LAHORE, Pakistan — On Jan. 13, the police in Karachi, Pakistan,
claimedto have killed four militants suspected of having links to the Islamic State. Rao Anwar, the officer leading the operation, said that the men had opened fire on the police and were killed in the gunfight.
Pictures of the dead circulated on social media and were broadcast on Pakistani
television networks. Family members watching television news recognized one of the dead: Naqeebullah Mehsud, 27, from Waziristan, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the border with Afghanistan. He had been arrested by the police 10 days earlier.
Mr. Mehsud, who is survived by his wife,
a son and two daughters, had worked various jobs in the city and recently decided to set up a clothing store with help from his brother. He was also an aspiring fashion model,
posing rakishly in bright clothes and sporting a manicured beard in photographs on his Facebook page.
Photo
Naqeebullah Mehsud was an aspiring fashion model.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images
On that night in January, a photograph of Mr. Mehsud’s bloodied
corpse in a bare room appeared on my Facebook feed. I shivered with a mixture of dread, anger and hopelessness. He wasn’t very different from me: a young Pashtun man who had escaped the pitiless war consuming our home in Waziristan, a poor, isolated place that became an epicenter of the so-called war on terrorism and would be
referred to as “the most dangerous place in the world.”
Mr. Mehsud, like me, was trying to build a life in a Pakistani city far from home. Doing that requires acts of will and hope despite an awareness of a history of neglect,
prejudice and violence that the people of the tribal areas share with Pakistan.
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An operation by the Pakistani Army against militants in the tribal areas in 2014
displaced around a million people. The process of return
began in 2016, and military authorities
formulated new rules of passage. To visit or to return to live in Waziristan and a few other districts, you needed more than a Pakistani national identity card. You had to produce identification called a Watan Card.
I got my Watan Card last March. On it, apart from my biographical details and a photograph, there is a drawing of the Khyber Pass and the abbreviation N.W.A., for North Waziristan Agency. It marks me and other residents of the region as separate from the full citizens of Pakistan.
In the aftermath of Mr. Mehsud’s death, as accusations mounted that the gunfight in which he was said to have died had actually been staged by the police, thousands of young Pashtuns began marching in protest to Islamabad, the capital.
On Feb. 8, I set out from Lahore in a bus to join them. On the ride, I thought of the personal and political history that had shaped our lives, brought us to the moment when thousands of Pashtuns were gathering in an
unprecedented protest to say treat us with dignity and as equal citizens.
I was born in the late 1990s in Khushaly, a village in northern Waziristan circled by blue and black mountains about 30 miles from the
Durand Line, which messily demarcates the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Most people in the area were subsistence farmers, cultivating wheat in winters and corn in summers. Some ran small stores in Mir Ali, a nearby town of about 20,000. The economic precariousness forced a substantial number of men to leave for distant lands as migrant workers. I was 5 when my father left for Dubai to work as a laborer.
I lived with my mother, a sister and a brother in a mud-brick house. Our days began with the morning call to prayer. After the prayers we returned home and drank tea with milk. Pakistan might have had a nuclear bomb, but my people couldn’t afford breakfast.
Over the years, men from Waziristan and other tribal areas like my father sent home remittances and nourished dreams of a better life for their children. Thanks to these remittances, thousands of students in Waziristan in the mid- and late 1990s were able to enroll in modest
private schools, which were an improvement on the abysmal government-run schools.
Our troubles began after the Taliban, led by
Mullah Muhammad Omar, took over Kabul in 1996. Waziristan became the gateway for thousands of madrasa students who traveled to Afghanistan to join the Taliban. Many young men from madrasas in our area signed up. When they returned home, they set out to replicate the oppressive, puritanical ways of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
In the summer of 2001, my father returned home from Dubai after seven years. He set up a shop in the Mir Ali bazaar, buying and selling automobile tires. He spoke wistfully of the doctors and engineers he had met in Dubai. He hoped I would study to be a doctor.
A few months later, the Sept. 11 attacks and the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan changed everything. Arab and Central Asian militants on the run from Afghanistan sought
refuge in Waziristan. In the summer of 2002, the Pakistani military started
operations against the militants. Anger over these operations radicalized young men in the area, who flocked to join militant groups.
My father worried that I would get caught up in the war. In the spring of 2004, I left my village with him to attend high school in Peshawar, the largest city in northwestern Pakistan. Every day I wondered whether my family and friends back home were alive, whether they were safe. Newspapers ran cryptic reports about the violence and the deaths in Waziristan. Phones remained cut off for weeks.
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A decade of pitiless violence followed. The militants attacked military posts and passing convoys, and planted bombs on roads. The military retaliated with
aerial bombingsand artillery fire. New cemeteries were opened across the region. Coffin stores did brisk business. Civilians were disappeared and killed by both the militants and the military.
President Barack Obama increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan in December 2009, and
intensified the drone strikes on Qaeda and Taliban fighters in South and North Waziristan. Researchers at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London
estimated that American drone strikes in Pakistan from 2009 to 2015 killed 256 to 633 civilians and 1,822 to 2,761 militants.
I witnessed my first drone strike when I was home for summer holidays in 2009. One night I was sleeping on a cot under the starlit sky, when a fierce explosion woke me up. I tried to collect myself. My uncle shouted: “Drone! A drone attack!” Two more explosions followed. My uncle led me to the village square where people had gathered.
Villagers had seen a ball of light and fire rise from the house hit by the missile fired from the drone. Normally, we would rush there to help. Yet fear of another drone strike kept us from making the short journey, from picking up the remains of the dead and transporting the injured to a hospital. I saw the corpses of three militants in the morning when the funeral was held. The missile had shredded their bodies. I couldn’t sleep for days.
The war continued. After graduating from high school in Peshawar, I moved to a public college in Lahore in 2010 to study literature. The seductive, sprawling metropolis of Lahore was strikingly different from the war-ravaged Peshawar and Waziristan......
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