MALAKAND, PAKISTAN – In Pakistan they have have a great sense of the continuity of history.
These days, local government officials are called district coordination officers or DCOs rather than political agents, but when I visited Malakand yesterday I noted that the sign on the gate still read “Political Agent’s Residence” as it must have done since 1895 when the British took control of the area.
Above the DCO’s desk was a wooden board listing the names of all the political agents of Dir, Swat, Chitral, Bajaur and Malakand Agency. Number one was Major HA Dean, who lasted from October 1895 until 1899. The encumbent, Arshad Khan, is Number 100.
I looked for 1947, the time of independence and partition. The last British name was Major EH Cobb OBE, and the first Pakistani was KB Nawab SL Mehboob Ali Khan OBE.
I had gone to see a camp for people displaced by the nearby fighting in Swat. We were escorted by a truckload of Malakand Levies, a local paramilitary police whose name hasn’t changed since the colonial days. The head of the North West Frontier Province Red Crescent, a grey haired man with a certain sense of his own importance, greeted me with enthusiasm.
“You’re British? We still follow the British. You know that Winston Churchill used to be here in Malakand? And see those pickets…” – he pointed to small fortress-type structures on craggy hilltops. “The British invented pickets! We still have them!”
Churchill’s book The Story of the Malakand Field Force was his first, an account of the 1897 British campaign to subdue the North West Frontier, written from his experience as a press officer with the cavalry.
Of course, the North West Frontier has never been subdued, hence the current trouble with the Taliban. The next army offensive is likely to be in South Waziristan, where the Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud has his headquarters.
Many of the current Taliban attacks are in exactly the same places in South Waziristan where British forces were hit in the war there between 1936 and 1947. It is probably of little comfort to the current Pakistani government to remember that the British lost.