committed by what a local magazine called
"unaffiliated contract killers"; none was solved by the police. Mobile phones
were banned in the 1990s, because urban guerrillas were using them. Wire services
dutifully report all the violence in Karachi, and in Baluchistan and the North-West
Frontier, too. The reports are rarely picked up by the American media.
Just as the yearning for an independent Pashtoonistan is
ever present in the Afghan borderlands, in southern Pakistan some Sindhis long for an
independent Sind. Sind has been inhabited for 6,000 years, and although the Sindhis are a
mixture of Arabs, Persians, and other passing conquerors, they retain a strong cultural
identity. But the idea of a stable, independent Sind is ludicrous, given the enmity
between Sunnis and Shias that I saw in Karachi.
I drove through a mishmash of gleaming high-rises,
katchiabaadis, and sloppily constructed overpasses to arrive at a guarded house where a
man introduced himself as a "retired school principal" and a "moderate
Shia." Surrounded by his friends, he told me, "They'll kill us if you identify
us by name."
General Musharraf, Pakistan's new ruler, "is a
serious, humane man, but he has arrived too late to save Pakistan," the Shia leader
explained. "With life getting worse materially, religion is more enticing, and
tensions between us and the Sunni extremists are on the rise." The man spoke at
length about universal love, honor, and tolerance in a very soft and patient tone, while
offering me tea and dainty sweets. He gave me several books that laid out the Shia view of
Muslim history -- doctrines, he told me, that had gotten his friends murdered. Nothing he
said seemed offensive or narrow-minded. Rather, it was the obsession with Shi'ism itself
that was the problem. His orthodoxy conflicted with others in a land where poverty is
stark, ignorance and conspiracy-mongering are widespread, and the state itself is weak.
Next I visited the Sunnis. I drove through another
succession of katchiabaadis to a bleak industrial zone, where I left the car and banged at
an iron gate. Inside was a complex of school buildings with armed security guards. One of
the guards led me to a room with a wall-to-wall carpet that had just been vacuumed. People
sat on the floor with cushions behind them, in the traditional Oriental fashion. All had
beards, skullcaps, and spotless white robes. The low glass coffee tables had just been
polished. After the filth of so much of Karachi, I couldn't help being impressed.
I noticed security cameras mounted over all the doors.
After removing my shoes, I was brought an ice-cold Pepsi. Then I was ushered into another
spotless room, also with a vacuumed rug. Behind a low glass desk in a corner I saw three
closed-circuit television screens, a speakerphone, headphones, a VCR, and a computer. A
tiny, pudgy man with a gray beard and fashionable glasses, wearing a skullcap and a white
shalwar kameez, entered the room.
"Will you excuse me while I say my prayers?" he
asked. I waited as he knelt on the floor and prayed. Then he sat down behind the desk,
turned on the television screens, put on the headphones, and proceeded to observe two
classes in progress, giving orders to the teachers over the speakerphone while monitoring
the entrance on a third screen. Speaking in a finely enunciated blend of Urdu and Arabic,
he seemed both meticulous and relentless.
Mufti Mohammed Naeem is the rector of the Jamia Binoria, a
"society" of Islamic madrassas linked to the extreme Wahabi and Deobandi
traditions. (Masood Azhar, a militant whom India jailed for fanning Islamic separatism in
Kashmir and was forced to release after an airline hijacking last December, studied in one
of these academies.) Mufti Naeem rattled off statistics for me: the Jamia Binoria has
2,300 students, ages eight through twenty, from thirty countries, including the United
States. The twelve-acre campus includes a hotel and a supermarket. Separate accommodations
and cafeterias are provided for boys and girls. "The girls arrive from abroad with
skirts, but now they are fully covered," he said breezily. "We have changed
their minds." He explained that although the foreign students paid tuition, the poor
of the katchiabaadis were educated without charge. Yes, he had a Web site. As he spoke, he
fielded calls and kept checking the television monitors.
"What do you teach?" I asked. "Islam, not
math or anything else, only Islam." Mufti Naeem called in a number of foreign
students. One, a teenage American boy from Los Angeles, explained, "We only study
those sciences -- such as grammar, Arabic linguistics, and jurisprudence -- that help us
understand Islam." When I asked the students what they planned to do when they
returned home, they all said, "Propagate Islam." Some of the Americans came from
Muslim backgrounds; others were Christians who had converted. The Americans agreed that
the United States was a land of decadence and materialism for which only the prophet
Mohammed had the answer.
The most significant aspect of the madrassa was the service
it provided for the poor. Here was the one school in Karachi, a local analyst told me,
where the children of the katchiabaadis were fed, educated, protected, and even loved.
Mufti Naeem said, "The state is bathed in corruption. The teachers at the government
schools are unqualified. They get their jobs through political connections. We, not the
government, are educating the common people. And we are putting all our efforts into
training those who will spread Islam."
According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, many
of the country's public schools are "ghost schools" that exist only on paper. If
there was one thing the military regime could accomplish, I thought, it would be to force
parents, particularly in the backward tribal areas, to send their children, boys and
girls, to school, and to make the schools decent. But General Musharraf is not doing that.
Nor is he being pressured by the West to do it, even as the West spends its political
capital here demanding a return to the same parliamentary system that bankrupted the
country and resulted in the military coup. Given that the Subcontinent is a nuclear
battleground where defense budgets are skyrocketing, and at the same time it is home to 45
percent of the world's illiterate people, I can see few priorities for the United States
higher than pressuring governments in the region to improve primary education. Otherwise
the madrassas will do it. What was so frightening about Mufti Naeem was the way he used
Western information-age paraphernalia in the service of pan-Islamic absolutism.
General Musharraf AKISTAN has never been well governed.
After the military fought its catastrophic war with India in 1971, hopes were placed on
the new democratic leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a wealthy landlord from Sind. But Bhutto
turned out to be a divisive populist who sowed fear with his security service and
surrounded himself with sycophants. His 1977 re-election was marred by fraud; riots broke
out and Bhutto declared martial law. Soldiers fired on people in the streets. The military
wasn't happy; the army chief of staff, Zia ul-Haq, led a coup.
It was Zia who released the fundamentalist genie: though
moderate himself, he allied the military with Sunni radicals in order to win support for
his new regime. After his death, in 1988 in an air crash that has yet to be explained,
democracy returned with the election of Bhutto's daughter, Benazir, as Prime Minister.
Though educated at Harvard, Benazir had no political or administrative experience and had
made what by all accounts was a disastrous marriage to Asif Ali Zardari, who later became
her Investment Minister. Zardari's large-scale theft of public funds undermined his wife's
government. Elections next brought the Punjabi businessman Nawaz Sharif to power. Together
with his brother, Shabaz, Sharif ran Pakistan as a family enterprise; the brothers'
reputation for taking huge kickbacks and other financial malfeasance outdid even that of
Benazir's cabinet. By his second term, reportedly, Sharif was amassing so much money that
it was feared that he could perpetually buy off the members of the National Assembly and
create a virtual dictatorship. The Sharif and Bhutto governments stand accused of stealing
$2 billion in public money, part of some $30 billion smuggled out of the country during
democratic rule.
When, last October, General Musharraf toppled Sharif's
government in a bloodless coup, the West saw it as a turn for the worse. However,
Pakistanis saw the accession of General Musharraf as a rare positive development in a
country where almost all trends are bad. The local media are (at least for now) freer
under the military than they were under Sharif, whose aides frequently intimidated
journalists. Musharraf has initiated no extensive personality cult. He has said more to
promote human rights than have the officials of recent democratic governments, working to
end such abhorrent tribal and religious practices as "honor killings" and
"blasphemy laws" (though radical clerics have forced him to back down on these
issues). Mehnaz Akbar, of the private Asia Foundation, in Islamabad, says, "This is
the most liberal time ever in Pakistan." Musharraf, an admirer of Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, is a like-minded modernizer. He shakes hands
with women in full public view, and one of the first pictures taken of him after he
assumed power shows him holding his two poodles, even though dogs are considered unclean
by traditional Muslims. Most important, as one Pakistani journalist told me,
"Musharraf speaks with conviction and people believe him, whereas Benazir, though an
intellectual, was never believed."
President Bill Clinton's visit to Pakistan in March was not
a public-relations success. Clinton, who was opposed to the military take-over, refused to
shake hands with Musharraf for the television cameras. A day later Pakistanis saw Clinton,
on television in Geneva, clasping the hands of the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad -- whose
regime, they knew, was far more repressive than that of any Pakistani military ruler since
the founding of their state.
Musharraf is characterized in the West as a dictator who
supports fundamentalist terrorists in Afghanistan and Kashmir and who is not moving fast
enough to restore democracy. The truth is somewhat different. Musharraf, one of the last
British-style aristocratic officers in the Pakistani army, is a man in the middle. The
West demands that he stop supporting Islamic militants; his fellow generals, who carried
out the coup in his name, are Islamic hardliners, capable of staging another coup if
Musharraf puts too much distance between himself and the Taliban and the Muslim fighters
in Kashmir. Moreover, some analysts in Islamabad worry that Musharraf might be moving too
fast on too many fronts in his drive to reform Pakistan. In addition to promoting human
rights, a free press, and local elections that threaten tribal mafias, he has challenged
the smugglers throughout Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier. As the gun battle I saw
in Quetta demonstrated, Musharraf has struck hard against various ethnic nationalists and
criminal groups. Unlike previous anti-corruption drives in Pakistan's history, Musharraf's
has indiscriminately targeted officials from all political parties and ethnic groups. And
Musharraf has not relied on fundamentalist organizations like the Maududi-influenced
Jama'at-I-Islami ("Islamic Society") for support, as Zia did. He has in fact
alienated many vested interests, who have the will and the means to fight back -- which is
why, despite his liberal instincts, Musharraf may yet declare martial law.
Even if Musharraf's reformist plans succeed, one crucial
element will remain: the military itself, which with its own factories, agribusinesses,
road-construction firms, schools, hotels, and so on, constitutes a parallel state. No less
than the civilian sector, the military is mired in corruption, and yet it is exempt from
investigations by the courts. Tanvir Ahmad Khan, a former Foreign Secretary, told me that
Pakistan's only hope may be "a genuine hybrid system in which the army accepts
responsibility for poverty and illiteracy in return for limited political power." A
successful hybrid system, he went on, would "democratize the army." Rifaat
Hussain, who chairs the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Quaid-Azam
University, in Islamabad, agrees: "I will not rule out a formal constitution on the
Turkish model in order to create a national-security council and give the army
constitutional privileges. We must find a way to legally stabilize civil-military
relations."
Attock Fort AKISTANI politics have been a circular tale of
passion in which one group of people imprisons or persecutes another, only to be
imprisoned or persecuted itself once political fortunes change. Consider the story of
Farouk Adam Khan.
In 1973, as a thirty-three-year-old army major, Adam led a
coup against the elected Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The coup failed when one of
the officers deeply involved lost his nerve and reported the details to the Prime Minister
himself. Adam spent five years in prison, including, as he puts it, "thirteen months,
two days, and six hours" at Attock Fort, fifty miles west of Islamabad, overlooking
the Indus River, which was built by the Moguls in 1581 to guard the Afghan frontier. Adam
went on to become a lawyer in his native Peshawar, where I met him in 1987. He is now the
prosecutor-general of Musharraf's National Accountability Bureau. I saw him again in May,
back at Attock Fort, where he was to arraign the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on
corruption charges.
After the proceedings in a whitewashed barracks hall --
where fans whirred overhead and flies hovered and the unfortunate Sharif pleaded for
better food -- Adam pointed out the room where he had read The Federalist Papers and John
Stuart Mill's On Liberty in the semi-darkness of solitary confinement. "Those books
confirmed my judgment that I was absolutely justified to attempt a coup," he told me.
"Every single ingredient that the authors of those books say is required for a civil
society -- education, a moral code, a sense of nationhood: you name it, we haven't got it!
Just look at our history. It sounds authoritarian, but we need someone who will not
compromise in order to build a state. It is not a matter of democracy but of
willpower."
Adam's interpretation of Mill and the Founding Fathers is
certainly questionable. Yet fifty-three years after independence only about one percent of
Pakistanis pay any taxes at all: one can empathize with his yearning for a functioning
state. But I fear that Adam's dreams may be impossible to realize, under either democracy
or the semi-authoritarian conditions he recommends. Musharraf may be better respected by
his countrymen than any other Pakistani leader in decades, but there is just too much
poverty and ignorance, too many ethnic and sectarian rivalries, too many pan-Islamic
influences, too many weapons filtering back from Afghanistan, and too many tribal and
smugglers' mafias able to challenge the military. As the Shia leader in Karachi told me,
Musharraf may simply be a good man who arrived too late. Ataturk had decades to build
Turkey -- time Musharraf doesn't have.
>From the mottled-ocher battlements of Attock Fort, I
gazed down on the Indus River, which marks the geographic divide between the Subcontinent
and the marchlands of Central Asia. Mogul, Sikh, and British conquerors, and then the new
state of Pakistan, had all rearranged borders, but the river still expressed a certain
inexorable logic -- evinced by the resentment that the Pashtoons of the North-West
Frontier on one bank felt for the more settled Punjabis on the other. Here, at this broad
and majestic crossing, is where India truly begins, I thought. A forty-five-minute drive
east of Attock lay Taxila, where amid the enervating heat and dust are the ruins of
Persian, Greek, Buddhist, and ancient Indian civilizations: a lesson in history's
transmutations, with one culture blending with and overturning another. If there is any
common thread, it is that India has always been invaded from the northwest, from the
direction of Afghanistan and Central Asia -- by Muslim hordes like the Moguls, the
builders of the Taj Mahal. And given the turbulence within Islam itself, it is hard to
believe that this region has seen the last of its transformations -- or that Pakistan
constitutes history's last word in this unstable zone between mountains and plains.
At the end of my visit to Pakistan, I sat with a group of
journalists trying to fathom why Nawaz Sharif, when still Prime Minister, had reportedly
turned down an offer of several billion dollars in aid from the United States in return
for agreeing not to test nuclear weapons. A Pakistani friend supplied the simple answer:
"India had tested them, so we had to. It would not have mattered who was Prime
Minister or what America offered. We have never defined ourselves in our own right -- only
in relation to India. That is our tragedy."
The feebler the state becomes, the more that nuclear
weapons are needed to prove otherwise. At major intersections in the main cities of
Pakistan are fiberglass monuments to a rock that was severed in 1998 by underground
nuclear tests in the Baluchistan desert -- celebrating the achievement of nuclear power.
Do not expect Pakistan to pass quietly from history.
Robert D. Kaplan is a correspondent for The Atlantic, a
senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and the author of Eastward to Tartary:
Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, which will be published in
November. |