By intervening militarily in Afghanistan, the US thrust itself into the middle of this border dispute without adequately recognizing it as such. As a result, two successive American presidents have repeatedly failed to get Afghanistan and Pakistan to take joint responsibility for security in the border areas. Tarzi is surely right when he asserts that “a rearrangement of Pakistan — Afghanistan bilateral relations, beginning with resolving the difficult question of the common boundary between the two countries, seems a necessary ingredient” for peace in the region.
One of several other remarkable essays is by James Caron, a lecturer on Islamicate South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He shows, through a historical examination of the expressive arts of the Pashto-speaking region, that the folk figure of the “talib”—or religious student, the singular of “Taliban”—is traditionally seen as romantic, antihierarchical, and opposed to the prevailing culture. There are obvious tensions between this folk figure and the present-day political-military group, but there are unexpected linkages as well. For instance, we read Caron’s surprising description of the young Mullah Omar, now leader of the Taliban, singing classical songs called ghazals on the day he lost an eye during the campaign against the Soviets in the 1980s. One of the lyrics went: “My illness is untreatable, oh, my flower-like friend/My life is difficult without you, my flower-like friend.” Caron suggests that such language allowed Taliban leaders to express their own “pious heroism” in terms familiar from courtly love poetry, and to construct a talib persona of “authoritative respectability” around their themes of “sincerity, earnestness, and morality.”
Also arresting is a folk story, elaborated upon by Caron, of a young man named Talib Jan and Pashtana (literally: “female Pashtun”). In a recently printed version of this story, the two fall in love, but while the poor, low-born Talib Jan is away, Pashtana is persuaded by her unscrupulous family to marry her rich, high-born (“khan”) cousin in London. Talib Jan dies of sorrow — pure, devoted to his love for Pashtana, and penniless — but after his death he comes to be venerated as a martyr. The story seems intended, Caron writes, “to convey… what is, for the author, the heartbreaking rejection of sincere talib morality by Karzai-era Afghan Pashtuns, and their ‘marriage’ to khan-ism through the intervention of foreign brothers.”
The anti-imperialist and antihierarchical echoes of this tale are clear, and quite different from accounts of nihilistic militants belonging to a death cult at war with freedom — or, for that matter, of Pashtun supremacists bent on subjugating other ethnicities. Many of the Taliban have certainly proved themselves murderous, vicious, and Pashtuncentric. But their self-perceptions and the ways their motives are embedded in Pashtun culture do not necessarily correspond to popular caricatures in the West.
Most of the essays in this book — including noteworthy pieces by Sana Haroon, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, and Faisal Devji — come across as challenges, intent on debunking popular myths. In his essay on the Red Mosque in Islamabad, which was raided by the Pakistani government in 2007, for example, Devji argues that it does not make sense to compare the aggressive activists of the Red Mosque with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Many of the Red Mosque’s practices that Devji cites are unknown among the Taliban, such as the involvement of women and their deployment as activists “shoulder to shoulder” with men. The experience of reading Under the Drones may, for many readers, be one of constantly losing their footing, as they realize that the assumptions on which their views are grounded have only tenuous basis in fact. It is a feeling that, over the past dozen years, US military planners in the region will have come to know well.
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AS DRONE WARS continue in Africa and Southwest Asia, we ought to remember that Western governments can be dangerously ignorant of these other regions. US policymakers are looking for a new approach to fighting terror after sustaining thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones do not expose their operators to the risk of physical harm and avoid the need for the large and costly deployments of troops with which the US public has grown weary.
So a widening and covert campaign heavily involving drone strikes might seem an attractive option. Already, the intensifying pace of strikes in Yemen (twenty-three in the second half of 2012) is on the verge of overtaking the reduced campaign in Pakistan (twenty-four in the same period). US drones have struck in Somalia, and there are plans to establish a base for US drones near Mali.
Yet to imagine that drone strikes are a panacea is to draw overly simplistic lessons from the wars of the past dozen years. Whatever the merits of toppling cruel and justifiably hated dictatorships in Iraq and Libya, these countries and their neighbors are today probably of more concern from the perspective of international terrorism than they were before.
Each country and region is different. But some states in Asia and Africa are trying to make transitions to democracy after years of despotic rule. During these transitions, they will often be weak. We ought, therefore, to reflect on the fact that strong states police themselves better than weak states. When states have elected governments, as is the case in Pakistan, and if the US drone strikes are unpopular, as they naturally are, the governments are likely to be made weaker, not stronger, by them. Few foreign military campaigns remain popular with locals for long.
Strengthening such countries will therefore depend on support for the complicated and unique internal political processes that can build in each a domestic consensus to combat extremists — who, after all, typically kill more locals than they do anyone else. International pressure and encouragement can help secure such a consensus. But it cannot be dispatched on the back of a Hellfire missile fired by a robot aircraft piloted by an operator sitting halfway around the world in Nevada.
(2013)
14
Islam Is Not a Monolith
IN 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I was traveling through Europe and North America. I had just published a novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and as I traveled I was struck by the large number of interviewers and of audience members at Q&A’s who spoke of Islam as a monolithic thing, as if Islam referred to a self-contained and clearly defined world, a sort of Microsoft Windows, obviously different from, and considerably incompatible with, the Apple OS X — like operating system of “the West.”
I recall one reading in Germany in particular. Again and again, people posed queries relating to how “we Europeans” see things, in contrast to how “you Muslims” do. Eventually I was so exasperated that I pulled my British passport out of my jacket and started waving it around my head. “While it’s true the UK hasn’t yet joined the eurozone,” I said, “I hope we can all agree the country is in fact in Europe.”