The Taliban's New Target: Losing Faith in Pakistan's Future

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Rashid has been invited to a lunch with Asma Jahangir, an impressive woman who is very well known in Pakistan. She is a lawyer and advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Attorneys like Jahangir and the Supreme Court justices form Pakistan's civil society, because the country's civilian politicians are weak, corrupt or both. The members of the liberal intelligentsia are a thorn in the side of the religious fanatics, and as a result must constantly fear for their lives.

The guests assemble in a room with paneled walls reminiscent of a British club. Most are women in saris, all very self-confident and cosmopolitan. They exchange pleasantries and discuss their opinions about Obama, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and General Petraeus, as if they were guests on a morning talk show on US television. They have all spent years in London, New York and elsewhere in the West. They are pinning their hopes on the West, and yet they are also despairing of the West.

They are part of the Rashid generation, born shortly before or after Pakistan's independence. They are privileged, they have lived in the West, and they can leave the country at any time if things become too dangerous. But they are deprived of the one thing that members of the intelligentsia in other countries that call themselves democracies have come to expect: the opportunity to share in political power.

Controlled by the Army

Pakistan is in fact an army that controls a country. The country itself was born in 1947, out of blood and violence, when a large share of the Muslims living in what was to become India emigrated to the future Pakistan, while the Hindus in Pakistan went to India, with both sides committing horrible massacres against one another. For the past 63 years, Pakistan has been governed by an alternating succession of unstable military leaders and unstable civilian governments.

Both civilian governments and the military determine what the national interest should be. Pakistan's military leaders are against reforms. Instead, they want to add even more nuclear weapons to their arsenal, in their determination to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, a nuclear clash with India.

After 9/11, the Rashid generation was more hopeful than ever that Pakistan would either come to its senses or be forced to do so by the Americans. And the United States is very active, pumping untold billions into the country. But when push comes to shove, American presidents are more apt to strengthen the Pakistani military, which they see as the last stronghold of rationality.

Wild Past

The day is coming to an end. Spain is about to defeat Germany in the World Cup semifinal. Rashid is married to a Spanish woman, and the house is starting to fill up with guests. Rashid is in good spirits after having finished a successful interview with a daily newspaper. He still has one wild story up his sleeve. This time it's about him, about his early years as a chronicler of his part of the world. There was a period in Rashid's life that preceded his transformation into a public intellectual, a revolutionary phase that was no game.

It was 1968, and Rashid was a student at Cambridge. The student revolts of the late 1960s were in their infancy, and Rashid was the Pakistani version of his generation. They read Mao, Trotsky and Lenin, and Ché Guevara was their hero. They were caught up in the great flow of emotions of the time, which derived its energy from an abhorrence for the Vietnam War.

Rashid was one of four Pakistanis who called themselves the "London Group," a name that sounded important to them. They wanted to do more than read and attend protests. They wanted to change their country, change it in revolutionary ways. They began by flying to Beirut to attend a training camp, where they completed a basic course in guerilla tactics and learned how to use weapons.

Taking to the Mountains

When they returned to Pakistan, the country was in the midst of one of the more difficult of its many difficult existential crises. After its 1971 war for independence, East Pakistan had seceded and renamed itself Bangladesh. The entire country, already an artificial construct, seemed to be on the verge of disintegration. The establishment was weaker than it had been in a long time. As Rashid and his compatriots saw it, they had been presented with an enormous opportunity to change the country.

But where would their revolution begin? Ché, their idol had fought his way out of the mountains and into the cities. Pakistan was their Cuba. And their mountains were in Balochistan, a poor province where the mountain tribes, as tested by war as their Afghan counterparts, had been fighting for independence, or at least autonomy, for years.

The four men established contact with the tribal leaders in the mountains. They immersed themselves in a world that was as foreign to them as the moon. They called themselves commanders, suggested ways to improve the farmers' harvests and addressed problems of medical care. They published newspapers and taught children. Rashid wrote poetry and short stories in his spare time, fancying himself a writer in a revolution.

The Pakistani army sent 100,000 soldiers into the mountains. The ensuing war claimed many lives, but it must have been a strange conflict, with the army attacking in the summer and the guerillas striking back in the winter. It dragged on in this fashion for 10 years. When life in the mountains became intolerable for the women and children, Rashid was put in charge of resettling them in Afghanistan.

Priceless Material

That was how he first came to Afghanistan, where he entered into negotiations with local clan leaders and warlords to determine where the families from Balochistan should be allowed to settle. He went on to Kabul on foot, and so it transpired that he was in Kabul in the winter of 1979/1980, when the Russians marched into the city. He had the good fortune that most historians never have.

The new situation in Afghanistan also affected the interests of the Pakistani army. Anxious to rid itself of the pointless war in Balochistan, it signed a ceasefire agreement with the tribes and offered the four revolutionaries the opportunity to return to the cities, promising them amnesty.

Rashid traveled to London to visit his parents and attend to his health. He saw a dentist, sought treatment for back pain and recuperated after years of physical exhaustion. Then he joined forces with a French photographer who had taken pictures of the Soviet tanks in Kabul, and the two men started knocking on doors at British newspapers. Of course, Rashid was interested in writing about the struggle for freedom in Balochistan, but the editors at the papers' foreign desks only pricked up their ears when they discovered that the two men had priceless material on the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. And so Rashid ended up writing his first major article about Afghanistan and the superpower that had invaded the country to change conditions there.

Losing His Optimism

Was it worth it, spending almost 10 years masquerading as revolutionaries in the mountains? Rashid laughs and shrugs his shoulders. At least something new came of it, he says.

He could just as easily have died in Balochistan, and then he would indeed have become a minor Pakistani version of Ché Guevara. Instead, he began to travel and tried to understand what was happening in this complicated world into which he had been born. He became a historian, with a constant awareness that one day the conflict that had been raging in Afghanistan for years could spill over into Pakistan.

That day has come. For the Taliban, Lahore is Pakistan's New York. Ahmed Rashid, who has always been an optimist, is slowly losing his optimism.

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• Part 1: Losing Faith in Pakistan's Future
• Part 2: How Lahore Is Changing Its Ways
• Part 3: Despairing of the West