Mark Collins – Churchill on Killing Pathans

From a post about Syria and the Middle East:

… without willingness to war, and realistically rule, we (especially chattering Canadians) might better not be so hortatory: e.g. “Assad must go“…

Now about willingness to war and rule (somewhat) on the North West Frontier of British India (“Pathan tribes” is the phrase Churchill actually used in the quote at the top of the post):

Churchill’s First War

A review of Con Coughlin’s Churchill’s First War (London: MacMillan, 2013)…

This book, by the defence editor of the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, has a double significance. It gives an insight into the early life and career of one of the twentieth century’s most famous statesmen, Winston Churchill. It also assesses Western strategy in the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan today in the light of Churchill’s experiences there almost 120 years ago…

Both sides were ruthless. The British suffered twenty per cent casualties, while unnumbered thousands of Pashtuns were killed. “There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,” one of the British participants wrote. The same man added, “I have not soiled my hands with any dirty work,” but since he had no compunction in destroying the homes of rebellious Pashtun villagers, the unnamed “dirty work” was apparently something darker.
The writer was Winston Churchill, at an early stage of his career…

…the core of this book is a grimmer story. Churchill’s articles for the DailyTelegraph were brutal and devoid of compassion: they make for unpleasant reading. He described the Pashtuns as “pernicious vermin,” whose clearance from their valleys would be a boon to humanity. Their religion was “the most miserable fanaticism.” Twenty-three years old, with no prior experience of war, he was seeing the Pashtuns only through the barrel of a gun. “The religion of blood and war,” he wrote sententiously in one of his columns, after hearing of the warlike behaviour of certain Pashtun clerics, “is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.”..

Churchill’s own book: The Story of the Malakand Field Force.  Then there’s Waging War in Waziristan.

Mark Collins, a prolific Ottawa blogger, is a Research Fellow at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute