Where the Kalashnikov is king

>> In Peshawar and the North-West Frontier Province, guns and bin Laden are the Pushtun's best friend

by KEN HECHTMAN

Fazul Kuruna, Pakistan--Oct. 12 I got my visa in Islamabad and it's time to hit the frontier. Next stop, Peshawar. CNN takes Pakistani Airlines for 80 bucks; the Mirror takes the jeepney, an overcrowded taxi-van more often than not used for moving livestock, for 80 cents. Then again, you meet a better class of people on the jeepneys. Take Kamran, for instance.

In the capital, Kamran is a mild-mannered student at Islamabad Business College, but in his village of Fazul Kuruna, he's the grandson of a king and he has the attitude to go with it.

Fazul Kuruna isn't on any maps; it's a Pushtun village of 150 people 20 miles east of Peshawar in the part of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) the journalists call the Koran Belt. Ten minutes into our conversation, Kamran had invited me to stay in his village and I knew I had scored. Westerners are avoiding the Koran Belt, and with good reason. Ethnically, culturally, religiously--this is Afghanistan. In Pushtun culture, one of the most important traditions is the protection given to a guest. If I go there on Kamran's invitation, I'm untouchable.

The village itself is a few square miles of farmland surrounding some mud huts with a mud-brick fortress in the centre. The last seven miles of the road from Peshawar can only be travelled by donkey-cart and since Kamran's great-grandfather founded the village in 1930, apparently I'm the second foreigner and the first white man to see it.

Kalashnikov culture, as the city folks call it, thrives here. Kamran burst into the guest room of the fort where I was staying, waving an AK around in a way no range safety officer would approve of. "Darra," he says, meaning Darra Adam Khel, the village of the gunsmiths. This is one of their famous hand-made--and environmentally friendly--weapons: all metal parts are made from recycled auto parts and the clip began its life as a hubcap. Kamran detaches the clip and before I can say "unload and make safe," he tries to dry-fire, discharging a live round into the ceiling. It doesn't look like the NRA's Eddie the Firearms Safety Eagle has flown through these parts in a while.

They do take security very seriously though. Before curling up in bed with his Kalashnikov, Kamran assigns his cousins to patrol and sniper duty, and indicates a line of bricks in the courtyard. "Very important, you do not cross this line at night. Past this line someone outside the fort can see over the walls. If he can see you, he can shoot you." This isn't wartime paranoia. The Pushtun people always live like this.

The armed mob's power of persuasion

Nowshera--Oct. 13 In this nearby town of 20,000, Saiful, Kamran's uncle, is delivering a wedding invitation to his brother-in-law, the local superintendant of police. While waiting outside the station, I saw a crowd gathering across the street. The night before, the NWFP Police arrested Maulana Mohammed Mujahid Khan, the leader of the local Muslim fundamentalist group JUI (Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam), on charges of making objectionable speeches, specifically repeating his party's call for jihad. The superintendant picked me up, said, "Agitation against America! You wait here!", tossed me into his office and ran off. Within a few minutes, 200 angry people had gathered, many of them armed. The police quickly decided it had all been a misunderstanding and allowed Maulana Khan to leave. He briefly addressed his followers from across the street, who marched off chanting "Allah-hu Akhbar" while firing their Kalashnikovs in the air.

By the end of the day, I was frustrated from following Saiful and his nephews on their errands and not getting to finish any of mine. After being led through a maze of cloth bazaars and being prompted to compliment said cloths for the fifth time I finally lost it. "I'm not a fucking tourist, okay? I didn't come here to see markets, I came here to see mujahideen!"

"Why you don't say so?" pipes up Saiful's nephew Zia, a skinny 19 year old with razor-cut hair who had been tagging along. "I am mujahideen. Hezb-ul-Mujahideen [party of the holy warriors]. Fight three months in Kashmir. What you want to know?"

Turns out the kid is the real thing. He's not going to Afghanistan himself, but only because he's also enlisted in the Pakistani Army. I asked if that created a conflict of interest and he found the question highly amusing. I was later told that Zia's unit in the army is the ISI (Inter Service Intelligence, which either helps or owns the Kashmiri Mujahideen, depending on whose version you want to believe).

Osamamania

Tarkha--Oct. 13 After talking politics for two days and nights and drinking my bodyweight in tea in several Koran Belt Pushtun villages, I can now write the "Finger on the Pulse of the Nation" piece. Herewith is a man-on-the-donkey-track survey.

There's a range of opinions on the Taliban, especially among Afghani refugees. Maybe a fifth of the people I spoke to strongly support the Taliban and most of those are members of JUI. To them, Osama bin Laden is almost secondary; the Americans want to destroy the world's only Islamic government while their obligation is to defend it. Another fifth hate the Taliban and wouldn't mind if they became a casualty of this war. The rest admit the Taliban is a bad government, but point out that Afghanistan's never had a better one. As a student organizer in Peshawar said, "Taliban means students. It doesn't mean scholars."

In general, Afghanis are more willing than Pakistanis to consider the return of the former Afghan king, Zahir Shah. No one, not even a group of Tajik refugees I met in Peshawar, wants the Northern Alliance back now that their charismatic leader Ahmad Shah Masood is dead. They're remembered for fighting the Russians well but were despised as a government. If the U.S. State Department has conveniently forgotten that faction fights within the Northern Alliance government degenerated into rocket and artillery duels in Kabul, killing 60,000 civilians, no one here is ready to give the NA another chance.

Getting people to share their feelings about Osama--everyone here is on a first-name basis with him--is easy. Finding enough superlatives to describe them is hard. There's no equivalent figure in the West who commands that kind of love, respect and loyalty. Think Kennedy, Princess Di and Beatlemania and you're still not even close. In Tarkha, population 2,500, there are five 10-year-old boys named Saddam. This year, the popular names for baby boys are Osama and Mujahid.

Surprise number two is that this reverence has very little to do with Osama's anti-Americanism and nothing to do with the World Trade Center. They don't believe he did it. Not one single Pakistani I spoke with believes their great Muslim hero could have done such a thing. If the Americans produced a videotape of Osama with an aviation map and pointer, walking the 19 hijackers through their approach routes, they'd denounce it as a clever forgery.

Without exception, they believe the Jews framed their beloved Osama. Every person I spoke with presented this information like he was the only one who knew it. Their smoking gun is the claim that the 4,000 Jews who worked in the twin towers were mysteriously absent from work that day. Even the Nowshera police chief said, "The main problem has been made by the Jews. Osama is just the reaction to American policies." When pushed, he admitted it stuck in his throat to have to arrest Maulana Khan for saying the same thing in the street that he said to me in his office.

Dying for cause and country

The local villagers confirm the reports of volunteers already in or heading to Afghanistan and say more are prepared to go if necessary. I figured they were just blowing smoke until I saw that every village cemetery here has at least two or three of the green flags that designate the grave of a shaheed (martyr in a holy war). Most date back to the Russian war, but a few look a lot newer than that.

So where does Osama's popularity come from? There are a number of places in the world where it isn't safe to be a Muslim. Some, like Palestine, we're used to hearing about. Some, like Chechnya, we hear about once and then never again. Some, like Xinjiang, in Muslim western China, we never hear about. If you're a Muslim living in fear in any of these places, there are two things you can count on: one, nobody in the self-proclaimed civilized world cares. Two, no matter how poor and isolated you are or how big and powerful your enemy is, Osama does care and he will help. Over the last 10 years, bin Laden has sent people to two dozen countries between Algeria and the Philippines, the so-called Jihad Lands. Al Qaeda has armed and trained villagers, organized patrols and led retaliatory attacks. In return, some of their people spend two years in Afghanistan training in the camps, after which they answer the next distress call from somewhere else in the world.

Pakistanis from all walks of life have said they're not only prepared to defend Osama now, but to continue his work if he's captured or killed. "There will be many Osamas, thousands of Osamas," said Islamabad JUI leader Nazir Farouki. Mushtak, a wise-cracking civil servant from Tarkha, said, "I will be Osama," but smiled when he said it. On a personal note, Mushtak's two-year-old daughter died of leukemia the morning I left. Not all tragedies make it onto CNN.