Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan

Hindu. At least Punjabis on the Pakistan side of the India-Pakistan border were Moslems, and that connoted a fierce, fanatical, and therefore martial (read
manly)
culture — even if, as everyone on the Frontier supposed, Punjabis had “religion on their lips and money in their hearts.” Hindus practiced a religion that was subtle and introverted, which meant it was feminine. Hindus were concerned only with their personal salvation and not with the duty of a man to his tribal kinsmen. Their religion attracted hippies, mystics, and homosexuals. Hindus lacked all honor: the official policy of their country, India, was to support the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Pakistan at least backed up the mujahidin and was caring and providing a home for three and a half million fellow Moslems from Afghanistan, though not even this fact would get the war freaks to change their minds about the Punjabis.
    That's because they all knew that it wasn't the “filthy Punjabis” who were providing a home for the refugees but Pakistan's president, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, backed up by hundreds of millions of American taxpayers’ dollars. Without Zia, the refugees might have been turned back atthe border and massacred or starved to death in their own country.
    Zia's most prominent opponent was Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of former Premier Zulfìkar Ali Bhutto, who was executed by Zia in April 1979. The Bhutto family was Sindhi, but in the lexicon of the Northwest Frontier, Benazir, as she was always called, might as well have been a Punjabi because she thought like one. Throughout the 1980s, her Pakistan People's Party was on record as opposing the very presence of the Afghan refugees on Pakistani soil. Benazir was attractive and telegenic, but she was also willing to consign millions of refugees to a horrible fate. Only when it became clear that Zia's gamble had paid off and the Soviets were going to withdraw from Afghanistan did she begin to shift her position regarding the refugees.
    Benazir, the thinly disguised “Virgin Ironpants” of
Shame,
Salman Rushdie's novel about Pakistan, fooled no one on the Frontier with her Oxbridge English and her calls for “free elections.” Free elections were the war freaks’ nightmare:
Why should those millions of treacherous Punjabis be allowed to decide the fate of the refugees and mujahidin? No, never.
“Not for another twenty years should there be free elections in Pakistan,” said one Western relief worker. Many stories circulated about the things Punjabis said about the Afghans: “They're making so much trouble for us.” “Why don't they just go back home?” (Never mind that there was a war on, millions of land mines, and no food.) “It's those refugees who are planting all the bombs in our cities.” (Never mind that the evidence indicated that it was the Communist authorities in Kabul, through their Soviet-backed intelligence service, KhAD, who were responsible for the terrorist bombs.)
    Zia, with his slicked-back hair, deep-set hypnotic eyes, and trimmed black mustache, looked like the quintessential Punjabi — touched by the devil. But he was also a tough Islamic disciplinarian who armed the mujahidin to the teeth. Benazirwould never have come to power had Zia not been killed in an air crash in August 1988, for which KhAD and the KGB likely bear responsibility. As far as the war freaks and the Afghans were concerned, Zia was less a Punjabi than an honorary Pa-than.
    After just a few weeks on the Northwest Frontier, a Westerner's thinking along such sharp racist lines became natural. The Pathans really were waging a noble struggle. And many Pakistanis really were willing to cave in to Communist terrorism and run for cover behind flowery rationalizations. But as in other places in the Third World where journalists and relief workers inevitably found themselves on one side of a conflict, the border between “clientitis” and outright prejudice against the clients’ enemies was