‘We are the children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of – to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.’ George Eliot

Attock, or whatever it was called in ancient times, has always held a special place in the hearts of the people inhabiting the present day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It connects Pakhtuns not only to the rest of Pakistan but also to their clansmen living in Hazara, and is the meeting place of the two fabled rivers, the Indus and Kabul. The Grand Trunk (GT) Road connecting Pakhtuns living on the right bank of Indus to the Eastern India and upgraded by Sher Shah Suri in the 16th Century also runs through the district of Attock.

What Nile is to the Egyptians, Thames to the English, Amazon to the Brazilians et al, Kabul and Indus (Abaseen in local parlance) are to the Pakhtuns. River Kabul spouts from the Hindu Kush Range in Afghanistan but it gets strength only after it is met by its most potent tributary of River Chitral that spurts from its source in the Tirich Mir Mountains. Crisscrossing breathtaking valleys, River Chitral enters Afghanistan at Arandu where it melts in River Kabul before the two enter Pakistan in the tribal agency of Khyber at Shilman.

Kabul River gets a further boost from River Swat in the district of Charsadda before it meets Indus at Attock. The point where the muddy brown waters of Kabul River and the emerald green waters of Indus converge and embrace after travelling for hundreds of kilometers from their respective sources in the two opposite extremes of Hindu Kush and Tibet offers a most spectacular view to those with a sense for aesthetics, culture, history and geography.

The meeting point is reached just a short distance from the grand Attock Fort built by the Mughal King Akbar in the late 16th Century. The original boats-bridge built for crossing the river was replaced by the British with a Rail and Road Bridge in 1880. The Rail and Road Bridge survives to this day, but is used only for the trains traffic. Some beautiful old pictures of the boats, rail and road bridges currently being exchanged via internet stir a feeling of nostalgia for the years gone by.

Our present experience of travelling through Attock would suggest that history has indeed done us a great injustice by giving over the control of such fabulous routes of our existence to the people unworthy of the noble trust. The present master custodian of our ancient route to the eastern world appears to be the Attock police, and to a lesser but equally troublesome extent a plethora of other security agencies. Employed to be protector of our lives and properties, these guardians of law are a continuous source of mental, physical and financial strain for the travelers passing through more than half a dozen permanent and many more temporary check posts.

The worst, in fact nightmarish, halt comes at a check post manned by the Attock police just across the relatively newly built bridge on the river. At this point passengers traveling from KP are exposed to a most grueling search by the Attock police and their henchmen in the police fatigues. It would not be improper to equate this check post to a de factor border between two countries with some simmering old scores to settles. In terms of illicit financial benefits attached to being posted at the Attock police check post, it could be placed alongside with the Torkham check post dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan on the Durand Line. It is thus little surprising if posting at his point must be one of the most sought after enterprises with the police officials, be they from the elite premier Pakistan Police Service.

In the past on quite a few occasions some self-respecting government functionaries in KP took the treatment at this check post as an insult to the combined honour of the people of KP, and to repair that they went beyond the call of their duty. In one particularly memorable incident of audacity in the 90s’ a provincial minister and a staunch PPP enthusiast, the late Qamar Abbas, raided the Attock check post in company with a television crew. The incident is remembered by all and sundry as an act of rare bravado and a great expose to his day. Private people donning police uniforms were caught on camera fleecing gullible commuters at gun points. It led to a great outcry in the Punjab province which was at that time under the rule of a rival political party. They termed it as an act of interference in the affairs of another province, but Mr Abbas remained adamant and won plaudits from his people.

The nineties were another age, another century. In 1997 when the flour crisis got out of control, one saw rangers assisting the Punjab Police at the exits to check the movement of food grain from the Punjab province. They literally snatched five kilogram bags containing flour from the labourers returning to their homes in the then Frontier from their places of works in Punjab. It was a human tragedy of colossal proportions, but did not get much notice. Those who suffered forgot their sufferings equally easily owing to their forgiving and gentle nature.

Before that Mr Abbas’s adventure had the desired effect, if even for a short time. The brutal Attock police check post disappeared for a while, and the people of KP took a sigh of relief. But it reappeared sooner than later and with a vengeance. Apparently, in the eyes of Attock Police anybody traveling to or from KP is a potential carrier of something evil and hence a legitimate target for harassment. There is now not just the Attock check post to hit at the vulnerable people of KP, but several more including two on the entry and exit points on the Peshawar-Islamabad Motorway, and at least two on the road to Hazara.

On a hot and excessively sultry day this late August, one encountered a so called anti-terrorism squad of the Punjab Police checking the registration papers of vehicles plying on the Hazara-Hasanabdal Road. Dressed in black fatigues marked with terror in bold letters, the so called law enforcement personnel were indeed terrorizing motorists and their families by jumping right in front of their vehicles from both sides of the narrow single carriageway.

It is not an unusual sight to behold and experience on the GT Road with personnel of different law enforcement agencies discharging duties otherwise not included in their assigned TORs. Thus the police could very well be observed checking the smuggling of thermoses and electric bulbs and the anti-terror squads checking the license documents of the motorists.

Seen from a distance, or one’s position of relative comfort in an air-conditioned car, it is a most familiar pantomime taking place on our roads with policemen engaged in a war of gestures with their hapless victims. It only gets more prominent at the Attock police check post. Profusely sweating policemen with their khaki trousers hanging on the edge of their waistlines could be observed weighing the capacity of their objects of prey to cough up. It is on such occasions when one wonders, how do the officers leading these cops look back on their stints when they advance in rank and age?