When Winston Churchill, as a young cavalry officer, found himself fighting the fierce tribesmen who inhabited the imposing mountainous terrain that defined the Indian empire’s northern border, he provided a graphic account of the brutality of the enemy the British force encountered.
When Winston Churchill, as a young cavalry officer, found himself fighting the fierce tribesmen who inhabited the imposing mountainous terrain that defined the Indian empire’s northern border, he provided a graphic account of the brutality of the enemy the British force encountered.
‘At a thousand yards the traveller falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle,’ Churchill wrote in his account of the 1897 campaign, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. ‘His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the 19th century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.’
Visiting this same inhospitable area more than a century later, I find that very little has changed. In the early 21st century, the unenviable task of subduing the heirs to Churchill’s foes now falls to the Pakistani military, which is currently engaged in a brutal campaign against the Taleban in the independent tribal agencies that straddle the country’s border with Afghanistan.
A Pakistani general I met recounted how, in one particularly gruesome incident, the local tribesmen had cut open the head of a young Pakistani soldier they captured, ripped out his brains and fed them to a dog. In Churchill’s time, the British eventually succeeded in defeating the local tribes. But as Churchill himself noted at the conclusion of the campaign, ‘Never return to fight in Afghanistan again. If we do, the whole Muslim world will turn against the British.’
Unfortunately the British, the Americans and their Nato allies have been given little choice in the matter as this region is now the epicentre of the war against Islamist terrorism. The North-West Frontier, where the young Winston won his spurs, forms the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. On the Afghan side there are now in excess of 100,000 Nato troops committed to destroying the Taleban’s powerbase; on the other side the Pakistanis, who have nominal control over the region, are trying to prevent the Taleban and their followers from overrunning their own country.
In fact Pakistan’s entry into this brutal conflict is relatively recent. For years after the September 11 attacks the Pakistani government stubbornly resisted Western pressure to intervene in the tribal agencies for the very good reason that it fully understood the pitfalls of meddling in an area that caused nothing but grief.
Although Pakistan technically has jurisdiction over this remote region, known collectively as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, the local tribes, who are predominantly Pashtun, are literally a law unto themselves. And they pay no heed to the Durand Line, the artificial demarcation of Pakistan’s 1,610-mile border with Afghanistan, which was established by the British in the late 19th century. The local Pashtun traverse freely through the multitude of unseen passes that link the tribal territories to Afghanistan. It was with the help of some of these tribes that Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and their followers escaped in 2001 and established a new base on the other side of the Afghan border.
One of the other striking features Churchill recorded during his sojourn among the Pashtuns was their inability to get on with one another, let alone the outside world. ‘Tribe wars with tribe,’ he wrote. ‘Every man’s hand is against the other and all are against the stranger... the state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity.’
In modern-day Bajaur this has manifested itself with one of the main tribes, the Mamund, supporting the Taleban while their main rivals, the Salazai, have been more inclined to support the Pakistani authorities. Unravelling this complex tribal web is essential to Western hopes of success in its campaign to destroy the militants’ infrastructure and return the region to something approaching normality. No wonder a visitor recently found General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, immersed in Churchill’s book.
The Pakistanis have certainly exploited these tribal divisions to their advantage in Bajaur, as I discovered when their commanders took me to see the area they have recently cleared of Taleban insurgents. Churchill took a dim view of the Taleban’s forebears, describing them as ‘a host of wandering Talib-ul-ulms who live free at the expense of the people’. Colonel Nauman Saeed, the commander of the Bajaur Scouts, which have spearheaded the campaign to remove the Taleban, holds a similar view, calling them ‘miscreants’ who had the temerity to threaten the viability of the Pakistani state.
During the military offensive, Col Saeed took good care not to cause harm in Salazai territory, which has suffered hardly any damage in the fighting. The same cannot be said in Mamund territory, where the tribe has paid a terrible price for supporting the Taleban. At least 12 villages have been razed to the ground by the Pakistanis, and many locals were among the estimated 2,400 fighters killed. Churchill lamented ‘the punitive devastation’ visited on rebel villages by British forces. The Pakistanis appear to have had no qualms about repeating the tactic.
But even though the Pakistani military has inflicted a significant defeat on the Taleban in Bajaur, depriving them of a vital refuge, there is frustration that a significant number of Taleban fighters have been spirited away across the border by their Pashtun allies to Afghanistan, where they are now living under the protection of a local Pashtun governor.
In an ideal world, Nato would have apprehended the fleeing Taleban fighters, particularly as it was Nato that pressured the Pakistanis to launch their offensive. But then, as Churchill found, trying to impose any kind of order on a people whose first loyalty is to their tribe, and who respect neither the rules of government nor the constraints of borders, is a thankless task and one that, ultimately, will prove to be impossible.