25.
MORE TROUBLESOME TO the British than the Afghans would be the Pashtun tribesmen living on the Raj’s side of the Durand Line, which was drawn in 1896 to demarcate the border between Afghanistan and India. Britain took responsibility for this region after annexing the Punjab in 1849, but over the course of the next century it could never entirely subdue its fiercely independent and famously quarrelsome tribesmen. In a description published in 1815 and still applicable today, the British colonial official Monstuart Elphinstone, a cousin of the doomed General Elphinstone, wrote of the Pashtuns, “Their vices are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity, and obstinacy; on the other hand, they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependents, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent.”94 The similarities with the tribes of the Caucasus are not coincidental: one group of Muslim mountaineers is apt to resemble another.
The British made a distinction between the peoples of the lowlands, who could be controlled, and those of the hills, who could not. The former were incorporated into the Northwest Frontier Province, the latter remained in “tribal areas”—a division that still persists in Pakistan. The tribal “agencies,” somewhat similar to American Indian reservations, were governed by jirgas (councils of elders) administering their traditional honor code, the Pashtunwali. Ordinary law enforcement, to the extent that it existed, was undertaken by the tribal police, the Khassadars. If the tribes raided settled areas, they were liable to face a punitive expedition from locally raised militias such as the Chitral Scouts and Khyber Rifles, which were commanded by British officers on loan from the Indian Army and performed much the same role as the tribal auxilia that had secured the frontiers of the Roman Empire. If the scouts got into trouble, they could send messenger pigeons to summon help from the Indian Army and later from the Royal Air Force.95Only in the direst emergencies were British regulars called in. Political officers worked hard to avoid such contingencies, like their Roman forerunners, by a combination of suasion and subsidies—much to the consternation of warriors on both sides itching for action.
One of the most effective political officers was Colonel Sir Robert Warburton, who became known as the “king of the Khyber.” Like George Crook, he showed considerable sympathy for the people he was sent to administer and occasionally to fight. In his case, however, there was a direct family connection that was entirely lacking in the U.S. Army: despite centuries of warfare against, and interaction with, American Indians, not a single prominent army officer of the nineteenth century could claim to be descended from his foes. (William Tecumseh Sherman’s father admired the famous Indian chief, which accounted for his son’s middle name, but there was no familial connection.) Warburton, on the other hand, was the offspring of a marriage between a British officer and an Afghan woman, said to be one of Dost Muhammad’s nieces, during the First Afghan War. He was born in an Afghan fort while his father was a hostage of Akbar Khan. Although educated in England, he became fluent in all the local languages after he first arrived as a colonial administrator in Peshawar in 1870.
He would stay in the region for nearly thirty years, the last eighteen as the political officer for the Khyber, negotiating with tribesmen who were (and are) suspicious of all outsiders. “It took me years to get through this thick crust of mistrust, but what was the after-result?” he wrote in his memoirs. “For upwards of fifteen years I went unarmed amongst these people. My camp, wherever it happened to be pitched, was always guarded and protected by them. The deadliest enemies of the Khyber Range, with a long record of blood-feuds, dropped those feuds for the time being when in my camp.”96
Warburton retired in May 1897. Within months the frontier was aflame with a great uprising that he and many others were convinced could have been averted if he had still been on the job. The call to jihad was spread by religious leaders such as Sadhullah of Swat, whom the British called the “mad mullah.” (To the British it was obvious that anyone who opposed them must be mad.) Numerous forts were attacked and the Khyber Pass closed. But fortunately for the British, the Pashtun tribes were just as decentralized as the American Indians and did not coordinate their attacks, making their revolt easier to quell.
One of the expeditions sent to “thoroughly chastise the tribesmen” was the Malakand Field Force, named after the Malakand Pass, the entrance to the Swat Valley. It was commanded by the wonderfully named Major General Sir Bindon Blood and accompanied by Winston Churchill, a young cavalry officer moonlighting as a newspaper correspondent. In his first book Churchill recounted the difficulties encountered by the troops in dealing with “a roadless, broken, and undeveloped country; an absence of any strategic points; [and] a well-armed enemy with great mobility and modern rifles, who adopts guerilla tactics.” He found “that the troops can march anywhere, and do anything, except catch the enemy; and that all their movements must be attended with loss.”
The solution hit upon by the British was the same as that employed by the Americans against the Indians and by the Russians against the Chechens. Churchill recounted how in the Tirah Valley the troops “destroyed all the villages in the center of the valley, some twelve to fourteen in number, and blew up with dynamite upwards of thirty towers and forts. The whole valley was filled with the smoke, which curled upwards in dense and numerous columns, and hung like a cloud over the scene of destruction.”
When British troops did manage to catch tribesmen in the open, they wreaked devastation with their Lee-Metford rifles and exploding bullets. “No quarter was asked or given,” Churchill wrote, “and every tribesman caught, was speared or cut down at once. Their bodies lay thickly strewn about the fields. . . . It was a terrible lesson, and one which the inhabitants of Swat and Bajaur will never forget.”97
It was also a lesson that Churchill did not forget; his willingness to wage total war in World War II, including the bombing of German and Japanese cities, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, could be traced, at least in small part, to his exposure to this hard way of imperial warfare, far removed from the rules of chivalry that were supposed to govern European combat. His description of flames and destruction in the Swat Valley even anticipated future accounts of the bombing of Hamburg or Tokyo. But just as Anglo-American bombing did not break German or Japanese morale, so too the British reprisals on the Northwest Frontier did not have their intended effect. The “cruel misery” inflicted by British troops reaped what no less a personage than Field Marshal Lord Roberts described as “a rich harvest of hatred and revenge” and led to future uprisings.98
As late as the 1930s, the Indian Army officer and future novelist John Masters was describing the difficulties of dealing with the Pashtuns’ “pinpricking hit-and-run tactics” notwithstanding the considerable advances in British armaments since the days of the Malakand Field Force. “We had light automatic guns, howitzers, armored cars, tanks, and aircraft. The Pathan had none of these things . . . ,” Masters wrote in his finely wrought memoir, Bugles and a Tiger. “And when he stayed and defended something, whether a gun or a village, we trapped him and pulverized him. When he flitted and sniped, rushed and ran away, we felt as if we were using a crowbar to swat wasps.”
The ruthlessness on both sides had not diminished over the years. The Pashtuns “would usually castrate and behead” captives, Masters wrote, while the British “took few prisoners at any time, and very few indeed if there was no Political Agent about.”99 These were the wars of which Kipling wrote, “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, / And the women come to cut up what remains, / Jest roll up your rifle and blow out your brains / An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”100 On the Northwest Frontier, as on most other imperial battlefields, local fighters had no knowledge of the “laws of war” invented in the West, and Westerners had no intention of applying those laws to “savages.”
Britain’s wars against the Pashtuns lasted a century, until Indian independence in 1947 when the government of Pakistan took over the unenviable task of dealing with these “fierce men,”101 to borrow Masters’s evocative phrase. It is sometimes said that insurgents can win by not losing. But a stalemate of this sort favors the government. The British remained in control of India and reduced the Pashtuns to a minor nuisance that could be dealt with by a modest number of British volunteers overseeing armed forces composed primarily of Indians. Knowledgeable officials like Warburton, who won the tribesmen’s trust, helped keep the problem manageable.
Only in recent years, with advances in technology that allowed this isolated frontier region to become the hub of a worldwide terrorist network, has the threat from the Pashtuns turned more serious, making a containment strategy inadequate in the view of most, if not all, Western policymakers. This led the United States and its allies, including Britain, into an ambitious effort after September 11, 2001, to use a combination of drone strikes and Special Operations raids in Pakistan and conventional military operations in Afghanistan to defeat such foes as Al Qaeda and the Taliban. As NATO troops patrolled from Maiwand district in southern Afghanistan to the passes of the Hindu Kush in the east, both sites of past British battles, the echoes of history were as unsubtle as an exploding IED.