MUSHARRAF’S FALL appeared to be close at hand, so postponing my journey to the frontier’s troubled areas, I hotfooted it back to the capital.
The long hot month of July passed in a frenzy of protest, speculation and political intrigue. I spent it with phones pressed to my sweat-drenched ears, on occasion with buckets of my vomit being ferried from my office by Allah Ditta. I was becoming increasingly unwell. Yet I continued to try to decipher the horse-trading between political parties, the military and foreign diplomats, the high-wire, crisis-prone process that tried to corall the country into some sort of stability.
Musharraf finally resigned in August, but the country as a whole, and Islamabad in particular, reeled under a further series of misfortunes. On the same day as Zardari’s inauguration as president in September (never make predictions on the frontier, Curzon had said), a suicide bomber drove a dump truck filled with explosives into Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel, blasting a sixty-foot crater and killing over fifty people.
Shortly afterwards, in the last days of President George W. Bush’s tenure in office, two helicopter-loads of American soldiers crossed on foot from Afghanistan into the Pakistani tribal area of South Waziristan, but were driven back by Pakistani border troops shooting over their heads. A week or so before, American airborne troops had assaulted a nearby village. American officials claimed the raid had killed a score of al-Qaeda militants, but Pakistani officials and journalists said only civilians, including women and children, had died. Tension on the border was at an all-time high.
In November, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States (days before his election he had pledged to work seriously on resolving the Kashmir dispute, a pledge that remained unfulfilled during his tenure) and Pakistani terrorists launched coordinated attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai. At a party on a Karachi beach shortly after the attacks, our revelling was interrupted by news that Indian fighter jets had breached Pakistani airspace. People around me, who until that moment I had thought moderate, shouted for war against India. Beneath the surface, even Pakistanis habitually cynical about their own country sometimes harboured prickly chauvinism and rage.
*
One night towards the end of November, I returned to Peshawar and found a wintry city. Men clad in thick shawls bent over roasted maize on carts lit by hissing gas lanterns, cyclists muffled their faces with scarves. All was normal except the place was under siege.
The Taliban had attacked paramilitary and police posts on the outskirts. Reports had begun to appear in the press suggesting it could fall. Girls’ schools had been blown up, kidnaps and suicide-bomb attacks within the city had increased, critics of the Taliban had been assassinated and America’s chief diplomat in the city had narrowly escaped assassination in an ambush on her way to work.
Militants or criminals – it was difficult to tell who was who – looted Western military supplies intended for coalition forces in Afghanistan.
It was now dangerous to move outside the city. Like other Pakistani cities, its colonial-era police force was ill-equipped to deal with heavily armed militants. Leaning on his desk, a burly police chief listed on his fingers his requirements – weapons, armoured cars, instructors and funds.
I’d come to Peshawar for two reasons. To try to enter the countryside near the province’s insurgency-hit district of Swat, where, several locals had told me, lay a shrine of great enchantment perched on a hill, a sacred grove in which Pathans, Hindus and Sikhs rubbed shoulders, danced and meditated, the last bastion in the province of unbridled Sufi expression.
My attempt to do this had ended in failure. Halfway there, the man deputed by a local landowner to escort me had revealed he was too scared to go on, and explained – as we were driving over speed bumps in a notoriously militant village – that the clinking noise coming from the car’s boot was made by bottles of alcohol he intended to distribute to his friends in the locale. We had ended our journey at a farmhouse where he promised I would savour locally produced wine – of which previously I’d never heard and that transpired to be pure alcohol mixed with a carton of Nestlé grape juice. I would try to reach that place, the final shrine of my travels, another time.
My other aim, for journalistic purposes, was to find a way to enter the tribal areas without getting arrested or scalped.
I spent a few mornings sitting in the office of the Khyber Tribal Agency in Peshawar, trying to curry favour with the political agent in the hope that he might grant me permission to enter his area.
He explained that it would be difficult because militants had obliterated the traditional power structure of tribal leaders, elders and councils with whom he normally worked. And recent Pakistani military campaigns had been piecemeal and much of his fiefdom was now lawless.
Knowing that he was a brave and bombastic official who prided himself on being the most fearless and active of his peers, I goaded him by saying that surely he could take me up the Khyber Pass, where until only recently, before a spate of ambushes, skirmishes, feuds and assassinations, tourists had gone for jollies on an old steam train up the pass’s remarkable railway and foreign dignitaries were herded along a well-worn path to the Afghan border.
He told me to come back in a few days and he would see what he could do.
*
I didn’t hold out much hope that the political agent would deliver the goods, so I also preyed on my host, asking for his help. The city’s hotels were now likely targets for bomb attacks (indeed the one at which I had last stayed in the city was soon blown up) and so I’d put up at the home of an acquaintance, the head of the Pathan Marwat tribe, Anwar Kamal. His house was thick with pile carpets, chintz curtains and doilies. Its 1970s cosiness was jeopardised by an anti-aircraft gun installed on the roof and by a sitting-room that seemed more like an arsenal.
His lands, in the district of Lakki, some distance south of Peshawar, abutted the tribal area of Waziristan, which had largely fallen to the encroaching tide of militancy. ‘Talibanisation’ had seeped from the tribal belt into these ‘settled areas’ in the form of violence and edicts targeting barbers, shrines, music and women out in public.
Anwar had just returned from his lands, but he was not dispirited. Indeed, he crackled with energy and derring-do. An astute and gentlemanly man, his moustache, whiskered like coconut fibre, was permanently set to ‘action stations’; his nose was as large and ebullient as a port drinker’s, his eyes pearly flames. A couple of years before he had taken a posse of heavily armed men up into the hills of Waziristan to avenge the abduction of two of his women by a neighbouring tribe. They had killed eighty people and razed a village. ‘I’m not proud of it,’ he said, stiffening with pride. ‘But justice was not just seen to be done. It was done.’
Anwar had seen off various gangs of Taliban and showed me pictures on his mobile phone of the corpses of those who had strayed on to his land. He had travelled into the heart of Waziristan to speak to the Taliban leadership. ‘I told them that the next time I see a Taliban on my land I am going to screw him as hard as I can – I spoke to them in traditional language.’
He had shown me some of his own arsenal of weaponry. ‘I have a lakh [100,000] of bullets for my personal use only.’
I made impressed noises.
‘I also have a 30mm gun,’ he said, and then showed me where it was stored in his kitchen, leaning against a shelf of painted porcelain chickens.
‘Remarkable.’
‘It takes half an hour to assemble. My servants can do it. I am waiting for the enemy any time, any place.’
As he chatted animatedly, he swiped a rocket head about like an old gent practising sword strokes. ‘Very effective, very effective,’ he said, seeing my eye following its arc.
But he refused to take me into the tribal areas, saying it would get us both into trouble or killed.
*
One evening, we visited a mutual friend, a senior Pakistani military intelligence official. Our host’s brain worked at a rapid rate and he smoked incessantly, jigging a leg up and down, rattling off future scenarios for the government and country.
I had to restrain my amazement when, revealing another mechanism in the Heath Robinson contraption, he explained how military intelligence, which often used Islamist political parties to further its own ends – for example by organising protests against things it disapproved of such as the government talking too enthusiastically about peace with India – then found it difficult to control them. He personally had had to travel hundreds of miles across the country, he said with indignation, to pay off the head of a religious group to stop him from mounting a riot at an airbase used by American aircraft.
He said that military intelligence’s senior echelons had limited control over its mid-ranking officers – jihadis, who had been arrested in the tribal areas, had sometimes been mysteriously released by his rogue underlings.
He went on to narrate another tale from the murky intelligence world. Not long before, a retired two-star general, Faisal Alvi, who had commanded Special Forces operations against militants in the tribal area, had been assassinated on the road from Rawalpindi to Islamabad. Elements of British intelligence put it about that he had been forcibly retired and then assassinated on the orders of senior generals whom he had accused of going soft on the Taliban. To counter that, Pakistani intelligence put out a rumour that he had had an affair with a British intelligence stooge. My friend said that there had been an altercation between him and two senior officers who, after he had openly insulted them, mounted a smear campaign against him, which included a reference to an indiscreet affair he had had with a fellow officer’s daughter.
But the real cause of his death, according to our friend, was otherwise: a Special Forces officer who had served under him in Waziristan had grown disillusioned with fighting against his co-religionist Muslims and had resigned his commission to join militants waging war against coalition forces in Afghanistan. Before he had gone on jihad, he had told his brother, another officer, that if he died in battle he was to avenge his death by killing Alvi. He was killed in battle and his brother, joining forces with a handful of militants, carried out the assassination. Encouraged by their success, the band turned to kidnap and extortion. They were caught when they ran into a routine checkpoint, where police officers found one of their kidnappees in the boot of their car.
*
One morning, a few days later, Haq Nawaz, my local journalist fixer, and I went to the office of Tariq Hayat Khan, the Political Agent of the Khyber Tribal Agency.
On entering, a file flew past my nose and on across the room, bursting in an explosion of papers on the head of a man.
‘Get out you rascal!’ Hayat Khan shouted, his face mottled with rage. At first I thought he was talking to me. But he jabbed a finger towards a clerk who had clearly fallen into disfavour and now cowered among sheets of paper in a corner of the office. The Political Agent shouted through the open door in Pashto and two uniformed tribal levies ran in clutching rifles, looking about the room for signs of trouble. ‘Throw him in the guard room,’ bellowed Hayat Khan, pointing at the hangdog clerk. The guards appeared reluctant to manhandle a babu, but one of them gave him a light-fingered tug on the sleeve and they escorted him from the room.
Haq Nawaz whispered to me, ‘He wants a role in Hollywood’. Pleased that I had seen this fit of passion, Hayat Khan smoothed his hair and motioned for Haq Nawaz and me to sit opposite him at his desk.
A tallish mustachioed Pathan with nostrils that flared frequently with belligerence, he was dressed in a white shalwar kameez, over which he wore a grey jacket. He lit the first of many cigarettes he smoked during our stay in his office, as minions came and went, one placing a file in front of him, another emptying his ashtray.
‘Now, what can I do for you?’
‘You mentioned that we might go up the Khyber Pass and I wondered if you could arrange that please?’ I hoped my directness would appeal to his man-of-action idiom.
‘Of course, why not?’
He then turned his attention to other matters, speaking on telephones, issuing orders. Half an hour later I shot Haq Nawaz a glance that asked, ‘Is this man for real or are we hanging about for nothing?’
Haq Nawaz laughed and, cupping a hand over one side of his mouth so that Hayat Khan, who was talking on a phone, should not hear, said loudly: ‘He is enjoying the show. Let us see. I think he is mad enough to do this thing.’
After a further hour of waiting, Hayat Khan turned his attention once more to our petition. He explained that the Khyber Pass was now closed to foreigners, that it had been overrun by a patchwork of militants, some of them backed by America, others by Pakistani military intelligence, and others pursuing other agendas. Mangal Bagh, the former bus conductor turned reformist who had been used by Americans and Pakistanis as a proxy, was up to his usual tricks. Not for the first time, nor the last, the use of proxies in the tribal areas, he said, had ‘become a bullshit fuck-up’.
He sprang to his feet, marched across the office to a wall-map and pointed to the whereabouts of the ‘troublemakers’. He said that ‘a confederacy of crooks and brigands constitute the Taliban’ and that he had no time for peace deals and ceasefires that in his view had stymied efforts to bring these people to heel.
‘You name it. They do it!’ he explained, his voice rising, a cigarette-wielding hand slicing the air.
‘What can be done about them?’ I asked.
‘Hit them! Hit them! And hit them hard!’ he shouted, cigarette ash flying over the map.
Haq Nawaz could suppress his laughter no longer, and his shoulders shook as he guffawed into his lap.
Hayat Khan, who hadn’t noticed Haq Nawaz’s lapse in etiquette, walked back and sat at his desk and asked him in a low voice, ‘What was that Clint Eastwood film where he is in the bath and the bandit hesitates to kill him and so Eastwood pulls his pistols from the water and finishes him off, saying, “If you are going to shoot, shoot”?’
With great effort and tears of laughter at the corner of his eyes, Haq Nawaz muttered, ‘I do not know sir.’
‘Well, no matter,’ he replied, his voice once more gaining volume. ‘What I say is if you are going to shoot, shoot!’
At that moment a helicopter passed overhead. ‘Ah,’ said Hayat Khan, beaming and spreading his hands across his desk. ‘My beloved gunships.’
He leapt to his feet again, shouted some orders and immediately we were caught up in a flurry of activity as militiamen scrambled for weapons, clerks brandished papers in front of their master’s face and we loaded ourselves into pick-up trucks mounted with large machine guns.
The morning’s sky was faded cobalt and we were heading for the Khyber Pass, which sparkled ahead of us.
Our cavalcade of four pick-up trucks – from whose sides hung a guard of immaculately turned out tribal levies armed with rocketlaunchers and Kalashnikovs – roared along at high speed to avoid the attentions of suicide bombers, but also out of respect for the spirit of panache that ruled the frontier.
I was nervous that we might be attacked but drew strength from our escort’s impassive faces. At the same time I was delighted that Hayat Khan, doughty man, and true to his word, had ignored commands from his superiors and was taking a foreigner into the pass. Seated next to me, he explained with puff-chested pride that at this time he was the only Political Agent of the seven tribal agencies to venture into his territory.
On the outskirts of Peshawar, we passed the Smugglers Market, a place where I had been before and seen stalls stacked with Korean and Chinese electrical goods, skin-whitening cream and sex products such as delay sprays, breast-enhancing cream, replica Viagra and hardcore pornography, and jihadi DVDs.
We barged our way to the front of queues at checkpoints, climbing up into the narrow, arid, twisting thirty-mile-long pass under forts perched on hillocks and regimental badges painted on rocks.
By the roadside, camels and donkeys stumbled along, their panniers filled with contraband. We passed a mansion owned by a drug baron, a crumbling Buddhist stupa, and a line of veiled women descending sinuously on foot to the valley floor to draw water from an emerald stream.
Of the mountains beyond I knew only the little I had gleaned while on media jaunts with the Pakistan army: a landscape of rocks and goat trails, forests of pine and meadows, and orchards of apples and apricots that now included among its inhabitants not only formidable, doubledealing tribesmen but also foreign jihadis, spies, agents provocateurs and embattled soldiers, a place which the locals themselves spoke of proudly as being in ‘purdah’.
For these trips we were ferried in by helicopter and only allowed to see what the military wanted, bar a few mishaps. A favourite Pakistani English phrase was ‘There’s many a slip between cup and lip’. An officer had disclosed that a fellow soldier’s head, which had been cut off by militants, was put back on so that his family would not be too distressed at the sight of his dead body. On another occasion we were scheduled to meet a Taliban commander allied to the Pakistani government, but the meeting was cancelled at the last minute when it was realised this would not play well with Pakistan’s American allies against whom the militant commander was waging war. Then there was the time when we almost tripped over militants giving their wounded brethren piggy-back rides through a town supposedly under the army’s control. And once we had to hide in some buildings when we got mixed up in a firefight between the army and the militants.
Often, the army paraded before us suspected Taliban militants, blindfolded and handcuffed. ‘Were you tortured?’ the press pack would bray in unison. ‘No, I was not tortured,’ the correct answer inevitably came. The questioning over, a journalist or two would then ask if this parade had not been in breach of the Geneva Convention, but such quibbles were quickly forgotten amid a clatter of porcelain as military mess servants clad in green and yellow striped cricket sweaters laid out tea and samosas. It was a scene that discomfited me, this display of cruelty, but one to which I had partially hardened myself, wearing as a shield the scaly carapace of my trade’s cynicism.
We continued up through the pass, whose topography begged a thousand ambushes, towards the border, the men’s eyes scanning the landscape with more vigilance, holding their rifles tighter.
The desire to come under fire, which had a couple of years before propelled me into ill-fated places, had greatly subsided in recent months. Earlier, I had suppressed my fears of coming to harm in hostile zones with grand thoughts about how life’s disappointments, stifling conventions, boredoms, the onset of middle age and a thousand petty compromises were worse than bullets, but now I admitted to more honest views about self-preservation.
At Jamrud, some miles from the border, Hayat Khan beckoned me to join him in a government office. As he spoke with one of his officers, I looked up the pass towards Afghanistan as I had done on my first trip up the pass aged 18 with my grandmother in an old Mercedes.
For a young man just out of school, the arid hills, pickets, regimental shields and tales of conquering Muslim warriors and tribal lore had been exhilarating. On assignments since then, I’d seen Afghanistan beneath the pall of the ongoing war; it had been too fraught a time to relish the sight of tribesmen clutching nasturtiums between their teeth, meadows of asphodel and the Minaret of Jam. Mainly, I’d sensed the foreigner’s alienation, which was written all over whiteboards in bold felt-tip pen in the tents of the West’s military camps, alongside prints of mug shots of villainous-looking Afghans described as ‘known drug smuggler’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘illiterate’ – the coalition forces’ local allies.
Afghan scenes flickered through my mind: the Taliban commander sitting on a bank of the Helmand River eating watermelon, who had warned foreigners not to upset his opium-smuggling business or he would give them war; the quiet, soft-spoken driver who had been beheaded after being kidnapped with an Italian journalist (who had been ransomed); the good and bad soldiers on both sides, the stoned ones and the corrupt ones; the Kabul cant about ‘ink-spots of security’, ‘kinetic warfare’, democracy and development; the heavily armed and bearded military contractors with ray-bans and their personal armouries of Glock pistols and sniper rifles; and the furry handcuffs and coffee and burger bars of the coalition camps; the artifice that sustained the theatre of war.
It was now dusk. I watched the trundling progress of the last of the day’s NATO supply convoys, which had become prey to militants, head up to the border. Hayat Khan said his local commanders advised us not to go farther up the pass. Beyond Jamrud his writ was even shakier. We emerged from the office and amid a hail of commands our cavalcade raced back into the darkening mouth of the pass, towards Peshawar.
The pass had once held something of a storybook quality for me, but now tales of beheadings, and of brainwashed young men blowing themselves up, shaded the surrounding cliffs of shale and limestone with malefic shadows.
Suddenly, not far from Jamrud, a convoy of pick-up trucks with black Islamic pennants fluttering on their bonnets ferrying heavily armed militants approached us. A sharp intake of breath. Soldiers cocked their rifles. Repressing a surge of fear in the pit of my stomach, I asked who they were. Nobody knew. A stand-off: we looking at them, them at us. Hayat Khan barked at a subordinate. He barked into a walkie-talkie. A crackle of static and a voice from the other end. The junior man looked carefully at the cars and answered something rather uncertainly.
‘It’s OK. They’re on our side,’ Hayat Khan confirmed at last. ‘At least for now.’ Some minutes passed and then he added reflectively, ‘Mangal Bagh is a crackpot, a nut, but he has his plus and minus points. He is a commercially minded person.’
Looking sideways at him, I admired his sang froid. But I saw a hint of fear in the whiteness of his compressed lips.