A British newspaper, The Guardian, recently reported that intelligence officials of Pakistan arrested Shakil Afridi, a doctor from Khyber Agency, FATA, for organising a fake vaccination campaign for the CIA in Abbottabad whereby a nurse was sent into Osama bin Laden’s house to collect DNA samples of bin Laden’s family members. The ISI, according to the newspaper, is angry with the CIA for recruiting Pakistani citizens to spy on bin Laden’s residence in Abbottabad and Afridi is ‘the most involved’ among CIA spies. He is under custody since late May and the US now fears for his safety.
What will become of Afridi — will he be punished or released by the ISI — will depend on the CIA-ISI negotiations to work out their differences over the conduct of the war on terror in the post-OBL period. Let’s not forget that some months back another alleged US spy, Raymond Davis, was arrested in Lahore. The religious right-wingers in Pakistan ran a campaign of hate against him. The security establishment seemingly encouraged the campaign and then Davis was released overnight in a suspicious diyat (blood money) deal. Interestingly, the religious lobby, a natural ally of the military establishment, fell silent after his departure.
General Pasha, the ISI chief, landed in Washington on July 13 to put the CIA-ISI’s tense intelligence cooperation back on track in the post-OBL period. The Guardian has also reported that Dr Shakil may soon be released as part of the negotiations between the two intelligence agencies during Pasha’s visit to the US.
Interestingly, the religious parties and Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) have not started a hate campaign against Afridi demanding severe punishment for the tribesman. What kind of narrative and discourse will they use should they unleash a campaign against the tribal doctor? The right-wingers and pro-establishment media have always described the tribal people through the colonial stereotype of ‘furiously autonomous’ and ‘religious’ people who are taking revenge from the US and the Pakistani state through acts of terrorism. Dr Shakil clearly does not fit into the stereotype.
The British colonials have also left behind this stereotype: “Rule the Punjabi, intimidate the Sindhi, honour the Baloch and buy a Pakhtun.” This stereotype might be invoked to assassinate Dr Afridi’s character, especially keeping in view the possibility that the US might have offered him a hefty sum of money for such a daring adventure.
Due to lack of publicly available information, it is difficult to say what motivated Dr Shakil to collaborate with the US to trap Osama bin Laden. Dr Shakil could have been motivated by the amount of money offered by the CIA or his collaboration with the US could be rooted in the frustration that many tribesmen feel about the Pakistani state for having (wilfully) surrendered them to violent jihadis led by bin Laden or it could be a combination of both.
Let’s not forget that Dr Shakil’s native Bara in Khyber Agency is ravaged by the religious militants and reportedly Dr Shakil himself, like countless residents of Bara, suffered at the hands of the Mangal Bagh gang based in his native area. I have been writing on these pages that the people of FATA are sick and tired of the militants in the area and several of them may go to any extent to get rid of them. The term ‘any extent’ here implies that there may be people in FATA who, disappointed with the Pakistani state, may be willing to collaborate with the US to get rid of the militants.
I had several discussions back in 2009 and 2010 with several family members of some of the anti-Taliban tribal leaders from Waziristan who had been target-killed by, in the view of their relatives, the ISI through the militants to create a leadership vacuum for the militants in the tribal society in order to camouflage the bases of the state’s jihad against the international forces in Afghanistan in the area by creating an artificial tribal public support for the militants through violence. The relatives specially referred to the Angoor Ada operation back in 2008 whereby the US forces stationed in Afghanistan physically entered Waziristan to kill certain militants. They said they would welcome the entry of the US forces inside Waziristan to conduct intelligence-based targeted operations against what they called “the ISI’s assets”. They said they had been baselessly accused of having given refuge to al Qaeda militants, which they said they never did and if they had done so, why would their close family members be killed by the militants? But they said they would really like to offer hospitality to the Americans in case they physically enter Waziristan.
Commenting on the ongoing bloodshed in Kurram Agency and, seemingly, the state’s unwillingness to protect the people, a tribesman from Kurram wrote this on an internet blog: “Our forefathers were facing such situation in the last decades of the 19th century when they were under Afghan cruel rule, so they revolted against rulers and invited the British forces to secure their dignity, integrity, and sovereignty…Now our ruler is helpless in front of our enemy and unable to defend us. I warn that NATO is on our western border, and we have the right to repeat history.”
The point that I wish to make is that a decade-long bloodshed in FATA, largely perceived as inflicted by the state for foreign policy objectives, has accumulated hatred against the militants and frustration with the Pakistani state. As an expression of their hatred and frustration we might see in future more people of FATA collaborating with the US and NATO forces to get rid of the militants as well as frustrate the state’s jihadi designs. Should that happen, the religious and pro-establishment forces might attribute it to the essentialism based on the colonial stereotype, “buy a Pakhtun”, or disregard such people as ‘Mir Jafar and Mir Qasim’ among the ‘fiercely autonomous and religious’ tribesmen, thus absolving their own anti-Americanism and state jihadism of any responsibility for the security crisis in FATA. This attribution will be wrong, just like all narratives of the ‘fiercely autonomous and religious’ tribesmen are far from the truth.
It is important for FATA observers around the world to rise above the colonial stereotypes and discourses of the Pakistani right-wingers about FATA. The area should be seen as a normal human society that is trapped in a prolonged security crisis. Any society in the world in a similar situation would produce desperate people engaging in desperate acts for survival or in response to perceived injustices. In this context, we might be seeing more and more people like Dr Shakil emerging from FATA in the future.
The writer is a PhD Research Fellow with the University of Oslo and currently writing a book, Taliban and Anti-Taliban