Those Imperial Brits

I have started reading a fascinating book about Afghanistan, actually about a person of Afghanistan. The book by Eknath Easwaran is entitled Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, a Man to Match his Mountains  (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, c.1984 and 1999.) Badshah Khan, who lived from 1890 to 1988, was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi.

I bought the book after 9-11, but had not read it. I recently spotted it on our bookshelf and decided that with ongoing U.S. military activities and current offensive in Afghanistan, it was time to read it.

What I just read, in the first part of the book, in the third chapter, I believe I need to share. We need to pay attention to history and learn from it. Seeds have always been sown in the past which bear fruit later on. The British of the Empire had particular actions in Afghanistan which are continuing to play out and which we even seem to continue. Like today, this involved foreign policy doves and hawks and geopolitics.

What I just read and want to pass on involves the people we call today the Pashtuns, the primary ethnic group of Afghanistan that forms the basis of the Taliban. The British referred to these people as Pathans (rhyming with batons). Their lands involved parts of Afghanistan and what we call today, Pakistan. The Pashtuns have also been called, Paktuns--hence, the name Pakistan.

I quote from the book:

The borders between Afghanistan and India were ill defined and not easily defended. When Russian troops clashed with the Afghans in 1885, the Conservatives insisted it was Britain's's 'bounden duty'  to build a permanent buffer zone between British India and Imperial Russia along a secure border. The obvious location for the border was the range of mountains between Afghanistan and British India. High and rugged, their narrow passes were easily defended. The only problem was that this placed the buffer garrisons squarely within the homelands of the Pathans. Not even Forward School hawks were eager to arouse Pathan ire. But the protectors of the Empire felt that they had no choice: India, Britain's prize possession, must be defended at all costs.

In the autumn of 1893, Lieutenant Henry Durand was sent to Kabul to negotiate a border between Afghanistan and British India that would effectively hand over to the British most of the Pathan homelands, historically part of the Afghan empire. The proposed border--the 'Durand Line'--cut through the heart of the Pathan nation, leaving a third of all Pathans in Afghanistan.

The Afghan amir [ruler] warned the British that they had more to lose from the settlement than he did. 'If you should cut the Pathan tribes away from my domain,' he wrote the viceroy in desperation, 'they will not be of any use either to you or me. You will always be engaged in fighting them or be involved in some other trouble with them and they will always go on plundering.'

The British forced the issue. ... (pages 47, 48)

A few pages over in the book, the author quoted another author on Annie Besant, an English woman in India writing on the British Frontier War:

We loudly proclaimed that we had no quarrel with the Pathan nation, yet we burnt their villages, destroyed their crops, stole their cattle, looted their homes, hanged their men as 'rebels' if they resisted, while we drove out their women and children to perish in the snow.

From out of the darkness moans of suffering reach us, and we shrink in horror from the work which is being done in our names. These starved babes wail out our condemnation. These frozen women cry aloud against us. These stiffened corpses, these fire-blackened districts, these snow-covered, blood-stained plains appear to humanity to curse us.

Englishmen, with wives nestled warm in your bosom, remember these Pathan husbands, maddened by their wrongs. Englishwomen, with babes smiling on your breasts, think of these sister-women, bereft of their little ones. The Pathan loves wife and children as you do. He also is husband and father. To him also the home is happy, the hearth sacred. To you he cries from his desolate fireside and from his ravaged land. In your hands is his cause. (pages 52, 53)

Here is a short video to update: