The Stubborn Hope for Peace at the Pashtun National Jirga
A report from the 2024 Pashtun National Jirga
Image: Author
Thousands of Pashtuns gathered in Khyber on October 12th this year, against all odds, intimidation, and barricades, with a shared longing and a single hope: Peace. In the Pashtun National Jirga, Pashtuns from all walks of life declared a stance against the war and violence that has been wrecking the Pashtun region for half a century.
The National Jirga, called by the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), was unprecedented in Pashtun’s history in various respects. It was the largest one in terms of numbers and the most inclusive. As a researcher of politics, I went to the jirga with many curiosities and presumptions. I learned and unlearned a lot.
The jirga is a cultural institution through which issues are resolved by male elders through consultation and an agreement is reached in the face of a challenge. The National Jirga was not convened to resolve a dispute but to reach an agreement for the coming times, which Pashtuns dread and decry will be violent.
“Immediately after announcing the Jirga, Manzoor Pashteen worked hard to mobilize various political and social forces. He met with all political parties, social organizations, professional unions, tribal elders, and visited almost every district in Pakhtunkhwa. ”
The resurgence of the Taliban and increasing violence across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan warranted a grand gathering of Pashtuns. No one else but the leader of the PTM, Manzoor Pashteen, had the widespread acceptability to garner wider support for a jirga. In contrast to the Bannu Jirga held by Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) in March 2022, attended mostly by PkMAP leaders and cadre, the Khyber Jirga was non-partisan.
PTM organisers emphasised that they were just hosts and gave their input in the consultation without influencing it completely. PkMAP did not attend the Jirga held in Khyber on the pretext that it was useless since a jirga had already been held in Bannu, the decisions of which are yet to be implemented. Among the nationalist parties, Awami National Party (ANP) and National Democratic Movement (NDM)’s central leadership was present along with their district level cadre.
Born out of the trauma of the War on Terror in 2018, the PTM had effectively diffused after an initial eventful couple of years. The peace marches in Malakand, Swat and Buner in 2023 brought it back to the fore. In 2024, PTM was the main architect of peace marches in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa against the resurgent Tehreek Taliban Pakistan. The National Jirga was called in the aftermath of the tragic killing of the poet-activist Gilaman Wazir. It is fair to speculate that the PTM had reached a saturation point with regards to holding mass gatherings and was in need of a forward leap. The on-going violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, offered the PTM a solid reason to call for a grand gathering to change its course.
Immediately after announcing the Jirga, Manzoor Pashteen worked hard to mobilize various political and social forces. He met with all political parties, social organizations, professional unions, tribal elders, and visited almost every district in Pakhtunkhwa. Conversely, the government wielded every force and tactic to sabotage the Jirga. The Jirga ground was barricaded at least three times. Highways were blocked. But eventually it allowed the Jirga to proceed.
A Caricature of the Jirga Ground
“From teenagers to men in their 70s, university students to the toiling classes, political cadre and tribal elders, tableeghi jamat and people affiliated with religious parties – all kinds of folk, rural, urban, and civil strata of Pashtun society were represented. ”
Spanning over 400-acres of rugged land at the footstep of Tatara hills, the Jirga ground resembled a huge caravan’s camping site from afar. Almost each Pashtun majority district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan had a camp bearing the district name. There were also camps based on professions, such as lawyers, teachers and so forth. In total, there were more than 80 camps. The coordinators of each district camp were primarily PTM activists. Similarly, PTM volunteers and organizers were mostly young men. Apart from these camps, there were hundreds of tents (some provided by Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), where Jirga participants rested in off-hours. The district-based camps were certainly a diversion from the traditional constitution of a jirga, which is based on clan/tribe membership. Perhaps, this signals a step ahead in shedding off the tribal identities in Pashtun society.
Bacha Khan Trust Medical Camp. Photo: Author
Almost every camp had pictures of “missing persons.” Some camps displayed demands for rehabilitation of Internally Displaced Persons. When formal proceedings ended, Jirga participants visited each other’s camps, shared their stories, and exchanged ideas on what could be done.
From teenagers to men in their 70s, university students to the toiling classes, political cadre and tribal elders, tableeghi jamat and people affiliated with religious parties – all kinds of folk, rural, urban, and from the civil strata of Pashtun society were represented. There was very little women’s participation, marking the general and significant lack of women’s representation in the Pashtun political landscape.
The dirt-pathway leading to the Jirga ground from the main Jamrud road, was a turf of political activism as well. All the houses along the road had placed drinking water for those going to the Jirga. Kids splashed water on the dirt to keep the dust from rising. Many of the participants had their cars parked in nearby homes. In the evening, people from nearby areas visited the Jirga ground and invited the participants to be guests in their homes.
The pain of decades-long war and longing for peace that connected everyone was embodied in the local people’s hospitality, warmth and generosity. They did not attend the Jirga as their hujras (male gatherings spaces) were full of Jirga participants around the clock. In addition to the local folks’ openness and warmth, there was a mini-bazar in the Jirga ground with all kinds of food and drinks.
Another feature which gave the Jirga a distinctive character was a set of book stalls. The ANP’s Maulana Khanzeb was in one such stall, signing his book Shtamana Pakhtunkhwa (resource-rich Pakhtunkhwa) while he was surrounded by curious youngsters asking him about the implications of the Jirga, and Pashtun politics in general.
“In the past, jirgas on national issues were attended by representatives of different political parties, with all the bureaucratic formalities. In contrast, this jirga was a peoples’ assembly, as it was more representative of common people. ”
The Jirga was divided into two main spaces. There was an open space for public gatherings, where leaders and notables from different walks of life delivered speeches. There was another closed area, which accommodated three to four thousand delegates and representatives of different areas, professions, political parties, civil society, and the socio-political elite. Entry in this area was allowed through a card issued by the respective district camp coordinator, or those formally invited by PTM. This is where deliberations happened and where the representative of each camp proposed their recommendations. Through this process, a committee of 80 members was formed which put forth 22 demands of the National Jirga.
In the past, jirgas on national issues were attended by representatives of different political parties, with all the bureaucratic formalities. In contrast, this jirga was a peoples’ assembly, as it was more representative of common people. It was not organized as such, but it was not chaotic either. Perhaps, exactly how an organic assembly of people should look like.
The Sentiment and Discourse
The Jirga was a mosaic of different political subjectivities. The longing for peace was the thread that weaved through everyone’s heart. It also explains why people from all walks of life participated.
Manzoor Pashteen is criticized among the nationalist circles for not clearly outlining his ideological line. They think he is trying to appease everyone, including religious parties and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), the centre-right party popular among the Pashtuns. Unlike other nationalist leaders, Manzoor Pashteen is particularly persistent in pressing that Pashtuns have been victims of imperial wars irrespective of their political or professional identity. Perhaps he is wise in not drawing the lines clearly. PTI supporters may have not attended the Jirga in such large numbers, if he had. Perhaps he is an organic intellectual with an independent mind.
His strategy seems to be congruent with my later realization that political subjects can no longer be fixed into a single category, they are inherently heterogeneous and fluid. Take the case of a PTI Member of National Assembly, who said that his brother has been missing for the last few years. How should we understand an elected official who has been a victim of the war but is affiliated with a centre-right party, as opposed to a left nationalist organization?
Image: Author
The Jirga brought to surface some contradictions that I have previously written about. These contradictions underlie the Pashtun political conjuncture, particularly the fact that many Pashtuns support PTI and PTM at the same time. In the run-up to Jirga, the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was in troubled waters. It could not ignore the mass popularity of the Jirga, and the support it had among party workers. On social media, PTI supporters were both criticising the provincial government for not doing enough, and defending the PTI’s lack of support of the PTM because of its anti-establishment stance. Similarly, nationalist circles were quick to remind PTI workers that after all the PTI was the establishment’s party.
The reluctant and uneasy participation of the PTI and JUI-F leadership was in contrast to their workers’ enthusiasm. This shows that while the leadership may have ideological positions vis-à-vis the state structure, along with material interests and constraints, their workers on the ground do not have such baggage. Their demands were simple and immediate: the right to live peacefully. This shows that people are moved by their material experiences and the immediacy of their surroundings. No amount of ideology can fool them about their living conditions. They are reasonable thinking people not “dupes,” as Vivek Chibber points out.
“This popular politics, however, should not be confused with populist politics based on hatred for others and false promises. But popular in the sense that it reflected people’s aspirations at large.”
Another way to look at the contested views in and about the Jirga is through the class question. I suspect that the intelligentsia, the nationalist cadre and leadership, who are mostly comprised of the middle or affluent class, approaches the Pashtun question with an ideology/identity laden lens with an a priori imagination of the future. That is, their worldview is arrested and impinged by ethno-nationalism, where the future is already imagined and the path towards that future is carefully drawn in nationalist ideology. In contrast, the toiling classes and people of ex-FATA, who are direct victims of the war, approach the future with a consciousness impinged by violence and everyday experience in their villages and towns.
For example, when I asked an academic affiliated with a nationalist party about his views on the Jirga, he sounded pessimistic albeit perturbed. Pointing to the ideological mosaic of Jirga participants, he complained about the apparent irrelevance of nationalist discourse. He emphasized that only an ideologically coherent nationalist leadership can guide the people, compared with which the Jirga was incoherent and chaotic. When I pointed out that this was what an organic assembly of people may look like, he dismissed it as “popular politics.”
Popular politics, indeed. There was virtually no political party, or political leader who did not appear on the stage. This popular politics, however, should not be confused with populist politics based on the hatred of others and false promises. But popular in the sense that it reflected people’s aspirations at large. In Gramsci’s words: “The popular element ‘feels’ but does not know or understand; the intellectual element ‘knows’ but does not always understand, and in particular does not always ‘feel.’’’ Gramsci’s “intellectual” would include both the intelligentsia and the nationalist political leadership who seem to be ruptured with the people.
In the academic’s talk, I suspected an underlying tension between the affluent, urban middle class and the lumpen, people on the margins from war-torn Waziristan. There was a dialectic between “civil society” and “political society,” as Partha Chatterjee calls it. Civil society speaks in the same language of authority with which it negotiates in “civil space” through “democratic means,” i.e. electoral politics, parliamentary structure , development and so forth. This section of society is more concerned with its share in the larger state structure, and decision-making forums rather than everyday reality.
And here the PTM departs from the orthodox or traditional Pashtun ethno-nationalist discourse. It represents Pashtuns from all across the ideological spectrum seeking change in their basic conditions of life: the release of missing persons, the return of Internally Displaced Persons, an end to extrajudicial killings and other performances of violence.
As people waited patiently for the declaration, there was a general agreement that demilitarization should be an essential part of it. And it was. In spite of varying affiliations, everyone in the Jirga agreed on demilitarization for the restoration of normalcy in their lives. It reflected the popular aspiration. However, the desire for peace alone is not enough to realise it. The interdiscursive subjectivities, i.e. the differences amongst the people along the lines of class, geography, and ideology need further political work if they are to be formed as a popular collective will. Or as Stuart Hall in his reading of Gramsci, puts it, “a class will have its spontaneous, vivid but not coherent…understanding of forms of exploitation to which it is commonly subjected.” Hall insists that a class requires further political education to transform this popular aspiration into a popular political force. PTM has thus far deftly articulated the popular demands of the people, yet, it needs further organizational work to coalesce them into a persistent political movement.
Participants meeting each other. Image: Author
After the Jirga
“ The most remarkable demand was the demilitarisation of the Pashtun region. ”
The 22-points resolution included providing electricity on cheaper rates, ownership of land and mining rights, abolishing internment centres, the return of Internally Displaced Persons, and a judicial commission to investigate extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. The Jirga demanded visa-free trade on the Durand Line. It called for the end to racial profiling of Pashtuns in the metropole, but did not specifically mention the treatment meted out to Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The Jirga also demanded that the Afghan Taliban reopen girls’ educational institutes.
The most remarkable demand was the demilitarisation of the Pashtun region. The two months’ deadline given for it has passed, however, without a spectacle. Nonetheless, the Jirga’s importance for the future of PTM is obvious. While it was successful in bringing virtually all of the political leadership on its stage, the latter are not bound to support or pursue the implementation of the demands put forth in the Jirga. I suspect they won’t.
It is important to bear in mind that while political parties may not represent the people, they do represent significant sections of the people who have stakes in the status quo and party networks. Take the JUI-F, for instance. It has a genuine support base among the masses on the one hand. On the other, its village, town and district level leadership has material interest in the existing system. Their central leadership has its institutional and ideological baggage. These contingencies pose a challenge to the ideal of pan-Pashtun solidarity. The unity across party lines at the Jirga stands on shaky ground.
Finally, the PTM is a grassroots political movement which is in an asymmetric struggle with a structure of power aligned with the neo-liberal system. What happens in Pashtun regions is not a consequence of state policies only, but informed by geo-strategic games in the region. Does the anti-war PTM stand a chance in defiance of the brewing new great game?
Whichever turn the political leadership takes, and whichever direction the geo-strategic calculus of the great power goes, it is certain that the people can no longer be lured by any ideology that justifies and prepares the ground for violence in their villages and bazaars. They would resist any scheme that dispossesses and dislocates them. The widespread participation in the Jirga, and the hopes attached with it, is the manifestation of the longing and resolve for peace.
An astute approach to the Jirga is to view it not as an event that may or not determine something immediately, but as a process, a making, that may take different forms in coming years.
Bakht Noor Nasar is a researcher affiliated with the University of Loralai, Balochistan. His interests include the political economy of conflict and development, ethnicity, and social movements, with a geographical focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan. He can be reached at @zabulistan_ on Twitter (X) and bakhtnuur@gmail.com