Marwat Khan Lodhi
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Along the high street in Kumbar Bazaar, normally a bustling market town, every shop has either been smashed by shells and missiles or sealed with steel shutters.
The only sounds carried on the hot morning air are birdsong and the soft, throaty clatter of the engines idling in the tanks guarding our rear. A forlorn cow, its ribs jutting, picks its way through the debris.
I turn to Major Zafar, the young Pakistani officer showing us round. 'What is happening to the animals, now their owners have fled?' He smiles ruefully and shrugs: 'Nothing. They are free.'
Last week, photographer Alixandra Fazzina and I became the first British journalists to be given sustained access to some of the battlefields in Pakistan's war on Islamist militancy, a rapidly burgeoning confrontation that has already displaced millions and engulfed large swathes of the Northwest Frontier Province.
But we weren't the first to cover a conflict against jihadists trying to overthrow a government in this region. Among our predecessors was an Army captain turned reporter who came this way in 1897: the future Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill, then aged 23.
That summer the frontier tribes were inspired by radical mullahs to drive out the British. When the revolt started, Churchill was on leave in England from his regiment, which was based 2,000 miles from the front in Bangalore, south India.
But thanks to his acquaintance with the British commander, the curiously-named General Sir Bindon Blood, he secured what would now be termed a media 'embed'. Churchill's first book, The Story Of The Malakand Field Force, was the result.
Reading it now, the parallels between that distant campaign and Pakistan's present crisis seem close, a point clearly recognised by Pakistan's army.
Its chief spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, says: 'Going through the old Imperial gazetteers, you see ambushes are taking place in exactly the same locations now as they were in the 1890s.
'The people of the frontier have always been fierce fighters, and their motivation has remained the same, whether they are fighting the British, the Soviets or a Pakistan government supported by the Americans. As they see it, they are fighting occupation.'
Just after dawn one morning, we flew by army helicopter from a base on the plains near the capital, Islamabad, to spend two days in a world of beauty and menace.
In the highland district of Dir, close to the Afghan border, craggy, snow-capped peaks rise to more than 18,000ft. Around the fertile valleys, their sides lined with terraced orchards and fields, there are twisting ravines, foaming rock-strewn ******** and dense green forest.
This is terrain that a vengeful God could have created for fighting lingering insurgencies, and it has harboured them for many centuries against, among others, Alexander the Great, the Mughals and, of course, the British.
'When you find yourself fighting frontier warfare, you open the old British manuals,' says Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani, the former head of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service. 'You will find they contain many lessons.'
Less than two months ago, both Kumbar Bazaar and the rest of the fertile Maidan plateau on which it sits were controlled by what Pakistani soldiers call the 'miscreants': the Taliban and its allies. Now, although they are still standing, most of the buildings in its central strip have been badly damaged.
The steel reinforcing rods inside the concrete used to build the shops and homes hang in strange tangles from the edges of shellholes.
Like many other houses, a fine, pink stucco villa is missing a wall, exposing the remains of an affluent lifestyle: expensive furniture, a modern kitchen. In another next to the cratered road, someone has made a pile of the blackened fragments of bombed-out cars.
'This was the Taliban's hub,' says Major Zafar. 'You see, the army means business.'
Kumbar Bazaar was the home of Sufi Mohammed, the fundamentalist ideologue who led 10,000 frontier Pakistanis to fight the jihad against US forces in Afghanistan after 9/11.
His simple, unprepossessing house has now been trashed by the army, which reduced some of his extensive jihadist library to a pulp by running the books through his washing machine. He is now among the country's most wanted men.
It was Mohammed who earlier this year negotiated a peace deal under which Pakistan's homegrown Taliban were allowed to run the district of Swat, the next valley across from Dir to the east, and it was this deal's speedy breakdown that triggered the army offensive launched on April 26.
Mohammed does not like to compromise. 'We hate democracy,' he told a crowd in Swat's capital, Mingora, earlier this year. 'We want the occupation of Islam in the entire world. From the very beginning, I have viewed democracy as a system imposed on us by infidels.'
Mohammed's damaged home, where the sitting room bears the slogan 'Jihad Is Great' engraved in the plaster in letters a foot high, commands a magnificent view of the mountains around the valley.
Subzaidi Khan, a local policeman, gestures towards them: 'The military operation has succeeded now in this area. It is under the control of the government. But the mountains, and some of the mountain villages, are still full of Taliban.'
According to the army, the Taliban has lost 412 men around the Maidan plateau, along with weapons, hideouts and a training camp. However, sporadic attacks by small groups continue.
On the eve of our visit to Kumbar, as we enjoyed a barbecue on the splendid lawns of a fort a few miles down the valley, the army fired round after booming artillery round at the enemy's positions. The experience of the Empire era suggests their impact may have been limited.
'Just as in British times, the miscreants don't offer well-organised resistance, because they can't match our firepower,' says General Abbas. 'We've been facing groups of about six to 20. They like to melt away. Our strategy now is to force them into the open.'
Although almost everyone in the area speaks Pashto, the area is far from homogenous. The history of Dir and Swat, which during the Empire were ruled by princes who swore allegiance to the Crown, is different from the wilder tribal areas to the southwest. There the writ of Pakistani law has never run, and one of them, South Waziristan, has long been thought to harbour Osama bin Laden.
Similarly, the radical movement in Dir and Swat is different from the bigger, highly organised Taliban in Waziristan, which has been closely linked with Al Qaeda since 2001 and was responsible for the murder of Benazir Bhutto last winter.
Between 2004 and 2007, while Sufi Mohammed was in prison, the main leader in Dir and Swat was his son-in-law, a former ski-lift operator named Maulana Fazlullah. He built Taliban support through Mullah Radio, an illegal FM station that broadcast his sermons and those of his junior commanders, along with lists of those the movement was targeting for assassination - usually by decapitation.
Now, however, the insurgents from different tribal areas are starting to unite. 'Integration and networking are taking place,' says Lieutenant-General Durrani. 'You now have what amounts to a bigger, Pakistan-wide Taliban group, and it's in their interest to help each other. They're not goofs or fools.'
Brigadier Amal Zada adds: 'Communication intercepts show the militants in Dir have been asking for reinforcements from Swat, Bajaur [another tribal area], North and South Waziristan and from across the Afghan border.'
General David Petraeus, the American commander who led the 'surge' in Iraq and is now responsible for the whole of Asia from Pakistan to the Middle East, has said repeatedly that this alliance, which is also responsible for the spate of terrorist bombings in Pakistan's big cities, poses a threat so great that the country's very existence is at stake.
He might be right. But this is not the first time militants from disparate frontier tribes have been spurred on by radical mullahs to fight as one. It also happened in 1897, as described by Churchill.
Just as in 2009, the 1897-8 campaign began in Swat, when thousands of tribesmen attacked British forts at Malakand and Chakdara less than 20 miles from Kumbar Bazaar.
And just as the 2009 conflict shows every sign of doing, it went on to involve operations the length and breadth of the frontier, from Buner, 40 miles to the north of what is now Islamabad, through the Dir, Bajaur, Mohmand and Khyber areas all the way to Waziristan. The Empire had to mobilise 75,000 troops.
It is easy to see why Churchill felt he could not stay away. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had died at 45, and Winston was convinced he must make his mark while young.
But despite his aristocratic lineage, his school career, culminating at Harrow, had been far from illustrious, and it took him three attempts to pass the entrance exam for Sandhurst. He was, in the literal sense, a man in a hurry.
'The rising of 1897 is the most successful attempt to date to combine the frontier tribes,' wrote Churchill. 'It will not be the last. The simultaneous revolt of distant tribes is an evidence of secret workings. These features will be more pronounced in the future.'
Like his distant successors, Churchill believed these frontier battles had an 'existential' significance: 'Civilisation is face to face with militant Mohammedanism. When we reflect on the moral and material forces arrayed, there need be no fear of the ultimate issue, but the longer the policy of half measures is adhered to, the more distant the end of the struggle will be.'
His description of the enemy sounds familiar. Churchill singled out a 'Mad Mullah': 'A wild enthusiast convinced of his divine mission preached a crusade, here called Jihad, against the infidel. Even after the fighting - when the tribesmen reeled back from the terrible army they had assailed, leaving a quarter of their number on the field - the faith of the survivors was unshaken.'
In fact, the evidence suggests the 1897 uprising was even more organised than Churchill thought. Behind the 'Mad Mullah', whose fiery sermons could be said to equate to Fazlullah's FM talk shows, stood a group of radical frontier clerics.
As in 2009, the fate of the eastern side of the frontier was bound up with events in Afghanistan. In 1897, the mullahs attended secret meetings in Kabul with Abdur Rehman, the Afghan 'Iron Amir', still smarting from being forced to cede chunks of his country to the British in 1893.
Costly as it was, the 1897-8 campaign ended in victory for the British. But as Churchill realised, it was not the end of the story: 'I do not see any sign of permanency in the settlements that have been made with the tribesmen in Dir, Swat and Bajaur. They have been punished, not subdued; rendered hostile, but not harmless.
'Some have been killed, but these fertile valleys will in a few years replace the waste of war - every year the tribesmen will have better weapons, and the difficulties of dealing with them will be increased.'
He was right: in the remaining half-century before independence, violence broke out on the frontier time and again, sometimes at highly inconvenient moments such as in the middle of the First World War.
Baffled by what he called 'the riddle of the frontier', Churchill had no solution to offer, other than to urge that the British 'march with the firm step of an Imperial people' and so deal with 'whatever the future may contain'.
Sitting over coffee in the splendour of the Islamabad Club, I remind Lt-General Durrani of this arid analysis. He smiles: 'Both the Pakistani and the American governments need to remember that insurgencies go on for decades, not weeks or years. They last so long because time and again, the state messes up.'
Ultimately, he says, they end or die down only when opposing sides make deals more resilient than the one that broke down in Swat. On its own, a military solution is unlikely to work: 'Firing missiles from F16s sends a message to your countrymen. But the insurgents will simply evaporate.'
As for Waziristan, where the Taliban is bigger and has been entrenched for longer, Durrani views with foreboding the pledges by the Pakistan government to send in the army: 'If anyone thinks the Taliban are going to be impressed by such statements, they are very much mistaken. Experience suggests that a military solution in Waziristan is impossible.'
After Churchill's time, the British learned important lessons. The region still saw frequent rebellions, but they managed to avoid another frontier-wide conflagration with a combination of threats and bribery, and by founding and paying native militias: a textbook example of 'divide and rule'.
A century later, Petraeus emulated this policy to curb the insurgency in Iraq by encouraging the US-financed militias of the Sunni Awakening.
As Durrani puts it: 'You have to be much more sophisticated. Eliminate some of the leaders, bribe others. You have to look for allies.'
In the remote mountain villages of Upper Dir, a gruelling four-hour Jeep drive away, something along these lines seems to be stirring. A couple of miles from Dhok Darra Main, the biggest settlement in a steep-sided valley where a blue glacial stream thunders down rapids between banks planted with hazelnuts, a lashkar - a tribal militia convened by the local inhabitants - has surrounded about 90 Taliban fighters in a wooded ravine.
Saraj Uddin, 57, points to his lashkar's makeshift fortifications: a circle of rocks on a hilltop above the village erupting with mortar and machine gunfire from weapons supplied by the army.
He says tensions had been building for months, and after the Taliban ambushed and killed five local policemen, the lashkar set up roadblocks in an effort to cut off their supplies.
The Taliban's response was a suicide bombing in a nearby village mosque the Friday before our visit, an attack that killed 39, many of them children.
This, Uddin says, triggered the lashkar's action: 'We want to finish these Taliban. They are against humanity. They used to control five of our villages and they have money. When we get some work, we are paid $2 a day. The miscreants are paying people $8 or $10 to fight for them.'
It's easy to see why this could be an incentive. The scenery might be breathtaking, but the poverty of Dhok Darra is grinding.
The government hopes the lashkar shows it is winning the battle for hearts and minds, and that ordinary Pakistanis regard the Taliban with revulsion. But although the early stages of the army's operation appear to have been successful, the evidence on the ground suggests it might be creating as many new problems as those it solves.
As the operation has unfolded in the mountains over the past seven weeks, camps for refugees made homeless by the fighting have been established on the plains wherever there is space: in fields, colleges, factory yards and mosques. They range in size from a vast tented city said to house some 90,000 next to the Islamabad-Peshawar motorway at Swabi, to gatherings of just a few hundred.
Even this masks the scale of the displacement: according to the United Nations, about 80 per cent of the refugees are not staying in camps at all, but the homes of family and friends. There are at least 2.7million refugees, a total that is certain to rise as the operation extends to places such as Waziristan.
This marks a departure from the policy of the Empire, when punishing the civilian populations from whose ranks rebels had been drawn was seen as a useful tool. Churchill described the most effective way to destroy a village: 'In every case, the spurs on either side must be occupied before the village is attacked, and held until after it has been burnt.'
As late as 1937, in his book Tribal Fighting In NWFP (Northwest Frontier Province), General Sir Andrew Skeen wrote about what he termed 'demolition', noting: 'There is usually an outcry about this form of punishment, with good reason. I dislike it intensely, but after the enemy's will to take punishment is broken, there is no other way to make him watch his step in future.'
Skeen gave detailed instructions about how to weaken roofs and houses with grappling irons before setting them on fire. Civilian homes in the current campaign have mainly been destroyed by accident. Nevertheless, says Kilian Kleinschmidt, the UN's Pakistan emergency co-ordinator, the numbers uprooted dwarf those affected by the 2006 Pakistan earthquake: 'To find a displacement as big as this you'd have to go back to the Ethiopian famine of the Eighties.' To date, donations from the world community are nowhere near equal to the task. In late May, when there were only 1.5million refugees, the UN asked for pledges of £330million to cover the barest necessities: tents, mosquito nets, basic bedding and food. Thus far, although there are almost twice as many refugees, the shortfall is £215 million. Army spokesman Major General Abbas says he hopes the refugees will be able to go home to Dir and Swat within a year. But he might be too optimistic. The first of five camps I visit is Paloosa, near the town of Charsadda, home to 3,447 refugees who fled from fighting in the Charmang valley in Bajaur ten months ago. There is still no sign of when their ordeal will end: there were renewed clashes in Charmang only last Monday. A lucky few are housed in the classrooms and offices of an elementary school, the rest in tents. No one has work or income. The World Food Programme provides just flour and lentils - no vegetables, meat, tea, milk or sugar. Nor does it provide fuel. To cook, the refugees have to hunt for twigs in the nearby woods.
It doesn't take much imagination to see that when the monsoon begins some time in the coming fortnight, bringing gales and rainfall measured in inches per day, conditions in these camps will become unspeakable. There are already cases of cholera.
[COLOR="#FF0000"]At Paloosa, the boys have made toy rocket launchers from sticks and plastic bottles, and they pass the time enacting 'battles' between the army and the Taliban. Their sympathies lie with the insurgents. 'We want to crush the army,' says Khysta Rehman, ten. 'I really miss my home, and I blame the government for making me leave it.'
[/COLOR]
Also near Charsadda is a camp for refugees from Swat, established a fortnight ago in the grounds of a sugar mill. Here conditions are already desperate.
Families crowd into flimsy, ancient tents, sleeping on thin mats. They cannot cook at all, and are forced to subsist on two meals of rice and dahl a day, doled out at a communal kitchen. Many are well educated, and used to a comfortable standard of living.
'A buffalo costs 100,000 rupees [£800],' says one man. 'I had ten. Where will be my compensation?'
Shafi Ullah, a 42-year-old English teacher, says: 'Our plight is the fault of the government. They said they had to clean the area of terrorism, so we have done them a huge favour by leaving. They owe us proper facilities.
'But this is bigger than Pakistan: it's part of an international conflict. We have sacrificed everything for the sake of the world, and yet we are given almost nothing.'
[COLOR="#FF0000"]At Katlang, at the base of the mountains, I meet Najma Minhaj, 25, who lost eight relatives to a stray F16 missile that hit their house near a Swat village mosque.[/COLOR]
'We thought maybe the Taliban were at the mosque,' she says, her expression blank with grief. 'The youngest was my cousin, Ma'az. He was four. The Taliban let us have a funeral but they buried them together in the same hole. We left a huge, lovely home with all the facilities one needs for a comfortable life. We haven't even got pillows here.'
Meanwhile, political opposition is growing. As he visits a camp at Mardan, I interview the former cricketer Imran Khan, now leader of Pakistan's Justice Movement. He says: 'To hunt down 5,000 people, they've made nearly three million homeless. It's absolutely crazy. They should have pursued dialogue longer.'
According to Khan: 'Pakistan is heading the way Cambodia went in the Vietnam War, and extremists who are the Pakistani equivalents of Pol Pot are now coming through as the product of this destabilisation. The refugees are already seething with anger.
'[COLOR="#FF0000"]Just as with the British in 1897, the whole tribal area is on fire. The more you kill them, the more they will come back. Revenge is part of their basic make-up, and if you think that by bombing them you are going to make them give up, you are crazy.'[/COLOR]
Back in Islamabad, another retired general, Talat Masood, says that while the army can beat the Taliban, 'it cannot beat the Pashtun tribes'.
Success depends on the Taliban being seen as extremists and outsiders, who subvert, rather than express, the frontier's Pashtun identity. Here the example of Churchill's campaign in 1897 is not encouraging.
Among the people of the frontier, I discover a rich oral tradition, which remembers Swat's 'Mad Mullah' and his comrades as 'mujahideen' - the term for holy warriors once used about the Pashtuns who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan.
'He was a little mad, but he was pious,' says Hazrat Ahmed, 70, in the camp at Katlang. 'So when he said that if they fought the British they would defeat them, the people believed him. There are a lot of graves of martyrs who died fighting the British in 1897.
'Now some people admire the Taliban. Others say they are foreigners, and not good Muslims. Insh'allah [God willing] whoever is right about the Taliban there will be a victory for Muslims, because when Islam is finished, the world will end.'
Nizar Mohammed, 76, explains: 'The jihad against the British was a special type of war, what we call a ghazar. That means a war in which the Prophet has a personal stake. That's how our people saw it.'
[COLOR="#FF0000"]Pashtun children still learn songs that commemorate the battles of 1897 and the years that followed.
One of the most haunting celebrates a warrior called Beram Khan. It imagines the words of his wife: 'O Beram Khan, if your body comes back with countless bullets in your chest, I will never mind. But I don't want to hear that you left the battlefield fearing death. O Beram Khan, if you are martyred defending your country, I will weave your shroud with the hair from my head.'[/COLOR]
From his very different perspective, Churchill paid an equivalent tribute. Although the fighters of Mohmand and Dir had 'struck a blow at civilisation, civilisation will ungrudgingly admit they are a brave and warlike race. The valley and its people have become historic.'
The Pakistan army can only hope that the present conflict never acquires a similar cultural resonance.
[url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1194352/Hunting-Taliban-footsteps-Winston-Churchill.html]Hunting the Taliban in the footsteps of Winston Churchill | Mail Online[/url]
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The only sounds carried on the hot morning air are birdsong and the soft, throaty clatter of the engines idling in the tanks guarding our rear. A forlorn cow, its ribs jutting, picks its way through the debris.
I turn to Major Zafar, the young Pakistani officer showing us round. 'What is happening to the animals, now their owners have fled?' He smiles ruefully and shrugs: 'Nothing. They are free.'
Last week, photographer Alixandra Fazzina and I became the first British journalists to be given sustained access to some of the battlefields in Pakistan's war on Islamist militancy, a rapidly burgeoning confrontation that has already displaced millions and engulfed large swathes of the Northwest Frontier Province.
But we weren't the first to cover a conflict against jihadists trying to overthrow a government in this region. Among our predecessors was an Army captain turned reporter who came this way in 1897: the future Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill, then aged 23.
That summer the frontier tribes were inspired by radical mullahs to drive out the British. When the revolt started, Churchill was on leave in England from his regiment, which was based 2,000 miles from the front in Bangalore, south India.
But thanks to his acquaintance with the British commander, the curiously-named General Sir Bindon Blood, he secured what would now be termed a media 'embed'. Churchill's first book, The Story Of The Malakand Field Force, was the result.
Reading it now, the parallels between that distant campaign and Pakistan's present crisis seem close, a point clearly recognised by Pakistan's army.
Its chief spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, says: 'Going through the old Imperial gazetteers, you see ambushes are taking place in exactly the same locations now as they were in the 1890s.
'The people of the frontier have always been fierce fighters, and their motivation has remained the same, whether they are fighting the British, the Soviets or a Pakistan government supported by the Americans. As they see it, they are fighting occupation.'
Just after dawn one morning, we flew by army helicopter from a base on the plains near the capital, Islamabad, to spend two days in a world of beauty and menace.
In the highland district of Dir, close to the Afghan border, craggy, snow-capped peaks rise to more than 18,000ft. Around the fertile valleys, their sides lined with terraced orchards and fields, there are twisting ravines, foaming rock-strewn ******** and dense green forest.
This is terrain that a vengeful God could have created for fighting lingering insurgencies, and it has harboured them for many centuries against, among others, Alexander the Great, the Mughals and, of course, the British.
'When you find yourself fighting frontier warfare, you open the old British manuals,' says Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani, the former head of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service. 'You will find they contain many lessons.'
Less than two months ago, both Kumbar Bazaar and the rest of the fertile Maidan plateau on which it sits were controlled by what Pakistani soldiers call the 'miscreants': the Taliban and its allies. Now, although they are still standing, most of the buildings in its central strip have been badly damaged.
The steel reinforcing rods inside the concrete used to build the shops and homes hang in strange tangles from the edges of shellholes.
Like many other houses, a fine, pink stucco villa is missing a wall, exposing the remains of an affluent lifestyle: expensive furniture, a modern kitchen. In another next to the cratered road, someone has made a pile of the blackened fragments of bombed-out cars.
'This was the Taliban's hub,' says Major Zafar. 'You see, the army means business.'
Kumbar Bazaar was the home of Sufi Mohammed, the fundamentalist ideologue who led 10,000 frontier Pakistanis to fight the jihad against US forces in Afghanistan after 9/11.
His simple, unprepossessing house has now been trashed by the army, which reduced some of his extensive jihadist library to a pulp by running the books through his washing machine. He is now among the country's most wanted men.
It was Mohammed who earlier this year negotiated a peace deal under which Pakistan's homegrown Taliban were allowed to run the district of Swat, the next valley across from Dir to the east, and it was this deal's speedy breakdown that triggered the army offensive launched on April 26.
Mohammed does not like to compromise. 'We hate democracy,' he told a crowd in Swat's capital, Mingora, earlier this year. 'We want the occupation of Islam in the entire world. From the very beginning, I have viewed democracy as a system imposed on us by infidels.'
Mohammed's damaged home, where the sitting room bears the slogan 'Jihad Is Great' engraved in the plaster in letters a foot high, commands a magnificent view of the mountains around the valley.
Subzaidi Khan, a local policeman, gestures towards them: 'The military operation has succeeded now in this area. It is under the control of the government. But the mountains, and some of the mountain villages, are still full of Taliban.'
According to the army, the Taliban has lost 412 men around the Maidan plateau, along with weapons, hideouts and a training camp. However, sporadic attacks by small groups continue.
On the eve of our visit to Kumbar, as we enjoyed a barbecue on the splendid lawns of a fort a few miles down the valley, the army fired round after booming artillery round at the enemy's positions. The experience of the Empire era suggests their impact may have been limited.
'Just as in British times, the miscreants don't offer well-organised resistance, because they can't match our firepower,' says General Abbas. 'We've been facing groups of about six to 20. They like to melt away. Our strategy now is to force them into the open.'
Although almost everyone in the area speaks Pashto, the area is far from homogenous. The history of Dir and Swat, which during the Empire were ruled by princes who swore allegiance to the Crown, is different from the wilder tribal areas to the southwest. There the writ of Pakistani law has never run, and one of them, South Waziristan, has long been thought to harbour Osama bin Laden.
Similarly, the radical movement in Dir and Swat is different from the bigger, highly organised Taliban in Waziristan, which has been closely linked with Al Qaeda since 2001 and was responsible for the murder of Benazir Bhutto last winter.
Between 2004 and 2007, while Sufi Mohammed was in prison, the main leader in Dir and Swat was his son-in-law, a former ski-lift operator named Maulana Fazlullah. He built Taliban support through Mullah Radio, an illegal FM station that broadcast his sermons and those of his junior commanders, along with lists of those the movement was targeting for assassination - usually by decapitation.
Now, however, the insurgents from different tribal areas are starting to unite. 'Integration and networking are taking place,' says Lieutenant-General Durrani. 'You now have what amounts to a bigger, Pakistan-wide Taliban group, and it's in their interest to help each other. They're not goofs or fools.'
Brigadier Amal Zada adds: 'Communication intercepts show the militants in Dir have been asking for reinforcements from Swat, Bajaur [another tribal area], North and South Waziristan and from across the Afghan border.'
General David Petraeus, the American commander who led the 'surge' in Iraq and is now responsible for the whole of Asia from Pakistan to the Middle East, has said repeatedly that this alliance, which is also responsible for the spate of terrorist bombings in Pakistan's big cities, poses a threat so great that the country's very existence is at stake.
He might be right. But this is not the first time militants from disparate frontier tribes have been spurred on by radical mullahs to fight as one. It also happened in 1897, as described by Churchill.
Just as in 2009, the 1897-8 campaign began in Swat, when thousands of tribesmen attacked British forts at Malakand and Chakdara less than 20 miles from Kumbar Bazaar.
And just as the 2009 conflict shows every sign of doing, it went on to involve operations the length and breadth of the frontier, from Buner, 40 miles to the north of what is now Islamabad, through the Dir, Bajaur, Mohmand and Khyber areas all the way to Waziristan. The Empire had to mobilise 75,000 troops.
It is easy to see why Churchill felt he could not stay away. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had died at 45, and Winston was convinced he must make his mark while young.
But despite his aristocratic lineage, his school career, culminating at Harrow, had been far from illustrious, and it took him three attempts to pass the entrance exam for Sandhurst. He was, in the literal sense, a man in a hurry.
'The rising of 1897 is the most successful attempt to date to combine the frontier tribes,' wrote Churchill. 'It will not be the last. The simultaneous revolt of distant tribes is an evidence of secret workings. These features will be more pronounced in the future.'
Like his distant successors, Churchill believed these frontier battles had an 'existential' significance: 'Civilisation is face to face with militant Mohammedanism. When we reflect on the moral and material forces arrayed, there need be no fear of the ultimate issue, but the longer the policy of half measures is adhered to, the more distant the end of the struggle will be.'
His description of the enemy sounds familiar. Churchill singled out a 'Mad Mullah': 'A wild enthusiast convinced of his divine mission preached a crusade, here called Jihad, against the infidel. Even after the fighting - when the tribesmen reeled back from the terrible army they had assailed, leaving a quarter of their number on the field - the faith of the survivors was unshaken.'
In fact, the evidence suggests the 1897 uprising was even more organised than Churchill thought. Behind the 'Mad Mullah', whose fiery sermons could be said to equate to Fazlullah's FM talk shows, stood a group of radical frontier clerics.
As in 2009, the fate of the eastern side of the frontier was bound up with events in Afghanistan. In 1897, the mullahs attended secret meetings in Kabul with Abdur Rehman, the Afghan 'Iron Amir', still smarting from being forced to cede chunks of his country to the British in 1893.
Costly as it was, the 1897-8 campaign ended in victory for the British. But as Churchill realised, it was not the end of the story: 'I do not see any sign of permanency in the settlements that have been made with the tribesmen in Dir, Swat and Bajaur. They have been punished, not subdued; rendered hostile, but not harmless.
'Some have been killed, but these fertile valleys will in a few years replace the waste of war - every year the tribesmen will have better weapons, and the difficulties of dealing with them will be increased.'
He was right: in the remaining half-century before independence, violence broke out on the frontier time and again, sometimes at highly inconvenient moments such as in the middle of the First World War.
Baffled by what he called 'the riddle of the frontier', Churchill had no solution to offer, other than to urge that the British 'march with the firm step of an Imperial people' and so deal with 'whatever the future may contain'.
Sitting over coffee in the splendour of the Islamabad Club, I remind Lt-General Durrani of this arid analysis. He smiles: 'Both the Pakistani and the American governments need to remember that insurgencies go on for decades, not weeks or years. They last so long because time and again, the state messes up.'
Ultimately, he says, they end or die down only when opposing sides make deals more resilient than the one that broke down in Swat. On its own, a military solution is unlikely to work: 'Firing missiles from F16s sends a message to your countrymen. But the insurgents will simply evaporate.'
As for Waziristan, where the Taliban is bigger and has been entrenched for longer, Durrani views with foreboding the pledges by the Pakistan government to send in the army: 'If anyone thinks the Taliban are going to be impressed by such statements, they are very much mistaken. Experience suggests that a military solution in Waziristan is impossible.'
After Churchill's time, the British learned important lessons. The region still saw frequent rebellions, but they managed to avoid another frontier-wide conflagration with a combination of threats and bribery, and by founding and paying native militias: a textbook example of 'divide and rule'.
A century later, Petraeus emulated this policy to curb the insurgency in Iraq by encouraging the US-financed militias of the Sunni Awakening.
As Durrani puts it: 'You have to be much more sophisticated. Eliminate some of the leaders, bribe others. You have to look for allies.'
In the remote mountain villages of Upper Dir, a gruelling four-hour Jeep drive away, something along these lines seems to be stirring. A couple of miles from Dhok Darra Main, the biggest settlement in a steep-sided valley where a blue glacial stream thunders down rapids between banks planted with hazelnuts, a lashkar - a tribal militia convened by the local inhabitants - has surrounded about 90 Taliban fighters in a wooded ravine.
Saraj Uddin, 57, points to his lashkar's makeshift fortifications: a circle of rocks on a hilltop above the village erupting with mortar and machine gunfire from weapons supplied by the army.
He says tensions had been building for months, and after the Taliban ambushed and killed five local policemen, the lashkar set up roadblocks in an effort to cut off their supplies.
The Taliban's response was a suicide bombing in a nearby village mosque the Friday before our visit, an attack that killed 39, many of them children.
This, Uddin says, triggered the lashkar's action: 'We want to finish these Taliban. They are against humanity. They used to control five of our villages and they have money. When we get some work, we are paid $2 a day. The miscreants are paying people $8 or $10 to fight for them.'
It's easy to see why this could be an incentive. The scenery might be breathtaking, but the poverty of Dhok Darra is grinding.
The government hopes the lashkar shows it is winning the battle for hearts and minds, and that ordinary Pakistanis regard the Taliban with revulsion. But although the early stages of the army's operation appear to have been successful, the evidence on the ground suggests it might be creating as many new problems as those it solves.
As the operation has unfolded in the mountains over the past seven weeks, camps for refugees made homeless by the fighting have been established on the plains wherever there is space: in fields, colleges, factory yards and mosques. They range in size from a vast tented city said to house some 90,000 next to the Islamabad-Peshawar motorway at Swabi, to gatherings of just a few hundred.
Even this masks the scale of the displacement: according to the United Nations, about 80 per cent of the refugees are not staying in camps at all, but the homes of family and friends. There are at least 2.7million refugees, a total that is certain to rise as the operation extends to places such as Waziristan.
This marks a departure from the policy of the Empire, when punishing the civilian populations from whose ranks rebels had been drawn was seen as a useful tool. Churchill described the most effective way to destroy a village: 'In every case, the spurs on either side must be occupied before the village is attacked, and held until after it has been burnt.'
As late as 1937, in his book Tribal Fighting In NWFP (Northwest Frontier Province), General Sir Andrew Skeen wrote about what he termed 'demolition', noting: 'There is usually an outcry about this form of punishment, with good reason. I dislike it intensely, but after the enemy's will to take punishment is broken, there is no other way to make him watch his step in future.'
Skeen gave detailed instructions about how to weaken roofs and houses with grappling irons before setting them on fire. Civilian homes in the current campaign have mainly been destroyed by accident. Nevertheless, says Kilian Kleinschmidt, the UN's Pakistan emergency co-ordinator, the numbers uprooted dwarf those affected by the 2006 Pakistan earthquake: 'To find a displacement as big as this you'd have to go back to the Ethiopian famine of the Eighties.' To date, donations from the world community are nowhere near equal to the task. In late May, when there were only 1.5million refugees, the UN asked for pledges of £330million to cover the barest necessities: tents, mosquito nets, basic bedding and food. Thus far, although there are almost twice as many refugees, the shortfall is £215 million. Army spokesman Major General Abbas says he hopes the refugees will be able to go home to Dir and Swat within a year. But he might be too optimistic. The first of five camps I visit is Paloosa, near the town of Charsadda, home to 3,447 refugees who fled from fighting in the Charmang valley in Bajaur ten months ago. There is still no sign of when their ordeal will end: there were renewed clashes in Charmang only last Monday. A lucky few are housed in the classrooms and offices of an elementary school, the rest in tents. No one has work or income. The World Food Programme provides just flour and lentils - no vegetables, meat, tea, milk or sugar. Nor does it provide fuel. To cook, the refugees have to hunt for twigs in the nearby woods.
It doesn't take much imagination to see that when the monsoon begins some time in the coming fortnight, bringing gales and rainfall measured in inches per day, conditions in these camps will become unspeakable. There are already cases of cholera.
[COLOR="#FF0000"]At Paloosa, the boys have made toy rocket launchers from sticks and plastic bottles, and they pass the time enacting 'battles' between the army and the Taliban. Their sympathies lie with the insurgents. 'We want to crush the army,' says Khysta Rehman, ten. 'I really miss my home, and I blame the government for making me leave it.'
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Also near Charsadda is a camp for refugees from Swat, established a fortnight ago in the grounds of a sugar mill. Here conditions are already desperate.
Families crowd into flimsy, ancient tents, sleeping on thin mats. They cannot cook at all, and are forced to subsist on two meals of rice and dahl a day, doled out at a communal kitchen. Many are well educated, and used to a comfortable standard of living.
'A buffalo costs 100,000 rupees [£800],' says one man. 'I had ten. Where will be my compensation?'
Shafi Ullah, a 42-year-old English teacher, says: 'Our plight is the fault of the government. They said they had to clean the area of terrorism, so we have done them a huge favour by leaving. They owe us proper facilities.
'But this is bigger than Pakistan: it's part of an international conflict. We have sacrificed everything for the sake of the world, and yet we are given almost nothing.'
[COLOR="#FF0000"]At Katlang, at the base of the mountains, I meet Najma Minhaj, 25, who lost eight relatives to a stray F16 missile that hit their house near a Swat village mosque.[/COLOR]
'We thought maybe the Taliban were at the mosque,' she says, her expression blank with grief. 'The youngest was my cousin, Ma'az. He was four. The Taliban let us have a funeral but they buried them together in the same hole. We left a huge, lovely home with all the facilities one needs for a comfortable life. We haven't even got pillows here.'
Meanwhile, political opposition is growing. As he visits a camp at Mardan, I interview the former cricketer Imran Khan, now leader of Pakistan's Justice Movement. He says: 'To hunt down 5,000 people, they've made nearly three million homeless. It's absolutely crazy. They should have pursued dialogue longer.'
According to Khan: 'Pakistan is heading the way Cambodia went in the Vietnam War, and extremists who are the Pakistani equivalents of Pol Pot are now coming through as the product of this destabilisation. The refugees are already seething with anger.
'[COLOR="#FF0000"]Just as with the British in 1897, the whole tribal area is on fire. The more you kill them, the more they will come back. Revenge is part of their basic make-up, and if you think that by bombing them you are going to make them give up, you are crazy.'[/COLOR]
Back in Islamabad, another retired general, Talat Masood, says that while the army can beat the Taliban, 'it cannot beat the Pashtun tribes'.
Success depends on the Taliban being seen as extremists and outsiders, who subvert, rather than express, the frontier's Pashtun identity. Here the example of Churchill's campaign in 1897 is not encouraging.
Among the people of the frontier, I discover a rich oral tradition, which remembers Swat's 'Mad Mullah' and his comrades as 'mujahideen' - the term for holy warriors once used about the Pashtuns who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan.
'He was a little mad, but he was pious,' says Hazrat Ahmed, 70, in the camp at Katlang. 'So when he said that if they fought the British they would defeat them, the people believed him. There are a lot of graves of martyrs who died fighting the British in 1897.
'Now some people admire the Taliban. Others say they are foreigners, and not good Muslims. Insh'allah [God willing] whoever is right about the Taliban there will be a victory for Muslims, because when Islam is finished, the world will end.'
Nizar Mohammed, 76, explains: 'The jihad against the British was a special type of war, what we call a ghazar. That means a war in which the Prophet has a personal stake. That's how our people saw it.'
[COLOR="#FF0000"]Pashtun children still learn songs that commemorate the battles of 1897 and the years that followed.
One of the most haunting celebrates a warrior called Beram Khan. It imagines the words of his wife: 'O Beram Khan, if your body comes back with countless bullets in your chest, I will never mind. But I don't want to hear that you left the battlefield fearing death. O Beram Khan, if you are martyred defending your country, I will weave your shroud with the hair from my head.'[/COLOR]
From his very different perspective, Churchill paid an equivalent tribute. Although the fighters of Mohmand and Dir had 'struck a blow at civilisation, civilisation will ungrudgingly admit they are a brave and warlike race. The valley and its people have become historic.'
The Pakistan army can only hope that the present conflict never acquires a similar cultural resonance.
[url=http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1194352/Hunting-Taliban-footsteps-Winston-Churchill.html]Hunting the Taliban in the footsteps of Winston Churchill | Mail Online[/url]
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