Mustafa Qadri » Khyber Pass

When Two Tribes Go to War

mustafa — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 09:46:14 +0000

Mustafa Qadri finds out for himself during a night patrol with members of an anti-Taliban militia in Pakistan that sometimes, it’s kill or be killed.

On the boundary between Pakistan-controlled Peshawar and insurgency-hit regions of the tribal areas, the global fight against the Taliban has turned former neighbours in this once sleepy rural setting into mortal enemies.

On March 9, a powerful human bomb exploded during a funeral procession outside Adezai, a village on the outskirts of Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s northwest frontier; 37 people were killed, and another 100 injured. The blast was so powerful that many of the victims couldn’t be identified. Sandals, shredded bits of clothing and some human remains were scattered around the blast site like confetti, making it impossible to provide a speedy burial for the victims in keeping with Muslim tradition.

Although no one has claimed responsibility for the blast, there are strong suspicions that the Pakistani Taliban is involved. The target, after all, was the funeral of the wife of a senior anti-Taliban leader from Adezai. Adezai is literally the final settled outpost of Peshawar before the rugged, dusty terrain of Khyber Agency, the ancient gateway to Afghanistan that has played host to a myriad of conquerors from Alexander the Great to US and NATO forces. The famed Khyber Pass snakes across the landscape, and is the single largest supply route for troops in Afghanistan, including over 130,000 international troops.

Once a quiet little hamlet, Adezai now looks more like a medieval fortress, a veritable Alamo looking out on a sparse wilderness leading to tribal and semi-autonomous regions where control fluctuates between Pakistan and the Taliban. Dusty roads are lined with mud brick buildings, with only the occasional oasis of green fields dotting the landscape, surrounded by greyish-blue skies.

Entering this part of Pakistan requires discreet travel in the company of locals, a point made abundantly clear by the damaged buildings that line the road leading into Adezai. Two homes we passed on the edge of the village were blown up by the Taliban the previous night. Only a few months earlier, the village’s only girls’ school was destroyed by a suspected remote-controlled bomb.

As we enter the centre of the village, the powerful whirl of an Army helicopter blares out from above as it heads off on an anti-Taliban operation on the border with Afghanistan. Surrounding us are imposing mud walls that have clearly been peppered with machine gun fire.

A posse of local men, all armed to the teeth, are waiting to greet us. ‘I think that our village is a battlefield,’ says Irshad a tall, handsome young man with more than a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn. He says he left his job as a driver for a luxury hotel in Dubai to defend his home from the almost nightly raids that have seen scores kidnapped or killed. This is a rural society and most of those living here are farmers. But over the past three years, they’ve formed a militia, or lashkar, to defend Adezai against rival tribes in neighbouring Khyber tribal agency and Dera Dum Khel, which are aligned with the Taliban.

I ask what would happen if one of the residents of the village travelled to a neighbouring area, just ten minutes away by car. ‘They’ll kill us, it’s very simple,’ Irshad says. And if the men of Adezai capture one of their enemies? ‘We will kill them because they are our enemies, and the enemies of our country,’ he adds.

Local rivalries aside, it’s no exaggeration to say losing Adezai would result in an uptick in terrorism in Peshawar and the rest of Pakistan. ‘We feel we’ve saved Peshawar, because we are on the frontline,’ village chief Dilawar Khan says confidently as we survey the region from a tower looking out over the horizon. But he also tells me that Adezai receives little support from the Army or government authorities, and he has threatened to disband the lashkar if increased support – mostly money, fuel and ammunition – isn’t forthcoming.

This may have something to do with the fact that Adezai is aligned with the Pakistan Muslim League Quaid. Once the favoured political party of then-President Pervez Musharraf, the PML-Q is now in opposition, and Khan claims rival villages aligned with the Taliban are also getting support from local legislators. A smartly dressed, clean shaven man in his mid-forties, Dilawar answers my questions in between constant phone calls that are dispatched almost as quickly on a Bluetooth headset that seems surgically attached to his ear.

‘The Taliban fire rockets at us from those hills,’ he says, pointing out two mound-like hills that divide the farmlands of Adezai from the dusty plains of the tribal areas beyond. ‘If the village falls,’ an elder adds, ‘the Taliban would be free to infiltrate into urban Peshawar.’

That may sound outlandish, and perhaps the threat is exaggerated, but Adezai lays an easy 30-minute drive outside Peshawar. Although this year and last have both been relatively quiet in Pakistan’s frontier capital, it’s still surrounded by regions gripped by insurgency. According to police officials, the threat of suicide and remote-controlled bombs is an everyday concern in Peshawar, even during the cold season when hostilities traditionally ease off. Scores have died in Peshawar this winter in the sporadic attacks.

Here in Adezai, meanwhile, the security situation means that all the able-bodied men in the village must take turns patrolling the perimeter in the darkest, coldest hours of the night. Compounding the danger is the fact that their enemies are no strangers to them.

‘Yes, we know quite a few Taliban,’ says Hafiz Sajid Raza, a young Islamic scholar with a flowing henna-red beard and piercing blue eyes. Once a renowned local athlete, he’s one of Adezai’s best fighters. ‘Some of the Taliban came from our village, and I know most of the militants from neighbouring villages because I was involved in local elections and in sporting tournaments from before the fighting,’ he says. Some, like the feared Taliban commander Qari Ayub, used to teach in the local school.

‘People used to be very scared of the Taliban, that’s why they joined them,’ Hafiz Raza explains. I ask if he’s ever killed a Taliban. Yes, he answers casually, ‘the man who killed my father in Karachi, he was Taliban. After killing my father he called to tell me. He said “you must be very sad now because he’s dead.”’

In retaliation, Hafiz Raza and a few others from Adezai tracked down the brother of his father’s killer, who he says was also involved with the Taliban, to the neighbouring region of Bora. ‘I rang him (his father’s killer) to say I had captured his brother,’ he says. ‘I told him that if you are so brave and don’t fear death, come and rescue him.’

But the Taliban didn’t come to rescue their compatriot, so the men of Adezai shot him in the head. ‘We aren’t cruel, we didn’t mistreat or torture him, it was a quick death,’ Hafiz Raza tells me.

According to Pashtun tradition, a family must avenge the murder of their kin, a deadly obligation that has made it impossible for people here to escape the cycle of violence that sees endless skirmishes during the winter heat up along with the temperature into full blown warfare every summer. Judging from yesterday’s devastating suicide bombing targeting the people of Adezai, that could mean this will be a particularly bloody year.

Although Adezai technically isn’t part of the tribal areas, the ethnic Pashtuns here still adhere to the Pakhtunwali, an ancient tribal code that has governed relations within and between different tribes for centuries. The sudden US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the influx of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters into Pakistan’s tribal areas that followed it, may have disrupted much of the traditional Pashtun tribal structure. But in many ways, the current conflict is merely the latest in a long line of inter-tribe disputes that have engulfed foreign empires from the British to the Mughals, and now Pakistan.

As the call to prayer rings out at dusk, dark begins to fall on the village. In the hujra, something of a community safe house in the heart of Adezai village, young men gather to play cards and watch Bollywood films as they wait to begin their shift in the night patrols. Eventually, just after midnight, it’s my turn to go on patrol with Irshad, Hafiz Raza and a few other men.

Outside the hujra, a fine mist hovers close to the ground. The almost total silence is broken only by the rhythmic grinding of the gravelly earth under our sandals as we walk in single file, and the occasional piercing sound of distant gunfire. We trudge around the village through narrow streets and alleyways flanked by the mud boundary walls that separate the different family estates of Adezai.

We travel in almost total darkness so as not to give Taliban snipers an easy target, but the black of night presents problems of its own – at least for me, as I struggle to keep up with the lashkar. After each kilometre or so, we reach a clearing. The most exposed parts of Adezai, these areas are guarded all night by men who will later work the adjoining fields. ‘I’ll stand here until 5am,’ says Noor Malik. ‘Every night.’

After traversing the village and spending time with several night patrols, we return to the hujra in the early hours of the morning. The sun is slowly rising and another night draws to a close. Thankfully, this night has passed with few disruptions. But it’s only a matter of time before the fighting begins again. Two days after I left Adezai, the Taliban again bombed the girls’ school. Like the deadly bombing that killed and maimed so many that same month, it’s a reminder that for the people of Adezai, this conflict isn’t some vague, distant war, but an everyday struggle for survival.

Mustafa Qadri is a Pakistan-based journalist.

http://the-diplomat.com/2011/03/18/when-two-tribes-go-to-war/

Pakistan’s dangerous divisions

mustafa — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:03:13 +0000

Antagonism between Sunni and Shia Muslims is entrenched, and there is little the state can do to quell the violence

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co. uk, Thursday 11 February 2010 18.00 GMT

Ordinary Pakistanis have fallen victim to a civil war largely orchestrated by forces well beyond their control. As the recent bombings targeting Shia Muslims in Karachi proves, the violence facing the country is more complex than extremists versus moderates. But how to unravel all the twists in this violent story?

“The Shia are responsible for all our troubles,” one former member of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, a vital cog in Pakistan’s counterinsurgency machine, told me in the Lower Dir region of Pakistan in 2008. Only a few miles from where we broke bread and drank copious cups of hot tea, eight people, including four schoolgirls and three US soldiers were killed last week in a suicide blast later claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.

Anti-Shia graffiti littered lamp posts and walls across the village where we met, a clear sign that this cancerous conflict is not just about anti-Americanism. In the tribal areas, particularly Khurram and Orakzai to the south of the Khyber Pass, Shia and Sunni tribes have been in open, bloody conflict. But apart from mutual resentment and stereotyping, no one precisely knows why.

This is not an indigenous problem. Ever since 1979′s revolution in predominantly Shia Iran and the Islamisation of the Afghan conflict in the 1980s, several countries have supported sectarian organisations to violently push for their version of Islam.

The spectre of sectarianism visited most recently and violently on Karachi – where even the hospital where casualties from an initial bombing was attacked – is only the latest episode.

As early as the prophet Muhammad’s death in the 7th century AD his disciples bickered over his rightful successor. The Shia-Sunni divide born out of this dispute, and the broader theological debate over how to live the good Muslim life remains the most significant source of internecine tension among Muslims.

Yet such divisions, increasingly marked in recent years, are the exception rather than the rule. For most Pakistanis, particularly away from the tribal areas in the urban sprawls, sectarian differences matter little in everyday life.

“This is politics, all politics,” argues Shabeer, a resident of one of Karachi’s Shia neighbourhoods that I interviewed for a story on this topic. “We are all Muslim, you and I are brothers.”

The divisions have nevertheless surfaced on several key moments. In 1953 a group of religious scholars lobbied to have the minority Ahmadiyya community – already considered apostates by most Muslims for claiming that Muhammad was not the last of Allah’s prophets – branded heretics by the state. They had to wait until 1974 when the embattled prime minister, Zulfiqar Bhutto, finally acquiesced to a constitutional amendment to that effect.

In between those dates, in 1971, the mainstream religious party Jamaat-e-Islami was widely implicated in the mass slaughter of Bengali Muslims in what is now Bangladesh. That was not a sectarian conflict, but it set an important benchmark for state support of Islamist violence.

The modern period of sectarian tension arguably commenced around this time.

It accelerated in the 1980s under military dictator Zia-ul-Haq and has continued in the intervening decades as Islamists, ever eager to find a reason to be, and pocket generous funding from the Arabian peninsula, branched off into a plethora of causes – jihad in Afghanistan or Kashmir, and, of course, crusading against false Muslims.

Because Islamist groups claim to uniquely promote authentic Islam, however, they often fall foul of one another. The virulently anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, for example, was created in 1996 after Pakistani mujahideen from the Afghan jihad split from Sipah-e-Sahaba, a large Islamist group created as a Sunni vanguard against the Iranian revolution spilling into Pakistan (at around 23 million, Pakistan has the largest Shia population outside Iran).

Jhangvi’s founders abandoned Sipah after the assassination of a key leader, Maulana Jhangvi, claiming it had strayed from its original goals, an explanation frequently given by ambitious activists seeking their own cadres. Owing to differences of theology and political allegiances, the Pakistan Taliban aligned Lashkar-e-Islami has routinely fought pitched battles with the pro-Pakistan Ansar-ul-Islam in the Khyber and Bajaur tribal agencies, key passageways between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Every society has its divisions. But a dangerous mix of political instability, poverty, and the tendency to shroud fascism under an Islamic veil have made Pakistani society intensely susceptible to exclusivist conceptions of Islam.

Those with the means and the inclination have long known this. That is why, along with militancy, charismatic preachers and their local and foreign backers have methodically created social welfare organisations across the Punjab and Sindh involved in both. It would be wrong to call all of the schools, hospitals and mosques they have built as hotbeds of extremism. But this infrastructure has given them a platform to shape domestic politics by creating loyal activists and playing on popular frustrations. This inevitably creates a disjointed relationship with the state. Most, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, decry the state – as its leader Hafiz Saeed did at a very public rally recently – but are careful not to stray past rhetoric lest they face elimination like the Pakistan Taliban.

For ordinary Pakistanis the strings that pull this violent drama are as distant as the drones that rain death on successive Taliban commanders.

NATO’s soft underbelly

mustafa — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:59:20 +0000

My latest column for The Guardian is on the quandaries of supplying NATO forces in Afghanistan:

NATO’s soft underbelly

Nato operations in Afghanistan depend on a precarious international supply system – and the Taliban have realised it

“An army marches on its stomach”, Napoleon apparently once said some two centuries ago. For the International Security Assistance Force for Afghanistan (ISAF), those stomachs, literal and metaphorical, are fed by a complex series of supply lines through Pakistan and Central Asia. ISAF’s 62,000 soldiers predominantly come from Nato countries – 8,900 of them, the largest non-US contingent, are British.

Armies are intensely resource-hungry. But when they are operating in Afghanistan, a landlocked country in one of the most politically sensitive regions in the world, the task of keeping them supplied becomes especially challenging.

The first of these challenges is delivering what are termed “lethal supplies”, or ammunition and weapons systems. Because of the risk of theft or destruction posed by delivering these supplies by land, most are flown into the country from airbases in neighbouring Central Asian countries and Pakistan. According to the manager of one freight company I met recently, in the past entire helicopters and other military hardware have been stolen from convoys travelling over land through Pakistan.

This has led western planners to consider bolstering supplies through alternate routes. Already the US is considering using roads through Iran that are already used to deliver basic supplies, like food and fuel. Negotiations are also afoot with Afghanistan’s neighbouring Central Asian nations, but any deal will also have to be okayed by Russia. For its part, Moscow has already agreed to allow “non-lethal” Nato supplies through the region.

Despite these developments, negotiating supply routes through Russia and Iran are a political minefield. The calculations with Iran are easy to understand – because the emerging nuclear power has been economically boycotted by Nato countries, any major deal over supply routes will have to be part of a wider improvement in diplomatic and trade relations.

With Russia, the calculations have much more to do with hegemonic rivalries. Having historically dominated the Central Asian countries, it views the expansion of western forces into the region – along with the conscription of former Eastern European satellite states into Nato – as a serious threat to its security and regional influence.

In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, the government ordered the United States and Nato to vacate the vital Manas airbase after Russia offered a better deal. It hasn’t helped that western forces are unpopular with the local population.

These considerations have led Nato countries to rely on Pakistan for the delivery of most supplies. Pakistan also has the advantage of offering the shortest land route to Afghanistan. At present, close to 75% of non-lethal supplies are sent via two land routes in Pakistan. Almost all of these supplies reach Pakistan by sea at the southern port city of Karachi. The vast majority of it – everything from soap to spare parts and petrol – is trucked through two entry points from Pakistan to Afghanistan.

The first, which is facing the most disruption, is through Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). From Peshawar it travels towards Torkum, a small town along the Khyber Pass that sits immediately on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. From Torkum, supplies are eventually transported to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.

The other route goes from Chaman, in Pakistan’s southern state of Balochistan, to Kandahar, the southern capital of Afghanistan and original home of both President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban. Although Nato claims to control the city, Kandahar province is one of the most volatile in Afghanistan.

Both Chaman and Torkam and the surrounding regions are home to traditional Pashtun societies. The people in both regions, and particularly the tribal agencies around Torkam, have been fiercely independent for centuries. Smuggling and banditry – the theft of goods and kidnapping for ransom – have occurred here for just as long.

Unsurprisingly, Pakistan authorities have only limited control of these regions and tensions between these authorities and the tribes, and between Pakistani and Afghan troops along the border, have been high for decades.

All of this makes for two of the most volatile trade routes in the world. On 27 March a suicide bomber destroyed a mosque near the Khyber Pass supply route, killing at least 24 but possibly more. A Taliban strike last December resulted in the destruction of over 160 Nato military vehicles. Last week in Chaman, two men on a motorbike attacked a truck delivering an excavation machine to Nato. The militant group destroyed a key bridge in the Khyber Pass last month.

The militants are not the only ones disrupting the NATO convoys. Last September, for instance, the Khyber Pass was closed to NATO convoys in protest at US missile strikes in Pakistan. In January, members of the tribal communities in Khyber Agency blocked key roads in protest at the unrelated murder of a tribesman during a police raid.

Truckers blocked the Chaman crossing earlier this month in protest at hikes in taxes by Afghan authorities. And let us not forget the truck drivers who make the perilous journey. Every one of the several truck drivers I’ve spoken to along the road to Chaman and in Karachi share the same sense of trepidation. “We are always fearful [for our safety], but what can I do? A job is a job,” said one driver who had stopped for a cup of tea along the road to Chaman. In recent months a string of truckies have been killed or abducted in convoy attacks.

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that few of the trucks are insured. “We have many claims against [Nato and] the Pakistani government, but our drivers and companies receive nothing,” explained Noor Khan Niazi, president of the Karachi Goods Carriers Association, the representative body for many of the trucking companies that transport Nato supplies.

Companies have taken to hiring only drivers from the tribes who control the regions bordering Afghanistan around Chaman and Torkum. “We pay around 30-35,000 rupees (around $600-700) per trailer, per [tribe] in protection money,” explained one trucking company manager.

Some convoys travel under armed escort and the Pakistani army has stepped up operations against pro-Taliban militants and bandits disrupting supplies, but attacks remain frequent.

“[These attacks] do not pose a strategic threat to the ISAF mission,” spokesman Brig-Gen. Richard Blanchette told me this week.

But supply convoys are the soft underbelly of a powerful, modern military force that the Taliban is incapable of matching in conventional combat.