Transforming Pakistan by Synnott Hilary;

Author:Synnott, Hilary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

‘Pashtunwali’: the Pashtun tribal code

The legendary Pashtun nationalist leader, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, who died in 2006 aged 89 having spent his life leading a movement that agitated against the British and Pakistani authorities for an independent Pashtunistan, remains a symbol of the Pashtuns’ independence of spirit. In 1972, asked by a journalist about his loyalties and to whom he felt his first allegiance, he said: ‘I have been a Pashtun for six thousand years, a Muslim for thirteen hundred years, and a Pakistani for twenty-five.’12 Wali Khan was regarded almost as the embodiment of the Pashtun tribal code, or Pashtunwali, a collection of long-established ethical and customary norms of communal life. Although it has been seriously eroded in recent decades, the code's obligations remain relevant today, and have an impact on tribal attitudes towards military and other operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the early 1970s, US anthropologist and Afghanistan specialist Louis Dupree collected and summarised what he judged to be the main generally accepted features of the code. Among these were individual and collective obligations to:

• Avenge blood (badal). This obligation may persist over generations until it is fulfilled.

• Fight to the death for a person who has taken refuge with one, regardless of that person's lineage (nanawati).

• Defend to the last any property entrusted to one (ghayrat).

• Be hospitable and provide for the safety of the persons and property of guests (melmastia, mehrmapalineh).

• Pardon an offence on the intercession of a woman of the offender's lineage, a sayyid13 or a mullah. (An exception is made in the case of murder: only blood or blood money can erase this crime.)14

Running through all these are notions of honour, bravery, manliness, chivalry, steadfastness and righteousness. Historically great warriors, the Pashtun tribes maintain arsenals of arms and ammunition, qaumi aslaha, for use in tribal and other feuds. Every tribesman considers it his inalienable right to carry arms from childhood. Colonial accounts abound with tales of young men who gained honour by fulfilling the obligations of badal and wiping out enemies. At the start of the Second World War, the British estimated that nearly every tribesman who had any possessions at all owned one or more rifles of European or local manufacture, which he treasured above all else.

Dupree describes Pashtunwali as a ‘tough code for tough men who, of necessity, live tough lives’. It allows little room for dissidence. If a coward returns home, his mother will disown him; if he runs away from a fight, he will not be buried with the Muslim rites but will become a ghost, never to reach Paradise.15

The former head of the ISI's Afghan bureau, Mohammad Yousaf, who mentored mujahadeen from 1983 to 1987, confirms the significance of Pashtunwali in tribal life, and the hardiness of its adherents: ‘Even a jihad does not stop badal’; ‘Physical courage is central to the Afghan character.’ Although possessed of many of the attributes necessary for good soldiery, the effectiveness of Pashtun warriors in the fight against the Soviets was, Yousaf

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