A district governor in Afghanistan was accidentally gunned down by NATO forces!
Read the story here – and it paints a horrible picture of a nation in great strife.
Afghanistan was handled differently in the days of the British Raj. The Raj did not send the Army. Rather, they sent in “political officers” who were members of a special cadre of senior civil servants. They comprised a “political service” and it was they who had nudged the Indian princely states into reforming their institutions.
Philip Mason’s The Men Who Ruled India tells the story of one such political officer, Herbert Eduardes. This was shortly after the Lawrences took over the administration of the Punjab – and Eduardes was one of Lawrence’s men. He was given the task of taming some wild Afghan tribes in the region of Bannu.
He took with him a contingent of the recently defeated Sikhs and proceeded – but not as a soldier; only as a “civilian.” His only condition to his troops was: “You will buy whatever you need.”
This stunned the Bannochis – who expected all victorious armies to plunder. Eduardes soon found local leaders calling at his tent in order to discuss important matters.
Eduardes returned to Banno year after year and patiently won the confidence of these war-like tribes. He was, like all political officers who worked in the area, fluent in Pushtu and would happily trade one proverb for another with the tribesmen. He understood their culture. He was, like Lawrence in Arabia, a man who understood the local customs well.
I do believe that we need such “political officers” today. NATO ham-handedness cannot deliver any real results.
Note that in Banno, on just his second trip, Eduardes hammered out a basic legal code. All the tribesmen agreed to be governed by that code. And by year 3 he was even collecting taxes.
The British Raj was built on excellent institutions – and the Political Service was one of them. Astonishingly, the cadre came to an abrupt end when Mountbatten let them down.
The Political Service had close relations with all the “princely states,” and these rulers also had treaties with the Crown. The Political Service felt that these princely states should not be amalgamated into India or Pakistan. But Mountbatten was a man in a hurry. He addressed the Chamber of Princes just once, that too in his Admiral’s uniform, and refused to answer any questions. He bluntly told all the princes – and all the political service officers gathered there – that it was all over. He then told Patel that he would deliver him his “basket of apples.”
We could do with a Political Service today – especially in Afghanistan.
And I daresay we could do with those 600 + princely states too. Almost all of them were better run than an average district is today.
Another good read is Charles Allen's The Lives of the Indian Princes.
well, the British weren't concerned abt the internal matters of the Afghan tribes. They only wanted tribute (tax) and overlordship. But now, NATO needs to flush out the Taleban and al Qaeda, hence they need to use force. As for Mountbatten giving up on the princely states, the chances of either India or Pakisatan choosing to annex them by force were high, as seen in the case of Kashmir and Goa. Mountbatten's ultimatum avoided what would have been just a pyrrhic victory for the larger nations.
ReplyDeleteDo the Afghans need foreign intervention, no matter what the flavour? Isn't Afghanistan capable of solving its own problems without outside interferance? Ghandi is believed to have told the British that he prefered his own bad rulers rather than be ruled by the good British ones. Perhaps the Afhans feel the same way too...
ReplyDeleteMy limited point is that any "imperial power" should want nothing more than "tribute and overlordship": to quote arby k.
ReplyDeleteThe British Empire did just that - and it was a well known saying that theirs was "an empire of laws and not of men."
The USA also has ambitions of Empire - but its methods are all wrong.
Note that nuclear India also sees itself as an Empire - so this discussion should be of utility to our rulers.
US never seeks to rule another nation. It is logistically difficult, considering their location in the world (Something the British found out after WWII). They choose to control other nations by remote control. This way they can delegate the responsibility to a Perves Musharaff or an Asif Ali Zardari, and need not be worried about accountability. The reason there is foreign intervention is Afghanistan is that their internal problems spilled over to US and US came to defend their rights by removing the problem.
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