CHURCHILL'S FIRST WAR
Young Winston and the Fight Against the Taliban
Con Coughlin
Pan Macmillan; 259 pages; Rs 450
As Allied combat troops prepare to pull out of Afghanistan, the inconclusive 13-year military engagement in that country will remain a discomfiting memory in the West, forever bracketed with George W Bush's equally indecisive war in Iraq. But Afghanistan holds a special place in British imperial historical memory. In some ways, Churchill's First War, by the executive foreign editor of The Daily Telegraph, is a reflection of that frustrating sense of hubris.
A pawn in the Great Game, the hot-and-cold war between the British and Russian empires in the frozen fastness of the Karakoram and Himalayas, Afghanistan has forever been the untamed frontier. The Russians rarely managed to make durable forays among that country's unruly militant tribes even in their Czarist heydays, and scarcely succeeded when they tried in their Soviet avatar in 1979. The British expended much blood and treasure on three major and savage wars against Afghanistan between 1839 and 1919 and could claim a victory of sorts in just one (the last). Books on these wars abound, from Peter Hopkirk's masterly account of the Great Game to William Dalrymple's Return of a King, a detailed but readable narrative of the First Anglo-Afghan War.
Churchill's First War deals with a more limited engagement on the hotly disputed tribal territories that the British clumsily divided with the notorious Durand Line, one of the four hotspots of global insecurity they bequeathed to the world in the retreat from empire - Kashmir, Israel and the McMahon Line being the others. This involved a rebellion against the British by Pashtun tribes incited by the fanatical Talib-ul-ilm, forerunners of a sort of the Taliban, in areas that are familiar today: Chitral and the Swat valley.
Con Coughlin attempts to draw parallels between that distant but savage six-week skirmish in 1897 that established the reputation of the future British prime minister as an enthralling war correspondent and rescued him from the oblivion as the son of a discredited politician. The book is built largely on Winston Churchill's own accounts - his prolific personal correspondence, his entertaining memoir My Early Life and The Story of the Malakand Field Force, the book version of dispatches he wrote for The Daily Telegraph of London and Allahabad Pioneer, Rudyard Kipling's old paper. Current events provide the context.
"In many respects … the challenges faced by the latest generation of soldiers fighting in this inhospitable mountain region of the Afghan border are those encountered by the British at the end of the nineteenth century," Mr Coughlin writes in the Prologue. "They are fighting the same Pashtun tribesmen who are determined to maintain their independence from foreign interference and who have been inspired by a particularly uncompromising brand of Islamist ideology to resist the occupiers."
Not that Churchill appeared to suffer any self-doubt in the heat of the campaign. Drafted in to command the 31st Punjabis as an emergency, he remembered it as "the oddest experience" because of the language barrier. "I had to proceed entirely by signals and dumbcrambo [sic]. To these I added three words, 'Maro (kill), 'Chalo' (get on) and Tally Ho! Which speaks for itself." Ever the racist, he added patronisingly, "There was no doubt they liked to have a white officer among them when fighting… If you grinned, they grinned. So I grinned industriously."
Still, his assessment of the Malakand campaign was forthright: "Financially it is ruinous. Morally it is wicked. Militarily it is an open question and politically it is a blunder," he wrote in a letter to his mother. He was right then, but Mr Coughlin may be overstating the case in his effort to draw direct parallels.
Sure, there are some historical similarities - the presence of the "Mad Mullah" Sadulla, the rallying calls to "liberate Afghanistan for Islam from the English" and the fierce martial spirit of the Pashtuns. But commentators from Ahmed Rashid to, most recently, Carlotta Gall have reiterated that the Taliban by no means enjoy widespread popular support. It is now clear that had it not been for sustained support from the Inter-Services Intelligence, the movement would have fizzled out. Outgoing President Hamid Karzai may be a discredited figure today, but he was not so when Afghans voted him to power. The conflict today has different contours because Afghan society has evolved. Its tragedy lies in its geographical position as a pawn for Pakistan's chronically strategic insecurities.
It is a measure of the paucity of human intelligence for American forces in Afghanistan that Churchill's forgotten classic suddenly became a hit in US military circles. General Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and Nato forces till 2010, would apparently listen to Churchill's account on his iPod during his daily jog around the Kabul base. And David Petraeus, who devised the counter-insurgency campaigns and was a star of the establishment before his ignominious sex scandal-related resignation as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, claimed to draw on Churchill's account when writing the army's new field manual.
If you have not read much on the imperial struggles in Afghanistan, this is a great introduction. Mr Coughlin has a gifted journalists' skill in capturing the tumultuous history of the times and drawing contemporary parallels in an engaging potted history of 259 pages. By linking this benighted contest to a future British hero of World War II, he may have also assuaged British national self-esteem a little. For Indians watching the ham-fisted management of the Af-Pak dynamic across our borders, however, there may be little comfort in reading an account of history repeating itself as farce and tragedy.
