Page 2 of 2 A lesson in imperial paranoia
By Juan Cole
that they would no longer explode in the valley. (Overblown imperial anxiety
about such faqirs or akhonds, Pashtun religious leaders, inspired Victorian
satirists such as Edward Lear, who began one poem, "Who, or why, or which, or
what, Is the Akond of Swat?")
The faqir's spells were to no avail. The shelling, the Pioneer reported,
continued over the next two days, "with good results". Then on the 23rd,
"another bombardment of Makin was carried out by our 6-inch howitzers at
Ladka". This shelling "had a great moral effect", the newspaper intoned, and
revealed with satisfaction that "the inhabitants are now evacuating their
families". The particular nature of the moral effect of bombarding a civilian
village where women and children were known to be present was not explained.
Two days later, however, thanks to air
observation, the howitzers at Ladka and the guns at "Piazha camp" made a
"direct hit" on another similarly obscure village.
Such accounts of small, vicious engagements in mountainous villages with (to
British ears) outlandish names, fit oddly with the strange conviction of the
elite and the press that the fate of the empire was somehow at stake - just as
strangely as similar reports out of exactly the same area, often involving the
very same tribes, do in our own time.
On July 7, 2009, for instance, the Pakistani newspaper The Nation published a
typical daily report on the Swat valley campaign which might have come right
out of the early 20th century. Keep in mind that this was a campaign into which
the Barack Obama administration forced the Pakistani government into to save
itself and the American position in the Greater Middle East, which displaced
some two million people, risking the actual destabilization of the whole
northwestern region of Pakistan. It went in part:
[T]he security forces
during search operation at Banjut, Swat, recovered 50 mules loaded with arms
and ammunition, medicines and ration and also apprehended a few terrorists.
During search operation at Thana, an improvised explosive device (IED) went off
causing injuries to a soldier. As a result of operation at Tahirabad, Mingora,
the security forces recovered surgical equipment, nine hand grenades and office
furniture from the house of a militant.
The unfamiliar place
names, the attention to confiscated mules, and the fear of tribal militancy
differed little from the reports in the Pioneer from nearly a century before.
Echoing Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, secretary of state Clinton said on July 14, "Our
national security as well as the future of Afghanistan depends on a stable,
democratic, and economically viable Pakistan. We applaud the new Pakistani
determination to deal with the militants who threaten their democracy and our
shared security."
As in 1921, so in 2009, the skirmishes were ignored by the general public in
the West despite the frenzied assertions of politicians that the fate of the
world hung in the balance.
A paranoid view of the Pashtuns
On July 21, 1921, a "correspondent" for the Allahabad Pioneer - as anonymous as
he was vehement - explained how some firefights in Waziristan might indeed have
consequences for Western civilization. He attacked "Irresponsible Criticism" of
the military budget required to face down the Mahsud tribe. He asked, "What is
India's strategical position in the world today?" It was a leading question.
"Along hundreds of miles of her border," he warned darkly in a mammoth run-on
sentence, "are scores of thousands of hardy fighters trained to war and rapine
from their very birth, never for an instant forgetful of the soft wealth of
India's plains, all of whom would descend to harry them tomorrow if they
thought the venture safe, some of whom are determinedly at war with us even
now."
Note that he does not explain the challenge posed by the Pashtun tribes in
terms of typical military considerations, which would require attention to the
exact numbers, training, equipment, tactics and logistics of the fighters, and
which would have revealed them as no significant threat to the Indian plains,
however hard they were to control in their own territory. The "correspondent"
instead ridicules urban "pen-pushers," who little appreciate the "heavy task"
of "frontier ward and watch".
Not only were the tribes a danger in themselves, the hawkish correspondent
intoned, but "beyond India's border lies a great country [Afghanistan] with
whom we are not even yet technically at peace." Nor was that all. The
recently-established Soviet Union, with which Afghanistan had concluded a
treaty of friendship that February, loomed as the real threat behind the
radical Pashtuns. "Beyond that again is a huge mad-dog nation that acknowledges
no right save the sword, no creed save aggression, murder and loot, that will
stay at nothing to gain its end, that covets avowedly a descent upon India
above all other aims."
That then-Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, who took an extremely dim view of
colonialism and seriously considered freeing the Central Asian possessions of
the old tsarist empire, was then contemplating the rape of India is among the
least believable calumnies in imperial propaganda. The "correspondent" would
have none of it. Those, he concludes, who dare criticize the military budget
should try sweet-talking the Mahsud, the Wazir and the Bolsheviks.
In our own day as well, pundits configure the uncontrolled Pashtuns as merely
the tip of a geostrategic iceberg, with the sinister icy menace of al-Qaeda
stretching beneath, and beyond that greater challenges to the US such as Iran -
incredibly, sometimes charged by the US military with supporting the
hyper-Sunni, Shiite-hating Taliban in Afghanistan. (See
US revives talk of Iran-Taliban ties, Asia Times Online, July 7).
Occasionally in this decade, attempts have even been made to tie the Russian
bear once again to the Pashtun tribes.
In the case of the British Empire, whatever the imperial fears, the actual cost
in lives and expenditure of campaigning in the Hindu Kush mountain range was
enough to ensure that such engagements would be of relatively limited duration.
On October 26, 1921, the Pioneer reported that the British government of India
had determined to implement a new system in Waziristan, dependent on tribal
mercenaries.
"This system, which was so successfully inaugurated in the Khyber district last
year," the article explained, "is really an adaptation of the methods in vogue
40 years ago". The tribal commander provided his own weapons and equipment, and
for a fee, protected imperial lines of communication and provided security on
the roads. "Thus he has an interest in maintaining the tranquility of his
territory, and gives support to the more stable elements among the tribes when
the hotheads are apt to run amok." The system would be adopted, the article
says, to put an end to the ruinous costs of "punitive expeditions of merely
ephemeral pacificatory value".
Absent-minded empire keeps re-inventing the local tribal levy, loyal to foreign
capitals and paid by them, as a way of keeping the hostiles in check. The US
Council on Foreign Relations reported late last year that "US military
commanders are studying the feasibility of recruiting Afghan tribesmen ... to
target Taliban and al-Qaeda elements".
Taking a page from the so-called "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq, which turned Sunni
tribesmen against militants first in Anbar Province and then beyond, the
strategic about-face in Afghanistan would seek to extend power from Kabul to
the country's myriad tribal militias. Likewise, the Pakistani government has
attempted to deploy tribal fighters against the Taliban in the Federally
Administered areas such as Bajaur. It remains to be seen whether this strategy
can succeed.
Both in the era between the two world wars and again in the early 21st century,
the Pashtun peoples have been objects of anxiety in world capitals out of all
proportion to the security challenge they actually pose. As it turned out, the
real threat to the British Isles in the 20th century emanated from one of what
Churchill called their "civilized" European neighbors. Nothing the British
tried in the North-West Frontier and its hinterland actually worked. By the
1940s the British hold on the tribal agencies and frontier regions was shakier
than ever before, and the tribes more assertive. After the British were forced
out of the subcontinent in 1947, London's anxieties about the Pashtuns and
their world-changing potential abruptly evaporated.
Today, we are again hearing that the Waziris and the Mahsuds are dire threats
to Western civilization. The tribal struggle for control of obscure villages in
the foothills of the Himalayas is being depicted as a life-and-death matter for
the North Atlantic world. Again, there is aerial surveillance, bombing,
artillery fire, and - this time - displacement of civilians on a scale no
British viceroy ever contemplated.
In 1921, vague threats to the British Empire from a small, weak principality of
Afghanistan and a nascent, if still supine, Soviet Union underpinned a paranoid
view of the Pashtuns. Today, the supposed entanglement with al-Qaeda of those
Pashtuns termed "Taliban" by US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
officials - or even with Iran or Russia - has focused Washington's and
Brussels' military and intelligence efforts on the highland villagers once
again.
Few of the Pashtuns in question, even the rebellious ones, are really Taliban
in the sense of militant seminary students; few so-called Taliban are entwined
with what little is left of al-Qaeda in the region; and Iran and Russia are
not, of course, actually supporting the latter. There may be plausible reasons
for which the US and NATO wish to spend blood and treasure in an attempt to
forcibly shape the politics of the 38 million Pashtuns on either side of the
Durand Line in the 21st century. That they form a dire menace to the security
of the North Atlantic world is not one of them.
Juan Cole is the Richard P Mitchell Professor of History at the
University of Michigan. His most recent book, Engaging the Muslim World (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), was published this spring. He has appeared
widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East
affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or
translated 15 books, and authored 65 journal articles and chapters. He is the
proprietor of the Informed Comment weblog on current affairs.
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