Af/Pak's Pashtun Border Reivers

By Steve Hynd

Veteran journalist Eric Margolis, who reported from among the mujahedeen when they were fighting Russia and holds three degrees in foreign affairs to boot, says the U.S. is "stirring a hornets nest" in Pakistan through "profound ignorance" of the ethnic and cultural truth on the ground and through "gung ho military arrogance".

Washington's ham-handed policies and last week's Swat atrocity threaten to ignite Pakistan's second worst nightmare after invasion by India: That its 26 million Pashtun will secede and join Afghanistan's Pashtun to form an independent Pashtun state, Pashtunistan.

This would rend Pakistan asunder, probably provoke its restive Baluchi tribes to secede and tempt mighty India to intervene militarily, risking nuclear war with beleaguered Pakistan.

The Pashtun of NWFP have no intention or capability of moving into Pakistan's other provinces, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. They just want to be left alone. Alarms of a "Taliban takeover of Pakistan" are pure propaganda.

Lowland Pakistanis repeatedly have rejected militant Islamic parties. Many have little love for Pashtun, whom they regard as mountain wild men best avoided.

Nor are Pakistan's well-guarded nukes a danger -- at least not yet. Alarms about Pakistan's nukes come from the same fabricators with hidden agendas who brought us Saddam Hussein's bogus weapons.

The real danger is in the U.S. acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad's military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like U.S.-occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless.

The Punjabi and Sindh populations have always regarded the Pashtun as mountain wild men, bandits and reivers. The Pashtun have always regarded their neighbours as prey for their raids. It's been that way since before the British arrived and shows no sign of abating anytime soon. The Pashtun were only forced at gunpoint into accepting the splitting of their traditional tribal ranges by the Durand Line in 1893. The situation is entirely analogous to the old border reiver clans of the English/Scottish border - another bunch of inter-related hill country wildmen who raided their neighbours irrespective of nationality for over 300 years before finally calming down and accepting imposed nationality. That territorial stramash was only solved by exiling the worst offenders to the American colonies.

But waiting another 200 years, or exiling Pashtun militants to America, aren't options. And I think Margolis is wrong somewhat about the helplessness of a Pakistani state without the Pashtun or Balochis. Afghanistan wouldn't suffer unduly from losing its Pashtun segment either. The only real hurt would be national pride - and that's the real stumbling block to offering the Pashtun either greater self-determination or full independent status. If that pride could somehow be overcome by an appreciation of reality, then it'd be up to the Pashtun whether they wanted Taliban rule or not, and the rest of the world would at least have a containable border for Taliban expansion if they did.

That's a pretty big if, though. As my friend Zenpundit pointed out to me recently by email: "The Taliban created many enemies by casually killing people whose clan members then became motivated to avenge them" under the pushtunwali honour code. That's probably not enough to outweigh the wish for revenge on US or Pakistani attackers, but once they are removed from the local equation that's an exploitable fault line. More, with the Pashtun in their own homeland free from outside overlords their reason for supporting the Taliban politically would disappear and the incompatibility between the Taliban's extreme form of Islam and the Pashtun's own traditional religious forms would put the two at odds more often than not.

Rather than insisting on fighting the Pashtun, the amswer in Af/Pak may lie in giving them back the independence they once had.

Comments

[Ron Beasley]

This is the problem AF/PAK strategy - they don't have a clue as to who we are fighting.

[zenpundit]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the nod. These tribal codes are very powerful social motivators, so much so that even under the Soviets (including Stalin), the Chechen code of Adat continued to regulate the initiation and termination of blood feuds. Chechens also ended up composing a disproportionately large percentage of professional NCO's and SPETSNAZ in the Red Army and it was not unknown for Soviet commanders to deal with errant and dangerous Chechen subordinates by flying in their village elders, whose stern reprimands were meekly accepted by the Chechen soldier.

One might suspect that one attraction of religious extremist movements like the Taliban are that they can offer a low-status, young male from outlier families an opportunity to get out from under the constraints of traditional behavior, which usually favor seniority, family prestige and patriarchal status.

[empty]

Steve,
I think Margolis is making some incorrect assumptions of his own. The population of the frontier regions may seem homogeneous and segregated (from Pakistan) to outsiders but it isn't. The largest Pashtun city is not in the NWFP - it is Karachi. And while Pashto is the language of the majority the NWFP contains large numbers of Hindko speakers as well as groups that are linguistically closer to Punjab. While the FATA people may be described as mountain wild men, the description is perhaps not that appropriate for many of the inhabitants of the NWFP/Pakhtunwa/Afghania region. The largest city in the region, Peshawar, has been a very cultured and civilized city for most of the last 2000 years.
Given the level of integration between at least three of the four provinces, if Pakistan splits along provincial lines the bloodletting will make the splitting of Yugoslavia look like a tea party. That does not mean it will not happen. But the likelihood is much less than it might initially look. The wild card here is Baluchistan which is cursed with natural resources and a primitive societal structure.
There is a hornets nest being stirred up and it could include provincial conflict, but I don't think that is the most likely outcome - or the second or third for that matter. Not that the possible outcome will not be tragic, but just not tragic in that way.

[empty]

I should have added that I agree with Margolis' final paragraph about the "Real Danger." If the left had not been so thoroughly ground down they would have not found it at all difficult to find adherents. And they would have been able to channel the peoples outrage and despair in more productive ways than what Margolis correctly fears.

[Lex]

Wait, why isn't exiling militant Pashtuns to America an option? Seems like just as good of an idea as this or the previous administration came up with.

[Lex]

Let me rephrase: Seems like just as good of an idea as anything that either of the last two administrations have managed to pull out of their asses.

[Al Fin]

Afghanistan would not suffer, it would simply cease to exist, should Pushtunistan arise. The remains of Afghanistan would likely be gobbled up by neighboring countries.

[Z]

Why do people insist on calling the possibility of an independent Pashtunisan a "danger" or a "travesty"? Oh, I know why, because those people are Pakistanis or Americans who have their own agendas in the region. Self-determination is one of the most basic rights that such large ethno-linguistic groups as the Pashtuns should have (there are over 40 million of them). They share the same language and culture with each other...not with Punjabis or Hazaras or any other groups in the region. I don't understand why non-Pashtun people care to oppress and try to control Pashtuns so much? What does it give them? Why can't they focus on their own people and their own land? Let the Pashtuns of the region unite and finally be able to move forward and thrive with no outside interference. Punjabis can make their own country, too, and leave Pashtuns and Balochis alone. Pashtuns and Balochis are not Punjabi and will not submit to Punjabi rule or Tajik rule or any other rule but their own. Get it through your thick heads!