CHAPTER VI. India and Her Neighbours. India has as neighbours on the landward side some small and undeveloped states, but here and there, her borders march with those of powers of some importance. A remote and little known corner of Baluchistan runs with Persia from the Koh-i-Malik Siah to the sea, and Northern Baluchistan is bounded by the Kandahar province of Afghanistan. North, again, of Baluchistan, the Durand line, for some hundreds of miles, marks the boundary between Afghanistan and the loosely administered belt of tribal territory which, since 1894, has been formally included within the boundaries of India. From the North-Western Frontier we have to undertake the immense journey to the North-Eastern confines of Burma before, with the exception of Nepal, we again touch an important Independent Power. There, for about a thousand miles, the frontier divides Burma from China. Hitherto no incidents on the Sino-Burmese Frontier have occurred more formidable than the incursions of bands of brigands and so there is no North-Eastern Frontier Problem to compare with that of the North-West of India. South of the Chinese Frontier, Burma touches part of French IndoChina for a hundred miles and then marches for six hundred miles again with Siam. Thus, Afghanistan and the North-Western Frontier normally focus interest in the external affairs of India. Here it will be profitable to examine the outlines of the problem of the North-West Frontier of India, for, until they are known, the significance of recent happenings in that quarter will not be perceived by those who have no first hand knowledge of the Frontier. The Indian North-West Frontier problem is made up of a number of problems which, though they are frequently detached from each other and studied in isolation by writers on this subject, are really inextricable. Four subsidiary problems make up the main problem, and these are:— (1) The international problem of the relations between India and Afghanistan, ( 198 ) (2) The problem of the military defence of the Frontier, (4) The problem of the administration of the North-West Fron- No one of these subsidiary problems should be studied save in connection with the others; for they shade imperceptibly into each other, and undue stress laid upon one will lead to a faulty understanding of the others, and a lopsided view of the Frontier problem as a whole. The word "Frontier" itself used in this connection has different meanings for different persons. In the first place we are concerned with two frontiers in the generally accepted sense of the word. There is the administrative border, i.e., the border between the five districts of the Frontier Province, and Tribal Territory, and there is also the Durand line, which is the border between India and Afghanistan. By the word Frontier, then, a Frontier Officer usually understands the whole tract of country running from the Hindu Kush in the north down to Chaman in the south and bounded on the West by Afghanistan and on the East by the river Indus. The Hazara District, it is true, lies East of the Indus, but geogra phically and ethnically it belongs partly to Kashmere and partly to the Punjab, and the tribes on its border, who are mostly somewhat backward off-shoots of the great Yusufzai tribe, do not present such a formidable problem as do the warlike and well-armed people on the borders of the four trans-Indus Districts. The trans-border tribes are linked to each other from North to South, and military operations against any one of them are apt to produce sympathetic effects among the others. These tribes are among the hardiest fighters in the whole world and only picked and highly trained troops can compete with them on anything like equal terms in their own hills. They are believed to number nearly three millions, of whom at least half are males and of the latter, close on three quarter of a million are regarded as adults and fighting men. Their armament has vastly increased within the last few years, and as long ago as 1920 there were believed to be not less than 140,000 modern rifles in Tribal Territory. The Mahsuds alone can arm effectively about 12,000 men out of a total of 16,000, whilst the Wazirs can similarly arm 10,000 out of a total of 23,000 fighting men. The difficulty of the military problem presented by the Frontier can thus be appreciated. All these tribes have historical connections with Afghanistan and in some places are bound to the neighbouring tribes of Afghanistan by ties of blood. The importance, therefore, of our relations with Afghanistan to the state of the North-Western trans-frontier, is obvious. It is possible to distinguish two different parts of the trans-border which present two somewhat dissimilar sets of conditions. One part is the territory which stretches from north of the Kabul River to Waziristan, whilst the second is Waziristan itself. The relations between the Indian Government and the tribes inhabiting the first of the above divisions have in recent years been satisfactory on the whole. North of the Kabul River are great chiefs like the Mehtar of Chitral, the Nawab of Dir, and the Mian Gul of Swat. These may fight among themselves, but they all desire friendly relations with India. Trade between this section of the trans-border and India is active and the Swat River canal finds employment for many hardy spirits who would otherwise make a living by committing crime inside British India. South of the lands of these great chiefs are the Mohmands, Afridis and Orakzais, all of whom have far too many corrections with India to fight save on any but the most serious grounds. Waziristan, however, presents a very different face. Its people are fanatical and intractable to a degree, and have come less under British influence than any other of the great trans-border tribes. We have conducted seventeen active operations against them since 1852, and four since 1911, the latest of which provided the most desperate and costly fighting in all the history of the North-West frontier. Also, as one goes from north to south of Tribal Territory, one finds that the constitution of tribal society grows steadily more democratic until it reaches the chaotic licence of Mahsud country where every man is a law to himself, and a wellaimed bullet is better than any consideration of right or justice. A well-known Frontier Officer, Sir Armine Dew, read a paper in London in 1925 on North-Western Frontier policy. In his paper he pointed out that while the history of the Government of India's military policy on the Frontier had been adequately written, no |