Many Pakistani Pakhtuns find themselves in a spot of bother when some political commentators define right-wing extremist/militant organisations as extensions and expressions of Pakhtun nationalism.

Ever since the beginning of the US/Pakistan/Saudi-backed insurgency against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Pakhtun identity (at least in popular imagination) has been gradually mutating to mean something that is akin to being entirely conservative, even fanatical.

At the end of the Afghan insurgency (that was followed by a civil war between various right-wing insurgent groups in Afghanistan), the rugged expanses of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s (KP) tribal areas began teeming with anarchic extremist organisations. Many of them were mutations of groups that had taken part in the anti-Soviet ‘Afghan Jihad’ in the 1980s from Pakistani soil.

In 2008, while on a trip to Islamabad I met a 60-something Pakhtun who owned a chain of shoe stores in the city. He had a flowing grey beard and seemed to be a very religious man. But as we got talking, and after I told him that I was a journalist, he said he too once wanted to be a journalist.

Why is the Pakhtun identity overshadowed by radicalisation and fanaticism?

 ‘I was studying journalism at the Peshawar University more than 40 years ago when I was picked up by the police and jailed without a trial,’ he said.

The man then sat me down and ordered some tea: “I was a guerilla fighter too!” He announced.

“During the Afghan jihad?” I asked.

‘No, that came later. I was fighting in the mountains of NWFP (present-day KP), long before the jihad,’ he explained.

Intrigued I immediately requested him to order another round of tea.

Though he claimed to have taken part in the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s with the ‘mujahideen’ forces, he had once been a committed communist!

He spoke about how long before KP’s tribal areas became bastions of all kinds of extremist/militant outfits, they were the domain of Maoist fighters.

 I did have some superficial knowledge about this: a now largely forgotten piece of modern Pakhtun history about large patches of land in the KP that though, for decades have been crawling with extreme religious outfits were once swarming with Pakhtuns quoting Marx and Mao.

In the 1960s the Pakhtun and Baloch dominated National Awami Party (NAP) was the country’s largest left-wing outfit. Even after the rise of the populist PPP in 1967, NAP remained popular in KP and Balochistan.

However, in the late 1960s NAP split into three factions. During its analysis on how to achieve a socialist revolution in Pakistan, the NAP leadership failed to come to a mutual agreement.

The pro-Soviet faction (led by legendary Pakhtun nationalist, Bacha Khan’s son, Wali Khan), suggested working to put Pakistan on a democratic path and then achieve the party’s goals of provincial autonomy and socialism.

The pro-China faction led by the Maoist Bengali leader, Maulana Bhashani, rejected democracy and labelled it as being ‘an exploitative tool of the bourgeoisie’.

The pro-Soviet NAP became NAP-Wali while the pro-China one became NAP-Bhashani. 

In 1968 another faction emerged.  A more radical group within NAP-Wali broke away and decided to adopt the Maoist strategy of achieving a socialist revolution through an armed struggle by organising peasant militias in the countryside.

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Thus was born the Mazdoor Kissan Party (Worker & Peasants Party) that held its first convention in Peshawar in 1968.

The Mazdoor kissan Party (MKP) refused to take part in the 1970 election. Inspired by the beginning of the Maoist ‘Naxalite’ guerrilla movement in India and Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ in China, MKP activists, led by former NAP leader and Pakhtun Maoist, Afzal Bangash, travelled to Hashtnagar in KP’s Charsadda district and began to arm and organise the peasants against local landlords.

MKP’s early manoeuvres in this respect were highly successful as its activists joined the area’s peasants and fought running gun battles with the mercenaries hired by the landlords and against the police.

As the area of influence of MKP’s struggle grew, another communist, Major retired Ishaq Mohammad joined MKP with his men.

Both men led MKP to spread its influence across various rural and semi-rural areas of the KP and gained the support of the area’s peasants as well as some tribal elders.

MKP’s guerrilla activities continued to grow and gather support in KP, and their fighters even managed to ‘liberate’ some lands by ousting the landlords.

By 1972 Z.A. Bhutto’s PPP had become the country’s new ruling party, whereas NAP-Wali formed coalition provincial governments in KP and Balochistan.

The old shoe trader that I was talking to told me that he was in his early 20s when he joined MKP militants in the mountains: ‘I came from a peasant background in a small town near Charsadda. I was in Matric (in 1968) when some MKP cadres came to our school and gave us translations of writings by Marx, Mao and Che (Guevara). Many of us were soon converted and vowed to bring a socialist revolution,’ he added.  

The man claimed that action against MKP guerrillas was mostly taken by the NAP-Wali government in KP: ‘Bhutto and Wali did not get along and Bhutto as PM indirectly encouraged MKP to destabilise the KP government,’ he said. 

MKP militants drove out a number of landlords in KP’s hilly Hashtnagar area and redistributed some land among the area’s peasants.

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‘We fought waves of police squads and mercenaries hired by the landlords,’ the man explained. ‘But (in 1974) after Bhutto was successful in getting rid of the KP government, he used federal security forces against us and our movement was finally crushed.’

He claimed that Bhutto also did this because by 1973 the MKP had begun to also make inroads into Punjab’s rural areas.

But how did this young Maoist Pakhtun then end up becoming an anti-communist insurgent in neighbouring Afghanistan?

According to him after he was released from jail in 1978 (one year after the fall of the Bhutto regime at the hands of Gen Zia), he went back to the university to complete his studies.

 He finally got a degree in journalism in 1980 and was in Peshawar looking for a job when he received a visit by three men: “They just appeared at the apartment I was living in. They told me they were from an intelligence agency. I thought they had come to arrest me again, even though I had quit politics. But they told me that I had fought a just war but with a flawed ideology. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan (December 1979) and they said they were looking for trained men to fight the Soviets”.

He said some of the first trained fighters among the mujahideen (from Pakistan) were mostly men who had been MKP guerrillas: “We joined because we were also angry at how fellow socialists like NAP-Wali and the PPP had persecuted us”.

He fought in Afghanistan till 1985 (with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group), but then quit: “One day I returned from the Afghan border and refused to go back. I asked myself, how was my fighting for Afghan insurgents helping the poor Pakhtuns of Pakistan? So much money had also begun to pour in (from the US and Saudi Arabia) and it began to corrupt a lot of Pakhtuns and mullahs. This totally destroyed our (Pakhtun) society and values.”

 He migrated to Karachi where he got married to a cousin and joined an apolitical evangelical Islamic outfit. He then moved to Islamabad where he started a shoe business with a friend: “Yes, men like me once believed in Marxism and Maoism and all that, but we were always Muslims,” he explained. “We were against corrupt landlords and the mullahs who did their bidding. But when I saw these same mullahs becoming rich and turned into heroes (during the anti-Soviet insurgency), I gave up the fight.”

I asked him what he thought about the new breed of religious militants that was emerging in KP.

He just shrugged his shoulders: “Only Allah knows,” he smiled. But then quickly added: “To me all are puppets, like I was. First in the hands of leftists and then in the hands of those who wanted to use religion to make political and monitory profits. I really don’t care anymore. It’s all a waste of emotion and youth. Our (Pakhtun) society has been ravaged.”

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 13th, 2014