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leafy garrison town of Abbottabad.
I had known Col. Mohsin (Retd) for some time now. He had appeared one day at our office with a brilliantly trimmed moustache, regimental cravat, and cuffs that crackled and shot with every opportunity. Since then he had managed a vast logistics operation—300 trucks, drivers and field staff—moving hundreds of thousands of tarpaulins, blankets, mattresses, tents, tools, clothes, and tens of thousands of people around the treacherous mountain roads with sangfroid and studied understatement. He had converted our office into an operation and had, with his years in the army, brought the art of war into the business of aid. Because of him, there was purpose in our work and the rooms were now covered in maps, diagrams and checklists; the atmosphere was a strangely relaxed, avuncular authority. Everyone now addressed each other as bhai (brother) or bhaji (sister), while heels clicked and salutes were given in the corridors of what had become a humanitarian war room.
Behind the nicotine-fuelled histrionics of the internationals, so visible during the initial phases of the earthquake response, our Pakistani friends and colleagues had brought order, humour, clarity, dignity and direction to the response. ‘Thank God the earthquake happened here,’ one departing aid worker told me. ‘We would have been lost anywhere else.’ With Colonel Mohsin and my indomitable colleagues—Shahab, Zubair, Usman and Samira—grinning broadly in response to each new setback (and there were many), we thought we could do anything. One glorious day I overheard Shahab, a fearlessly self-confident Pashtun, talking to a recently arrived international head of a major UN agency. ‘Boy,’ he commanded across the gulf of rank and pay, ‘I would advise you to go outside and see actually what’s happening.’
Some time later, at Colonel Mohsin’s invitation, I had driven to Abbottabad on my way back to the capital to join him in his spiritual home: the mess. After a tour of the extensive gardens and regimental dining room with its gleaming silverware we proceeded to the billiard room, where a portrait of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, gazed down from the wall. This was no ordinary Jinnah. In most portraits he was misleadingly shown in Islamic dress: the sober, steely-willed founder of the nation, its first governor-general and moral light. Yet in the Frontier Force Officers’ Mess, another Jinnah appeared. Cigar clenched between his teeth, he leaned over the very billiard table on which Colonel Mohsin and I now played, taking aim while a tumbler of whisky (not, judging from the evidence on the wall, his first) balanced precariously next to him. The picture had been taken many years before alcohol was banned in Pakistan. ‘Ah, yes,’ sighed Colonel Mohsin as he caught my eye. ‘This used to be a wet bar, but since 1975 we have been dry … Wet bar, dry bar …’ he repeated softly as we left the room, an untouched cup of milky tea going cold in a corner behind us.
Back on the verandah, we sat and talked and he returned to the subject of prisoners of war. Having been captured as a young lieutenant by Indian forces intervening in Bangladesh’s war of liberation from West Pakistan in 1971, he had decided that it was the duty of every young officer to resist capture and to escape. With his fellow conspirators he had tunnelled vigorously to get out of the POW camp, but every tunnel had collapsed inches from the perimeter fence. ‘So, after all these failed attempts to tunnel our way out, you know what we did, Tom,’ he said as I shook my head. ‘We made a run for it.’
Comrades in the disaster response, we embraced, shook hands and saluted as I said goodbye. A peacock wandered past the gate and I started my journey back to the capital, wondering which country and century I was in.
Years later I was stunned when ‘sociable Abbottabad’, as we had known it, with its leafy streets and
I had known Col. Mohsin (Retd) for some time now. He had appeared one day at our office with a brilliantly trimmed moustache, regimental cravat, and cuffs that crackled and shot with every opportunity. Since then he had managed a vast logistics operation—300 trucks, drivers and field staff—moving hundreds of thousands of tarpaulins, blankets, mattresses, tents, tools, clothes, and tens of thousands of people around the treacherous mountain roads with sangfroid and studied understatement. He had converted our office into an operation and had, with his years in the army, brought the art of war into the business of aid. Because of him, there was purpose in our work and the rooms were now covered in maps, diagrams and checklists; the atmosphere was a strangely relaxed, avuncular authority. Everyone now addressed each other as bhai (brother) or bhaji (sister), while heels clicked and salutes were given in the corridors of what had become a humanitarian war room.
Behind the nicotine-fuelled histrionics of the internationals, so visible during the initial phases of the earthquake response, our Pakistani friends and colleagues had brought order, humour, clarity, dignity and direction to the response. ‘Thank God the earthquake happened here,’ one departing aid worker told me. ‘We would have been lost anywhere else.’ With Colonel Mohsin and my indomitable colleagues—Shahab, Zubair, Usman and Samira—grinning broadly in response to each new setback (and there were many), we thought we could do anything. One glorious day I overheard Shahab, a fearlessly self-confident Pashtun, talking to a recently arrived international head of a major UN agency. ‘Boy,’ he commanded across the gulf of rank and pay, ‘I would advise you to go outside and see actually what’s happening.’
Some time later, at Colonel Mohsin’s invitation, I had driven to Abbottabad on my way back to the capital to join him in his spiritual home: the mess. After a tour of the extensive gardens and regimental dining room with its gleaming silverware we proceeded to the billiard room, where a portrait of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, gazed down from the wall. This was no ordinary Jinnah. In most portraits he was misleadingly shown in Islamic dress: the sober, steely-willed founder of the nation, its first governor-general and moral light. Yet in the Frontier Force Officers’ Mess, another Jinnah appeared. Cigar clenched between his teeth, he leaned over the very billiard table on which Colonel Mohsin and I now played, taking aim while a tumbler of whisky (not, judging from the evidence on the wall, his first) balanced precariously next to him. The picture had been taken many years before alcohol was banned in Pakistan. ‘Ah, yes,’ sighed Colonel Mohsin as he caught my eye. ‘This used to be a wet bar, but since 1975 we have been dry … Wet bar, dry bar …’ he repeated softly as we left the room, an untouched cup of milky tea going cold in a corner behind us.
Back on the verandah, we sat and talked and he returned to the subject of prisoners of war. Having been captured as a young lieutenant by Indian forces intervening in Bangladesh’s war of liberation from West Pakistan in 1971, he had decided that it was the duty of every young officer to resist capture and to escape. With his fellow conspirators he had tunnelled vigorously to get out of the POW camp, but every tunnel had collapsed inches from the perimeter fence. ‘So, after all these failed attempts to tunnel our way out, you know what we did, Tom,’ he said as I shook my head. ‘We made a run for it.’
Comrades in the disaster response, we embraced, shook hands and saluted as I said goodbye. A peacock wandered past the gate and I started my journey back to the capital, wondering which country and century I was in.
Years later I was stunned when ‘sociable Abbottabad’, as we had known it, with its leafy streets and
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