B005OWFTDW EBOK (21 page)

Finally, at half past midnight, the call went up – food. The group staggered out of the garden and into three small cars that made a dash for the city centre, the occupants roaring and cheering like teenage joyriders. In my car a small dashboard screen showed a bikini-clad dancer writhing to a roaring Bollywood sound track; veiled female shoppers blurred past in the street outside. It felt surreal. Reaching the restaurant, supper was consumed with a minimum of ceremony: my new friends wolfed down plates of chicken, said their farewells, and parted ways. Back in my guest house I flopped on to the bed, exhausted, inebriated and exhilarated.

The origins of the Pashtun are lost in a genealogical fog. Some consider themselves the ‘lost Jews’ – descendants of Qais, an Afghan convert to Islam who was descended from Saul, king of the Israelites. It is an odd theory, given the vicious anti-Semitism of many Pakistanis, but it has been embraced by Israel. In the 1950s, the country’s second president, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, publicly supported the notion that the Pashtun were among the ‘ten lost tribes’ of Israel. Scholars are sceptical of this link, though, and many Pashtun prefer to see their roots among the other ancient powers that have passed through: Arabs, Persians, Central Asians and Greeks. Simply being a Pashtun, however, is a less complicated matter. There are two requirements. The first is to speak Pashto, an ergative language considered trickier than Urdu. Two dialects are spoken – Pukhto, the hard-tongued variety of the Peshawar Valley, and Pashto, the softer version spoken south of an invisible line that runs between Kohat in Pakistan and Paktika in Afghanistan.

The second requirement is to observe
Pashtunwali
– literally, ‘the way of the Pashtun’ – the famous code of conduct. Its bedrock is
nang
, or honour. A Pashtun without
nang
is considered worthless; in fact he is no longer a Pashtun. Honour faces a multitude of threats – a murdered relative, a philandering wife, perhaps just a casual insult – but has one fail-safe remedy:
badal
, or revenge. Hence the profusion of blood feuds in places like Lakki Marwat. But bloodshed is not compulsory:
Pashtunwali
also has noble tenets that promote compassion and conciliation. Under
nanawatai
, the law of sanctuary, a man can go to his enemy’s house and beg forgiveness. And
melmastia
, hospitality, is practised with great seriousness. After the devastating 2005 earthquake, I climbed for hours to a Pashtun village untouched by rescuers or aid. There I found families huddled in the rubble, their food stocks precariously low. Yet they insisted I share a meal. ‘You are our guest,’ they said.

Educated Pashtun see the image of the trigger-happy tribal, tethered to tradition and blind belief in a bloodthirsty God, as a simplistic orientalist cliché. They have a point. Pashtun form the second-largest ethnic group in Pakistan’s army and crowd the upper echelons of its powerful bureaucracy. There are Pashtun pilots and pop stars, sports icons and tycoons. Shahid Afridi, a showy batsman, until recently captained the national cricket team; Zebunnisa Bangash and Haniya Aslam, two Pashtun women, are among the country’s hottest music acts. There have even been Pashtun dictators – General Ayub Khan, who seized power in 1958, hailed from Haripur.

Pashtunwali
has been diluted in urban areas where the writ of the police is strong, which makes blood feuds trickier to prosecute. Anyway, educated Pashtun consider a shoot-out with the neighbours to be a drain on their time, and have much to lose from a tangle with the law. Consequently most disputes are entrusted to the courts, crooked as they may be.

Yet while urbanites have tailored
Pashtunwali
to the modern world, this is not true of everyone. Large swathes of the frontier are neither modern nor urban. Here, tradition retains its grip and people observe the laws of Islamabad more in the breach than in the observance – which, in turn, can place unusual demands on their elected representatives.

T
here are, by his own admission, two Anwar Kamals. One is the ‘polished gent’ of Peshawar, a leading member of the Pashtun elite with a taste for frontier bling. His pied-à-terre is a spacious house in Hayatabad, the city’s best suburb, where he frequently dines with his three university-educated sons. He drives an imposing white Japanese jeep with dashboard television (and prayer counter for Islamic recitations), carries the latest mobile phone and, being a qualified pilot, keeps a small plane at the local aerodrome. Some years back he imported a pair of greyhounds from England for the purpose of hunting boar on the family lands. A fading portrait of a serious-looking man on his living-room wall is testimony to his rich political pedigree. Khan Habibullah Khan, Kamal’s father, was a minor star in the early decades of Pakistan, serving as Home Minister in the 1960s and chairman of the Senate in the 1970s. At one point he was Acting President of the country. Kamal has had a less prominent, yet also distinguished, career in public service. He was a provincial minister twice and a national senator once; in 1990 he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, during which time he lodged at the luxury Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan.

The second Anwar Kamal emerges when he jumps into his jeep and heads for Lakki Marwat, a bumpy four-hour ride to the south. Lakki is his constituency, but also his land, his power, his identity. Here, Kamal sleeps with a rocket launcher under his
wooden-framed
bed, in a sprawling, draughty fortress guarded by dozens of tribesmen, spends his time in lengthy confabulation with bearded elders and generally acts in a manner that seems to contradict everything the other Anwar Kamal stands for.

The first time we met, in June 2007, we were sitting in his living room in Peshawar, which is adorned with pinkish, flowery wallpaper. On the table between us was a photo album, the sort that might contain snaps of foreign holidays or grinning grandchildren. Instead it was a gallery of war: dozens of images of fierce-looking tribesmen, bristling with weapons, against a harsh backdrop of arid hills. Kamal featured in several of the pictures; in one he sat at the controls of a long, menacing weapon. It was an ack-ack, he explained: a 12.8cm anti-aircraft gun of the kind used by the British to fend off German bombers during the Second World War. A most satisfying weapon, he added, recounting its most recent use.

‘You see, we were being fired on from three sides by some individuals who were hiding in a
burj
,’ he said in his gravelly voice. ‘So I called up my driver, Akhtar’ – a smiling young chap I’d met earlier – ‘and I said, “Bastard! Get that ack-ack and fire back!” So he grabbed it and gave it a burst of seven or eight rounds. What a noise – the whole ground started shaking! The bullets went right through that
burj
, killing two of those individuals who were sitting there.’

He paused for effect, then chuckled.

‘Within a split of a second there was absolute silence. Everyone was calm and cool.’

This dramatic exchange had taken place in 2004 at the height of some particular aggravation with the Bhittanis, the Marwats’ nearest neighbours and oldest rivals. A row had erupted and for the next year hotheads from both sides engaged in the usual needle tactics – tit-for-tat shootings, kidnappings, hostage executions – when things got out of hand. In a brash upping of the ante, the Bhittanis snatched two Marwat women. Kamal was outraged. ‘Now, kidnapping men we don’t mind. That is usual. But taking our ladies – that was totally unprecedented!’

In retaliation, first the Marwats kidnapped six Bhittani women and three children. Then they roused a
lashkar
– a tribal fighting force – with the aim of sweeping into the Bhittani lair, retrieving the abducted damsels and teaching their insolent neighbours a sharp lesson. Kamal led from the front, binoculars in one hand and pistol in the other. It was, by several accounts, a messy affair. The Pakistan Army, which was conducting operations in the nearby tribal belt, mistook the tribesmen for al-Qaeda fugitives and fired a few artillery rounds at them. ‘A genuine misunderstanding,’ said Kamal.

Combat was sporadic. The most dramatic confrontation occurred when Kamal’s guards shot dead a pair of Bhittanis racing towards them on a motorbike. ‘Two hundred bullets in each!’ he recalled with relish. And the hostages were less lucky. One of the abducted women was burned alive with lamp oil (some said it was suicide, others murder); the second was spirited deep into the tribal belt. When the matter was finally resolved a year later, an inter-tribal
jirga
ordered the Marwats to pay 16 million rupees – about $260,000 – in blood money. It was expensive, Kamal admitted as we polished off our tea, but worth every cent. ‘It’s not about money. The question is: “Did you restore your honour?” And we did.’

I stayed in Kamal’s guest quarters that evening, rising early the following morning to travel to Lakki. I found him after dawn in his bedroom, alone, watching the National Geographic channel on television, an AK-47 propped against the bed. His wife, a hepatitis sufferer, had died in tragic circumstances a year earlier. They had travelled to China for a liver transplant, but she died of complications after the operation. Kamal flew home with her body. He spoke about the episode quietly and sparingly; it seemed to pain him.

After a breakfast of eggs and greasy paratha bread, we plunged into the belching Peshawar traffic and left the city. The road swept past Dara Adam Khel, the storied village of gunsmiths, then descended on to the rock-strewn plains of the southern frontier. Halting for tea at a grubby truckers’ cafe, we sat outside on a cluster of rope beds. Kamal pointed to one of his bodyguards: Mina, a stocky fifty-five-year-old with creased skin and gleaming eyes, now contentedly slurping his tea. ‘A complete and utter outlaw,’ he said. He wasn’t exaggerating. Eighteen years earlier, as part of a blood feud, Mina had chased a man across Sindh and Punjab provinces. He finally cornered his quarry after nine months in a dusty Punjabi backwater. Whipping out his pistol, he shot the man repeatedly – the
coup de grâce
, Kamal said, was a bullet to the temple – then picked up his bicycle and fled back to Lakki Marwat via the Indus (where he forced a boatman to carry him across). Some time later, Kamal gave him a job. He slapped my knee and chortled. ‘We may have licensed weapons, but we don’t have licensed individuals!’ The guards laughed along.

Kamal might have been a diplomat. As a young graduate he was on the verge of being posted to the Netherlands in the late 1960s when his father called him home to study law and tend the family’s political affairs. For the past two decades he’s been a supporter of Nawaz Sharif, the current opposition leader. It seems an odd choice: Sharif’s party is rooted in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, and enjoys little support among the Pashtun. But it makes sense to Kamal because the alternatives – Pashtun nationalists, liberals and mullahs – are not to his taste. Still, he can be sharply critical of Sharif. ‘Honestly speaking, I find him to be a mediocrity,’ he once confided. And his rustic, hip-shooting style doesn’t always sit well with the slick Punjab-wallahs who dominate the party. ‘Sometimes,’ he told me in a moment of exasperation, ‘I think I am the only straightforward man in my party.’

For all that, Kamal is fiercely loyal. He served a short jail stretch on political charges in 1993 (he was released due to a heart condition) and proved his mettle again in September 2007. As Sharif attempted to return from exile, in defiance of General Pervez Musharraf, Kamal led a posse of supporters to welcome him at Islamabad airport. It ended in fiasco. Sharif was turned back and Kamal’s mob ran into a checkpoint twenty-five miles from the capital, where they clashed violently with police. The Marwats sacked the local constabulary, looted its contents and hauled seven police hostages back to Lakki. The authorities held Kamal responsible and charged him with seventeen crimes including kidnapping and dacoity. For months he could not visit Islamabad, fearing arrest. The charges were eventually dropped a year later when Sharif, now successfully returned from exile, won control of the Punjab government.

After four hours of driving, we reached Lakki Marwat, a scrubby, mustard-tinted plain with a line of hills in the distance. A reception committee was waiting on the roadside: a dozen tribesmen loitering by a pair of 1970s-model Datsun cars with red velvet curtains across their rear windows. Nearby, a sign peppered with buckshot read:
Karachi, 1,400 kilometres
. The tribesmen hugged Kamal warmly, served him a glass of soda and led the way into town, guns poking from the car windows.

The Marwat are not among the celebrated tribes of the frontier, such as the smuggler Afridi of Khyber or the Yusufzai of Swat. Farmers by nature, they migrated from Paktia in southern Afghanistan perhaps five hundred years ago. The British arrived in 1850, bringing bureaucracy and some development. Within half a century, Lakki had 52,000 inhabitants, a train station and colonial administrators who had grown fond of the locals. ‘In person, they are tall and muscular; in bearing, frank and open. Almost every officer who has administered the District has left on record a favourable mention of them,’ recorded the
Imperial Gazetteer
of 1909.

Today the population has swelled to 700,000 – as Kamal puts it, ‘Sexual intercourse is appealing to everyone. Everyone!’ – and the railway has been replaced by the Indus Highway, a battered ribbon of tarmac that stretches almost eight hundred miles from Karachi to the Khyber Pass. The town has a tumbleweed feel. Traders squat in boxy shops before gunny sacks of grain and sugar; camel-drawn carts slide down the main street. The local bigwigs, the Saifullah family, are among the richest people in Pakistan, with textile mills, power plants and city real estate. Most folk are dirt poor. A few thousand have jobs at a sprawling Saifullah cement factory; a few thousand more work at a secretive government uranium mine that extracts ‘yellow cake’, a raw material for the military’s nuclear bombs. Otherwise there’s farming, but the land is useless without irrigation, which is expensive and difficult (well-diggers often sink seven hundred feet before striking water). Their engagement with the state is weak. Nobody pays income tax, the roads are full of duty-free cars smuggled from Afghanistan, and everyone steals their electricity, which helps explain why the voltage is so feeble (it’s hard to power even an electric iron). The state vigorously reciprocates their lack of enthusiasm, providing threadbare education and health services. Only 12 per cent of women can read and write – unsurprising, perhaps, considering how rarely they leave their houses – but even among men literacy rates are shockingly low. Kamal offered a dispiriting explanation. ‘To his father, a crude man is an asset. You tell him to plough the land, or kill another man, and he will do it. But if the son is educated, he will say, “I am too good for that.” And if he cannot find a job, he will get frustrated. So the father prefers a crude man.’