The hot frontier

Of all the flashpoints in the world, Pakistan’s tribal areas in the north-west are the hottest frontier, these days. For quite a while, now, the defence forces have been engaged there in pacifying the militants considered to be a threat to the national and international peace. As the attention of the world is focused on the outcome of this battle, many in the West, particularly the US are getting impatient with the efforts and strategy of the Pakistani state in this regard as they eagerly look towards a swift solution. Such people are either naive or totally ignorant of the history of warfare in this area.
To expect a resource-constrained Pakistan to smash the tribal rebels in a jiffy is unfair and unrealistic because even the British Empire – the mightiest of all the empires in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries – with immense financial resources at its disposal and great military traditions was never able to completely subdue the tribal warriors. This can be understood from the fact that in the two-decade period from 1879 to 1900, the British had to undertake twenty-one punitive military expeditions in the tribal region.
In replica of the challenge faced by the Pakistani military, today; the British Indian Army also had to conduct two campaigns in Waziristan (1919-20) and (1936-7) and one in Mohmand (1935). The intensity of the resistance from Mahsud and Wazir lashkars in the (1919-20) can be imagined from the ‘butcher’s bill’: the British force had 366 dead, 1683 wounded and 237 missing. Sixteen years later, in the same area, the uprising of just four thousand warring tribesmen was so severe that the British had to deploy over sixty thousand troops for pacification.
Those sitting in the cozy capitals of the West desiring quick fix of the ongoing hill warfare probably do not realise that it is an altogether ‘different’ warfare and they better read the accounts of those British officers, who fought in this region for years. One such account of 1933 published in the Journal of the United Service Institution of India inferred that the military training and equipment devised for ‘civilised’ European warfare were not suitable for tribal engagements. So, for many British, the tribal warfare was not ‘civilised’ but savage. One instance of tribal savagery recorded in history was witnessed by John Nicholson (who went on to become a general at the time of the 1857 Indian War of Independence), whose brother Alexander Nicholson, a soldier in the British ‘Army of Retribution’ in 1842, had his body badly mutilated and the hacked genitals stuffed in his mouth by the predatory tribesmen.
The tribesmen remained a continuous pain in the neck of imperial Britain. The British generals tried every sophisticated weapon in their armoury against them. For example, in 1919, they tried tanks and investigated the employment of gas warfare. In 1925, Captain Mervyn Gompertz talked about the use of the Lewis gun to increase the fire effect; the motor vehicle to speed up the operations; the wireless telegraphy for quick communication; and the glider in the air to assist the infantry on the ground. A decade later, the Royal Air Force (RAF) conducted tactical exercises in Rawalpindi and Kanpur to support ground forces in mountain warfare. To ensure the quick movement of the soldiers in the hills, the amounts of ammunition and equipment carried by soldiers were reduced and instead of heavy ammunition boots, they were allowed to wear ‘chappals’ from 1934 onwards.
The unusual nature of the tribal challenge compelled the British to introduce institutional changes to train the soldiers. After suffering heavy casualties in the 1897-98 Tirah campaign, specialised official manuals for mountain warfare were produced and the Mountain Warfare School was set at Abbottabad. To acquaint the British troops garrisoned in NWFP and Balochistan with the ‘uncivilised’ warfare, a special pamphlet was issued that laid down the general principles of military operations against the tribesmen. As all soldiers were expected to fight in the tribal territories, therefore, ‘the Manual of Operations on the North- West Frontier of India’ was distributed among the units of the army throughout the subcontinent in 1925. So unique and diverse was the nature of the tribal battles that several unofficial textbooks were written by experienced Indian Army officers to enrich their junior colleagues that might have to fight on the north-western border, one day.
To gain access to the heart of the tribal areas, the British undertook road construction which also permitted the use of lorries (rather than mules) to transport troops, supplies, heavy artillery and deploy tanks. Side by side ran the project of railways in the Khyber Agency which was completed in 1926 due to a masterful survey by Lieutenant- Colonel Gordon Hearn and the building of three miles of tunnels, hundreds of bridges, culverts and the shifting of about three million cubic yards of rock.
After shedding much blood and spending enormous treasure, the British finally realised that the military option was not the only solution to the tribal problem. Instead of turning the tribesmen into permanent enemies, a need was felt to convert them into friends of the Raj. This approach was pioneered by Colonel Frederick Keen in a journal of the Indian army in1923, when he argued that “We should realise, as we have perhaps not done in the past, that in fighting the Pathans we are engaging in civil war and that it is to our advantage that enemies of today should be turned into our friends of tomorrow.” During the next ten years, the British pursed the policy of winning the “hearts and minds” and were quite successful in cultivating friendship with many tribes in this otherwise volatile region. That is why, when the Waziristan campaign was undertaken in 1936 and six squadrons of (RAF) were employed in the largest air operation ever conducted in India, the British government imposed clear restrictions on bombers whereby they were to avoid the bombing of non-combatants as well as attacks on the friendly tribes during the air operations. Such have been the intricacies of tribal warfare. If the British Empire with all its might could not impose a military solution during a century of its imperial rule, the West should not assume that the Pakistani state has a magical wand to bring peace in its tribal areas with the swish of a hand.

The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]