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Counterinsurgency Lessons from the
North-West Frontier 1
Colonel Graeme Sligo, Australian Army
Introduction
The British were engaged on the North-West Frontier (along the border of Afghanistan and
what is now Pakistan) from 1849 to 1947, frequently involving actions against the local Pushtun
tribes. 2 This article examines the counterinsurgency lessons that may be drawn from that era.
Its context is political, strategic and civil-military, and is not a social or humanitarian analysis
of British policies on the frontier.
The article argues that, particularly from 1901 to 1939, the British were successful because
of good analysis within a strategic context of ‘ends and means’; the deep local knowledge of
their civil and military officers; effective civil-military cooperation and sound administrative
structures; and the intelligent application of non-military and military power and influence,
which included at times the application of intense military force.
These conclusions are consistent with—and indeed have been influenced by—similar
assessments in Christian Tripodi’s recent publication, Edge of Empire, in which he notes that:
… attention was consistently focused toward resolving the fundamental demand of the grandstrategic
level; the effective and calculated relation of ends and means to achieve policy objectives. 3
The lessons
Strategy and tactics
The British were ultimately successful on the North-West Frontier because they thought
strategically about what they were trying to achieve. 4 The underlying strategic context was the
so-called ‘Great Game’ being played out between the British and Russian Empires for control
of the East, where Great Britain perceived its overseas interests menaced by a Russian pincer
movement, one prong of which was aimed at Constantinople, the other at India via Central
Asia. 5 Within this context, management of the frontier was merely a ‘means to an end’—the
‘end’ being the securing of British India from foreign incursion.
After decades of inconclusive skirmishes, the British negotiated a border, the Durand Line,
with neighbouring Afghanistan in 1893. 6 This gave the British some certainty, if not stability,
in their ability to stave off any possible Russian advance through Afghanistan. Importantly, it
gave them access to the major mountain passes and a sounder defensive zone. The problem
then became how best to ‘manage’ the border and its fringes, a zone inhabited by a number
of ‘difficult’ Pushtun tribes. The British decided that the border must not be treated in an
arbitrary, linear fashion but as a more amorphous, permeable and cultural phenomenon. The
result, in 1901, was the creation of a separate border zone, with its own legal regime, to be
called the North-West Frontier Province.