The Age of Kali (48 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There are now more than one million Kalashnikovs in this province alone. It has got completely out of control.’

He shook his head sadly.

‘I feel,’ he said, ‘as if I’m living on an ammunition dump.’

The bazaar in Peshawar is the great meeting place of the tribes. It is here that the region’s produce is brought to be sold, here that
goods smuggled over the Afghan border pass in to Pakistan, here that news and gossip is passed on and exchanged. Appropriately enough, the main street of the bazaar is known as the Qissa Khawani, the Street of the Storytellers.

It is only here, as you wander through the bazaar, that you realise the great diversity of racial types that the different invasions have left behind them. The genes of a hundred different races meet here and intermingle. The passage of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes has elongated many eyes and turned to silky down the normally thick beard of a Pathan chin. Bright Aryan-blue eyes flash beneath mountainous turbans, calling to mind the old tales of Alexander’s lost legions left stranded in these mountains – and also the taste for British memsahibs that the Pathans developed over the century following 1840. Curly hair and Semitic noses remind one of the (admittedly slightly far-fetched) legends which maintain that the Pathans are a lost tribe of Israel – those who got separated from Moses during the forty years wandering in the desert and mistakenly stumbled in to the Hindu Kush while looking for the way back to Egypt.

The contents of the bazaar are as diverse as the people within it. Along with the rugs and sheepskin coats, the
karakul
caps and the Chitrali cloaks, the pavements of Peshawar appear to be the end of the line for many of the knitted woollies and discarded trousers proudly donated by tens of thousands of Home Counties grannies to Save the Children or Oxfam. Ten yards further down the street plastic mirrors, broken toy tanks and red waterpistols all appear to have fallen off the back of a lorry
en route
from Taiwan. The fraudulent Rolexes, brass idols, cassettes of wailing music and garish calendars have been smuggled across the border from India.

But alongside this small-scale junk business is hidden another much more lucrative trade. In the last few years many of the mud-brick houses in Peshawar have been faced with marble. Goatherds have become millionaires and bazaars boulevards. The same transformation has left the lobby of the Hotel Pearl Continental in Peshawar one of the strangest sights in Pakistan. The Pearl Continental
is among the most lavish establishments of its kind in South Asia, but unlike its rivals it is not full of Western tourists and businessmen. The people who dine in its five restaurants and spend in its lavish shopping arcade are wild-looking tribesmen, hung with ammunition belts and weapons, eating with their hands, appearing to the casual observer too poor to be eating anywhere more luxurious than the
kebabji
of the bazaars. Yet these men have money, and in no small quantity. They pay for their meals in cash, handing out bundles of notes from the sports bags they keep tucked by their sides.

The source of this money is no mystery to the inhabitants of Peshawar, although it is a matter for some indignation. ‘I am number two in this hotel,’ I was told by Mohammed Riaz, the assistant manager of the Pearl Continental. ‘I work thirteen hours a day and have been working like this for eight years. But in that time how much do I manage to save? Perhaps one hundred thousand rupees [£2,000] in two years. With that I can afford a small motorbike. But I see my classmates: they have beautiful Suzuki jeeps, some even have Mercedes. I ask, “How much do these cost?” They reply, “Seven hundred thousand.” I ask, “Where did you get that money?” They reply, “We have shops.” Shops! Shops do not make this sort of money. Of course it is drugs money. Go to the tribal areas – you will see there bad land and no industry. Everyone there is uneducated and illiterate. But many of the tribesmen are driving around in big BMWs. They are all in it up to their necks.’

According to US drug enforcement officials, about 30 per cent of all American and perhaps 80 per cent of all British heroin passes through Peshawar. The poppies are grown in the tribal areas and in Mujahedin-held areas of Afghanistan. From there the poppy heads are brought to one of sixty illicit processing laboratories dotted around the Khyber Pass. The processed heroin then passes to Peshawar, where it is loaded on to lorries – or occasionally on to military transports – and taken to Karachi. Then it is shipped to the West. Pakistani customs officers actively encourage the trade.
Their monthly salary is equivalent to about £40, but payoffs from the drug mafias are so lucrative that highly skilled graduates compete to bribe their way in to the customs service. A recent survey at Karachi University found the customs service to be the single most popular career.

Most of the rich men in Peshawar are involved in the drug trade some way, as is much of the Pakistani civil and military establishment: known heroin smugglers sit in parliament. In Pakistan they can buy themselves out of trouble. Only when they venture abroad are they in danger of being arrested: the brother of the Chief Minister of the North-West Frontier and the son of the province’s Governor are currently both in jail near New York on narcotics charges.

Yet even the Americans have to tread carefully here. Pakistan is a valuable and fragile ally, which cannot be bullied and invaded like Colombia or Panama. Pakistan is a base near the Gulf, a base for the operations in Afghanistan, and a base on the Iranian border. For this reason the Americans put up with the martial law of General Zia, and now they put up with the new and ever-expanding drug culture for the same reason.

Landi Khotal, at the top of the Khyber, is the nerve centre of the opium trade and home to many of Pakistan’s biggest drug barons. Hiring a guard armed with an American-made automatic rifle, I managed to wangle a pass from the tribal authorities and set off soon after dawn in an old Morris Traveller, still in service as a taxi after thirty-five years.

We passed a clutch of mud-walled Afghan refugee camps and then were out of the town and on to the plain of Peshawar. As we
came to the border of the tribal area two ominous signs reared out of the scrub:

and beyond it:

I looked nervously at the guard. He smiled blankly back.

We snaked in to the narrow mouth of the Khyber Pass, and rose, past a series of castellated farmsteads, higher and higher in to the barren hills. On one bend we passed a huge marble-faced enclosure surrounded by high-tension electrified wire. Guards holding Kalashnikovs flanked the marble gateway.

‘Zakir Afridi – big drugs man,’ explained the guard.

Every so often we would pass a fort – a succession of bleak, mud-walled fortifications – at least one of which, Kafar Kot, the Fort of the Unbelievers, dates back to the time of Alexander the Great. Few places in the world have seen such a succession of armies pass through them. When Alexander’s generals, Hephaestion and Perdiccas, led their Macedonian legions down the caravan road which threads through this narrow defile, they were already following in the footsteps of Darius and no doubt countless other earlier prehistoric armies. Since then the same snaking road has seen Seljuk, Moghul, Khajar, Afghan and British armies come and go. All have left their mark, but none has managed to hold the Pass for more than a century or two.

On the outskirts of Landi Khotal we passed the station. When it was built in 1925, in the aftermath of the third Afghan war, it was the last railhead in British India and the terminus of the Khyber Railway, one of the most remarkable – and expensive – engineering projects ever undertaken by the British in India. Costing more than £2 million to complete, it wound its way up fifteen miles of impossible gradients through thirty-four tunnels and over ninety-two bridges and culverts. But since 1985 the railway has been closed. ‘The tribesmen were firing Stinger missiles at it,’ I was told by a
friend in Peshawar. ‘It was the drugs barons that were behind it: it was crossing their territory so they closed it down.’

Certainly, Landi Khotal station looked as if it had been built to expect the worst. It seemed more like a castle than a railhead, with solid stone walls pierced by tiny arrow-slits. Projecting turrets on its four corners covered every angle. All around the houses had been cleared to leave a free field of fire. Afghanistan is less than half a mile away: this was once the British Empire’s first line of defence.

The windows were covered with thick metal grilles, and the doors were of reinforced steel. One, however, had been smashed off its hinges, and I climbed inside to explore. The interior – a quadrangle of rooms giving off an overgrown cloister-garth – had something of the air of Custer’s last stand. You felt instinctively as if something terrible had happened here: that the tribesmen had crucified the Stationmaster perhaps, or garrotted the ticket collector. This was the sort of place where Kipling’s short stories came to an end, the true-blue Victorian hero lying disembowelled on a frontier pass, and the vultures hovering nearby:

Inside the stationmaster’s office, everything was as it had been when the last train pulled up the Pass. The
Pakistan Railways Almanac 1962
lay open on a desk and old ledgers gathered dust on a shelf. It was an eerie place and I had no wish to linger.

It was now mid-morning and the market in the centre of Landi Khotal was in full swing. Old men were gathered around a fire drinking Pathan
khawa
(sweet green tea).
Kebab-wallahs
fanned little charcoal grills while butchers disembowelled chickens and tanners skinned dead goats, leaving little rivulets of blood running in to the open sewer. Nearby a scrap merchant was weighing a crate full of spent shell-cases. I explained to the guard what I was looking for, and he nodded and led me further in to the labyrinth.

Along an alley, down a dark, slimy staircase we arrived at a gateway. The guard knocked three times, and the door swung open. Inside eight bearded tribesmen were sitting in the half-lit gloom under some trellising. For a moment I looked at my companion, wondering why he had brought me here. Then one of the tribesmen took from his pocket a paper envelope. He tipped the contents – some browny-white powder – out on to a piece of silver foil, then held it up to his face. He lit a match and warmed the foil until the powder liquefied. Then he took a small white tube and inhaled the vapours. The sweet, sickly stench of heroin filled the air.

Landi Khotal was awash with narcotics. Heroin itself was generally kept out of sight under the counter, but hashish and opium were freely available, and as casually displayed as cigarettes and betel nut. Some of the hash was set in great toffee-like blocks; other pieces were folded in to hash chapattis or tortured in to spaghetti strands. One roadside stall moulded its hash in to curvilinear arrangements that looked like liquorice allsorts.

The US tried to bribe us to stop growing the poppy,’ one vendor told me. He tore a little lump of opium off a block, nonchalantly rolled it in to a ball and popped it in his mouth. ‘They promised us irrigation and improved roads if we destroyed our crops. We let them spend their money, then used the wells to grow better poppy.’

Drugs were not the only illegal trade flourishing in Landi Khotal. The town also has one of the largest smuggling bazaars in Asia. Electrical equipment from Hong Kong and Japan and cheap Russian household goods (huge washing machines; vast, outdated air conditioners) are brought by rail or air from the former Soviet Union to Kabul. They are transferred to lorries and driven towards the Pakistani border, then loaded on to pack-mule or camel and wind their way by night across the border and in to the tribal territories. There they are either sold direct or passed on to middlemen who smuggle them in to Pakistan proper. No duty is paid at any stage. The profits are colossal.