The Original Insurgent

Alo

ng the mountainous, 2,600-km span of the Durand Line—the porous border separating Afghanistan and Pakistan—a notorious jihadi is on the loose. He is responsible for guerrilla attacks, sabotage and cruel executions; his religious fanaticism inspires multitudes and threatens to destabilize much of Southwest Asia. Thousands of Western soldiers desperately search for the renegade terrorist in inhospitable terrain. But each time they have him cornered, he and his militia slip away into hidden valleys and caves.

No, this has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden but with Mirza Ali Khan, a Pashtun holy man who revolted against the British in the late 1930s. For nearly a decade, the British army chased him and his followers through the remotest reaches of Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier Province—the same ground where allied troops have spent the past five years searching fruitlessly for bin Laden, and where the remnants of Afghanistan's Taliban fled to lick their wounds and recover their strength. The region was then, as it is today, a powder keg of fractious tribes and fundamentalist firebrands, and Britain's experience with trying to capture Khan mirrors the frustrating hunt for bin Laden.

Khan was called the Fakir of Ipi, after the Wazir town where he was said to exercise divine powers—like turning sticks into guns and feeding multitudes with a few loaves of bread. Flying the banner of "Islam in Danger," his small lashkars, or war bands, ambushed convoys and raided prominent towns, killing Hindu traders and marching off with money and munitions. For colonial officials in London and New Delhi, this was no minor uprising of petty bandits. Intelligence estimates at the time counted 400,000 fighting men among the various Pashtun tribes, at least half of them armed with modern rifles. The insurgency forced the British to commit as many as 40,000 troops to the frontier, and, as World War II raged, to station a permanent garrison there even as the Japanese advanced steadily into Burma.

The Fakir tormented the British brigades, evading capture with only the aid of local informants and guides (not one fighter in his ranks possessed a radio). In response, the British imposed fines on Pashtuns who refused to cooperate with their search, bombed troublesome villages, burned the fields of unhelpful tribesmen and destroyed the houses of his ringleaders—a violent clampdown that only alienated the local population further. A London newspaper heralded Khan in a couplet as the Scarlet Pimpernel of the East: "They sought him here, they sought him there, those columns sought him everywhere." After independence and the partitioning of India, Khan became a thorn in the side of the new Pakistan government, violently agitating for an independent Pashtunistan until his death, by natural causes, in 1960.

Decades later, the Fakir's stomping grounds are again ground zero in a war on terror. American, NATO and Pakistani troops face a hydra-like insurgency led by a string of shadowy extremist leaders who make expert use of the border's treacherous, land mine-riddled terrain, melting into the mountains only to resurface, ever stronger, from their myriad training camps and bases. "I doubt whether Washington in 2007 knows much more about what is happening in Waziristan than London did in 1937," says Alan Warren, a military historian and author of a book on Khan. If so, as with the elusive Fakir of Ipi, the heirs of that British frontier force of old might, too, never get their man.