April 4, 2004

Continuity, resistance and control lie at the heart of tribal society and partly explain the turmoil in it. It’s important to remember that while in the Pakistani stereotype the tribesman is motivated by money alone, it is his sense of honour that is crucial in understanding his behaviour

THE Quaid-i-Azam was not only a brilliant political leader but also a master strategist. The policy that he identified for Pakistan at its creation rested on three interconnected assumptions: the fundamental link with Kashmir (which he called “the jugular vein” of Pakistan); a close relationship and interest in Afghanistan which would allow the Pakistan Army to concentrate on the eastern border; and the dramatic decision to withdraw troops from the forts and garrisons of the Tribal Areas of the North-West Frontier Province.

The last was a master stroke. Explicit in the removal of troops was the message that a new political order had arrived in the region: these tribes were now part of the new nation of Pakistan. Pakistan was not an alien empire ruling by force as the British, but their own Muslim nation. Pakistan signed treaties assuring the tribes that their customs and laws would be preserved. The gamble paid off. The Tribal Areas remained more or less in a peaceful state for the last half-a-century, allowing hundreds of thousands of troops who would normally be stationed there to concentrate on the eastern front.

These three assumptions of the Quaid in time became the pillars on which Pakistan rested its foreign policy and defence strategy. Half-a-century on, the leaders of Pakistan have dramatically rejected all three assumptions and given different directions for Pakistan. But there is a common perception among Pakistanis that change has come not from rational choice or changing times, but simply because of the crude and unremitting pressure from the United States. Rightly or wrongly, Pakistanis who do not have a vested interest in this change resent what they see as a compromise of their national interest and dignity.

Perhaps the most dramatic change has taken place in the Tribal Areas with a full-scale military incursion in South Waziristan Agency which has resulted in dozens of Pakistani personnel being killed or kidnapped. A jirga has been hastily summoned and sent into the Tribal Areas to discover a formula to restore peace. That is putting the cart before the horse.

Last month, American troops launched ‘Operation Mountain-Storm’ along the Afghan frontier, and President Pervez Musharraf, on American television, identified a “high-value target” in South Waziristan Agency. The Pakistan Army was ordered to charge into the Agency where angels fear to tread in what they assumed would be a “cake-walk”. The surprise of the Pakistani government spokesmen surprised me. They obviously had no idea of the history, people and terrain of the Agency.

In the meantime, the world media shone a spotlight on South Waziristan Agency. Senior Pakistani spokesman freely described the people as ‘terrorists’ and in time the distinction between those accused of crimes and law-abiding local tribesmen was blurred. The worldwide media was talking of all inhabitants of the Agency as ‘terrorists’. In several interviews — including CNN — I had to correct this misperception. While some people living in the Agency may have escaped the law and may well be wanted by it, the vast majority were certainly not ‘terrorists’.

On September 11, 2001, when death and destruction visited New York and Washington DC, few Wazirs and Mahsuds living in the faraway South Waziristan Agency imagined they would one day be involved. Yet on the second anniversary of September 11, US officials told ABC television that Osama Bin Laden, wanted on several counts including the events of September 11, was probably hiding in the Agency.

The Agency is redolent of the British imperial encounter with Asia: the Great Game, the Durand Line, tough terrain and tougher tribes — in this case the Wazirs and Mahsuds were described as “panthers” and “wolves” by Sir Olaf Caroe, the last governor of the province, who wrote one of the most popular books on the tribes, The Pathans (1965). T.E. Lawrence visited the Agency and its tribes provoked the usually cerebral Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, beyond endurance to note: “Not until the military steam-roller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace”. This is quintessential Rudyard Kipling territory.

One of Kipling’s most famous literary creations, Kim, was a child of and played in the Great Game. Although the Great Game may suggest a friendly sporting contest, it was played in deadly earnest for power and prestige by imperial Russia, China and the British in the valleys and mountains of Central and South Asia.

The South Waziristan Agency and the North Waziristan Agency together constitute what in the area is called Waziristan, which means the land of the Wazirs. Two powerful and fiercely independent tribes, the Wazir and Mahsud, live in Waziristan. The Wazir tribe lives on both sides of the international border and crosses it freely. The tribes are generally poor and there is little difference in wealth between the elders and the rest of the tribe.

The South Waziristan Agency is about 4,000 square miles with mountains as high as 11,500 feet. Temperatures go up to 120 degrees in summer, and below freezing during winter. The terrain is harsh and mountainous and the settlements scattered far and few between. With these tribes and this terrain, entire regiments of Al Qaeda and the Taliban could move in and out of Waziristan without detection. As for Osama, I told ABC News, he could swim like a fish in an ocean.

Forced to go back 25 years ago to the time when I took charge of the Agency as political agent, I was filled with nostalgia not unlike that felt by Sir Evelyn Howell, another political agent long before my time. I thought of what Caroe had written to me in a letter regarding his friend Howell shortly before his death.

Howell was political agent of the agency in 1905. The political agent was hand-picked from an elite cadre. He had to be the best of the best. In terms of authority, power and status, the post was unrivalled in the British Empire. The tribes of Waziristan called the political agent badshah, or king, of Waziristan.

British officers, like the popular Raj novelist John Masters, who wrote about these tribes, called them “physically the hardest people on earth”. In 1920, they mauled a British brigade, killing about 400 men, including 28 British and 15 Indian officers, (Howell 1979: 83). In the next decade there were more troops here than in the rest of the subcontinent.

“When I met him in Cambridge about four years ago”, Caroe wrote of Howell, “he said so many years had gone by. But he would feel happier in the mountain ranges of Waziristan. It was, he said, precisely because that was the most dangerous period of his life that it had become the period that he loved most. Often in his dreams he found himself in Waziristan, and his heart flying in those precipitous gorges” (Caroe, personal communication. Reprinted in Resistance and Control in Pakistan 1991: 175).

I also met Howell in Cambridge in 1965 shortly before he died at the great age of 94. He lived opposite Selwyn College, where I was studying. He had asked me to have tea with him to talk about the translation of Khushal Khan Khattak’s poems into English, which he was working on with his friend Caroe. I was not particularly helpful as I had little idea of what he was talking about. Little did I know that just over a decade later, I would be in his shoes as the political agent of South Waziristan Agency (1978-1980).

In the official files I came across a moth-eaten manuscript in an advanced stage of decay. It was Howell’s little gem, Mizh: A Monograph on Government’s Relations with the Mahsud Tribe. I persuaded my friends at Oxford University Press to publish it in their Oxford in Asia Historical Reprint Series (1979). Caroe was thrilled, and said this was the greatest tribute to Howell; his soul would be undoubtedly pleased.

The preface to Mizh contains a telling conversation with a Mahsud elder from the Agency. Howell and the elder are discussing the merits of their respective civilizations. The tribal elder argues that a civilization must be judged by the kind of man it produces. It is better therefore to leave us alone so we can “be men like our fathers before us”, men of honour and tradition, he argues. He is scathing about the British reforms “which have wrought such havoc in British India”. Howell, after much reflection, agrees.

This is a significant exchange. At the high noon of the British Empire its chief instrument in the field, its most important field officer, had assessed his own civilization against that of Waziristan, weighed and found his own wanting. This would have seemed to many on the British side as not only letting the side down, but also as borderline treason in the cultural chauvinism that pervaded discussion of the empire.

As political agent, I, too, had a similar reaction to the local customs and culture that I encountered. The sense of honour, tradition and tribal code were factors for stability. But I also saw how these very features of society could be perverted to isolate an entire community and prevent it from moving with the times.

I had left a hard and difficult but exciting time in the Agency in late 1980 to avail myself of a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in New Jersey. There was an air of unreality for me when I arrived. I had left charge of one of the most turbulent and isolated areas of the world. I had been on duty round the clock and the vigilant tribesmen would immediately punish a mistake by the administration. I had come close to death on several occasions in the Agency. I arrived in a haven for scholars. Some of the most distinguished scholars of the world — including several Nobel Prize winners — lived in comfort and security on what appeared to be an island of lakes and forests and walks.

I had held similar key field posts before — including that of Political Agency, and also as commissioner of three different divisions in Balochistan — but Waziristan was special. Inevitably I wrote about my time in the Agency, hoping to provide an ethnographic account and general principles of what was happening in Muslim societies. The account eventually became the book Resistance and Control in Pakistan (Routeledge 1991).

I was struck by the rise of religious leadership that was prepared to challenge established government authority. I was also fascinated by the case of Mullah Noor Muhammad and his creation of the madressah, or religious school, in Wana. Looking back, now it seems that the madressah was the harbinger of things to come in the region. The Taliban who would go on to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan and later occupy Kabul would be products of such madressahs. In order to update myself for the discussion on Waziristan, I rang Azam Khan, the present political agent, a few days before September 11, 2003. He said kind things about my work and my book, and was quick to point out that I was the first person to penetrate to Birmal on the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The population of the Agency was now about 450,000, up from about 300,000 when I was there — although population figures are, at best, rough estimates in the Tribal Areas. The elders were ineffective and seriously challenged by the young generation. People wanted to connect with the rest of the world and the young in particular were restless for change.

As a sign of the times, General Alam Jan Mahsud, a traditional elder mentioned in the book, lost the elections. The Pakistan Army, in an explicit show of support for American troops across the border in Afghanistan, was now at the international border for the first time in history, but attempted to keep a low profile. However, the momentum created by its presence was drawing it into sporadic confrontation with the tribesmen with unpredictable results.

American troops have found themselves having to take a crash course on the Great Game. They have desperately tried to stay on the Afghanistan side of the international border while pursuing Osama, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But things are never quite what they seem in this part of the world as Kim discovered early on in his life.

To start with, the international border, never fully demarcated on the ground, has been constantly disputed. Even the so-called political officers were not political, but drawn from the elite civil service cadre. Not for the first time in history would soldiers from distant lands with ideas of superiority have to contend with the powerful tugs and pulls of the currents emanating from Waziristan. Informers and those suspected of helping the American or the Pakistan Army were swiftly and brutally executed. War drums were being beaten. There was talk of holy war against the Americans. If the Americans crossed into Waziristan and occupied it, what was happening in Iraq in 2004 would seem like a picnic on the lawns of the White House.

I felt, however, that Waziristan was on the threshold of major social and political changes. What had not changed was the accepted tradition in Waziristan that anything beyond a hundred yards on either side of the main road was off limits to the Agency administration. Disputes were still decided by custom and not through the Criminal and Civil Procedure Codes of Pakistan. There were no police or revenue officials as in the rest of the country. The people of the Tribal Areas see these officials as corrupt and incompetent. They are not a good advertisement for Pakistan. They would be preferred to be administered according to their own customs and traditions which they see as having worked for centuries.

A debate has begun in Pakistan, arguing for the ‘incorporation’ of the Tribal Areas which are seen as either ‘backward’ or an ‘anachronism’ by many people writing and living in cities. Perhaps they miss the irony of commenting on the lack of law and order in the Tribal Areas while living in cities like Karachi where law and order collapsed years ago.

For those in the Agency, tribalism is both a blessing and an affliction; tribalism provides stability in unstable times but also creates complications in changing times. Now in the 21st century, would tribal people see its intrusion as yet another assignation with their own past. The theme of continuity and change, of resistance and control, lies at the heart of tribal society and partly explains the turmoil in it.

In conclusion, unless the political leaders in Islamabad very quickly evolve a strategy for the Tribal Areas which is based on the understanding of its history, culture and traditions and give it a sense of direction, the present standoff will end badly. Above all, it is important to remember that while in the Pakistani stereotype the tribesman is motivated by money alone, it is his sense of honour that is crucial in understanding his behaviour.

The writer is Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies and Professor of International Relations at American University in Washington, DC, and the author of Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honour World (Polity Press, 2003).

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