With Pathans

A Canadian writer, Matthieu Aikins, now in New York City, has written a marvelous article about his spending time earlier this year with Pathans in Quetta and then just across the Durand Line in Spin Boldak. Also with time in Kandahar and Kabul. The article is in the December 2009 issue of Harper's magazine. I urge you most strongly to buy it.

Mr Aikins captures remarkably, to my mind, a great deal of what Pathans are all about. I was a very junior diplomat at the Canadian embassy in Islamabad from 1975 to 1977. I was also the designated "our man in Kabul" since we then covered Afstan from Pakistan. I went up the Grand Trunk Road, across the Indus at Attock, to Peshawar (Jan's and Dean's) and then through the Khyber Pass (ah, Shagai Fort), the border at Torkham, Jalalabad and on up the Kabul River Gorge (more here)

to Kabul three or four times a year (two or so weeks per trip) to be the Canadian embassy in Afstan. Actually one room in the chancery of the British embassy in their Curzonian compound in the northern part of the city near the Intercontinental Hotel. About which I made a rebellious point of not using, unlike most Westerners with money (or on expenses), rather going to the downtown Hotel Kabul; the current version is nothing like the place at which I stayed .

Meanwhile, after few months in Isbad, it came to pass that my best friend in Pakistan was a Pathan, of good family and quite Westernized, up to a point. In any event Mr Aikins' words ring very true. Excerpts, with which he concurs:

The master of Spin Boldak:
Undercover with Afghanistan's drug-trafficking border police

...I arrived in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan Province...

Perhaps because tourists have become a rare sight in this violent city, a Toyota Land Cruiser stopped just ahead of me and two men in the front beckoned to me. Their plump, clean- shaven faces were unthreatening, so I walked over to chat. When they learned I was a foreign visitor, they invited me for a sumptuous lunch, and later we drove around the city’s crowded bazaars and toured a restricted area of the military cantonment. I decided not to introduce myself as a journalist; they seemed to accept that I was simply a young traveler interested in poking around their rough corner of the world.

A few days later, one of the men, Jahanzeb, introduced me to his cousin, Sikander, who soon began taking me out around the city himself. As I had already discovered, Pashtuns are a frank and friendly lot with visitors, and one night, cruising around in the Lexus that Sikander used as a mobile office, he confided to me that he was shipping forty mon, or two metric tons, of opium once a month from the Afghan border town of Spin Boldak...

The most important of Sikander’s connections was Colonel Abdul Razik, the leader of a tribal militia and border police force that extends across Kandahar and Helmand provinces— which produce 80 percent of Afghanistan’s opium, which in turn is nearly 90 percent of the world’s crop...

At thirty years of age, Razik was the most powerful Afghan Border Police officer in the southern part of the country—a formerchild refugee who scrambled to power during the post-9/11 chaos, his rise abetted by a ring of crooked officials in Kabul and Kandahar as well as by overstretched NATO commanders who found his control over a key border town useful in their war against the Taliban. With his prodigious wealth, loyal soldiers, and connections to top government officials, Razik was seen as a ruthless, charismatic figure, a man who brooked no opposition to his will. I asked Sikander if he would take me to Afghanistan for a day to show me Razik’s operation, and he agreed...

I was learning...that Boldak is a special sort of border town. The big business there is cars—right-hand-drive cars, to be precise, used cars bought mainly in Japan and shipped in duty-free via Dubai. Afghanistan is a left-hand-drive country, but the vehicles are intended for Pakistan. They are sent overland from Karachi in sealed containers, unpacked in Spin Boldak, and sent right back across the border, with forged papers and baksheesh given to various officials along the way. This may seem like a strange journey, but it’s a simple matter of comparative advantage. Under the Afghan Transit Trade agreement, which dates to 1965, Pakistan allows Afghanistan-bound goods to traverse its territory duty-free. Afghanistan is a free port with minimal duties, whereas in Pakistan taxes and customs can double or even triple a vehicle’s cost. This price differential, combined with widespread corruption and inefficient law enforcement in both countries, has created an enormous market for smuggling [in my time Swedish Ifö toilets were doing the turn-around]...

The conjoined mention of “Abdul Razik” and “drug smuggling” by a Western journalist in Kandahar was enough to cast a chill over most interviews. But on condition of anonymity, two other Kandahari politicians—Achakzai tribal elders with clean reputations and who were widely respected—made similar assertions to me about Razik’s involvement in drug smuggling, his private prisons, his vast wealth, and his entanglement in a network of corrupt high officials and major drug smugglers. An official at the Kandahar office of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, who asked not to be named, agreed that Razik was operating his own prisons and conducting extrajudicial executions...

A grim irony of the rising pro-Taliban sentiments in the south is that the United States and its allies often returned to power the same forces responsible for the worst period in southerners’ memory—the post- Soviet “mujahideen nights.” In the case of Gul Agha Shirzai (now governor of Nangarhar but still a major force in Kandahar), the same man occupied the exact same position; in the case of Razik, nephew of the notorious Mansour, it is the restoration of an heir. By installing these characters and then protecting them by force of arms, the ISAF has come to be associated, in the minds of many Afghans, with their criminality and abuses. “We’re doing the Taliban’s work for them,” said one international offi cial with years of experience in counternarcotics here...

“We were facing the worst-case scenario in 2006—a conventional takeover by Taliban forces,” said Brigadier General Jonathan Vance, the Canadian commander of ISAF forces in Kandahar Province [more here]. He was proud that his country’s small contingent had been able to hold the insurgency more or less at bay. But he admitted that the life of the average Kandahari had become less secure as the Taliban began to tighten their grip on Kandahar city. “I don’t have the capacity to make sure someone doesn’t rip their guts out at night.”

Military officers like General Vance find themselves in a peculiar fix when confronted with characters like Abdul Razik. These entrenched figures hold posts or wear uniforms whose legitimacy must be respected. But many of those who maintain their power through corruption and coercion were originally installed by the U.S. military—a fact not lost on Afghans, who tend to have longer memories than Westerners here on nine- or twelve-month rotations.

I asked General Vance if he was aware that Razik was directly involved in the drug trade. “Yes,” he said. “We are completely aware that there are a number of illicit activities being run out of that border station.” He had few illusions about Razik, with whom he interacts directly. “He runs effective security ops that are designed to make sure that the business end of his life runs smoothly, and there is a collateral effect on public order,” he told me. “Ideally, it should be the other way around. The tragedy of Kandahar is that it’s hard to find that paragon of civic virtue.”..

...Razik is hardly at odds with his government. After the first round of national elections closed on August 20, his men forcibly took Spin Boldak’s ballot boxes into his house for “safekeeping” overnight. It was just one of the many reports of electoral fraud in Kandahar Province, which polled overwhelmingly for President Karzai, according to the independent Election Commision of Afghanistan. The count from Spin Boldak’s polling stations: Karzai, 8,341; his main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, 4.'