Khyber - Story of an Imperial Migraine

Charles Miller

Macmillan, New York, 1977

Publishing Date: Thursday, July 29 2004

This is an American book, but an English edition is published by MacDonald and Janes. Ostensibly it deals with the North-West Frontier, but in truth it treats the Frontier in the context of Afghanistan; the country and the people, Pathans, of both the N.W.F.P. proper (the Settled Districts) and the Tribal Areas are here seen by the rulers in Kabul, and often presented by the author, as an Afghan irredenta. Mr Miller quotes extensively from my works, and pays the compliment of calling my book the definitive work on Pathan history. And indeed in that work I tried, as he does, to see the Frontier and its people in their ethnic and historical relationship with Afghanistan. But his book, while covering much the same ground, appears twenty years later and is able to take account of the stresses in the sub-continent, and in Kabul, that have developed in that time. He does, however, stop short of the latest Afghan development, the seizure of power by Nur Muhammad Tarakki, and the displacement of Durrani rule for the first time since the Afghan State was founded by Ahmad Shah in 1747.

Inevitably there is in his story much reference to Russian designs and actions in all three Afghan Wars, and in the intervals between them. It would be true to say that this book, perhaps for the first time, sets in ordered perspective the pressures, Russian, British, Afghan, tribal and other, that have afflicted this strategically placed, land-locked, multi-racial country. As such it fills in many gaps - particularly in the 1897 revolt - left in the story told hitherto. On a broad view it suggests too that the days of Russian influence may be far from over. The departure of the British and the partition of India have seen to that. The title, Khyber, is far too narrow for the subject.

The story grips and the style is bracing. The author is not without sympathy for the British - even Roberts gets a good mark and Warburton figures as "a sort of Frontier Kissinger". Mr Miller falls into the trendy trap of condemning Englishwomen in the East - "the British memsahib had yet to establish herself as the most noxious figure in the annals of British imperialism" - but cannot himself refrain from admiration of the courage and honour of such as Lady Sale and Mrs Starr. He maintains a reasonably fair attitude in the assessment of Afghan character, and of the motives of Russian, British and Afghan rulers. The pictures drawn of Sher Ali, Abdurrahman, Amanulla, Nadir, are true enough, and when the author arrives at Nehru, Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his son Wali Khan, he writes with some discernment. In Abdul Ghaffar there is a true nobility; he bears no grudges. Wali he underrates; Wali is no demagogue; given a little more luck, he might have pulled Pakistan together. But the family is not Yusufzai; it belongs to a sibling sept, the Muhammadzai of Hashtnagar (not the same as the Muhammadzai Durranis who ruled in Afghanistan for over two centuries). There are, too, lapses in statements of fact, suggesting that the writer is not entirely familiar with his terrain, for instance both Malakand and Nowshera are wrongly stated to be 40 miles from Peshawar, and the Khyber railway is broad, not narrow, gauge. The Kashmir Maharaja was never a Brahmin, but a Dogra Rajput. Kitchener did not disband The Guides. Its is not true that the Waziristan tribes all abstained in the 1897 uprising; it started at Maizar in Madda Khel Wazir country. What is true is that the Mahsuds refrained; they had been trounced in an expedition in 1894. On a personal note, while grateful for kindly references to my endeavours, I feel Mr Miller should have acknowledged that the specimens of Khushhal Khan's poems he quoted (pp. 9 and 45) are my English translations. At one point he suggests that Harry Flashman was an historical character, but a reference to the Index shows that here he is kidding!

On one major point he goes astray. His maps and some of his references show that he does appreciate the difference between N.W.F. Province proper (the Settled Districts) and the Tribal Areas. But he often fails to grasp the logic and effects of that difference. He suggests for instance that Congress influence was strong among the trans-border tribes, and even that the people of the Districts might welcome rule by Kabul. In fact the Khan Brothers' influence in the tribal areas was very small, and if a joinder were ever effected, I would expect Peshawar to absorb Kabul, and not Kabul Peshawar. Further, the crowds faced by Mountbatten when he came to Peshawar in 1947 in his green shirt echoes of Freedom at Midnight! - were not tribal, but mainly city and village mobs. I was there and I know. This is not to undercut Mountbatten's panache at that confrontation.

The illustrations are good, particularly that of Abdurrahman, but the author seems to enjoy curdling the blood by details of tortures inflicted by him and other Afghans. The prose is striking, but sometimes a little naive, as when he writes of the Rani of Jhansi, a Mutiny character, as "a dainty young woman, who may have been braver than Nicholson, a smarter politician than Palmerston, and a greater patriot than Gandhi". He has his knife into Lytton and Palmerston.

All said, this is a book most valuable in setting the Afghan and Pathan scene in a bright, ordered and historical perspective, from the time of Mount stuart Elphinstone in 1809 up to the present date, ending just before the Tarakki coup and the ouster of the Durranis. It may be that the Durranis will return, and Tarakki prove no more permanent than was Bacha-i-Saqao forty years ago. What do the Soviets plan?

Mr Miller owes much to Kaye's three volumes on the First Afghan War and to Fraser-Tytler's Afghanistan. This is far better history than the contemporary fictional work, The Far Pavilions, dealing with many of the same events and characters. In reviewing Khyber it has been hard not to feel a little like Boswell on Johnson, or Johnson on his biographer. But on the whole it leaves a good taste in the mouth.

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