First, a clarification of my employment of the word "AfPak" is in order: I find the term "AfPak" as the most accurate name for this region. I do not wish to horrify my Afghan and Pashtun nationalist "friends" in this regard, but AfPak is the truth - it has been that, in one form or another, since the Indo-Aryans commenced their invasions of this area in around 1700 BC, right upto the artificially contrived Punjabi British successor state of Pakistan which now exists. Even the "modern" Afghan kingdom of Ahmad Shah Abdali "Baba", the national icon so beloved of the Afghan/Pashtun nationalists, was actually AfPak than anything else. It was only when the British drew the Durand Line in 1893 that some portion of AfPak was cut away to become so-called "modern" Afghanistan (which I refer to as "AfPersia"), but the remaining British controlled portion still continued to be "British AfPak" in composition - even after 1947, when the British handed over power to their "Pak" Indian Muslim toadies - and formed Pakistan. AfPak therefore is not a misnomer coined by the Obama Administration: it is even more valid than the universally recognised term "Indo-Pak", used liberally for the subcontinent. One minor difference was, that in the epoch of Islam, it was the "Afs" and their Central Asian Persianate-Turkic cousins who ruled the roost; however, things began to change in the eighteenth century after the Iranian king Nadir Shah Afshar's coup in Iran, follwed by his attack on decadent Mughal India when the Marhatta tribes revolted. Shortly afterwards, the rise of Sikh power was witnessed in Northern India - for a good few decades prior to that area becoming part of the British Company Raj in 1849 - which a decade later became the British Crown Raj. Many of the Central Asians (and Pathans) previously settled in subcontinental Mother India lost their edge and became ethnic paan-chewing Indians. But in the present situation, some variables have been permanently changed. India (Bharat) has been separated, and has been permanently empowered as an individual polity. The British empowered the huge servile and greasy Indian ethnicity (both Muslim and Hindu) in a permanent way, enabling them over the generally loutish and boorishly proud Pathans who lived on the north western frontiers of British territory. That situation still remains intact in what remains of the old AfPak, although now the latest form of Pathan political expression and agression against the old order, Talibanism, is basically a Pathan manifestation - but soon may not be... Those who lived in "modern" Afghanistan "proper", still retained their empty clamour and comical bravado, but in an increasingly Persianised, and medieval feudal "statehood". I put it in quotes, as it isn't nor ever was, a state by any proper standards. The Punjabis still have a centuries old collective inferiority complex when faced with Pathans, and the thinking in their "Pak" establishment went that Islamic Jihadism would imbibe them with the Pathan kind of "ghairatmandi" and fearless manliness they so envied in their otherwise hated Pathan foes...that thinking seems to have been a total flop and led the "Paks" into a total mess...because, as one is reminded by the wise proverb: You can never make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Things are always the way nature has made them, and those limitations are inviolable. However, in British India and more so in its successor Pakistan, the Pathans in high positions nowadays display the exact opposite trend: they are almost all Punjabised/Pakised: the opposite of what I mentioned above; it is very hard to find a Pathan suitably modernised who is bereft of negative Pathan and "Pak" traits - or, in Afghanistan, of Persian traits...Returning to the (Pakistani) Taliban, now it seems, however, that in the aftermath of the three decade long Jihadi epoch, that the "Af" ascendancy is returning - in the form of the Taliban. And it is clearly apparent how the Punjabi "Paks" have fallen to such dissolution and degradation through their legendary corruption; but in keeping with their psychology, they are now, in the terminal delirium of their statehood, getting a sadomasochist kick out of being screwed by their Taliban proteges.
As can be seen now, however, AfPak has arrived at the end of its three millenia long travails. It is now a thoroughly decrepit and condemned hulk in the global scrapyard, awaiting the judgments of both history and eternal progress.
And now to the subject of this article: So, since the last 62 years, the Jihadist Punjabi "Paks" are in the ascendant in the Pakistan bit of the AfPak region. Don't worry, they are their own biggest enemy. God has given them a voracious appetite - so voracious, that they have now been eating their own selves for quite long. So those who detest them needn't belabour or bother themselves with this; they needn't even wag their little fingers at them threateningly, for the AfPaks will do themselves in by themselves. They will eat themselves up! Even their Chinese "all weather" friends are aghast and dismayed at this prospect, as are their Arab "Muslim brothers" - at this seventh nuclear power of the world - a nuclear power with a difference, as it is in reality a khargaday (donkey cart) nuclear power - with its weapons being made of kabari (scrap) tinplate and are fitted onto donkey carts. The Durand Line has vanished in all but name. (The British artfully choose a man named Durand to head their border demarcation commission, because they felt that the similarity of this name to the Afghan royal family's tribal name of Durrani would make a favourable and agreeable impression upon Afghanistan's boorish and illiterate "Iron Amir", Abdur Rahman Khan. It apparently did, too).
Seen in the wider regional and recent historical context, the "modernist" glamour during the 1950s-70s era of the Shah's Iran, Afghanistan's Kabul City, and also the first 30 years of Pakistan from its creation in 1947 to the takeover of General Zia in 1977 - was all illusionary: a complex kalaidescopic surface patina, looking intriguing but actually false and worthless. This illusion, engendered by the stable rule of "postcolonial"/neocolonial parasite elite ruling orders had no real foundations and was equivalent in every aspect to the drugged "trips" of the trashy "hippies" of the era who frequented this area in droves...a decadent patina, restricted to the surface of client elites with no spiritual foundations whatsoever. The same can be said of the so-called Arab "nation-states" with pretensions to secular modernism and socialism, other than the Gulf Sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia - such as Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq and Syria. This definition can even be extended to ex-Soviet Central Asia. It was as much an illusion as was the contemporary opinion about the successes of industrialisation and petroleum, or even cigarettes - the destructive environmental, pollution and health consequences of which became apparent at almost the same time. On the other hand, Islam, in its original primitive and popular essence, remained locked safely in the roots of the decrepit society and its bedrock - and as the mass upheavals to transform the rotten elitist structures began to ferment, the Islamic essence was unlocked, and began to bubble upwards, altering the very colouration of those upheavals - as we see in Afghanistan's quirky "Saur Revolution" followed by its Jihad, then Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran, and general Zia's Islamisation policies, all of which occured at the end of the 1970s. The glamour was over, and the post-drug trip ralities began to bite, as the "addicts" woke up on the rubbish dump where they always were on... The global, Pashtunised revival of Islam after 1980 was amply assisted and nurtured by Western money and power - most of which countries didn't even have an inkling of the kind of monster they were birthing...but as they say, malevolent intentions give rise to ...further malevolence. But they "cleverly" thought that while they would be able to employ it in use against the USSR and in local geopolitics, they themselves would be shielded from it....ah.
The Pashtun brand of tribal Islam has equalled if not outdone Wahabism; except that it lacked the pretense of sophistication which it later picked up from Qutb, Maudoodi & co: not even the "redoubtable" Jamaluddin Afghani could achieve that. In the pre-Jihadi days, the traditional feudal classes - who were under British and then neocolonial influence - arbitrated this Islam, and saw that it tailored their opportunist social needs. Of course, the century of British rule had a deep diluting influence on this polity - right upto the Jihadi Era starting in 1980. Now, the revitalising and assisted encounter of Pashtun Islam with Jihad and Wahabi ideology has complemented its scope in contributing towards forming a new fountainhead for a revitalised new extremist Islam, on a global basis. The time when decadent Western liberalism and excessive political correctness - reinforced by a general paradigm of misunderstanding, could be used as convenient fig leaves in this regard - has passed away.
The tragicomic paradox of the matter is that those who have not progressed, in real terms, beyond donkey carts and the middle ages - are now at home with computers and modern culture as if they always had been.
