How ‘Little London’ Quetta became an haven for the militants The name Quetta comes from the Pashto for fort. In colonial times its nickname was “Little London”, a reference to its vast urban sprawl, home to more than a million souls. Both are appellations Barack Obama should consider before sending in missiles to strike at the black-turbaned Taleban that walk unharassed through its dusty streets.
I arrived in Quetta several days after the September 11 attacks having looked on a map and figured out that this was the closest I could get to Kandahar, the forbidding stronghold of Mullah Omar and his Taleban ilk.
When I finally reached Kandahar three months later I realised I had already been in Taleban central all along, right there in Quetta.
Quetta and its refugee camps were the real crucible of the Taleban, where dirt-poor, disenfranchised refugee boys became radicalised in the madrassas in which they received their free education.
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The first town that the Taleban seized in their long march to Kabul was Spin Boldak, just over the Pakistani border, on the artery that runs straight from Quetta to Kandahar. The Taleban and their fellow travellers have always wandered freely back and forward on this road.
In December 2001, nosing around a public hospital, I came across a ward of wounded Arab al-Qaeda fighters lying beneath a sign reading: “Ward for Afghan War fighters.” Social services were fretting about what to do with the sudden influx of al-Qaeda widows and children.
Such encounters would be difficult now, but not for lack of dubious patients. For the past four years, journalists visiting Pakistan have been issued with visas that prohibit them specifically from visiting Quetta. When a colleague sneaked there in 2006 he found Taleban fighters happily availing themselves of Pakistani medical services and sipping fragrant green tea as they recuperated from wounds sustained fighting the British.
So it came as something less of a surprise when on the trail of a Guantánamo detainee-turned-Taleban bomb mastermind, I discovered that he lived in Quetta. All of this might seem like a good reason to send in the missiles, except for a large number of very good reasons not to — including the danger of mass civilian casualties and the area’s well-proven volatility.
When the American bombing of Afghanistan began in October 2001, all that could be seen of it from Quetta were the distinctive vapour trails of B52s scarring the sky. Three days of ferocious riots ensued, with four protesters shot dead by police. Any buildings with Western associations were smashed and set ablaze. It was extraordinary there were not more deaths. Quetta is awash with weapons and Kalashnikov shops line its main streets like newsagents.
Travelling to the Chaman border crossing — which required government permission and police protection, so unstable were these supposedly centrally governed areas — our convoy came under attack by hordes of armed men pouring out of a desert refugee camp.
Quetta roils with other tribal furies too. Baluch tribesmen battling for self-determination and a greater share of Baluchistan’s resources have grown stronger as the Government’s energies are consumed by Taleban militants elsewhere.
Plenty of the city’s inhabitants have no tribal loyalties to the Taleban: the Christians who distil Quetta’s throat-scorching spirits and begged me not to “give in” to the prevailing Islamism by donning a headscarf; the Turkmen, Hazaras and Sikhs drawn by trade routes to this cusp of South and Central Asia.
It has been home, as well, to the Taleban’s resistance. Hamid Karzai lived here as he worked to topple the Taleban, although fears of assassination forced him to move house every evening. And hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled Taleban cruelty still live here, side by side with their old oppressors.
Every day, however, more and more of their sons are won over, by money or faith, to fight the infidels in Afghanistan. I remember vividly a bright ten-year-old madrassa graduate called Muhammad sulking that although he had learnt the Koran by heart, he was too young to join the jihad. By now, he is no doubt battling it out in the deserts of Kandahar or Helmand. Rain missiles on Quetta and you will find yourself with many more Muhammads, not fewer, to fight.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5934856.ece
