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The
Peacemaker of the Pashtun Past
By
Karl E. Meyer*
New
York Times December 7, 2001
As the Afghan war enters into what may be its final
days, and the international community begins discussing
its next steps, Americans will be learning more about the
warrior people known to the British as Pathans, and more
correctly nowadays as Pashtuns. Most of the Taliban were
Pashtun - as is the new interim leader of Afghanistan,
Hamid Karzai, to whom Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban
leader, has ceded power.
The Pashtuns number upwards of 20 million, and their
squat stony villages straddle the Durand Line that
nominally demarcates Pakistan from Afghanistan, where
Pashtuns form the largest ethnic group. These are the
fighters who inspired reams of fearful and admiring verse
from Rudyard Kipling, the sharpshooters blessed with
perfect sight who picked off the soldiers of the British
Raj. But the Pashtuns also produced one of the most
remarkable pacifist movements of the 20th century.
British officers were so impressed by Pashtun valor
that in 1847 they created a Pashtun force, the Corps of
Guides - its emblem was crossed sabers over the slogan
"Rough and Ready" - that was soon celebrated in the
Indian Army. They led the way in adopting uniforms in a
new color, khaki, and became the prototype for today's
special forces.
The fascination with Pashtuns endured until the Raj's
demise. Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of the
North-West Frontier, left a systematic account, "The
Pathans" (1958), complete with pullout maps and
translations of love poems by the great Pashtun bard,
Khushal Khan, who died in the 17th century.
Caroe favored the partition of India and believed that
a Muslim state and its frontier warriors would form a
firewall blocking a Soviet advance toward the Persian
Gulf. The success of this policy depended on Pashtun
military prowess - and Caroe's greatest problem was a
Pashtun pacifist, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who
confounded every cliché about Caroe's favored
martial race.
Ghaffar was renowned as "the frontier Gandhi." His
followers, the Servants of God, were nicknamed Red Shirts
because of their brick-colored garb. All had to swear: "I
shall never use violence. I shall not retaliate or take
revenge, and shall forgive anyone who indulges in
oppression and excesses against me."
For two decades, Ghaffar and his Red Shirts dominated
the North-West Frontier without resort to violence,
enduring prison and torture. Ghaffar's friend and mentor,
Mohandas Gandhi, called his feat "a miracle."
Nevertheless, the most remarkable Pashtun of his era is
forgotten, not only because his cause was lost - he
sought self-rule for his people within a united, secular
India - but because it was an embarrassment to Britain,
India and Pakistan alike.
A new biography, "The Pathan Unarmed" by Mukulika
Banerjee, adds fresh light. The author began her
study as a graduate student in the 1990's, and after
learning Pashto managed to interview 70 surviving Red
Shirts. She found that Ghaffar's pacifism grew out of his
concept of jihad, or holy war, because nonviolent
resistance "offered the chance of martyrdom in its purest
form, since putting one's life conspicuously in one's
enemy's hands was itself the key act."
Using this strategy, the Red Shirts in 1930 shut down
Peshawar for five days protesting colonial rule, becoming
valued Muslim allies of Gandhi's predominantly Hindu
Congress Party. The movement flourished, and each wave of
arrests confirmed Ghaffar Khan's status as the liberating
champion of his people, who now called him Badshah Khan,
or the Khan of Khans.
In 1947, in final negotiations for independence,
Gandhi acceded to partition and the establishment of
Pakistan. A distraught Ghaffar Khan, feeling abandoned by
his Hindu allies and angrily aware that Caroe favored a
Muslim state, asked his followers to boycott the
referendum on joining Pakistan, whose founding he opposed
because he wanted a united, secular India.
Now derided as a lackey of "the Hindu Raj," Ghaffar
Khan was imprisoned and charged with sedition by
Islamabad's new masters. When the great rebel insisted
that he wanted only autonomy within Pakistan, it was
rejected as a ruse, since Afghanistan seized on this
moment to revive territorial claims to Peshawar and other
areas once held by Kabul.
The sequel was a martial crackdown by Pakistani
authorities, echoing the British line about the
incorrigible violence and suspect loyalties of Pashtuns.
Ghaffar was eventually released from jail but banished
from the frontier. In his last years he was allowed to
revisit Peshawar, where in 1988 he died at the age of 98.
According to an earlier biography by M. S. Korejo,
a Pakistani diplomat, a funeral procession stretching for
miles carried Badshah Kahn's body across the border to
Jalalabad, the summer home of Afghan kings. It was, the
author writes, "a caravan of peace, carrying a message of
love" from Pashtuns east of the Khyber to those on the
west.
This forgotten chapter suggests that Islam is more
mutable than either its radical adherents or its Western
detractors allow - and that Pashtun history offers an
extraordinary precedent for peace as well as a legacy of
war.
* Karl E. Meyer is editor of the World Policy
Journal and co-author, with Shareen Brysac, of
"Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for
Empire in Central Asia."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
Copyright © 2002 TFF
& authors
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