The FATA and NWFP of Pakistan have a population of approximately 30 million Pashtun and a political consciousness that only grudgingly acknowledges the political boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact I just heard a report on this on NPR 2 hours ago about 20,000 refugees fleeing Pakistan into Afghanistan. “Is this because the border is drawn by the West?” asked the NPR correpsondent. “Yes, yes – absolutely,” replied the Pashtuni guy.
This is exactly the problem with the liberal critique of Pakistan/Afghanistan, which makes it both blind to reality and blind to what is actually the major shortcoming of the conservative interpretation.
The fact is the West not only created “the border,” the West created “the country” of “Pakistan.” In fact “Afghanistan” is, more than not, just a political-geographical void between the tenuous entity “Pakistan” and the more established, self-conscious kingdom of Persia that always tried and mostly failed to rule as far east (from their point of view) as the now-Afghan city of Herat. These people think of themselves Pashtun and Muslim well before they think of themselves as Afghanistanis or Pakistanis or “citizens.”
Liberals – I’m sorry to be so tendentious – above all do not understand just how different these people are from us. Read Churchill’s The Malakand Field Force written in the late 1890s: these are the same people, except now they use AK-47s instead of their 19th century predecessors. While liberals are so busy learning their muddled moralisms and manipulative histories they are also busy not learning about the actual Pakistan.
Pakistan is a muddle that looks like a problem. That is, Pakistan’s just a big goddamn mess that anyone trying to approach as a genuine nation-state is going to founder on. When the Pashtun area around the Khyber Pass was the most likely route the Russians would take into British India, the British used to control that border zone with these little detachments of mostly Muslim Indian or Sikh Indian soldiers led by British officers who would go out and punish the Mahdi armies that would spontaneously form amid this morass of warlike, idle barbarians. That’s sort of what we’re doing now, again. It’s not like there’s a “solution” to this problem; they’re not bourgois social-democrats just agitating for the right balance of judicial equity and economic opportunity for god’s sake.
And by the way Musharaf was the best thing Pakistan had going for it since its founding – go look it up. And a lot of that has to do with the fact of an American spotlight on him from early on (he led his coup in 1999). But these people are barbarians man, it’s long past time to just admit it and get on with it.
