Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands

336 Pages·2012·4.23 MB·English

by  Shahzad Bashir

Under the Drones

UNDER T HE DRONE S
Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands

EDITED BY
Shahzad Bashir
Robert D. Crews
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England / 2012
Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Th is book was made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation
of New York. Th e statements made and views expressed are solely the

responsibility of the authors.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Under the drones : modern lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands /
edited by Shahzad Bashir, Robert D. Crews.
pages : maps ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-06561-1 (alkaline paper)
1. Afghanistan—Relations—Pakistan. 2. Pakistan—Relations—Afghanistan.
3. Afghanistan—Boundaries—Pakistan. 4. Pakistan—Boundaries—
Afghanistan. 5. Borderlands—Afghanistan. 6. Borderlands—Pakistan.
7. Afghanistan—Politics and government. 8. Pakistan—Politics and
government. 9. Islam and politics—Afghanistan. 10. Islam and politics—
Pakistan. I. Bashir, Shahzad, 1968– II. Crews, Robert D., 1970–
DS357.6.P18U53 2012
958.104'71—dc23 2011044605
Contents

Introduction 1
Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews
1 Political Struggles over the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands 17
Amin Tarzi
2 Th e Transformation of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border 30
Gilles Dorronsoro
3 Religious Revivalism across the Durand Line 45
Sana Haroon
4 Taliban, Real and Imagined 60
James Caron
5 Quandaries of the Afghan Nation 83
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi
6 How Tribal Are the Taliban? 102
Th omas Ruttig
7 Ethnic Minorities in Search of Political Consolidation 136
Lutz Rzehak
8 Red Mosque 153
Faisal Devji
9 Madrasa Statistics Don’t Support the Myth 162
Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, and Asim Ijaz Khwaja
10 Will Sufi Islam Save Pakistan? 174
Farzana Shaikh
11 Th e Politics of Pashtun and Punjabi Truck Decoration 192
Jamal J. Elias
12 Th e Afghan Mediascape 215
Nushin Arbabzadah
13 Women and the Drug Trade in Afghanistan 236
Fariba Nawa
Epilogue 257
Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews
Notes 265
Recommended Readings 309
Contributors 311
Acknowledgments 315
Index 317
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Introduction
Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews

Glancing at the front page of any major Western newspaper nowadays,
one is likely to see a story about Afghanistan or Pakistan. Such stories
tend to engage the same topics over and over: terrorism, militancy,
suicide bombings, counterinsurgency operations, corruption, mistreat-
ment of women, and occasional triumphs by heroic Afghans and Paki-
stanis in the face of nearly impossible odds. Journalistic descriptions
primarily privilege the present, seen through the interests and perspec-
tives of Western observers, as the ultimate vantage point for what occurs
along the boundary between these two modern nation-states. Th e people
who populate these stories seem to be stuck in a kind of time warp of
unchanging “tribal” traditions, eternally isolated since time immemorial
and only now coming face to face with realities the rest of the planet takes
for granted as part of the modern world. Th e Taliban, the region’s most
potent sociopolitical force of recent times, is referred to as “medieval”
without anyone batting an eye, even though the social formations that
comprise the group have their origins in the 1980s. On the rare occasion
1