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W
e rattled through the parched countryside, past fortress-like farmhouses and salt-flecked marshes, kicking up a cloud of dust. A village loomed. As our jeep slowed down, a gang of long-haired tribesmen stepped up, all turbans and curly whiskers, brandishing their Kalashnikovs with mobster panache. They seemed to be smiling. Then the firing started.

I crouched instinctively as three bullet bursts whipped over the jeep roof at a horribly low angle. My host, however, was entirely unperturbed. Anwar Kamal yanked his door open and strode purposefully into the gunfire, waving cheerily. His bodyguard, a strapping man with chipped teeth, trailed behind, cackling with delight as he, too, emptied his rifle into the sky.

It was January 2008, a fortnight before the last general election, and I had come to north-western Pakistan, along the troubled border with Afghanistan, to get a taste of the campaign among the Pashtun. Kamal, a local political veteran, was my guide. A burly
sixty-one-year-old
of martial bearing, Kamal was many things in life – lawyer and chieftain, landlord and warlord. Today, though, he was simply a candidate. Over thirty years in politics he had notched up six election victories, he said; now he was canvassing his rambunctious constituents for a seventh.

A whistle sounded, the shooting stopped and we were led into a courtyard where the elders, wrapped in wool shawls, were waiting. We sat down for an unusual variety show. The gunmen took to the floor to perform a traditional dance, whirling in a sort of shufflestep waltz, rifles swinging wildly from their shoulders. I hoped they had engaged the safety catches; it seemed unlikely. Next up were the volleyball aficionados – teenagers in baggy pants (no shorts) who tossed around a child’s pink ball that jolted violently when it hit the rutted ground, which was often. The crowd took the game seriously; when I overstepped a white scrawl in the soil, a gruff-looking man nudged me back with the barrel of his gun. ‘Line,’ he said.

Afterwards, Kamal, now garlanded with a Christmas-style tinsel necklace, posed for team photos and addressed the villagers through a crackly speaker system. I could make out just a few words – ‘electricity’, ‘money’, ‘America’ – but the punters seemed to like it, chortling at the gags and clapping vigorously at the climax. Finally we were hustled into a long, low room where a feast had been spread out on a plastic floor mat – spicy chicken wings, chunks of juicy mango, spongy cake and sweet tea served in dainty china cups. As we kneeled, Kamal turned to me. ‘I hope you’re enjoying yourself?’ he said. Of course I was.

Even by the rough-and-tumble standards of Pakistani politics, Kamal cuts a striking figure. Theatrical, loquacious and utterly unapologetic, he reminds me of a figure from another era – perhaps the Flashman historical novels. He is a commanding presence. His face is fleshy and pitted, dominated by a flamboyant moustache that sweeps from a centre part to sharply twirled ends. A lawyer by training, in public he articulates slowly and at length, speaking in a raspy baritone that swells on demand into a thunderous bellow, usually when addressing his fellow Marwat tribesmen. In private he is entertaining company, deploying a rascal’s smile in the service of tales of skulduggery and derring-do. He has a maddening disregard for precision. ‘You see that man over there?’ he will say. ‘He has killed six, seven, EIGHT men!’ And he uses an idiosyncratic turn of phrase that would be charming if the ideas he was articulating weren’t so alarming. ‘You see,’ he remarked casually during the electioneering, ‘this murder and fighting business is very tricky.’

Murder and fighting, it turns out, are constant preoccupations in Lakki Marwat, an impoverished district in the southern reaches of Pakistan’s Pashtun territories, wedged between the sluggish Indus River and the mountain wall of the tribal belt. I spent two days with Kamal on that trip, jammed into the back of his jeep. We splashed through ponds of mud and zoomed between stands of palm trees for a dizzy whirl of election rallies, sometimes three in an hour. I didn’t see a single woman. Guns, on the other hand, were everywhere – Soviet-design Kalashnikovs, old British Lee–Enfields and imitation Chinese pistols, often decorated with rainbow-coloured beads. ‘Carrying guns is a common fashion around here,’ Kamal told me as we bumped along. ‘Like a woman wears her necklace, this is our jewellery.’ Few were licensed, he added, but the authorities couldn’t do much about it. He pointed to the rutted road. ‘You see that strip of rubber? That is the only civilization around here. Either side of it, the government does not exist.’

Kamal sweetened his appeal with gifts – a wad of rupees here, an electricity transformer there – yet the people seemed genuinely to appreciate his swashbuckling style. ‘All the wealth of Kabir Khan is not worth one hair from Anwar Kamal’s moustache!’ declared a village headman; Kamal grinned like the Cheshire cat. Haji Kabir Khan was his old nemesis, a rich businessman with more hard cash to splash around. They had once been allies. But if Khan had the voters’ pockets, Kamal was confident of their hearts. In one place, villagers presented him with a jet-black turban wrapped with thick, luxuriant folds; for good measure they dropped one on my head too.

Nearly every building – houses, petrol stations, even mosques – was capped with a square tower, two or three storeys high and studded with loopholes. These medieval-style fortifications were called
burj
, Kamal said, and served as both home security and a marker of status. The richer a man, the higher his
burj
; poor families made do by punching a few holes in their living-room wall. But the feared enemy was not some invading army; more likely it was a vengeful cousin or an irate neighbour. Most Marwats were embroiled in blood feuds, he explained, and disputes dragged on for decades, handed from father to son like cherished heirlooms. ‘You never forgive,’ he said. ‘You may wait twenty, thirty, fifty years – and then you take revenge.’ I suddenly understood why, in some villages, Kamal held two rallies, often just a stone’s throw apart: any larger gathering would have risked a shoot-out among the voters.

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.

R
oasting 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:

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.

P
akistan’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.