Taliban butchers are Pashtun cowards

The Taliban have sunk so low on the scale of humanity, that they are no longer Pashtuns: for a Pashtun respects the the Pashtunwali and will die for the honour it implies. The Taliban have no honour.

By Robin Edward Poulton

If you sit of an evening beside a fire in the Pashtun heartlands, you will hear tales of bravery, honour and generosity. You will hear stories about how the Pashtuns were never defeated: not by Alexander the Great, nor by Genghis Khan the Mongol, nor by the British Empire, nor even recently by the Soviet and American imperial armies despite their fighter bombers and their helicopter gunships. All these great military conquerors passed through the Khyber Pass from Afghanistan into Pakistan, but they never ruled the mountain passes where the Durrani and the Ghilzai Pashtuns herd their goats and fight their blood feuds. Just as NATO forces are pulling out in 2014, so too the Soviets pulled out in 1989 and the British pulled out in 1842, and in 1880 and in 1919: the 1^st and 2^nd and 3^rd Anglo-Afghan wars all ended with retreat by the exhausted invading army, like the Anglo-American invasion we have been watching since 2001.

In the Pashtun evening light, you will drink your tea flavoured with cardamom and suck sugared almonds, while lounging on your tushak thick mattresses or lying on your charpoy wooden bed on the veranda of the guest house: for the first rule of Pashtun life is hospitality, melmastia. If you listen under the silence of the stars, you may hear young girls singling inside their qala, the fortified house inside which no stranger can ever venture. They will sing ballads about the bravery of their young warriors, recite poems calling their heroes home for a wedding with their sweet and loving bride, or to see their first-born son who will one day take the place of his valiant father to defend his family’s honour, nang. Like their ancestors before them, young boys take their turn in the watchtower built above the qala, watching for enemies and strangers: in these wild mountain passes that have seen so many aggressors, the assumption is always that a stranger may be an enemy. Hindus came in the 1700s and decapitated Pashtun warriors; conquering Persian armies came from the West; and countless Turco-Mongol hordes swept down from the Steppes of Central Asia.

But after the Taliban attack of December 16^th 2014 on a school in Peshawar, what will the Ghilzai ladies be singing this New Year inside their fortified qala? Will they be singing glorious bravery of the men who slaughtered 7 and 8 and 9-year-olds in their classrooms – or will they keep silent in face of this cowardly butchery of innocent infants?  Will they compose ballads to praise the honour of the Taliban Ghilzai who shot unarmed and elderly teachers in front of their students – or will the Ghilzai women feel shame?  Pashtun women remember those brave warriors who defeated the British armies of the 19^th century, but how can they compare battles in the mountains to the butchery of 100 children in a school in Peshawar?

Ah! How are the Ghilzai fallen!  Most Taliban are Pashtuns – and many, like Mullah Omar, are Ghilzai jealous of the Durrani presidents Hamid Karzai and Abdul Ghani. How did Pashtun warriors shrink to become the butchers of small children? What Pashtun maiden will compose poems for the coward who shot an unarmed, 15-year old called Malala Youssoufzai, and her friends in a school bus? Aiyee! Alas! The noble Pashtun have crumbled into a state of dishonour! While Malala (now 17) has been elevated to the status of Nobel Peace Laureate.

The Pashtun tribes have been Muslims for twelve centuries. The Arab expansion reached Afghanistan within 50 years of the death of Mohamed the Prophet (Peace be upon Him and upon all the Prophets). Afghanistan and Pakistan are 99% Muslim. If you sit for hours – or indeed for months, as I have done – in an Afghan village, talking through the evenings with your village neighbours, you can pretty well know that 40% of the conversation will concern the economy (the price of wheat, the value of sheep, the quality of karakul Persian lamb skins); 10% will be gossip about the village or about stuff that someone heard in the weekly market; and 50% of the conversation will be related to religion. Village life is dominated by Islam. Not that Afghan villagers are very knowledgeable about their religion: most of the rules that govern Pashtun life come from the ancient Pashtun Code of Honour, the Pashtunwali, and have nothing whatever to do with Islam: but villagers will assure you that these are the rules that the Prophet (PbuH) followed.

And where, you may well ask, did the Prophet recommend that Muslims should kill school children? Indeed, He did not. One of the Prophet’s most famous – and most profound – sayings was this: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”  The Prophet was in favour of education, including education for women. Most Taliban do not know this, because they are profoundly ignorant of the meaning of Islam, Very few of them can read or write, and most of them have no idea of the meaning of the Arabic sentences they recite in their prayers.

If you remind the Taliban about surats from the Holy Koran that tell Muslims never to kill another Muslim, how will your brave Pashtun slaughterer-of-children reply? He will get angry, because he has no answer. He will tell you that the people he killed were infidels. But he is wrong: it is the Taliban who are infidels, for they no longer respect the religion they profess to practice.

And if you remind them that a brave Pashtun warrior is committed to defend children and not to slaughter them? Then your Taliban will become angry again, because they know that they have violated the sacred Pashtun Code of Honour, the Pashtunwali.

They will try to justify their attack on a military school in Peshawar, by calling on the rules of blood feud and vengeance: for badal is a sacred Pashtun duty, to avenge any insult to your family’s honour. But their speech will be weak, for they know that there is no badal in the slaughter of school children – they will speak lies, and they will know it.

The Taliban have sunk so low on the scale of humanity, that they are no longer Pashtuns: for a Pashtun respects the the Pashtunwali and will die for the honour it implies. The Taliban have no honour.

Worse, the Taliban are no longer Muslims. Everything they do is so alien to the religion of the Prophet Mohamed (PbuH), that these are men without religion. The Taliban have brought the Pashtun lands back in time to the jahiliya, the pagan days when tribal elders worshipped idols and there was no One God in their lives. The Taliban have no God. They worship only idols: their Kalashnikovs and their RPG rocket launchers, and the religion of Violence. Never in the history of this great warrior people, have Pashtun men sunk so low. They and their Arab and Chechen fellow-jihadis have become ignorant  butchers who know neither honour, nor God.

Dr. Robin Edward Poulton is an international peace consultant with attachments to Virginian Commonwealth University (VCU), the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and the Transcend Peace Network. 

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