A NATION CHALLENGED: THE ROOTS
A NATION CHALLENGED: THE ROOTS; Afghan and Pakistani Tribe Lives by Its Guns and Honor
By RICK BRAGG
Published: October 21, 2001
PABBI, Pakistan, Oct. 19— When a male child is born in a Pashtun village, gunfire is the first sound he hears. Pashtun men celebrate the birth of a brand-new warrior by firing their rifles into the sky, and the lead falls back to the powdery earth like drops of hard rain.
The Pashtun, who are the dominant tribe in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and make up about half the entire population of Afghanistan, have done this since they first robbed British dead of their muskets two centuries ago. Muskets did not shoot very high and the bullets were tiny, say Pashtun elders, so there was little risk from falling lead during the celebration.
Then, generations later, Pashtun took Kalashnikov rifles from Soviet soldiers they killed in the war that led to an ignominious Soviet retreat in 1989.
''But the Kalashnikov bullet was so big and heavy that, when we fired it in celebration, it dropped back down back out of the sky, and killed us,'' said Sher Zaman Taizi, a writer, professor and elder in the village of Pabbi, just outside Peshawar. That does not mean the shooting stopped. Tradition, the elder said, holds firm here.
Even the police, who frown on the power of tradition, are ignored. ''A law, a government, is not so much a factor here,'' Mr. Taizi said.
The Pashtun have their own tribal laws reaching back thousands of years to govern a people who consider themselves Pashtun first and Pakistani or Afghan second. It is why the border with Pakistan drawn by a British general a century ago is still considered just a line on paper, and why Pashtun in Pakistan are enraged at the United States bombing.
To the Pashtun, the bombs might as well be falling on the old men who trail behind water buffalo tending sugar cane outside Peshawar. This is a tribe that anthropologists consider one of the oldest on earth, bound by a common language, but also by millenniums of marriage, and by blood.
As Islamic militants use religion as a rallying cry all around the Muslim world, here on the border it is ethnicity as much as Islam that ties Pakistanis to their Afghan cousins -- even those in the Taliban.
A proud, almost arrogant people who fought Alexander the Great, they have fought among themselves for centuries, as families do.
Their lighter skins hint at Aryan blood. ''Handsome, well built, powerful and strong,'' intoned Raj Wali Shah Khattak, a professor of Pashtun studies at Pashtun Academy in Peshawar and a Pashtun himself. ''They will rise as brothers against an outsider.''
That code and kinship explain much of what is happening in this conflict, such as why the Taliban are reluctant to evict their guest, Osama bin Laden, who has asked them for a sanctuary they are honor-bound to give, and why even those Pakistanis who are not religious militants have joined in heated protests.
''The first thing the male baby hears is that sound of a bullet,'' Mr. Khattak said. ''The second thing he hears is the name of God, from the mullah. And the third thing he hears is the voice of his mother speaking as she gives him a lesson of humanity. She sings a song and recites the deeds of his forefathers, and the values of his clan.''
Among these values are certain iron-bound laws, called the Pashtu Wali, or Code of Life. One is badal, which obligates members of a tribe to exact revenge for a wrongdoing -- like the American attack on other members of the tribe. Another is milmasthia, which binds tribe members to serve a guest. That includes giving sanctuary to anyone who asks for it, even an enemy.
That is why, say tribal elders, the Taliban cannot give in to demands to hand over Mr. bin Laden.
''We are very hospitable people,'' said Sufaid Gul, 65, as he worked in an irrigation ditch in a wheat field in the village of Zakhi Charbagh.
But there is also a part of that code that gives the host leeway to evict a guest if he creates trouble for the family while he is in the home -- a tenet of the tribal law that the Taliban has apparently chosen to ignore, said elders here. Pashtun law, like many a law, has loopholes one can drive a camel through.
Pashtun here seem to regard the Taliban as wayward cousins who -- racked by so much war and suffering -- had nothing left but their religion.
Mr. Khattak said the Pashtun, historically, have not even included mullahs in tribal councils. They are farmers, shepherds -- and warriors. ''A pure life,'' Mr. Gul said.
The mullah is a hired preacher, paid from the largesse of the village, usually not even a Pashtun.
But as Pashtun in Pakistan left their rural villages over the decades to find skilled work in a variety of jobs, the Pashtun in Afghanistan had almost nothing except their history of endless war. The mullahs, the older Pashtun say, filled that void with an oppressive religion that elevated the fighter clans to holy warriors. With so much death, they made death glorious.
''They took power in the name of religion, not as Pashtuns,'' Mr. Taizi said.
The Pashtun in Pakistan -- many of them, anyway -- do not want oppressive government, do not want to further subjugate their women, do not want Taliban-like lives. They love music -- musicians, like mullahs, are hired from outside the clan -- and women can choose to go unveiled. They dance. Their children run through the dusty fields outside the village, flying kites.
All that -- the singing, dancing, even the kite-flying -- has been banned by the Taliban.