The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

I heard versions of that speech from other Pakistani officers, who, it seemed, purposefully distorted Pashtun culture for their own purposes. Imam, for his part, didn’t even speak Pashto properly, and the way he talked was reminiscent of the old colonial writers, like Olaf Caroe, with their romanticised versions of the ‘noble savage’. But there was also no doubt that he considered jihad to be a sacred calling – as a soldier, a Pakistani and a Muslim. I think he viewed himself as a kind of Pakistani T. E. Lawrence: the army officer who turned unruly tribesmen into disciplined warriors, and now, through the toil of battle, had joined their ranks. But orientalism, even of an Islamist variety, can cloud one’s vision, and the world that Imam helped create was shifting rapidly beneath his feet. Around the time of our first meeting, in the mid-2000s, the powerful forces unleashed by the Afghan jihad of the 1980s were mutating in wild and unpredictable ways inside Pakistan. Nowhere were those changes more starkly evident than in the tribal belt, where it had all started.