October 16, 2003

Fouad M. Khan narrates the tale of one Pakistani jihadi who continues to languish in a jail in Afghanistan, hoping against hope that this government will rescue him

Babur sat in a lonely, desolate corner; his eyes, hazel brown, as his skin had once been, stared into the nothingness of dry, dusty, space. All around him were people, young men with whom he had chosen to die — the ultimate bond — but it meant nothing anymore. They were all separate in their shells, so stuck in the circles of the past and future, that the present had become an unreal chore.

Once every hour or so, someone said something to someone. But everything seemed a burden; every word that had to come out of the unwillingly stressed lips was an effort. They had hardly eaten for two days. There was a chill in the air, a dry chill that threatened to creep into the bones and kill one from the inside, on starlit, silent nights.

In the days when the sun shone upon the land with all its zest, the chill didn’t go away. Sometimes, almost as unexpectedly as when his old boyhood shone through from behind those war-torn, seasoned eyes, these days reminded Babur of Karachi — of a life so seemingly distant. He tried to count in his mind, it could not have been more than 56 days since he had left his home for jihad in Afghanistan.

In his memories it already seemed like a different age, a different time. In moments of inexplicable, unjustified embarrassment, his eyes crossed with those of a young man sitting in the opposite corner. They had known each other. They had been friends.

They had played football together in open fields, they had been to school together, taken a caning from the same Maula Baksh. They had stood together at the same bus stand in front of Islamia Girl’s College, together they had thought that they had fallen in love. Now, they had fought together. As moments of enlightening revelations go, the universal truth that had occurred to them now varied, shaped in its own local, mutated, distaste.

Yes, it was true: war had strengthened their bond, but only at a very instinctive, inhuman level. On a social level they were so far away. The instinct for survival was the only thing that added any possible meaning of oneness to the description of their companionship. This was ever more disheartening for Babur.

Taimur had been more than a friend for him, he’d been an inspiration. He was one of the reasons why Babur was where he was. This reminded him of other reasons why he had a kalashnikov in his hand, a jerky wooden plank under his butt, and nothing in his stomach. He remembered a big, fat man wearing a shalwar kameez and waistcoat, with a large, rugged beard.

The man could hardly walk because his stomach was always obviously too full. He imagined him with a rifle in a tight battle situation, he imagined him running for his life. For a brief second, a smile lit Babur’s face. Then he smiled thinking that he’d just smiled.

Humour, he thought, never fails to surprise you. Humour, he thought, I will never underestimate it again. It had all started in good humour too. Taimur had been hanging out with Wali Bhai, a blue-eyed young man who was always clad in white and whom Taimur had met at the mosque. Over the next three weeks Babur saw Taimur convert into an aspiring Taliban disciple. First came the beard — while Taimur had been ardent at prayer since Babur had known him, he hadn’t ever sported a beard before.

In a matter of weeks, his wardrobe was completely transformed also. He simply stopped caring for much except a shalwar kameez and a khaddar waistcoat — fit to survive winters in Afghanistan — afterwards. It was his overall attitude, however, which had shown the most perseverance against change.

Even a month after he visually resembled a Taliban supporter, with ankle-exposing short shalwars, a rudimentary beard, and a black imama, he’d remained the same Taimur for Babur, chatting about the same things, hanging around the same places, only for lesser spans of time.

It seemed almost like Taimur’s radical outer metamorphosis was a delusion, a camouflage, or facade he boasted to keep the inner inertia concealed. He was changing on the outside to remain unaltered from within. What Babur never understood, even after becoming a die-hard follower himself, was that Taimur’s transformation, just like his own, was a product of external influence. The inspiration, sometime during the process, might have come from within, but it could just have been a last minute effort of the soul to synchronize with the surroundings.

Taimur’s chance meeting with Wali Bhai was not the start of it. Wali just happened to be the right man at the right time.

Babur had lived in Patel Para all his life. Though on paper the place was meant to be a planned residential colony for government employees, the quarters had been acquired by migrants from Peshawar and Afghanistan a long time ago, and Patel Para had been turned into a slum, and has been one ever since.

The neighbourhood reeked of poverty and general indifference towards the civic standards of life. An overpopulation of kids wearing rags or nothing ran wild in the unpaved streets festooned with elements of an open sewage system. Education was a pariah of a concept here and the most that any of the children were offered consisted of lessons in the Quran, in the neighbourhood madrassah, conducted by a Qari Sahib.

Babur was comparatively lucky. His mother insisted upon an education and sent him to the government school in the vicinity; it was all that she could afford. She was a patient woman, resilient to the music of life, and perhaps could have affected a change in the lifestyles of her children had she lived any longer. But when Babur was just about to appear for matriculation, she died due to lack of medical attention.

After that, there was no orientation left to Babur’s life anymore. Babur’s father was never much of a man to depend on, but the death of his wife left him deeply affected, suddenly old and feeble. Babur was a responsible kid by nature, who tried to support himself and his family for some time by doing odd jobs, but it was not his age to carry such a burden on his shoulders. Involuntarily, he started looking for outside help.

The pressure of being alone took over him, and soon he wanted to share his burden with someone, to feel a part of something that was bigger than the perils of his life. The escape mechanism had been switched on. Wali was a member of Jaish-i-Muhammad.

When he came into the lives of these two young men, he’d already been for training twice and had spent three months fighting in Kashmir. Now he was planning to undergo six months’ training in Afghanistan. When Babur first went with Wali and Taimur to attend a rally by Maulana Masood Azhar, he was only looking for company. But the wily leader’s speeches motivated him; they filled him with anger against the tyrants of the world. He felt surges of compassion for his Muslim brethren sacrificing their lives in Kashmir and Palestine.

With little reasoning of his own, he took everything that came out of the leader’s mouth on face value. His untrained mind questioned nothing, ceded too easily to the rhetoric and gave in to the tirade of propaganda. Emotionally, Babur proved to be too easy a catch, but an appeal to his inner extremism would not have been enough. What really won him over was the way they owned him, made him feel like they would always be there to support him, to be his team.

Meanwhile, in another world, life was getting even more miserable. Everyday he felt the overpowering urge to run away from reality. Then one day they gave him his chance. Was there any chance of him ever coming across one infidel? Was there any chance he’d ever get his hands on one? Because when it happened, he’d vent it all out — he’d rip the devil’s heart out of his chest.

Wisdom of war told him that it would be just as it had been up until now. Hatred and love, revenge and reminiscence, are human conditions; they have nothing to do with war. He would feel nothing when he’d kill him. Although when he’d be done with it he’d feel relieved.

At least being able to say that he’d achieved what he had set out to do, though in reality it amounted to nothing. For now, however, he’d have to wait. He’d have to wait for the journey to come to an end, wait for the day to slowly slip into the absolute darkness of night, wait for the chill to reclaim its dominion. He knew he wouldn’t find himself an infidel any time soon.

As utter darkness sunk in, his eyes closed to a restless, weird slumber. An indefinite amount of time passed in that state before he heard the explosion. His eyes lit up red behind the lids. He lifted them open to find himself in the middle of human chaos.

The truck had stopped, bombs were exploding all around him. People, his partners in war, seemed to be running in aimless zigzag patterns. As he regained his auditory senses he realized that he was in the middle of an attack. In panicky brisk motions, he got up and looked around for one of those devils he had been told about, but he didn’t see any. He looked towards the skies. It was an infidel attack from the heavens.

Before sunrise the next morning, Babur and the rest of his group had been captured by fighters of General Rasheed Dostum. Nobody knows what he went through after that, but the last letter that was delivered to his family by the Red Cross informed them that he’d ended up in Shabarghan Jail.

Babur is not alone; he was never alone. He was always just one of the thousands of helpless souls whose lives were continually being shaped by the vicissitudes of a societal evolution. He was punished for the crime of having been born in a country that was undecided upon its ideals.

Somewhere down the line we failed to accurately document our complex cultural identity, and this gave the vultures of political wilderness a chance. The nooks of cultural darkness were always there in our society, prone to manipulation by opportunists who played the horns of extremism, be it of any ideology. People like Babur, who for most of their lives had few goals to strive for (besides survival), found themselves easily drawn to this battle of black and white.

There was no confusion between right and wrong, between faith and infidelity. Suddenly Babur was part of a great war. No longer a poor man by obligation to fate, he was now free to choose his destiny for himself. Infidel or believer — eventually it came down to that. The entire world could easily be classified into these two categories; all the knowledge sapped into the art of distinguishing between the two. This is how his universe rounded up in the end. He started seeing two things: infidelity and faith. He started feeling two things: rage and hope. The rest seemed nothing more than an illusion.

He prized the vision he had been accorded. It never occurred to him that he had been pawned and even when the realization did try to knock on his senses, he was stuck in a war, unable to afford the luxury of opening his mind to it, or disbelieving what he had risked a life for.

In the clash of civilizations, he was the only loser, the only party that had gained absolutely nothing out of the whole exercise. In his nightmares Babur saw a Rasheed Dostum dressed in the ill-tailored attire of his new found respectability, telling him, “Thank you very much for your participation sir, here’s something to appreciate your contributions with. What is it? It’s a great big nothing, null, nada, for you and you alone.”

Leaders of the impoverished east had established their girths and accentuated their stature by collecting as many people under their umbrellas of religious exploitation as they could. Leaders of the West had furthered their empires of oil, while their subjects, the objects of a sinister syntax, had been fighting for empires of dust.

What the losers had lost was immeasurable, far beyond all quantification because it was the purpose of all calculations. They had given up their lives, nights in comfy mattresses, days in the urbanity of hustling bustling cities. They had given up their identities all too happily to embrace an identity that had abandoned them all in the end. They had fought in the name of religion — but nobody had spared them — in the same name of religion.

But worst of all, they had lost their sense of belonging. They had all ended up being prisoners of “a holy war” — an oxymoron of proportions. They had all ended up being prisoners to it, lone rangers without any moral or ideological partners. Their countries had almost disowned them; their parties had used them and forgot about them like tissues of the cliched analogy.

Babur’s family feels that after what Pakistan has done for Afghanistan and the Karzai government, the government of Pakistan should be dictating its terms to Kabul. They feel there is not enough pressure from our government on the Karzai establishment to free Pakistani prisoners.

Babur is still in Shabarghan Jail. His days and nights are spent in hope for it is the only thing that keeps him alive. He does not know that in his absence, his father has died, possibly because it had been hard to bear the loss of a son. He does not know that in Pakistan, the government now decisively talks of making this country a “modern” and moderate Islamic state. What he does know, and will probably be right to believe for the next several years to come, is that the flames of this holy war are raging higher than ever.

Every incendiary step taken by hardliners, whether they sit in Washington, Tora Bora, or Jhang, fuels the fire even more. The war is claiming more and more causalities everyday. We’ve all suffered our shares of a collateral damage that seems irreparable. We’ve all become prisoners of a war that for now, seems to have no end.

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