[News] Empire's Paranoia About the Pashtuns

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/

posted 2009-07-27 16:10:49

Juan Cole, Empire's Paranoia About the Pashtuns

These days, it seems as though the United States 
is conducting its wars in places remarkably 
unfamiliar to most Americans. Its CIA-operated 
drone aircraft, for instance, have been regularly 
firing missiles 
<http://news.antiwar.com/2009/07/17/us-drone-strike-kills-five-in-north-waziristan-2/>into 
Waziristan, where, in 
<http://news.antiwar.com/2009/06/23/at-least-65-killed-as-us-drones-attack-south-waziristan-funeral-procession/>one 
strike in June, an estimated 80 tribespeople were 
killed while at a funeral procession for the dead 
from a previous drone strike.

Waziristan? If you asked most Americans whether 
their safety depended on killing people in 
Waziristan, they might wonder what you were 
talking about. But not in Washington, where 
Waziristan, the Swat Valley, the Lower Dir 
district, the Federally Administered Tribal 
Areas, also known as FATA, and the North-West 
Frontier Province, among other places you'd 
previously never heard of, are not only on the 
collective mind but evidently considered crucial 
to the well-being, and even existence, of the 
United States. Perhaps that's simply the new 
norm. After all, we now live in a thoroughly 
ramped-up atmosphere in which "American national 
security" -- defined to include just about 
anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth 
-- is the eternal preoccupation of a vast 
national security bureaucracy whose bread and 
butter increasingly seems to be worst-case scenarios.

The ongoing 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175069/everyday_is_doomsday_in_washington>hysteria 
about lightly settled, mountainous Pashtun tribal 
lands in Pakistan on or near the ill-defined 
Afghan border might seem unique to our imperial 
moment. So imagine my surprise when Juan Cole 
told me it actually has a history more than a 
century old. And there's nothing like a little 
history lesson, is there, to put the strange 
hysterias of our moment into perspective?

Cole has just written a whole book about 
America's "Islam Anxiety," 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230607543/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Engaging 
the Muslim World, and his invaluable website 
<http://www.juancole.com/>Informed Comment is one 
of my first daily on-line stops -- so who better 
to offer a little history lesson in imperial 
delusions of grandeur and peril? If you feel like 
a more extensive lesson in what to make of the 
gamut of issues where the U.S. and the Muslim 
world meet, or rather collide, don't miss his 
book. It's a continual eye-opener. Tom



Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!

A Century of Frenzy over the North-West Frontier
By Juan Cole

WHAT, what, what,
What's the news from Swat?
Sad news,
Bad news,
Comes by the cable led
Through the Indian Ocean's bed,
Through the Persian Gulf, the Red
Sea and the Med-
Iterranean -- he 's dead;
The Ahkoond is dead!

-- George Thomas Lanigan

Despite being among the poorest people in the 
world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of 
what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a 
series of frights into distant Western capitals 
for more than a century. That's certainly one for the record books.

And it hasn't ended yet. Not by a long shot. Not 
with the headlines in the U.S. papers about the 
depredations of the Pakistani Taliban, not with 
the CIA's drone aircraft striking gatherings in 
Waziristan and elsewhere near the Afghan border. 
This spring, for instance, one counter-terrorism 
analyst stridently (and wholly implausibly) 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR2009031903038.html>warned 
that "in one to six months" we could "see the 
collapse of the Pakistani state," at the hands of 
the bloodthirsty Taliban, while Secretary of 
State Hillary Clinton 
<http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1895167,00.html>called 
the situation in Pakistan a "mortal danger" to global security.

What most observers don't realize is that the 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175069>doomsday 
rhetoric about this region at the top of the 
world is hardly new. It's at least 100 years old. 
During their campaigns in the northwest in the 
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 
British officers, journalists and editorialists 
sounded much like American strategists, analysts, 
and pundits of the present moment. They construed 
the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as 
the new Normans, a dire menace to London that 
threatened to overturn the British Empire.

The young Winston S. Churchill even wrote a book 
in 1898, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, 
about a late-nineteenth-century British campaign 
in Pashtun territory, based on his earlier 
journalism there. At that time, London ruled 
British India, comprising all of what is now 
India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but the British 
hold on the mountainous northwestern region 
abutting Afghanistan and the Himalayas was 
tenuous. In trying to puzzle out -- like modern 
analysts -- why the predecessors of the Pakistani 
Taliban posed such a huge challenge to empire, 
Churchill singled out two reasons for the martial 
prowess of those Pashtun tribesmen. One was 
Islam, of which he 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=fqX-Dy9VoQkC&lpg=PA205&dq=Pathans%20%22Winston%20Churchill%22&lr=&num=30&as_brr=3&pg=PA18>wrote, 
"That religion, which above all others was 
founded and propagated by the sword -- the tenets 
and principles of which are instinct with 
incentives to slaughter and which in three 
continents has produced fighting breeds of men -- 
stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism."

Churchill actually revealed his prejudices here. 
In fact, for the most part, Islam spread 
peacefully in what is now Pakistan, by the 
preaching and poetry of mystical Sufi leaders, 
and most Muslims have not been more warlike in 
history than, for example, Anglo-Saxons.

For his second reason, he settled on the 
environment in which those tribesmen were 
supposed to thrive. "The inhabitants of these 
wild but wealthy valleys" are, he explained, in 
"a continual state of feud and strife." In 
addition, he insisted, they were early adopters 
of military technology, so that their weapons 
were not as primitive as was common among other 
"races" at what he referred to as "their stage" 
of development. "To the ferocity of the Zulu are 
added the craft of the Redskin and the 
marksmanship of the Boer," he 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=fqX-Dy9VoQkC&lpg=PA205&dq=Pathans%20%22Winston%20Churchill%22&lr=&num=30&as_brr=3&pg=PA17>warned. 


In these tribesmen, he concluded, "the world is 
presented with that grim spectacle, 'the strength 
of civilization without its mercy.'" The Pashtun 
were, he added, excellent marksmen, who could 
fell the unwary Westerner with a state-of-the-art 
breech-loading rifle. "His assailant, 
approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity 
of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the 
nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age."

Ironically, given Churchill's description of 
them, when four decades later the Pashtuns joined 
the freedom movement against British rule that 
led to the formation of independent Pakistan and 
India in 1947, politicized Pashtuns were notable 
not for savagery, but for joining Mahatma 
Gandhi's campaign of non-violent non-cooperation.

Nevertheless, the Churchillian image of 
primitive, fanatical brutality armed with cutting 
edge technology, which singled Pashtuns out as an 
extraordinary peril to the West, survived the 
Victorian era and has now made it into the 
headlines of our own newspapers. Bruce Riedel, a 
former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, was 
tasked by the Obama administration to evaluate 
security threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 
Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times 
reported breathlessly on July 17th that Riedel had concluded:

"A jihadist victory in Pakistan, meaning the 
takeover of the nation by a militant Sunni 
movement led by the Taliban... would create the 
greatest threat the United States has yet to face 
in its war on terror... [and] is now a real 
possibility in the foreseeable future."

The article, in true Churchillian fashion, is 
<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/17/armageddon-alarm-bell-rings/>entitled 
"Armageddon Alarm Bell Rings."

In fact, few intelligence predictions could have 
less chance of coming true. In the 2008 
parliamentary election, the Pakistani public 
voted in centrist parties, some of them secular, 
virtually ignoring the Muslim fundamentalist 
parties. Today in Pakistan, there are about 24 
million Pashtuns, a linguistic ethnic group that 
speaks Pashto. Another 13 million live across the 
British-drawn "Durand Line," the border -- mostly 
unacknowledged by Pashtuns -- between Pakistan 
and southern Afghanistan. Most Taliban derive 
from this group, but the vast majority of 
Pashtuns are not Taliban and do not much care for the Muslim radicals.

The Taliban force that was handily defeated this 
spring by the Pakistani army in a swift campaign 
in the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier 
Province, amounted to a mere 4,000 men. The 
Pakistani military is 550,000 strong and has a 
similar number of reservists. It has tanks, 
artillery, and fighter jets. The Taliban's appeal 
is limited to that country's Pashtun ethnic 
group, about 14% of the population and, from 
everything we can tell, it is a minority taste 
even among them. The Taliban can commit terrorism 
and destabilize, but they cannot take over the Pakistani government.

Some Western analysts worry that the Taliban 
could unite with disgruntled junior officers of 
the Pakistani Army, who could come to power in a 
putsch and so offer their Taliban allies access 
to sophisticated weaponry. Successful Pakistani 
coups, however, have been made by the chief of 
staff at the top, not by junior officers, since 
the military is quite disciplined. Far from 
coup-making to protect the Taliban, the military 
has actually spent the past year in hard slogging 
against them in the Federally Administered Tribal 
Area of Bajaur and more recently in Swat.

Today's fantasy of a nuclear-armed Taliban is the 
modern equivalent of Churchill's anxiety about 
those all-conquering, ultramodern Pashtun 
riflemen with the instincts of savages.

Frontier Ward and Watch

On a recent research trip to the India Office 
archives in London to plunge into British 
military memoirs of the Waziristan campaigns in 
the first half of the twentieth century, I was 
overcome by a vivid sense of déjà vu. The British 
in India fought three wars with Afghanistan, 
losing the first two decisively, and barely 
achieving a draw in the third in 1919. Among the 
Afghan king Amanullah's demands during the third 
war were that the Pashtun tribes of the frontier 
be allowed to give him their fealty and that 
Britain permit Afghanistan to conduct a sovereign 
foreign policy. He lost on the first demand, but 
won on the second and soon signed a treaty of 
friendship with the newly established Soviet Union.

Disgruntled Pashtun tribes in Waziristan, a 
no-man's land sandwiched between the Afghan 
border and the formal boundary of the 
British-ruled North-West Frontier Province, 
preferred Kabul's rule to that of London, and 
launched their own attacks on the British, 
beginning in 1919. Putting down the rebellious 
Wazir and Mahsud tribes of this region would, in 
the end, cost imperial Britain's treasury three 
times as much as had the Third Anglo-Afghan War itself.

On May 2, 1921, long after the Pashtun tribesmen 
should have been pacified, the Manchester 
Guardian carried a panicky news release by the 
British Viceroy of India on a Mahsud attack. 
"Enemy activity continues throughout," the 
alarmed message from Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, the 
Marquess of Reading, said, implying that a 
massive uprising on the subcontinent was 
underway. In fact, the action at that point was 
in only a small set of villages in one part of 
Waziristan, itself but one of several otherwise relatively quiet tribal areas.

<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230607543/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
[]
On the 23rd of that month, a large band of Mahsud 
struck "convoys" near the village of Piazha. 
British losses included a British officer killed, 
four British and two Indian officers wounded, and 
seven Indian troops killed, with 26 wounded. On 
the 24th, "a picket [sentry outpost] near Suidgi 
was ambushed, and lost nine killed and seven 
wounded." In nearby Zhob, the British received 
support from friendly Pashtun tribes engaged in a 
feud with what they called the "hostiles," and -- 
a modern touch -- "aeroplanes" weighed in as 
well. They were, it was said, "cooperating," 
though this too was an exaggeration. At the time, 
the Royal Air Force (RAF) was eager to prove its 
colonial worth on the imperial frontiers in ways 
that extended beyond simple reconnaissance, even 
though in 1921 it maintained but a single 
airplane at Peshawar, the nearest city, which had 
"a hole in its wing." By 1925, the RAF had gotten 
its wish and would 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=9QYNAQAAIAAJ&lpg=PA47&ots=aCenNWv_BX&dq=Mahsud%20Soviets&pg=PA49>drop 
150 tons of bombs on the Mahsud tribe.

On July 5, 1921, a newspaper report in the 
Allahabad Pioneer gives a sense of the tactics 
the British deployed against the "hostiles." One 
center of rebellion was the village of Makin, 
inhabited by that same Mahsud tribe, which 
apparently wanted its own irrigation system and 
freedom from British interference. The British 
Indian army held the nearby village of Ladka. 
"Makin was shelled from Ladka on the 20th June," the report ran.

The tribal fighters responded by beginning to 
move their flocks, though their families 
remained. British archival sources report that a 
Muslim holy man, or faqir, attempted to give the 
people of Makin hope by laying a spell on the 
6-inch howitzer shells and pledging 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 
<http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Politics/07-Jul-2009/Battle-in-Swat-hots-up>report 
on the Swat valley campaign which might have come 
right out of the early twentieth century. Keep in 
mind that this was a campaign into which the 
Obama administration forced the Pakistani 
government to save itself and the American 
position in the Greater Middle East, and 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, U.S. Secretary of State 
Hillary Clinton 
<http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/126071.htm>said 
on July 14th, "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, Then and Now

On July 21, 1921, a "correspondent" for the 
Allahabad Pioneer -- as anonymous as he was 
vehement -- explained how some firefights in 
Waziristan might indeed be consequential 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 then 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 U.S. such as 
<http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2008-04/2008-04-30-voa73.cfm?CFID=257284066&CFTOKEN=18818985&jsessionid=8830d80a1e4919e93fa8c4d5797a266a764a>Iran 
(incredibly, sometimes charged by the U.S. 
military with supporting the hyper-Sunni, 
Shiite-hating Taliban in Afghanistan). 
Occasionally in this decade, attempts have even 
been made to tie 
<http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Russia-funding-resurgent-Taliban.2426401.jp>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 reinventing the local 
tribal levy, loyal to foreign capitals and paid 
by them, as a way of keeping the hostiles in 
check. The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations 
<http://www.cfr.org/publication/17686>reported 
late last year that "U.S. 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 twenty-first 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 twentieth 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 U.S. and NATO 
officials -- or even with Iran or Russia -- has 
focused Washington's and Brussels's 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 U.S. 
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 twenty-first 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, 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230607543/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>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 
<http://dir.salon.com/topics/juan_cole/>Salon.com. 
He has written, edited, or translated 15 books, 
and authored 65 journal articles and chapters. He 
is the proprietor of the 
<HTTP://WWW.JUANCOLE.COM/>Informed Comment weblog on current affairs.

Copyright 2009 Juan Cole




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