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<font size=3><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/<br><br>
</a>posted 2009-07-27 16:10:49<br>
</font><h1><b>Juan Cole, Empire's Paranoia About the
Pashtuns</b></h1><font size=3>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
<a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2009/07/17/us-drone-strike-kills-five-in-north-waziristan-2/">
into Waziristan</a>, where, in
<a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2009/06/23/at-least-65-killed-as-us-drones-attack-south-waziristan-funeral-procession/">
one strike</a> in June, an estimated 80 tribespeople were killed while at
a funeral procession for the dead from a previous drone strike. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
The ongoing
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175069/everyday_is_doomsday_in_washington">
hysteria</a> 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? <br><br>
Cole has just written a whole book about America's "Islam
Anxiety,"
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230607543/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
Engaging the Muslim World</a>, and his invaluable website
<a href="http://www.juancole.com/">Informed Comment</a> 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. <i>Tom</i> <br><br>
<br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd><h2><b>Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!</b></h2>
<dd><font size=3>A Century of Frenzy over the North-West Frontier<br>
</b>
<dd>By Juan Cole <br><br>
<dd>WHAT, what, what, <br>
<dd>What's the news from Swat? <br>
<dd>Sad news,<br>
<dd>Bad news, <br>
<dd>Comes by the cable led <br>
<dd>Through the Indian Ocean's bed,<br>
<dd>Through the Persian Gulf, the Red<br>
<dd>Sea and the Med-<br>
<dd>Iterranean -- he 's dead;<br>
<dd>The Ahkoond is dead! <br><br>
<dd>-- George Thomas Lanigan</i> <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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)
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR2009031903038.html">
warned</a> 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
<a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1895167,00.html">
called</a> the situation in Pakistan a "mortal danger" to
global security. <br><br>
<dd>What most observers don't realize is that the
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175069">doomsday rhetoric</a>
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. <br><br>
<dd>The young Winston S. Churchill even wrote a book in 1898, The Story
of the Malakand Field Force</i>, 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
<a href="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</a>, "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." <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="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</a>. <br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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</i> reported breathlessly on
July 17th that Riedel had concluded: <br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"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."<br><br>
</dl>
<dd>The article, in true Churchillian fashion, is
<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/17/armageddon-alarm-bell-rings/">
entitled</a> "Armageddon Alarm Bell Rings." <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Frontier Ward and Watch</b> <br><br>
<dd>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</i>. 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.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>On May 2, 1921, long after the Pashtun tribesmen should have been
pacified, the Manchester Guardian</i> 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. <br><br>
<dd>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230607543/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
<img src="http://www.tomdispatch.com/img/colecover.gif" alt="[]"></a>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
<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=9QYNAQAAIAAJ&lpg=PA47&ots=aCenNWv_BX&dq=Mahsud%20Soviets&pg=PA49">
drop</a> 150 tons of bombs on the Mahsud tribe. <br><br>
<dd>On July 5, 1921, a newspaper report in the Allahabad Pioneer</i>
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. <br><br>
<dd>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</i>, 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</i> or akhonds</i>, 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?") <br><br>
<dd>The faqir's</i> spells were to no avail. The shelling, the
Pioneer</i> 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. <br><br>
<dd>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</i>
published a typical daily
<a href="http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Politics/07-Jul-2009/Battle-in-Swat-hots-up">
report</a> 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: <br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"[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."<br><br>
</dl>
<dd>The unfamiliar place names, the attention to confiscated mules, and
the fear of tribal militancy differed little from the reports in the
Pioneer</i> from nearly a century before. Echoing Viceroy Rufus Isaacs,
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
<a href="http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/126071.htm">said</a>
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."
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>A Paranoid View of the Pashtuns, Then and Now</b> <br><br>
<dd>On July 21, 1921, a "correspondent" for the Allahabad
Pioneer</i> -- 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." <br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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." <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2008-04/2008-04-30-voa73.cfm?CFID=257284066&CFTOKEN=18818985&jsessionid=8830d80a1e4919e93fa8c4d5797a266a764a">
Iran</a> (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
<a href="http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Russia-funding-resurgent-Taliban.2426401.jp">
the Russian bear</a> once again to the Pashtun tribes. <br><br>
<dd>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</i>
reported that the British government of India had determined to implement
a new system in Waziristan, dependent on tribal mercenaries. <br><br>
<dd>"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."
<br><br>
<dd>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
<a href="http://www.cfr.org/publication/17686">reported late last
year</a> 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.
<br><br>
<dd>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.
<br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>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. <br><br>
<dd>Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the
University of Michigan. His most recent book,
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0230607543/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
Engaging the Muslim World</a> (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 <a href="http://dir.salon.com/topics/juan_cole/">Salon.com</a>.
He has written, edited, or translated 15 books, and authored 65 journal
articles and chapters. He is the proprietor of the
<a href="HTTP://WWW.JUANCOLE.COM/">Informed Comment</a> weblog on current
affairs.<br><br>
</i>
</dl>Copyright 2009 Juan Cole <br><br>
<br><br>
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