Shariah or bust

>> Searching for a way to the Afghan border teeming with fundamentalist militants does little to ease anxiety or dysentery

by KEN HECHTMAN

Oct 25--Peshawar My plans to go to Khyber Agency to help out on a propaganda movie about the tribal warriors is dead because the director/cameraman/tribal contact, Lakhkar Khan, is also dead, killed in last Wednesday's bombing of Kabul. I feel like I dodged a bullet because he offered to take me into Afghanistan on Monday and I turned him down because I thought his plan sounded a bit dodgy (no visas, carrying a video camera and staying in the big cities).

I've spent the day trying to set up an invitation to Malakand Agency, where the Tehrik Nefaz-i-Shariah Muhammadi (TNSM--Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad's Islamic Law. Official slogan: "Shariat or Shahadat"--Islamic law or martyrdom) is sending 6,000 heavily armed and well-provisioned volunteers over the border. I read this one in my morning paper and forgot about the interview with the hospitalized Taliban anti-aircraft gunner--this one is the shit!

TNSM first appeared on the scene seven years ago, leading a campaign to impose Islamic law in their part of Pakistan. Everyone in the tribal areas is armed and guns are part of politics just because guns are part of life, but TNSM goes in for the heavy stuff--tanks, artillery, Katyusha rockets (the original WWII bunker-busters) and the like. In 1994, after 90 days of artillery duels with the army, the federal government decided that if the Malakand tribes really wanted shariah that badly, they could have it. It wasn't like they were in any position to enforce any other kind of laws.

If you want to know frustration, try telling a bunch of Pakistanis you want to throw together a roadtrip to Malakand and you want to leave immediately. I don't even think there's a word in Urdu or Pushtu for "immediately." P.J. O'Rourke said, in his classic Holidays in Hell, that every use of the future tense in this part of the world includes the word Insh'Allah (If God wills it). Insh'Allah means the same thing as the Spanish manana, but without the sense of urgency.

The fine art of ego-stroking
Everyone I ask is very clear that to walk into Malakand cold and start looking for mujahideen is suicide. How then to get an invitation from a semi-underground Muslim fundamentalist paramilitiary organization in the place where nobody trusts foreigners or speaks a word of English? Normally, I'd work the friend of a friend angle, but that takes days and the lashkar--the historical term meaning, roughly, legion of 1,000 or more irregulars--is moving out today; they'll be in Bajaur Agency tomorrow and over the border after that. I'm in no mood to spend three hours here and five hours there waiting for some guy who might or might not show up and might or might not know anybody helpful even if he did show.

Naveed Khan, my journalist friend, works his contacts by phone until he gets the home number of Sufi Muhammad, the leader of TNSM. He then gets the guy's son on the phone and gives him a song and dance about how he has a foreigner who wants, not to see the mujahideen mustering, oh my no, but to do a feature on the third greatest mujahid of Islam after Osama and Mullah Omar, both of whom, alas, are not returning his calls... In Pushtu, the expression for "buttering someone up" translates to "holding his testicles."

A note about Naveed. His professional beat is sports and crime reporting. Muslim fundamentalism and mujahideen are his personal interests. Hearing that gave me the confidence to start telling people the truth. My real job is with computers. War reporting is just a hobby.

Oct 26--Peshawar Four foreigners who did just jump into a car and rush off to Lal Qala, a village in Dir district where Sufi Mohammed's men are assembling, got "arrested" by TNSM as American spies. Hard as it is to get in through the front door, nothing else is even possible. I complained to Naveed that if we worked for CNN we'd be in Lal Qala by now. He says, "Yeah, and when you got there, the best thing that could happen is they'd give you one chance to leave."

On getting arrested
Oct 28--Somewhere in custody I always wanted to file a story with that dateline. I'd been chasing the Sufi Mohammed-TNSM lashkar story for a few days, and after the Frontier police ordered me off the bus at Fort Chardaka on the border of Dir district, I was ready to give it up. Then a friend in Montreal told me CNN broke it based on bar gossip and friend of a friend of a Pakistani journalist accounts, and I thought "Well, shit, I could have done that four days ago."

I made one last try to catch up with Sufi Mohammed at his camp in Laghari, in Bajaur Agency on the Afghan border. By now, the size is being reported as between 10- and 15,000 men, the TNSM core being supplemented by instant volunteers from every village along the route from Lal Qala, armed with everything from elephant guns to antique bayonets.

I probably wouldn't have gone into Injun Country except I met a guy from Laghari who claimed to be some kind of security spook. He certainly looked the part, or would have if this was a low-budget Bollywood movie, so off we went in a shared taxi, bouncing along bad mountain roads.

We entered the Tribal Area at Mohmand Agency. The differences between these villages and the ones near Peshawar are not obvious. Mohmand is a little poorer, a little more traditional in style of clothing, and oh yeah, outside Peshawar they don't display TOW missiles in the bazaar. Nor is there an army or paramilitary police checkpoint in every village. We got through three checkpoints before getting nailed at the fourth, about 10 miles from Bajaur and about 25 or so from Sufi Mohammed's camp. The spook, if such he was, didn't have the juice to get us through the checkpoint--the "no foreigners" order comes from the very top--but being with him did get me tea and cookies instead of the rubber-hose beatings and deportation that the Agence France Presse guys got.

I was going to give a detailed, eyewitness description of the 10,000 strong TNSM lashkar camped near the Afghan border. Unfortunately, the only eyewitness description I can give is one of a Frontier police holding cell about 25 miles from the camp...

I wish I could tell some Midnight Express-type horror stories--well, not really, but you know what I mean... It was just very weird. I was suffering from dysentery all day, on the drive through bad mountain roads and in the police station. By early evening I was sitting on the police station lawn with half a dozen teenage cops--I'm being held prisoner by children with Kalashnikovs; don't they know guys my age are supposed to arrest guys their age, not the other way 'round?--and they're very insistent that I recite the Kalima and convert to Islam on the spot. Not threatening, but very insistent.

After a few hours of this, I'm transported back to the Home Office in Peshawar. It's not the first paddy-wagon ride I've taken and it won't be the last, but so far it's the only one that ever pulled over on the side of the road for the guards' evening prayers.

Traffic jams and dangerous goods
I'd been hearing for weeks how dangerous the tribal areas are, getting so many warnings that they've been going in one ear and out the other. The one that finally registered came when I was released from the Home Office in Peshawar. My police escorts were planning to get a hotel room for the night. "Let me get this straight... You're four senior paramilitary police officers, two of you have assault rifles and you're afraid to drive home after dark? Whoa!"

So why are the tribal areas off limits to journalists? What's the story the Pakistani government is trying to suppress? Like most cases of national security, the fear isn't that any great secret will be discovered, but that someone will say out loud what everyone already knows.

While the Pakistani government helps America attack Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of Pakistani citizens are mobilizing to help defend Afghanistan against America, millions more are donating money and material from guns to gold, blankets to blood plasma. Truck drivers returning from the Khyber Pass--yet another place they don't want me to go--report trucks backed up 10 miles on the highway, almost to Peshawar city limits, all carrying military and humanitarian aid collected by the religious parties. Whether because it can't or doesn't want to ( I suspect a bit of both), the Pakistani government is doing nothing to stop it.

Oct. 29--Back in Peshawar The TNSM's 10,000 heavy-weapons troops are still being held back in Bajaur Agency, while Sufi Mohammed has gone to Jalalabad for talks with Taliban commanders. The conventional wisdom is that it's a command squabble, similar to the one recently settled with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who declared himself for the Taliban in mid-September but spent five weeks holding out for a voice in the government and a separate military command structure. Sufi Mohammed wants the troops brought in as a unit under his command while the Taliban wants them dispersed at the front. Taliban Intelligence sources deny this, saying, "Sufi Mohammed has asked for nothing. His forces are being held back as a reserve against the American ground troops."

On a related note, the command of Kashmir Khan, Hekmatyar's right-hand man in Kunar Province on the Bagram front north of Kabul and a legend in his own right, has become the dumping ground for all the volunteers who will only come in as a group, and whom the Taliban don't want to deal with, for a number of reasons. Sufi Mohammed now reports to him, as will a group of 11,000 additional volunteers.

Meanwhile, the roadblock on the Karakoram Highway in Dir district, set up by Sufi Moham-med's rear-guard, enters its fifth day. While supplies of fresh food in Afghanistan's mountainous Chitral district grow scarce, a Pakistani Army general refused a direct order to send in his tanks to clear the road. He explained that the 3,000 armed men dug into the highway were covered by heavy machine guns in the hills, which were covered themselves by seige mortars and Katyusha rockets in the Karakoram Mountains, and the TNSM's defensive depth made the ordered tank assault a suicide mission.

On Saturday, the day after the roadblock was lifted, 12 inches of snow fell in the mountains, closing the road again. Normally, drivers are allowed to use a 50-mile detour through Afghanistan to deliver food and other supplies but right now the Taliban aren't in a generous mood. There's panic and profiteering reported in Chitral district. :