35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

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EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
government takes a back seat to the tribal laws and customs that
have prevailed for as long as anyone remembers. It is ostensibly
another land, inhabited by another people: the Pathans. Tall, paleskinned,
hawk-nosed, many even with green eyes and red hair, the
Pathans have no racial connection to the small, dark folk in
Hindustan: their term for everything east of the Indus. They are
also among the fiercest, most dangerous warriors on earth, as the
Soviets were soon to discover in the mountainous tribal lands of
Afghanistan, just across the Khyber Pass, a mere dozen miles west
of Peshawar. Their law, the Pukhtunwali or Way of the Pathan,
derives as much from revenge and tribal feuds as it does from ancient
codes of hospitality to strangers. And this latter quality owes more
to pride than to generosity.
The Pathans refer to themselves as Pukhtun, Pushtun, or even
Afghan. Pathan is the Hindi form, itself corrupted by British soldiers
into Paytan. Some fifteen million of them, divided among as many
as one hundred distinct tribes, comprise the largest remaining tribal
society in the world today, occupying one hundred thousand square
miles of land that straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border. This is still
referred to as the Durand Line, after Sir Mortimer Durand, who
signed the treaty with the Afghan amir, Abdur Rahman, that in
1893 separated Afghanistan from British India. The Pathans then
simply ignored the border, as they do now. Thousands of the
nomadic Ghilzai tribe migrate annually from the Afghan highlands
down to the plains of Pakistan. Some quarter-million non-nomadic
tribesmen still cross back and forth over the line every year on
private business, even though Pakistan has officially ‘sealed’ the
border. No official in his right mind would dream of questioning
them or asking for papers, let alone refusing them.
Herodotus, writing sometime in the fifth century BC, mentions
‘the most warlike of all the Indians, who live around the city of
Kaspaturos in the country of Paktuike,’ and ‘the Aparutai, who live
in the seventh satrapy of Darius the Great of Persia.’ The only major
authority on the subject, Sir Olaf Caroe, a former British governor
of the North-West Frontier Province, wrote The Pathans, which
convincingly identifies Kaspaturos with Peshawar, Paktuike with the
Pukhtuns or Pathans, and Aparutai with the Afridi tribe.