Pashtoon Cultural Nationalist Movement

A good friend, Nushin jan Arbabzadah, asked me the following questions:

“….where do you see the place of the Taliban within the Pashtoun culture? People often equate the two but my impression is that the Taliban is in fact opposed to traditional Pashtoun cultural and religious values. And one more question, how come there never has been a real, strong Pashtoun cultural nationalist movement? Over the last three decades, the Pashtouns' leadership, from Taraki to Mullah Omar, have joined supra-nationalist movements. I am just curious why. Sorry for bombarding you with questions but I know that you know a lot about these things so it would be great if you could share your views with us….”

Bellow is my response. All your comments and suggestions are welcome.


Pashtoon Cultural Nationalist Movement (PCNM)

PCNM issue has been always political, and hence difficult to become strong in both homelands of the Pashtoons, Afghanistan and in what is now Pakistan, but for different reasons.

• In Pakistan, the genuine PCNM has been often suppressed for its obvious anti-colonial, later anti-Punjabi stand. It has been basically a minority protest and liberation/autonomy movement.



• In Afghanistan, however, Pashtoons had been until recently, at least nominally, the majority and the pillars of power. They had been, or have been perceived by non-Pashtoon Afghans as, the dominant ethnic group. Any attempt of a revival of PCNM has been tainted by this fact.

1. Since in the past the political power in Afghanistan has been in the hand of Pashtoons (ironically many of the Pashtoon power elites were even not able to speak Pashto!), and their Pashtoon ethnic belonging has served mainly their hold on to power, any official attempt of a cultural revival by the Pashtoon elites has been necessarily hegemonic and exclusive, or perceived as such by non-Pashtoons which amounts to the same (btw, nothing unique in a not-fully-democratic multi-ethnic country, as in comparable examples of say Yugoslavia, Russia, Turkey, Indonesia, China etc.)



2. The few non-governmental PCNM attempts have been also political and were/are aiming at strengthening the supposedly traditional 'right' to Pashtoon dominance in Afghanistan (Afghan Melat etc.), or were perceived as such by non-Pashtoons which amounts again to the same.



3. The Pashtoon centered Afghan national identity has failed to represnet a genuine natioanl identity for all Afghans (as also all the recent and exclusive attempts for a new national identity by other ethnic, linguistic and religious entities will fail). Curiously, the majority of Afghans, Pashtoon or non-Pashtoon, do suscribe to an Afghan identity, but pressed further, it will turn out that most see their particular cultural, lingusitic or religious entities as being, or as deserving to be, in the center of that perceived identity.
   This in turn has made any attempts at PCNM to be perceived as a contra-national identity in the muti-ethnic, muti-linguist Afghan society.



4. The presence of Pashtoon personalities in supra-nationalist movements from extreme left to extreme right has served, or has been perceived to serve, Pashtoon dominance , but it hasn't contributed (as you correctly mention) to a strengthening of PCNM for the obvious and by the actors stated reasons of a supra-nationalist ideology (internationalist, national-democratic - or "communist", to use a Western cliché - and Isamic/Jahadist/Pan-Islamic).



5. The deeply tribal, conservative and traditional lifestyle of the majority of traditional Pashtoons has been always suspicious of any "modern" attempt of a PCNM (always a project of Pashtoon political elites and "intellectuals"), as it is the case with any form of modernization that threatens the tribal thinking, values and the traditional desire for autonomy.


(I'm generalizing now gravely)

6. A Pashtoon is loyal first and foremost to himself! (like most people with tribal mentality, but Pashtoons have persevered this evolutionary thread amazingly intact into modern times)
   His commitment to any cause outside his individual existence is very conditional and limited, and to the extent he identifies that cause as beneficial to his survival. In the later case, he fights to death for it!
   The famous anecdotal, and certainly derogatory, statement (supposedly by a former British prime minister) contains a big chunk of truth, not just about Pashtoons: "You can't buy Afghans, but you can lease them!"



7. I know this is a controversial historic issue since there were other Afghan ethnicities too participating in the struggle for Afghan independence without being always acknowledged by the Pashtoon "nationalists", and many Pashtoons were serving colonialists.


Nonetheless, Pashtoons could once claim, and rightly so, to be at the forefront of the fight against British colonialism, and for Afghan national independence. Afghans in general, Pashtoons in particular, took, and still take, pride in their anti-Pakistani stand too, as they perceived their conflict with Pakistan as continuation of their anti-colonial struggle. That has been an often unmentioned justification of Pashtoon dominance in 20th century Afghanistan (partially accepted, unwillingly or willingly, by non-Pashtoon Afghans).


8. While all the Mujahedeen groups (the famous 7) were dependent on, directed, used, financed and controlled by Pakistanis and their ISI, Pakistan gave preferential treatment to the Pashtoon dominated groups for obvious political reasons. It started with G. Hekmatyar with his "federation" fantasies for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Haqqani, both Islamic zealots and Pashtoons.



9. This Pakistani policy culminated in creation of Taliban, a group exclusively recruited from among the Pashtoons. See how successfully the Pakistanis (may I say: the loyal servants of Britain!) used Pashtoons for their own political agendas! Pakistan turned the once so feared Pashtoon weapon against Afghans, including other innocent Pashtoons. This, however, happened under an Islamic flag. The Pashtoon Taliban in Afghanistan, and now in Pakistan, morphed into bizarre monsters, a blend of Pashtoon tribalism, Islamic ideology - anti-modern, anti-former-Mujahedeen, anti-non-Pashtoon, anti-Shia, anti-Iran, but Al Qaeda-, Saudi-, Pakistan- and ISI-friendly! (However, Pakistan itself will certainly pay a high price for creating this monster.)



10. Through this betrayal of Afghanistan, Taliban have harmed the Pashtoons in Afghanistan the most! They made the majority of the Pashtoons pay for the crimes of Taliban until toady. The helped deepen the ethnic and religious divide to new depths. They discredited all the Pashtoon causes, including the legitimate ones such as a healthy PCNM, in eyes of the non-Pashtoon Afghans and the world. As result of Taliban's actions, some narrow-minded Afghans regard all Pashtoons guilty by ethnic association. Of course, the mostly effected civilian victims of the conflict in Afghanistan, now mainly Pashtoons, pay the price with their suffering.



11. The current Afghan government, an artificial and corrupt system of different elements (but certainly with many good individuals in it), although with significant formal Pashtoon presence is eyed by most Pashtoons (and non-Pashtoons alike) with suspicion. The national and international reconstruction and pacification efforts are failing mostly in the Southern Pashtoon homelands.

Conclusion

A Pashtoon cultural nationalistic movement (PCNM) is needed and possible in future of the country, but we'll be very lucky if we see it in our life time.

This PCNM, however, has to be based on a new and just relationship between all the ethnicities of Afghanistan, and on a new and inclusive national vision in which all Afghans with their different cultural and linguistic values can share . Pashtoons have to recognize past injustices done in their names. They have to accept and acknowledge that many non-Pashtoons have the right of telling their side of our story, and that not every search for a non-Pashtoon Afghan identity is against Pashtoons. Of course, the same goes for the non-Pashtoons. They might have now even a bigger responsibility: not responding to past real and perceived injustice with injustice, to help their countrymen now suffering the most back on their feet, to help their "older" Pashtoon - at times unfair, but nonetheless - brothers and sisters in times of their greatest suffering.

In the moment, any attempt at PCNM will be seen by the local Pashtoons as irrelevant, and by the non-Pashtoons as just another attempt at Pashtoon dominance.

I hope I could provide some reasons for lack of PCNM in the past, and some hope for a future Pashtoon Cultural Nationalistic Movement. Needless to say that all the above mentioned is my subjective view. Many of my fellow Pashtoon and non-Pashtoon Afghans will disagree with me and I'm open to suggestions and corrections.

The End

The Last Visit In Kabul

The fifth or sixth of at least hundred rockets whistled over his head……

He always wondered where from his father took the power to stay so calm? By now, he had already his first signs of weakness.

He had arrived the day before on board of an Aeroflot flight from Tashkent, his last layover on the way from Berlin to Kabul.

Unlike the Kabul residents, he was blessed to not witness almost every day the cruelty of an undeclared noise that was raining on the city he had just entered for the last time. All he knew, or wanted to know, about that place was some broken pieces of news in the German newspapers he read. The news about his country sounded so far, so unreal, that he wasn’t really touched by it. He had successfully forgotten his now nightmarish country of his childhood and adolescent years.

But his last summer visit in Kabul was a grave reminder of things he hoped to forget: war and chaos in order of things. He could see it at the firmament, he could swear, he saw a blood and dust sky. The Kabul skies of his childhood were no more…….

He stayed at his parent’s apartment in Microrayon Three and at his in laws in Microrayon One during that last visit to the “no man’s land” of his imagination. The dust and the heat were reminders of a place he wished didn’t exit. It were travels to a present, to a place, he had already left forever.

He loved his parents and his family tough, and they were in Kabul. But of all places on earth, they had chosen Kabul?! How could one live there?
He knew he was unfair. Kabul had chosen them. But, could they not see what he read in those German newspapers?

And his dad! The Buddha, he always thought. The calm man who, while a rocket was passing by, just said: all will be fine, my son. And nothing really was fine.

During all his summer visits, day or two after he arrived, he got sick. It always started with his stomach. There was a hidden connection between the rockets and his stomach. He had learned form Kabul friends that if one hears the sound of a rocket, one is safe. But, what if I one doesn’t hear that sound? He thought.

He could not help them if something happened……He was the young son, husband and father who was supposed to protect his family. But he had become the concern of his family. They wanted him to go away as soon as he came to visit. They couldn’t promise protection. Protection for him!

His stomach again……

His mother in law had the medicine ready for him. It was a whitish liquid, prepared from a powder in a small Soviet made nickel can with black handle, which she had always ready for him. She seemed to never run out of that whitish drink. It had become tradition that he was always welcomed with a drink from that Soviet nickel can. Her eyes were demanding. He knew he had to drink that whitish drink; it was a must! He appreciated it tough.

His father in law, an important man, was projecting still his authority on him. He seemed to keep the dignity of a flag bearer on the sinking ship that he felt could not be saved anymore. He wore his dark suits and smoked his elegant Kent. In his presence, things resembled normality. Once the treatment with the whitish liquid was over, he was offered another liquid, this time by his father in law, one far more pleasant than the previous one: Czech Pilsner Urquell!

His father in law seemed to never run out of those liquids either and he enjoyed dinking those beers with his son in law. He was tired too. Tired from too much work that seemed to never end and that he had to bring home with him, after a 12 or more hours work day at his ministry and meetings.

Yes, he was a minister in a government without a country. His clinics were blown out, destroyed. His doctors killed, his nurses running out or staying home.

And he……, he tried to keep the appearance, and flew on board of old and shaky Soviet built helicopters to far away places to assure his unthankful people of a government that really seemed to care for them! He had on board with him his doctors and mobile clinics that were supposed to replace the destroyed ones, and he had medicine with him…….
The so much needed medicine!

He wondered about him too: Where did he get the power to pretend?

To him, the young student, the place didn’t mean anything anymore, except for those old and young women and man he deeply felt for. He felt ashamed that he felt so. But he couldn’t help it.

He never admitted to himself that he didn’t want to return to this godforsaken country.

It seemed that his loved ones who stayed in Kabul, all of them, did so out of a loyalty. But, loyalty to what? To an imaginary homeland? To a system that had gone wrong? To an idea of how things supposed to be?

No! They stayed there out of loyalty for each other! They felt ashamed just by the thought of leaving the city while others were still trapped in it; others who in turn felt the same shame to leave too. They maintained the love the city had long stopped giving them back.

Loyalty and love become more insane in times of war, he thought.

It was a matter of respect to the holders of the wake that he didn’t dare to tell them he didn’t like to return to Kabul! It seemed to him that all his family just hold a dead wake in that vast graveyard his country had become. A dead wake over corpses which were dead long before they were alive. He smelled the sweet smell of the death. His family seemed to not smell it. They just pretended. And he pretended too, at least for those few weeks of his last visit.

Only his stomach……his stomach was honest; it reminded him that things were not what they appeared to be.

He was happy that he would leave soon again. And he was saddened by the feeling of his happiness……

He had just realized that some of those loved ones remained there, in Kabul, so he could leave! They all had to stay so few others could leave.

As if they had to keep the dead wake so others could live……



The End

Nobility

His mom was always proud of her heritage. She was "noble by birth". She was a sardar. He saw that. When she spoke of her mother and her nobility, or when she spoke of her father, the deposed mayor of the summer capital of the deposed King Amanullah, her eyes sparked. It wasn’t false pride.

And her stories…he loved them. They were stories from not too long ago. They were full of proud and beautiful women, funny cousins, loving nannies, loyal servants and goofy carriage drivers, patriotic uncles, good and bad kings and queens, and noble and vicious sardars. And they seemed to have happened centuries ago.

Sometimes she recited a poem or two by Saa’di saheb. He didn’t really understand the verses, but he wondered why she was calling this Saa’di, a poet, not a sardar or holy man, always saheb.

The storytelling took place in his mom’s tailor shop. The shop was on the street level, adjacent to the apartment they had built and lived in. She used to work until late hours of the night, her store windows being sometimes the only illuminated ones in the whole block.

After finishing his homework and supper, he would go down to the shop to bring his mom her can of strong, hot black tea, and to listen to her stories. By then, her two employees had gone home. She was working on this wedding gown that had to be done by the next day or that dress that needed the last corrections. He helped her sometimes and pretended that holding a side of a gown that she was zipping through the machine, or holding the candle so she could burn the corners of a dress to give it the new fashionable curly style, made him an indispensable aide to her. She didn’t mind. And he was rewarded with her stories.

When his hand on aid was not needed, he read to her from the new issues of the two or three Iranian and Afghan magazines, Zan-e Roz, Etla’at Haftagee and Jowandoon that his sisters had subscribed. She corrected his many mispronounced words with a warm smile and without interrupting her work.

He didn’t mind her corrections.

He loved those moments…..in those moments he had his mom all to himself.

Sometimes his youngest, not by much older than him, sister annoyed him with her visits, usually to discuss her next birthday party with his mom or to get money from her for the notebook she needed for school, and sometimes his other, the little older, sister came running down to share the latest Indian song broadcast from Radio Ceylon on her transistor radio, to which she seemed to be glued since he was old enough to become aware of her existence. But, they usually left as abruptly as they had come down to the store. Soon the youngest sister would be on the phone anyway, humming and reciting the poem of the latest Ahmad Zahir song with one of her many classmates.

He didn’t mind his siblings being busy with their own lives.

During the day his mom was occupied with her, at times, crowded store. The customers were almost all women. Some had their cars with husbands or chauffeurs waiting outside, and some were women who could finally afford their first hand-tailored dress. And then, there were the block night watch, the shopkeepers, the beggars, and the many, many salespersons who were coming to the store to conduct their businesses, or who were just peeking through the door curtains to say salaam bibi.

His three uncles often came by the store to say hello, before or after visiting his dad at the apartment. They checked on their younger sister whom they always addressed respectfully with shoma, instead of too which would have been more customary when older siblings addressed their younger ones.

He also thought about those uncles in another regard. While his family car, driven by his older brother, a Kabul University law student, was an English Vauxhall, one of only two Vauxhalls in Kabul as far as he knew, two of the uncles rode bicycles. They drove bicycles and they were 'sardars'? he wondered.

His mom used to buy a lot. Most of it was some sort of food; as if she was afraid her family would run out. Rice from a semi nomadic woman from the Laghman province who not only tended her herd, but also delivered the sacks full of rice with her sons to Kabul customers on her spring visits, dried meat from another nomad, vinegar from a man who had his commodity in a sheep skin bag on his back, quroot from an Hazara woman, cheese from an old man shouting aashawa paneer, aashawa paneer, fresh tomatoes, eggplants and other vegetables and fruits from man who had their products on the back of donkeys or on hand or donkey driven carts. They always stopped at the store, sometimes just to chat for a little while with his bibi. They were offered a cup of tea or a glass of cold water and kept moving, singing aloud their products’ praises for the next customer.

She also had to keep an eye on the house, tell the cook what he should prepare for lunch or dinner, or go to the kitchen herself for half an hour to quickly cook something when the cook wasn’t there, or if they had no cook at that time. Then the kids would come from school, college, or work, joining their dad who was now retired; they would all be hungry soon and want a warm meal on the large dinning table. His mom usually ate lunch at the store with her employees. She sometimes joined the family at the dining table when the store wasn’t very busy, and her longtime assistant Mehrohjan was in a good mood and didn’t mind being left alone with the teenage Hossain, the shop intern.

His mom was a noble and smart businesswoman. Noble because she treated all her customers and business partners with the utmost respect, regardless of who they were, a respect that perhaps only hard working people have for each other. And smart because she got the best deals and prices for the clothes she made and the things she bought from others. The best deals sometimes included price discounts she gave certain customers who otherwise could not have afforded hand-tailored clothes for the regular, higher prices.

Yes, that was his bibi, a woman proud of her heritage, he saw now, because she herself had a proud, noble and self-conscious soul.

He remembered one occasion when his mom took him along to a visit to the Laghmani rice woman. The women had kept inviting his mom to her tent. His mom was a very busy wife, mother of nine demanding teenage and adult children, a respected host or guest of many and never ending extended family gatherings and events, and a busy tailor shop owner, but she could no longer deny her equally proud and noble Laghmani rice woman a visit.

The Laghmani rice woman lived with her family at a nomad’s tent camp outside of the Taimani district. He couldn’t recall now if they drove there or if they took the long walk to the campsite, but he vividly remembered the visit.

The tent was a usual, old, black, and patched Kochi tent. The small camp was clouded in a fog of smoke from burning branches, smells of animal wastes, of boiling milk and fresh chapatti bread.

He was mesmerized by that wild and crystal clear symphony of plants, animals, and humans.

The Laghmani rice woman’s eyes were sparklingly thankful for his mom’s visit and she and her family welcomed them inside the tent.

Of all the palaces and castles his mother had built in his young imagination with her noble stories, this tent was the most majestic place. This tent was the most real palace the queen, his bibi, and he, the prince had ever entered in their lives.



The End