Precis: The latest elections in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Provinces (NFWP) have produced a surprising alliance between the essentially Pashtun Awami National Party and the quasi-socialist Pakistan People’s Party. This is a response to Shaheen Buneri's upbeat War on terror, Taliban and Pashtun nationalists, a journalist friend I’ve made, writing from Peshawar.

(Afghan orphan girls, October 2002, Kabul, photograph by author, all rights reserved)

Yes, the flowers are blooming in the foothills of the Sulaiman Mountains, and many of them are poppies. I have long been an admirer of Pashtun culture, but let us not mince words: the Pashtun are behind the satanic epidemic of heroin addiction, a plague which will kill and degrade more young people than all the wars in the area.

To date, the Pashtun have strongly resisted every effort to become a nation. If at this point in time the Pashtun have decided to become a nation of sorts, they must contend with the same problems as the Kurds and Chechens: tribes without boundaries. Will the nation-states of the area allow them to exist in peace? I sincerely doubt it. The problem of militants has not gone away.

The Awami National Party has aligned itself with the quasi-socialist Pakistan People’s Party. This is a disastrous alliance: PPP has little interest in seeing an independent Pashtunistan of any sort, and has always viewed Khan Wali Khan’s ANP as a poor cousin. There was a longstanding hatred between Khan Wali Khan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of the PPP, whom Khan called Raja Dahir. This epithet was a deadly insult, for Raja Dahir was once a Hindu king of Sindh who stupidly played both sides against the middle and his allies deserted him. Dahir was beheaded for his trouble and his women confined to Muslim harems: Dahir has become a curse and a byword in Pakistan to this day.

When Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto went to the gallows after many inept and cruel treacheries, Khan’s curse came true. This alliance between ANP and PPP cannot last, will not last: the hatred goes back to before the foundation of Pakistan itself. The bizarre story of Khan Wali Khan, his efforts on behalf of the Pashtun people, his years of imprisonment, the death of his wife and children, the torture of his son, the murder of his friends, the many attempts on his life constitute a tale so long and incredibly sad I cannot recount it, even in brief without eruptions of dark anger. Suffice to say the PPP and ANP are merely opposed to a common enemy at present: there is no love lost between them.

As Khan Wali Khan grew old, his party became grossly corrupt under the influence of Khan’s wife. I am not privy to the finances of the ANP at present, but ANP has become yet another family fiefdom, as has the PPP, another hideously corrupt political entity. There is no accountability: ANP is only found in the NWFP, and cannot be said to represent the Pashtuns except in part, for the Pashtuns are clans. For all practical purposes, the ANP should be called the Pashtunistan Party, for that seems to be their only goal. The ANP has the support of the clans at present: alliances change more often than underwear in that part of the world.

The Pashtuns are not the only group clamoring for independence: the Baluchi and Sindhi are separate movements. The ANP has variously allied itself to these similar if smaller movements, but at their cores, these parties are simply shifting alliances of warlords and clan chieftains.

The Pashtuns have made their bed incredibly hard: Gulbuddin Hekhmatyar, who this author believes to be one of the worst criminals alive at present in the world, is a Pashtun. Hekhmatyar thrives in Afghanistan, though it is likely he is in Tunisia at present, worth over 600 million dollars, much of it gained from heroin trafficking, the rest from outright theft from relief efforts. He stole a year’s worth of medicine from Doctors Without Borders, and is directly responsible for the deaths of perhaps 30,000 Afghans in his destruction of Kabul. Hekhmatyar and his cronies run the Pashtun trucking mafia in Pakistan, and every guard along the Khyber Pass is on his payroll.

We cannot dissect away the Pashtuns and their legitimate grievances against Pakistan from the likes of the Hizb i-Islami or the Jameat i-Islami, any more than the Kurds cannot be separated from the PKK in Turkey. They are two sides of the same coin. Taliban equals Pashtun and by reflection Pashtun equals Taliban. There are exceedingly few Taliban who are not Pashtun, and both the ANP and Taliban are Pashtun nationalist movements.

Let it never be forgotten that Mullah Omar is a Pashtun. While he ruled Afghanistan, we had a Pashtun in charge of a fair chunk of real estate. We think of Mullah Omar in terms of 9/11 and his relationship with Osama bin Ladin, but to the Afghan people, his reign is remembered as a nightmare of religious persecution. Mullah Omar remains at large, quite likely protected within the Pashtun world. There is an old Pashto proverb: Sta da khaira may tobah da, kho da spie de rana kurray ka. = don't give me a handout, just keep your dogs from attacking me.

Can the Pashtun identity be reconciled to civil politics, with the give and take of coexistence required for integration into Afghan/Pakistan politics? I have grave doubts. Deobandi Islam is a ferocious and backward influence, and its heart is within Pashtun-controlled territory. The Pashtuns have won a minor victory within Pakistan by allying themselves to their old enemy the PPP: within Afghanistan, the Pashtuns cross over from Pakistan to destroy school buildings, terrorize their fellow Pashtuns and kill NATO troops. The Pashtun chieftains tolerate the Taliban: they have not risen up to drive them away, as the Sunni sheikhs of Iraq have driven away the Al Qaeda terrorists. Unless and until such a movement is seen, I hold out no hope for the Pashtuns.

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