From the fires lit across the borderlands of the British Empire, strange rumours had begun to rise of a Faqir with occult powers, which no power could crush with guns and cannon. “Firearms could not hurt his followers,” a military intelligence officer recorded in 1937. The Faqir of Ipi could turn branches brought by his followers into guns, his followers insisted, turn a few loaves of bread in a basket into enough food for his army. His divine powers could even turn bombs dropped from aeroplanes into shreds of paper—a prophecy proved when pamphlets fell from the air, instead of high explosive.
Last week, Khawaja Asif, Pakistan’s defence minister, warned that his country’s military is prepared to strike “deep inside Afghanistan”. It’s a sign of the pain Islamabad is suffering at the hands of Tehreek-e-Taliban jihadists who have been staging cross-border attacks that are claiming the lives of dozens of troops and police officers.
Even though Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate allied with those jihadists to defeat the Soviet Union—and then discreetly worked together to bleed the United States—the Fakir of Ipi’s story is a reminder that the relationship has been shaped by brutal warfare, not brotherhood.
Less than a week after Pakistan’s independence on 14 August 1947, King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan challenged Pakistan’s right to rule over ethnic-Pashtun communities living south of the colonial frontier, the Durand Line. The next month, Kabul opposed Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations. Even though there was progress in trade negotiations, the two countries deadlocked on questions of autonomy for ethnic-Pashtun lands.
Then, in 1949, the inevitable happened: Two Hawker Typhoon fighter bombers from the 14 Squadron of the Pakistan Air Force hit the village of Mughalgai, allegedly killing several civilians. The fire the Faqir had lit more than a decade earlier was beginning to burn. The two countries came to the edge of war in 1949, 1955, 1960, and 1976.
Far beyond the pale
Eighty-five years old, Nawab Shah Jahan Khan was patriarch to a harem of dozens, to which he added at his whim, and master of three hundred ferocious dogs reared on milk and raw meat. There were no schools or hospitals. The law was what the hundreds of armed bandits who patrolled the streets said it was. “This place really is a prison,” a young resident told the Italian anthropologist Fosco Mariani, who travelled through the region in 1959. There had been a rebellion in 1957, Mariani was told, but it was ruthlessly put down.
To the irritation of the British, then-foreign minister Jawaharlal Nehru argued that the subsidies handed to local rulers institutionalised backwardness across the North-West Frontier Province, and advocated for the monies to be made available for development instead. Local rulers—among them the small emirates of Dir, Swat, and Chitral—had remained largely autonomous even during the peak of the Empire’s power, but had done nothing for their citizens.
Fate drew Mirza Ali Khan Wazir, a Torikhel Wazir from North Waziristan, into the storm that was building up in the mountains as the Empire prepared to withdraw. Educated as a pupil of the Naqib of Chaharbagh, an influential religious leader, he settled in Ipi. He fought against King Nadir Shah’s monarchy in Afghanistan, seeing it as an illegitimate and un-Islamic entity, as well as the British.
Then, in 1936, the Faqir found himself at the centre of a crisis pitting local custom against the Imperial state. In 1936, Ram Kaur, a Sikh teenager, was alleged to have eloped—kidnapped, her parents insisted—with schoolteacher Sayyid Amir Noor Ali Shah. A local court ordered that Ram Kaur be returned to her family because she was a minor.
Even as two British army columns dispatched to the Khainsora river to keep the peace fell back, the Faqir’s supporters let it be known they were retreating in fear of his spiritual powers. The case also united clans such as the Khel Wazirs, the Mahsuds, and the Bhittannis.
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Ethnicity, faith, and politics
A letter arrived at Nehru’s desk in the autumn of 1937.
“To the Leader of liberty-loving people and the distinguished Head of the Indian nation,” wrote the Faqir, who sought to explain contemporary events to the new political movement that he knew was growing in the plains. Islam, he wrote, believed that “every person is free in the choice of religion”.
“The war between us and the tyrannical Government is entirely due to their unwarranted attack on our liberties and not because of our proselytising mania,” he added. The letter is remarkable for not seeking financial aid, support or weapons. Nehru never replied.
Eleven years of peace, though, seemed to be coming apart in Waziristan. In 1930-1931, the Khudai Khidmatgar Red Shirt militia led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had come close to evicting the British from Peshawar.
From 1937, the Faqir succeeded in launching a series of increasingly successful attacks on British forts and outposts, slaughtering troops patrolling the Khaisora valley, besieging an encampment at Bishie Kashkai. The campaign had soon drawn in a record 61,000 British and British-Indian troops, and was draining the exchequer of over Rs 1,00,000 each day.
The problem, soldier-turned-author John Masters recorded in his memoir, was “that while he flitted and sniped, rushed and ran away, we felt as if we were using a crowbar to swat wasps.”
Entire villages were bombed and strafed in acts of deliberate collective punishment against the families of tribal Lashkars. The Lashkars, in turn, mutilated slain soldiers’ bodies. Royal Indian Air Force pilots, coming under increasingly accurate small arms fire, began carrying so-called ‘Goli Chits’, promising ransoms would be paid if they were not castrated.
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The Cold War impasse
Following independence, Afghan nationalists thought the creation of an independent Pashtun state was a matter of time. The Faqir had seized Datta Khel as British troops withdrew, and declared it part of an independent Pashtunistan. The Afghan government dispatched officials to Tirah in March 1947, advising local tribes to seek the counsel of Kabul before committing to a relationship with Pakistan. Even Nawab Shah Jahan Khan of Dir, who had just a year earlier sent troops to fight alongside Pakistani soldiers in Kashmir, began hedging his bets.
The fires of Partition also threatened to overrun the Pashtun-nationalist project. Local Muslims in the Karral region began forcibly converting their Sikh neighbours, resorting to murder in some cases. To make matters worse, tribesmen near Hazara kidnapped several non-Muslims. When British administrators recovered the hostages and imposed fines on the perpetrators, the Muslim League protested loudly.
Large-scale incursions into Bajaur and Swat, though, continued, with Afghan officials whipping up support for the Pashtunistan project. At one stage, Afghanistan even proposed a confederal arrangement between Pakistan, Pashtunistan, and Afghanistan. Islamabad, however, rejected the idea outright.
The growing levels of violence led the Pakistan Army to launch a major operation, supporting militia like the Tochi Scouts with the 7 Division, under the command of Major-General M Atiq-ur-Rahman. A bitter war, involving car bombs, booby traps, ambushes with snipers, and relentless air attack, continued for years.
In 1955, a crisis erupted again, after military ruler General Yahya Khan introduced the one-unit plan, which would have significantly undermined the Pashtun heartland’s autonomy. Angry Afghans burned the Pakistani flag at the country’s embassy in Kabul, while Peshawar residents sacked the Afghan consulate.
Fighting broke out once more in 1961, when Afghan President Daud Khan sent in irregulars to support warlords Mullah Dindar Khan and Mullah Malik Niaz Ali Khan. The Pakistan Air Force had to be called in to bomb positions around Baganandail, as well as Lashkars massing in Bajaur, Dir, and near the Khyber pass. The countries ceased diplomatic relations with each other for over 18 months, as a consequence, disrupting trade and community ties.
Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, meanwhile, tried to retaliate against the Pashtunistan movement by unleashing Islamists against Kabul, like the warlord Gulbuddin Hikmatyar. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan offered Pakistan the means to enhance funding for Islamists massively—burying ethnic nationalism, it hoped.
That strategy has now backfired spectacularly: Islamabad faces terrorists far better armed and equipped than ever in the past, who display the same contempt for borders that their ancestors did. Islamabad has, in past peace negotiations, shown willingness to cede some autonomy to jihadist groups—but the jihadists know they can hold out for more. The instinct to bribe and coerce—instead of engaging with political leaders to build federal arrangements that could accommodate both ethnicity and rights—cost Pakistan its east. The same fate now stares at Pakistan Army in its Northwest—but more disorderly, more bloody, and far less likely to yield an end.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)