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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (46315)	5/26/2004 6:54:03 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50167

The romance of Frontiers province is unquestionable and I would quote here from the Plain Tales from the Raj in which it says that the stage in which the Pakhtun lived out his life was magnificent and harsh at the same time and the Pakhtuns liked their background. There was among the Pakhtuns something that called to the Englishmen or the Scotsmen, “partly the people looked you straight in the eye. There was no equivocation and you couldn’t browbeat them even if you wanted to. And we crossed the bridge at Atak and we felt we came home.” This is from Sir Olaf Caroe. One needs to go into details of our North Western Frontier Provinces. The best book on the traditions and narrative history of these provinces is Soldier Sahibs written by Charles Allen. This is the history of the man who made the NWFP. Anyone who tries to belittle the contributions of Pakistan in the northwest frontiers has absolutely no idea of the area. NWFP was to India and to British India what the Wild West was to the USA. It was a hard country of hard men who bore arms almost from the moment their mothers set them on the earth; who were merciless to losers yet always offered hospitality when asked. A Pakhtun would go to the end of the earth to settle old scores; who stuck to his own code through thick and thin. And who refused to become part of the fold even when it meant bringing the wrath of the government upon their heads. Throughout the period of British Crown rule in India from 1858 to 1947, scarcely a year passed without some form of military force or punitive action having to be raised and sent into the travel areas of the NWFP to bring one or the other clans to heel. But once a settlement had been reached and punishments or fines levied, the same punitive forces always marched away again out of the travel areas and back into the settled areas. And throughout the British periods, the Pakhtuns in the travel area uniquely retained a high degree of independence. They never pay taxes other than collective fines and even received what they regarded as a tribute from the Raj to keep the peace, dangled in the form of cash payment or gun licenses. So when the British troopships finally sailed away from Karachi in 1947, they left behind one of their biggest headaches, the NWFP. With the partition, the Pakhtuns of the Frontiers threw in their lot with Pakistan but remained as determined as ever to preserve their quasi independence and traditional way of life. According to Charles Allen, how the government of Pakistan has managed the Frontier since 1947 and what goes on today in those same divisions and districts that Nicholson and the rest of Henry Lawrence’s young men first governed is a story in itself. The romance continues and today, as yesterday, the politicals of the Frontier trade daily on the brink of eternity. These warriors of centuries whom even the Brits could not conquer, to be pacified by Pakistan is a very tall order. “I despise the man who does not guide his life by honour. The very word drives me mad and when a man is mad what does he care if he wins or loses a fortune.” – Khushhaal Khan Khattak, 1630-1691, Warrior Poet of Pakhtuns. This is the most notorious border of the world and what Pakistan is fighting today is something that has not been done over centuries.