Notes from a war zone

When Winston Churchill, as a young cavalry officer, found himself fighting the fierce tribesmen who inhabited the imposing mountainous terrain that defined the Indian empire’s northern border, he provided a graphic account of the brutality of the enemy the British force encountered.

When Winston Churchill, as a young cavalry officer, found himself fighting the fierce tribesmen who inhabited the imposing mountainous terrain that defined the Indian empire’s northern border, he provided a graphic account of the brutality of the enemy the British force encountered.

‘At a thousand yards the traveller falls wounded by the well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle,’ Churchill wrote in his account of the 1897 campaign, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. ‘His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the 19th century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.’

Visiting this same inhospitable area more than a century later, I find that very little has changed. In the early 21st century, the unenviable task of subduing the heirs to Churchill’s foes now falls to the Pakistani military, which is currently engaged in a brutal campaign against the Taleban in the independent tribal agencies that straddle the country’s border with Afghanistan.

A Pakistani general I met recounted how, in one particularly gruesome incident, the local tribesmen had cut open the head of a young Pakistani soldier they captured, ripped out his brains and fed them to a dog. In Churchill’s time, the British eventually succeeded in defeating the local tribes. But as Churchill himself noted at the conclusion of the campaign, ‘Never return to fight in Afghanistan again. If we do, the whole Muslim world will turn against the British.’

Unfortunately the British, the Americans and their Nato allies have been given little choice in the matter as this region is now the epicentre of the war against Islamist terrorism.