The Social Life of Rumors: Uncertainty in Everyday Encounters between the Military, Taliban, and Tribal Pashtun in Pakistan

"Do you know what my cousin told me? He told me that his friend had been kidnapped by the Taliban and held hostage for a couple of months," recalled Zar Ali. After the friend had been released, he met the cousin and recounted that he had been held in a mountain cave for several weeks in one of the valleys in Waziristan, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) situated along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. "A Taliban guard used to stand at the entrance of the cave—a tall man, his face always veiled. Farther down in the valley, there was an army patrol. The soldiers had a clear view of the cave and the Taliban guards that would stand there." Viewing this as evidence that the army is complicit with the Taliban, Zar Ali continued, "The friend told my cousin that not only could the army see them, the guard would even signal to them to keep an eye on the cave when he went for a break."

In Lahore, at a tea stall close to the university where they were studying, I was sitting with Zar Ali and several of his friends. They were all in their early twenties and from different Pashtun tribes in FATA.¹ Like many other tribesmen, most of them blamed both the Pakistan army and the Taliban for the violence in their villages, and often claimed, like Zar Ali, that they were in cahoots with each other. Asim, in particular, was a vocal critic of the army, and I was not surprised when he chimed in to remark: "This is how it is: a new Great Game in which we [Pashtun tribes] are being massacred. America is playing Pakistan and the army is playing America for money." Sadiq, who was sitting across from Asim, had been silent throughout the conversation up to this point but now asked in a quiet tone, "Why do you always talk of the army this way?" Asim sneered in response, "Of course you would say that, now that you have family in the army . . . me, I would never be like this. The blood of so many in my family is on their hands . . . Taliban, army, it is all the same." Sadiq, who was angry enough not to back down, retorted, "but your family continues to send all the children to army schools, so why this pretense that you want nothing to do with the army?"

The conversation I have described above captures many aspects of my broader interactions with, and experiences of conducting, fieldwork among tribal Pashtuns who have been displaced from FATA. Since the US-led invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistan has experienced significant unrest and violence; it is estimated that since 2005 more than fifty-nine thousand people have died in terrorist attacks across Pakistan. A significant portion of these attacks have been in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North West Frontier Province) and in the Tribal Areas. In addition, the Tribal Areas have been the site of US drone attacks and ground operations by the Pakistan army targeting the Taliban. Since 2004, somewhere between 2,500 to 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes, and many hundreds from military operations. More than 1 million have been displaced from the Tribal Areas.² During the time of this fieldwork, from 2011 to 2013, some of the villages in the Tribal Areas were evacuated for ground military operations against the Taliban. Driven out of their homes, many were sent to camps set up for internally displaced people (IDPs), while others went to live in cities such as Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Karachi, where their family members and relatives were already based.

It was among these latter groups, specifically those who had moved to Lahore, that my fieldwork was situated. Although many of the evacuated villages have since been reopened and I have been able to visit family homes of my interlocutors, the conspiracy theories and events I describe in this article are from the time of my original fieldwork in Lahore. The...