From: "Austin Muslims" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2001 03:23:25 -0000 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [AM] Pakistan disintegrating! Pakistan is in danger of falling apart Regional separatism and support for Islamist groups are growing William Dalrymple Tuesday October 23, 2001 The Guardian A couple of years ago, on a visit to the North West Frontier, I called in on Khan Abdul Wali Khan. The Khan had once been one of the Pathan's great leaders; but he was now a frail old man. We sat in his summer house in the middle of his irrigated garden. The Khan poured jasmine tea and asked me about my impressions of the area. I told him what I had just seen at the nearby Darra arms bazaar: hundreds of men busy manufacturing home-made assault rifles and anti-aircraft cannon. "Yes," said the Khan. "There are now more than one million Kalashnikovs in this province alone. It has got completely out of control." He shook his head sadly. "I feel," he said, "as if I'm living on an ammunition dump." I thought of the Khan this week as anti-American protests spread across Pakistan. Although there has been unrest in Karachi and a bomb in Rawalpindi, it is among the Pathans that the rioting has been most serious: a cinema, the UN compound and a bazaar burned down by Pathans in Quetta, and four more shot dead in a village nearby; significantly, the local Baluchis have played virtually no part in the riots. Worse still on the frontier, where the Pathans are from the same tribes as their cousins in the Taliban, Peshawar has disappeared into a miasma of tear gas and police shooting, with at least half a dozen dead. Machismo is to the North West Frontier what religion is to the Vatican. Bandoliers hang over the men's shoulders; grenades are nonchalantly tucked into their pockets. I once walked into a Khyber tea house to find a group of Pathan mojahedin huddled in a corner dismantling a live landmine with a broken screw driver. None of the other tea drinkers blinked. The Pathans have never been completely conquered, at least not since the time of Alexander the Great. They have seen off centuries of invaders, and they retain the mixture of self-confidence, independence and suspicion that this has produced. Beyond the checkpoints on the edge of Peshawar, tribal law - based on the tribal council and the blood feud - rules unchallenged. The dominant Afridi tribe controls the Afghan heroin trade and kidnapping and murder are virtually cottage industries. It takes very little for latent discontent of the Pathans with the Pakistani government to erupt, but this latest wave of riots is on a different scale to anything since partition, raising the perennial question as to the future of Pakistan - can the centre hold? If many in Pakistan now question the long-term viability of the state, it is certain that none would be so ready to separate themselves from it as the Pathans. Throughout the 1940s, Wali Khan's father, known as Padshah Khan, passionately opposed the creation of Pakistan, leading the Pathans to side with Gandhi's Congress against Jinnah's Muslim League. During this period the Pathans believed that they would gain their own state, allied to India, just as East Pakistan - modern Bangladesh - was originally separated by thousands of miles from its western wing. In the bloodshed of partition, this Pakhtun state never happened, but the dashed hopes left the Pathans estranged from the idea of Pakistan. Padshah Khan spent the 1960s and 1970s struggling in vain for a union with the equally disgruntled Pathans in Afghanistan to form a new state - Pakhtunistan, straddling the Durand Line (the hated frontier drawn up by the British in 1893 which broke the tribes in two). But the Pakhtun nationalist spirit survived his death in 1988, and has mutated into a very different Islamist form under a variety of Taliban-like groups such as the Jamiat Ulema i-Islam (JUI). If, as seems quite possible, Afghanistan breaks up in the aftermath of the American assault, with the Tajik Northern Alliance controlling the north, and a Pathan post-Taliban successor state taking the south, then demands for the creation of Pakhtunistan can only gain momentum. Regional separatism is only one of the problems now faced by Pakistan. President Musharraf's decision to support the American assault on the Taliban, against the wishes of more than 80% of his population, has greatly strengthened Islamist groups, bringing them support from swathes of the population not normally part of their constituency. Serious civilian casualties in Afghanistan or heavy-handed action by the Pakistani security forces would further radicalise the population. Last week Musharraf sacked two leading pro-Taliban generals and placed three pro-Taliban religious leaders (including the spiritual leader of the JUI) under house arrest; but after a decade of Talibanisation, Pakistan has never been closer to an Islamic revolution, or at least an Islamist coup. Such a coup would put nuclear weapons into Islamist hands: Bin Laden's wildest dream. These strains and tensions within Pakistan can only increase in the months ahead. It is likely to be a bumpy ride. · William Dalrymple is the author of The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (HarperCollins) ------------------------ Yahoo! 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