"The government wants to destroy the tribal system, but there are no institutions to replace it," the head of the Raisani tribe, Nawabzada Mir Lashkari Raisani, told me inside his walled compound, which was protected by white-turbaned bodyguards armed with Kalashnikovs. Chiefs here were nervous about Musharraf's plan to hold local elections, which could threaten their power.
Musharraf's regime was trying to extend taxation and the rule of law to this tribal area hard by Afghanistan, and it was encountering stiff resistance. A few weeks before that two bombs had gone off inside army bases in Quetta. The week I was in Quetta, there was also a series of bomb blasts in government buildings, relating to the arrests of a hundred members of an ethnic-Baluch clan who were wanted in connection with the murder of a judge. For the previous two days owners had shut their businesses to protest the regime's plan to tax the cross-border smuggling of computer parts, fuel, automatic weapons, and much other contraband on which the province's economy depends-as it depends on the heroin trade.
It was the second strike that week against the recently installed military regime of General Pervez Musharraf. Quetta's mainly Pashtoon shop owners called a strike to protest the raid. Security forces claimed victory, but reports later circulated that party members had filtered back into the area with weapons. The party stood accused of murders and kidnapping. five people had been killed and twenty wounded, and a large cache of weapons had been confiscated in a raid on the Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami (Pashtoon National People's Party), a group supporting an independent "Pashtoonistan" created out of Pakistani territory. Shots rang out from inside the adjacent compound. While they searched us, I saw two other soldiers with automatic weapons run along a high wall a few feet from where we stood. Suddenly we were surrounded by Pakistani soldiers, who forced us out of the car and pointed assault rifles in our faces. In search of the violence, my translator, Jamil, and I jumped into a four-wheel-drive Toyota and raced through the section of town inhabited by Pashtoon tribesmen. This past April in Quetta, the bleached-gray, drought-stricken capital of the Pakistani border province of Baluchistan, I awoke to explosions and gunfire.
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