Waziristan

WAZIRISTAN

After hearing a lot about the Waziristan area of Pakistan as a likely place to look for Osama bin Laden, I decided to go looking on the Internet photo-sharing site Trek Earth for pictures of the region. In case you skipped those stories, here’s something from The Long War Journal: “The fall of North and South Waziristan and the rise of the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan was an event telegraphed by al Qaeda and the Taliban. During the winter of 2006, Osama bin Laden announced his strategy to establish bases and pockets of territory along the Afghan-Pakistani border.”
Trek Earth can be addictive: starting with a country’s name, you can go to the north or south or east or west, then to provinces, then to towns, drilling down to the localities. National Geographic has better pictures, when it chooses to share them (parents take note: they have a section where you can find a great picture of almost any animal) but Trek Earth has a special energy from all the adventurous travelers who post there.
But Trek Earth struck out. Waziristan, as a tribal area, falls somewhere between official regions and towns, apparently. Spell-checker spazzed, too.
So I settled for pictures from the northwest border of Pakistan. Phenomenally beautiful valleys framed by towering mountains, as beautiful as those of Switzerland—why hasn’t tourism been mentioned as a potential resource for this part of Asia? Rural life as it used to be for centuries, millennia—shepherds, for instance, with big flocks of sheep.
Then I come on a picture of a bunch of guys pushing some kind of vehicle along a mountainside road. Not a truck, I decide, because Pakistani trucks are among the most colorful objects on Allah’s Earth. The truckers will pay a year’s wages to have a professional painting company put amazingly intricate designs on a vehicle that will then go out to negotiate some of the world’s most hellacious roads. No, this was something else.
Clicking on the thumbnail to have it expand—I won’t say “blow up” because this is a part of the world where too many vehicles have been blown up already—I found explanatory notes. This was a roller truck, on its way back home after helping with a paving job on the area’s only road, down in the valley. It had broken down, there was no way to fix it locally, so now all the men they could round up from the valley had to push this monster over a 3,000-meter (more than 9,000-foot) mountain in the Himalayan foothills. One man was looking back at the photographer as if to say “What are YOU taking pictures of, as if this is something abnormal?”
Meanwhile, I was thinking “These hapless farmers and herders are our mortal enemies? Get real. We should be helping them, not hating them.”
When was the last time you heard about all that aid we promised to Pakistan after their massive earthquake a few years ago? We should have a national rapid emergency response corps all ready to go for such contingencies, a Peace Corps on fast-forward. I’ll bet it would get more volunteers than the military, and in the long run would make a lot of military actions unnecessary.