The North-West Frontier of India: Imperial Borderlands

The North-West Frontier of British India was, in the words of the historian C. C. Davies, “a frontier of mountains, tribes, and British anxieties.” The region, which stretched along the Afghan border from the Hindu Kush to the Bolan Pass, was the most militarised area of British India, and it produced the largest concentration of British Indian Army units in the subcontinent. The British, in a phrase attributed to Lord Curzon, never knew whether the North-West Frontier was “the gateway of India or the grave of India.” They suspected, at different moments, both. The answer, in the long run, was the latter: the British withdrawal from India in 1947 produced the Kashmir crisis, the Afghan-Pakistan border war of 1961, and the long-running Pashtun insurgency that has shaped the politics of the region ever since.

The Geography of the North-West Frontier

The North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) is a mountainous region bordering Afghanistan, and it includes some of the most rugged terrain in Asia. The region is traversed by a series of passes, including the Khyber Pass, the Bolan Pass, and the Gomal Pass, which have been the traditional routes of invasion and trade between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The principal town was Peshawar, which served as the British military and administrative headquarters, and the region also included the tribal agencies of Malakand, Mohmand, Khyber, Kurram, Tochi, and Waziristan. The British were never able to extend direct administration to the tribal areas, which were governed indirectly through a system of political agents.

The Tribal Territories

The tribal territories on the North-West Frontier were governed indirectly by the British, through the political agents and the frontier corps. The Pashtun tribal system, based on a code of honour known as Pashtunwali, was the principal social institution, and the British attempts to govern the tribes produced a long-running conflict. The British political agents, who were stationed in the major tribal agencies, attempted to maintain order through a combination of subsidies, political negotiations, and military force. The frontier crimes regulation, introduced in the 1870s, allowed the political agents to try cases involving tribesmen in informal courts. The system of indirect rule was never fully accepted by the tribes, and the British presence was contested by recurring uprisings.

As the historian Thomas Holdich put it in The Indian Borderland (1901), the British administration of the tribal areas was “a system of perpetual and embarrassed negotiation, in which the British never quite knew whether they were being obeyed.”

The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842)

The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–1842) was a major British military disaster. The British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 was part of the “Great Game” of imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia, and the British government of Lord Auckland attempted to install a friendly ruler in Kabul. The British garrison in Kabul, under the command of Sir Alexander Burnes, was overrun in January 1842, and the retreat from Kabul in January 1842 was one of the most catastrophic military disasters in the history of the British Empire. Of some 16,000 people who set out from Kabul on the retreat, only one, Dr. William Brydon, reached Jalalabad alive. The war was widely seen as a British humiliation, and it set the pattern of British involvement in Afghanistan for the next century. As Lady Florentia Sale, the wife of Sir Robert Sale, wrote in her diary of the retreat: “we were a disorganised mob, without a plan and without a hope.”

The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880)

The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880) was a more successful British campaign. The war was triggered by the Russian advance into Central Asia and by the Afghan refusal to accept a British diplomatic mission. The British Indian Army invaded Afghanistan from the south, and the Treaty of Gandamak in 1879 imposed a new political relationship on Afghanistan, including the surrender of Afghan foreign policy to the British. The British withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1880 left Abdur Rahman Khan as the Amir of Afghanistan, and the British supported his regime in exchange for his acceptance of the British position.

The Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919)

The Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919) was a brief conflict triggered by Afghan independence. The Amir Amanullah Khan, who had succeeded his father Habibullah Khan in February 1919, declared Afghan independence and attacked British India. The British Indian Army responded with a series of air strikes and a ground offensive, and the war was ended by the Treaty of Rawalpindi in 1919, by which the British recognised Afghan independence. The war marked the end of British attempts to control Afghan foreign policy, and it was the beginning of the long-running relationship between Afghanistan and the British, and then the Pakistani, successor state.

The Waziristan Campaigns

The Waziristan campaigns of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were a series of British military operations against the Mahsud and Wazir tribes. The Mahsud Campaign of 1919–1920 was the first major operation, and it was followed by a series of smaller operations in the 1920s and 1930s. The Waziristan Campaign of 1936–1937 was a major operation, in which the British Indian Army used aircraft and armoured cars for the first time in the tribal territories. The role of the Royal Air Force in the Waziristan campaigns was particularly important, and the use of air power against the tribes was one of the most controversial aspects of British frontier policy. The Waziristan campaigns demonstrated the limits of British military power in the tribal territories.

Winston Churchill, then a backbench MP, was one of the few British politicians to criticise the use of air power in the tribal campaigns. As he told the House of Commons in 1923: “the drone and roar of the aeroplane is the most melancholy sound that has ever been heard in the hills of the North-West Frontier.” The British high command, however, regarded the use of air power as the most economical method of frontier control.

The Tribal Las and the Maliki System

The British administration of the tribal areas relied on a system of political agents and a code of law known as the maliki system. The role of the political agents was to maintain order through a combination of subsidies, political negotiations, and the threat of military force. The maliki judicial system was an informal system of justice that supplemented the formal legal system, and it was based on the customary law of the tribes. The tribal las, or tribal levies, were the principal instrument of frontier policy, and they were used to maintain order and to gather intelligence. The intelligence system of the frontier was one of the most significant in the British Empire, and it was the basis for the British understanding of the tribal areas.

The Durand Line

The Durand Line, the border between Afghanistan and British India, was established in 1893 by an agreement between the British Indian government and the Amir of Afghanistan. The negotiation of the Durand Line was carried out by Sir Mortimer Durand, and the line was intended to define the limits of British and Afghan spheres of influence. The consequences of the Durand Line for the Pashtun people were profound, as it divided the Pashtun tribal areas between Afghanistan and British India, and the dispute over the line continues to this day. The continuing dispute over the Durand Line is one of a particularly important issues in Afghan-Pakistani relations, and the line continues to be the de facto border between the two countries.

The End of the British North-West Frontier

The British withdrawal from India in 1947 was followed by the partition of the North-West Frontier Province, with the northern tribal areas eventually being incorporated into Pakistan. The partition of the North-West Frontier was contested by the provincial Congress party, which supported accession to India, but the British government accepted the position of the Muslim League. The independence of Pakistan and the Frontier was followed by a long-running conflict between the Pakistani government and the Pashtun tribal areas, which has produced several major military operations and which continues to influence the politics of the region. The post-colonial Pashtun question, including the Pashtunistan movement and the conflict in the tribal areas, has its origins in the British period.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the North-West Frontier has been transformed. The official British accounts — embodied in the work of the Intelligence Branch at Simla and the histories of the Waziristan campaigns — treated the frontier as a military problem to be managed. The Pakistani accounts, exemplified in the work of Olaf Caroe and the older chapters of the Oxford History of the British Army, tended to celebrate the British military achievement. The revisionist literature of the last thirty years, led by Robert Johnson’s work on the Afghan boundary commission, the writing of C. E. Callwell, and the more recent work of Christian Tripodi, has produced a more critical picture, in which the British frontier administration is read as a system of managed conflict rather than a system of effective governance. The current debate, exemplified in the recent work of David French on the British Indian Army, is over how far the frontier experience was a successful case of imperial policing and how far it was an example of the limits of British military power.

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