Deep Field (4 page)

Back on the verandah, we sat and talked and he returned to the subject of prisoners of war. Having been captured as a young lieutenant by Indian forces intervening in Bangladesh’s war of liberation from West Pakistan in 1971, he had decided that it was the duty of every young officer to resist capture and to escape. With his fellow conspirators he had tunnelled vigorously to get out of the POW camp, but every tunnel had collapsed inches from the perimeter fence. ‘So, after all these failed attempts to tunnel our way out, you know what we did, Tom,’ he said as I shook my head. ‘We made a run for it.’

Comrades in the disaster response, we embraced, shook hands and saluted as I said goodbye. A peacock wandered past the gate and I started my journey back to the capital, wondering which country and century I was in.

Years later I was stunned when ‘sociable Abbottabad’, as we had known it, with its leafy streets and parks and charming markets, shot to international infamy as the final hide-out of Osama bin Laden. Introduced to the town by my friend Colonel Mohsin, I had seen it not through the lens of twenty-first-century struggles but through the perspective of another age somehow lingering, just, on the brutal frontiers of the new Great Game.

My time in the cosy and endearingly civil world of Pakistan’s retired officer class was regrettably brief. ‘Good morning, sunshine,’ my all-too-contemporary American boss would say each day through a plume of cigarette smoke as I stumbled into the office from my cot on the floor, trying desperately to wake up. The repetition of this sardonic mantra over seven months would become almost a curse. With those words I entered the highly politicised and ruthless world of a major humanitarian operation.

The old certainties vanished instantly. To assist the people affected by the earthquake, we had to play the game, and much of this depended on what kind of guy you were. There were good guys and bad guys, cowboys, guys who ‘knew their shit’ and those who didn’t. And there was the inevitable division between the smooth, multilingual and well-paid UN staff, known for their relative timidity in promoting humanitarian principles to Pakistan’s military dictatorship, and the grotty NGO workers who glowed with self-righteousness. All complained about the honchos from headquarters, who had no idea about ‘the field’. Conversations with aid workers were replete with invocations of remote gods—‘Geneva knows’, ‘New York is watching’, ‘Oslo is aware’. And when the ‘goodwill ambassadors’ Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie suddenly presented themselves, hardened ‘grassroots’ aid workers suddenly abandoned the mysterious joys of tents, drainage ditches and latrines in search of a fleeting moment of glamour.

Then there was the cast of complete weirdos—some well-intentioned, others malign—that attends major catastrophes. There was a circus troupe that travelled through the mountains trying to cheer people up, a Korean NGO promoting the health benefits of tofu consumption (with a tofu-eating cartoon character featuring, appropriately enough for an Islamic republic, a smiling pig), and the worthy but regrettably named organisation German Agro Action, which promoted recovery in the agricultural sector. And there was a series of querulous American Vietnam vets who had been given sinecures with the US government aid agency as compensation for missing limbs. Congenitally opposed to the idea of an international community and viewing the UN as some kind of communist plot, these ‘one-armed bandits’, as they were known, strutted and twitched their way around the province. Britain also sent its finest minds. After a long meeting with an earnest Englishwoman from the UK’s Department for International Development, my boss turned to me with an acrid exhalation of cigarette smoke and growled, ‘Horse’s ass with teeth.’

Everyone had an agenda—personal, professional, institutional, political—and any action needed somehow to negotiate these. Institutions were at war; UN agencies and NGOs argued with each other and within themselves over responsibilities, visibility and turf. Bucks were passed and credit appropriated. Individuals on short-term emergency contracts were making connections for their next ‘gig’, while donors attempted to buy political favour through their generosity. Villagers were taught to say their tents were ‘from the American people’, and flags and logos jostled for precedence in the muddy and crowded camps that were now home to hundreds of thousands fleeing the encroaching snowline. At one meeting for the heads of the seven leading coordination agencies, I calculated 2401 permutations of vested interests and agendas that any collective decision would somehow have to navigate.

It was a desperate game of survival for not only the people affected by the earthquake but also the humanitarians. The institutional architecture for such a major international disaster response was weak and progress was dependent on the charismatic personalities who led the way. Reputations crumbled and were made; hardened aid workers went home early—shattered by the mud, the cold, the arguments and the complex logistics of the operation. One room of our office was converted into a sick bay for stricken colleagues who had caved under the pressure and needed to recuperate. ‘It’s like the Somme,’ said one friend on his way back down from the mountains, having decided he could not continue. Gone was his earlier self-confidence; we clapped and cheered as he climbed into a helicopter waiting to take him back to the capital. He had more than done his bit, and we sensed that this mission was to be his last.

Somehow, despite the immense obstacles, pressure and confusion of the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, a coherent and effective humanitarian response emerged—more by trial and error, it seemed, than by design. And for all the follies and foibles, personalities and turf wars, it was amazing to be part of it. Alliances formed, organisations stabilised, and the initial panic, desperation and reactivity transformed into a collective purpose. It was like catching a wave: the momentum bore us along. During those months in this fascinating, politically fractured country, everyone seemed finally to think and act as one.

In the distant hills of Khala Dhaka (Black Mountain)—a tribal territory well beyond the ‘writ of the state’ and now the NATO frontier in an ever-expanding Afghan war—I met with groups of bearded elders wrapped in coarse woollen cloaks and smelling of wood smoke. We discussed the earthquake and its consequences in the tribal belt and beyond, and they were exceptionally well-informed—partly through their networks of tribe and extended family across Pakistan and Afghanistan, and partly from listening to the BBC Pashto Service.

We are a neutral humanitarian agency, I said. We had no politics and would only work with them if they needed and wanted us. If not, we would go away—the choice was theirs. We discussed the Green Howards (a British Army regiment), the last Europeans to have entered the area prior to the Independence and Partition of the Indian subcontinent, and I assured them I was anything but a Green Howard.

Had they been badly affected, I asked?

‘
Ha
,’ they replied—the guttural Pashto word for ‘yes’.

Could we conduct an assessment?

‘
Ha
.’

Would we be able to speak to women and children?

‘
Ha
.’

Could we ensure that the most vulnerable people were assisted first?

‘
Ha
.’

Would we be able to come back and monitor the aid distribution, to ensure all needs had been met?

‘
Ha
,’ again came the reply.

We called for green tea to cement our deal—a sign that the substantive discussions were over and that trust had been established. And then they left, each one shaking hands and embracing, walking quickly back to the Black Mountain—a distant chorus of ‘
Ha
…
Ha
…
Ha
’ fading gently into the wood smoke and the night.

This is how we survived the earthquake—rare moments of solidarity in the turmoil of the Frontier Province—but now can we survive the drone attacks, and can we survive the war?

‘THE TIME HAS COME,’
my boss said to my immense horror, ‘to take on more responsibility.’ I had recently finished university and had inadvertently wound up working in the banking sector. In vain, I pleaded my case—perhaps I wasn’t ready, there was still so much to learn. Others had clearly shown more application and ability—was it fair for me to be chosen ahead of them? But despite my pleading I was consigned to higher duties. This was unfortunate. From my largely unsupervised administrative role, leavened by the exhilarating prospect of fortnightly pay after years of relative student penury, I was propelled into the dizzying world of the
Cheques Act 1975
and the mysteries of the Electronic Funds Code of Conduct.

Leonard was The Code Guru and felt it his duty to remind us sombrely of the days before The Code. Each provision and sub-clause was laboriously intoned aloud and accompanied by extempore interpretation in what was an almost scriptural performance. Here, the deity had been replaced by the ATM, and guidance for life’s trials could be found in the diligent interpretation of the text. In those unbearably long, drab and awful hours there was The Code and beyond this lay chaos.

My promotion was a clear indication that it was time for me to leave. The evenings were spent typing up job applications and CVs, and there were exciting moments during phone interviews when I’d spend a blissful hour shouting ‘What was that?’ over crackly and inaudible connections from Armenia or the Congo. I sent speculative emails to any institution that looked half-decent and one day a response came back from a leading institution for conflict prevention based in Pakistan. ‘Come,’ it said simply, ‘your desk awaits’. Elated, I booked my flights the next day.

I arrived in Islamabad at night, hot and excited. At the airport, the customs officer examined my case and asked what was in it.

‘Just clothes,’ I replied.

He looked at me for a second with a stern expression. ‘Clean or dirty?’

‘Mostly dirty.’

‘That’s okay, then.’ He waved me through.

I had arrived, each breath of the humid night air filling my lungs with an exhilarating sense of freedom and adventure. As I stumbled around outside the airport terminal trying to find my bags and get a taxi, a haunting memory of Jawaharlal Nehru’s address at the moment of Indian independence—shot in grainy footage amid the commotion and whirring fans of the parliament building in Delhi—played in my mind:

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny. Now the time has come when we shall redeem our pledge—not wholly or in full measure—but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.
A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

But it was 3am and I was in the wrong country. The midnight hour had long since passed and, while India had ‘very substantially’ redeemed its pledge at independence, Pakistan had not. Held on 14 August each year (one day before Indian independence), Pakistan’s independence day celebrations were as much about independence from India as they were about independence from Britain. Despite the hope and unity contained in the new country’s neologistic name—Pakistan means ‘land of the pure’, as well as being an acronym of the country’s main constituent provinces: Punjab, Kashmir, Sindh—the trauma of Partition had been catastrophic. While it was nominally created as a homeland for the Muslim minority of the subcontinent, even today more Muslims live in India than in Pakistan. A line was drawn almost at random down the subcontinent, dissecting the great provinces of Punjab and Kashmir and cutting off cities, families and trade routes across the land. The Grand Trunk Road—which, for more than 2000 years, had connected the fabled cities of Kabul to Peshawar, Lahore, Delhi; Allahabad to Chittagong (in what was to become Bangladesh) more than 2500 kilometres away—was no longer passable. The partition of India forced the greatest mass migration of people in history, as more than 10 million Muslims, Hindus, Parsis and Sikhs left their ancestral homes and crossed the artificial borders to their new countries. Even in this most diverse of places, the barbaric imprint of the nation-state was forced onto the cosmopolitan subcontinent, causing untold violence. The abiding image of Partition is the colonial rail network, whose trains ran on schedule but arrived full of dead passengers, killed in the ethnic violence that accompanied Partition. Even Pakistan’s secular founder—the brilliant Anglophile lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who perhaps did not quite realise what he had literally and metaphorically set in train by insisting on a separate Muslim homeland—described the new state as ‘moth-eaten’. The sartorial reference was not misplaced: until the 1940s, when Jinnah’s Muslim League began to advocate for independence, he had been seen wearing magnificently pressed linen suits, a pith helmet and a monocle. At his home in Karachi, now a museum, the state founder’s personal effects are on display—luminously polished brogues are lined neatly under his bed, while the great man’s cigarette holders and glittering crystal glassware are still on view. Jinnah died in 1948, little over a year after the founding of Pakistan. The elegant tailoring of the subcontinent had been ripped apart at the seams.