Abdul Ghaffar Khan

[Badlun]

So what for you is he definition of Pashtun liberation beyond just the mullah versus secularism conflict?

Let us put those issues aside. Lets say if Bacha Khan were resurrected today what do you feel he would say regarding the status of the liberated Pashtun? Does this mean Loy Afghanistan, Pashtunistan, free former NWFP irrespective of Afghanistan?

Everything remain the same except the emergence of Islamism after the demise of Bacha Khan. Pakistan, Afghanistan and NWFP now called KP all remain as these were in the times of Bacha Khan. If he will resurrect today, he would fight against Islamism (may be in a non violent way)or like his grandson Aasfandyar in a political but military way and may play role in establishing good cultural and commercial relations between Pashtuns on both sides of Durand line.

As now Pakistan is a state and has army and police not like British times, so Bacha Khan may approve role of state authorized forces against those who challenge state. Similarly he will be in favor of a strong Afghan army and police. Bacha Khan accepted the reality of Pakistan and that is why we expect such a role from him.

[Smarty]

Faqir of Ipi yes was a great Pashtun but we do not have nay legacy of him. He was a myterious character, shrouded in history with no political contribution like Bacha Khan. Bacha Khan has legacy in form of Khudai Khidmatgars and in today's Anp. He has given us brilliant sons like Wali Khan, Ghani Khan and Ali Khan.

Bacha Khan was a realist and he accepted Pakistan as his son was the first chief minister. Still he continued his struggle for Pashtun rights in the way we see today Asfandyar and MK Achakzai are doing.

Faqir of Ipi failed to gain the support of Mehsuds, Afridis, Mohmands etc, and was a failed person at the end but so was bacha khan. If Bacha khan was limited to peshawer division, faqir of ipi was limited to waziristan, bannu, lakki marwat, tank, karak and DI khan. He was the perhaps the first freedom fighter who tried to grow his influence beyond his tribe, i would equate his situation with khushal khattak who also failed. Like khushal khattak, faqir was both religous and nationalist. When you are under occupation and invasion, the armed struggle is priority not social reformation. It could have been more fruitful if bacha khan had handed over guns to his more than 100,000 red shirts.
Not every one is lucky to be jinnah . Jinnah was doing different types of politics, he was not a leader of nation/ethnicity, he was a wealthy man and politics was his hobby. He didnt put much effort, british simply bought his idea of division of india. If british had decided to leave india without partitioning, jinnah sahab would have accepted it, just like bacha khan accepted existance of pakistan. Not just jinnah, nehru also badly wanted india to be partitioned and british were very o.k with it. In this whole scene, jaw of bacha was opened wide in shock, hindus abondened him. He thought he would end up in united india and would enjoy governament of hindu majority. But his hindu buddies fed him to the "wolves".

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Everything remain the same except the emergence of Islamism after the demise of Bacha Khan. Pakistan, Afghanistan and NWFP now called KP all remain as these were in the times of Bacha Khan. If he will resurrect today, he would fight against Islamism (may be in a non violent way)or like his grandson Aasfandyar in a political but military way and may play role in establishing good cultural and commercial relations between Pashtuns on both sides of Durand line.

As now Pakistan is a state and has army and police not like British times, so Bacha Khan may approve role of state authorized forces against those who challenge state. Similarly he will be in favor of a strong Afghan army and police. Bacha Khan accepted the reality of Pakistan and that is why we expect such a role from him.

Thank you so now I am going to offer up two contrasting pieces of information for discussion based on the words of two people. First I am going to start with famed writer and Britain born in British India, George Orwell (penname).

We begin this discussion based on the fact that you and others have accepted the concept that Bacha Khan advocated pacifism as a way of resistance and as a pathway toward liberation by the definition you have above.

That is, the simple schema is:

Ghandi was a pacifist --> Bacha Khan was deemed frontier Ghandi ---> This embodied his pacifist approach toward nonviolent resistance --> Attained definition of liberation you present above.

So now in my occasional spare time I like to read old essays that perhaps bear on modern events.

Here is an essay from Orwell that is a favorite of neoconservatives (I hope you and others enjoy it):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.orwell.ru/library/article...english/e_patw

Pacifism and the War

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse by contemporary and near-contemporary English writers — for example, Eliot, Herbert Read, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden, D. H. Lawrence. Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the people who wrote them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote out-flanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need to explain here, but I should add that the fact that we were broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our technique to some extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by anything that could be described as British propaganda. It was known in advance that we could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse to be more ‘highbrow’ than is generally possible on the air.


Since I don’t suppose you want to fill an entire number of P.R. (Partisan Review) with squalid controversies imported from across the Atlantic, I will lump together the various letters you have sent on to me (from Messrs Savage, Woodcock and Comfort), as the central issue in all of them is the same. But I must afterwards deal separately with some points of fact raised in various of the letters.


Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.


I am not interested in pacifism as a ‘moral phenomenon’. If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though not much interested in the ‘theory’ of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldn’t own to any such fascination are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself. In the letter you sent on to me, Mr Comfort considers that an artist in occupied territory ought to ‘protest against such evils as he sees’, but considers that this is best done by ‘temporarily accepting the status quo’ (like Déat or Bergery, for instance?). a few weeks back he was hoping for a Nazi victory because of the stimulating effect it would have upon the arts:


As far as I can see, no therapy short of complete military defeat has any chance of re-establishing the common stability of literature and of the man in the street. One can imagine the greater the adversity the greater the sudden realization of a stream of imaginative work, and the greater the sudden katharsis of poetry, from the isolated interpretation of war as calamity to the realization of the imaginative and actual tragedy of Man. When we have access again to the literature of the war years in France, Poland and Czechoslovakia, I am confident that that is what we shall fined. (From a letter to Horizon.)


I pass over the money-sheltered ignorance capable of believing that literary life is still going on in, for instance, Poland, and remark merely that statements like this justify me in saying that our English pacifists are tending towards active pro-Fascism. But I don’t particularly object to that. What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally pro-Fascist, but who don’t care to say so and take refuge behind the formula ‘I am just as anti-fascist as anyone, but—’. The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions. The line normally followed is ‘Those who fight against Fascism go Fascist themselves.’ In order to evade the quite obvious objections that can be raised to this, the following propaganda-tricks are used:

1. The Fascizing processes occurring in Britain as a result of war are systematically exaggerated.
2. The actual record of Fascism, especially its pre-war history, is ignored or pooh-poohed as ‘propaganda’. Discussion of what the world would actually be like if the Axis dominated it is evaded.
3. Those who want to struggle against Fascism are accused of being wholehearted defenders of capitalist ‘democracy’. The fact that the rich everywhere tend to be pro-Fascist and the working class are nearly always anti-Fascist is hushed up.
4. It is tacitly pretended that the war is only between Britain and Germany. Mention of Russia and China, and their fate if Fascism is permitted to win, is avoided. (You won’t find one word about Russia or China in the three letters you sent to me.)

Now as to one or two points of fact which I must deal with if your correspondents’ letters are to be printed in full.

My past and present. Mr Woodcock tries to discredit me by saying that (a) I once served in the Indian Imperial Police, (b) I have written article for the Adelphi and was mixed up with the Trotskyists in Spain, and (c) that I am at the B.B.C. ‘conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses’. With regard to (a), it is quite true that I served five years in the Indian Police. It is also true that I gave up that job, partly because it didn’t suit me but mainly because I would not any longer be a servant of imperialism. I am against imperialism because I know something about it from the inside. The whole history of this is to be found in my writings, including a novel (Burmese Days) which I think I can claim was a kind of prophecy of what happened this year in Burma. (b) Of course I have written for the Adelphi. Why not? I once wrote an article for a vegetarian paper. Does that make me a vegetarian? I was associated with the Trotskyists in Spain. It was chance that I was serving in the P.O.U.M. militia and not another, and I largely disagreed with the P.O.U. M. ‘line’ and told its leaders so freely, but when they were afterwards accused of pro-Fascist activities I defended them as best it could. How does this contradict my present anti-Hitler attitude? It is news to me that Trotskyists are either pacifists or pro-Fascists. (c) Does Mr Woodcock really know what kind of stuff I put out in the Indian broadcasts? He does not — though I would be quite glad to tell him about it. He is careful not to mention what other people are associated with these Indian broadcasts. One for instance is Herbert Read, whom he mentions with approval. Others are T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Reginald Reynolds, Stephen Spender, J. B. S. Haldane, Tom Wintringham. Most of our broadcasters are Indian left-wing intellectual, from Liberals to Trotskyists, some of them bitterly anti-British. They don’t do it to ‘fox the Indian masses’ but because they know what a Fascist victory would mean to the chances of India’s independence. Why not try to find out what I am doing before accusing my good faith?

‘Mr Orwell is intellectual-hunting again’ (Mr Comfort). I have never attacked ‘the intellectuals’ or ‘the intelligentsia’ en bloc. I have used a lot of ink and done myself a lot of harm by attacking the successive literary cliques which have infested this country, not because they were intellectuals but precisely because they were not what I mean by true intellectuals. The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to see three of them come and two go — the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking. But even with these various schools I would differentiate between individuals. I would never think of coupling Christopher Dawson with Arnold Lunn, or Malraux with Palme Dutt, or Max Plowman with the Duke of Bedford. And even the work of one individual can exist at very different levels. For instance Mr Comfort himself wrote one poem I value greatly (‘The Atoll in the Mind’), and I wish he would write more of them instead of lifeless propaganda tracts dressed up as novels. But his letter he has chosen to send you is a different matter. Instead of answering what I have said he tries to prejudice an audience to whom I am little known by a misrepresentation of my general line and sneers about my ‘status’ in England. (A writer isn’t judged by his ‘status’, he is judged by his work.) That is on a par with ‘peace’ propaganda which has to avoid mention of Hitler’s invasion of Russian, and it is not what I mean by intellectual honesty. It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.

[Smarty]

Due to bacha khan patience and true believer of Islam, British tried every single option to disgrace bacha khan and spread lies against to creat disturbance in the region. Bacha opposed the creation of Pakistan as Gandhi did, he didn't believe in two nation theory. So the British were the first one to give him the name of frontier Gandhi to associate him with Hinduism. On the other Jinnah was declared the father of the nation as he was their ally.

To be precise, gandhi and his friend bacha khan along with abdul kalam azad opposed partition of india on communal basis. If there was no pakistan movement, gandhi and co would also have opposed separation of pakhtun areas from india. Bacha khan and co shouted about pakhtunistan option only when they realized that there will be no united india and they will be at the mercy of their political opponents, muslim league. Khudai khidmatgar were not separatists, they participated in elections and formed governaments with congress. They never had any intention of joining afghanistan or creation of pakhtunistan state untill 1947. After 1947 bacha khan got so panicked that he made contacts with "violent" faqir of ipi who had declared himself president of pakhtunistan. Later bacha khan chickened out ,changed his stance and dissociated himself from faqir and pashtunistan movement. On the other hand faqir of ipi stayed true to his decades long cause till his death.

[afghan]

To be precise, gandhi and his friend bacha khan along with abdul kalam azad opposed partition of india on communal basis. If there was no pakistan movement, gandhi and co would also have opposed separation of pakhtun areas from india. Bacha khan and co shouted about pakhtunistan option only when they realized that there will be no united india and they will be at the mercy of their political opponents, muslim league. Khudai khidmatgar were not separatists, they participated in elections and formed governaments with congress. They never had any intention of joining afghanistan or creation of pakhtunistan state untill 1947.

will bacha khan's struggle was to get rid of oppressors wether it be black british or white.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

The Orwell essay is a great essay and I am sure teachers like Tor Khan will value it (not necessarily for its message) but at least for its argumentation and its well written prose.

I want to provide some of Orwell's background. Why Orwell is important to us is that he has written one of the 4 most important novels of Dystopic Futures and also wrote the allegorical Animal Farm.

I recommend all 3 of these books which are fantastic and offer some insight from very intellectual people like Aldous Huxley:

Brave New World by Huxley
We by Zamyatin
1984 by Orwell

These three books should be read together because We is sort of a predecessor and rudimentary dystopian novel and the fascinating thing about 1984 and Brave New World is that they offer mirror image worlds of sorts. Huxley was concerned about the loss of culture, family values, religion etc and Orwell seemed more concerned with the growth of pervasive and overbearing dictatorship.

Up to this essay I greatly admired Orwell. Now after reading this I have to wonder about him a little and am a bit disconcerted. Perhaps it is because he is a Britisher and viewed the Second World War as having the potential to destroy his people in totality. But even then I would expect that he should have at least offered noninterventionalists and their American kin like Lindbergh the chance to explain themselves as they had some very strong arguments about what initiated hostilities with Germany in the first place.

So now some more about Orwell... he served the British empire in India during the occupation phase of British India. That is important to know about him.

I want to really bring out one of his (Orwell's) statements in this essay:

happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

I felt like this statement was key because it gives us a view into the mindset of the occupier (a view that we rarely get to see due to the control processes of refined empires and their slick propaganda machines).

But notice Orwell's rather practical and on the mark explanation that makes sense when one thinks about what he is saying in general.

Despite my slightly newfound (and possibly unfounded?) distaste for Orwell, I have to say he is being consistent. He is saying pacifism will lose Britain's war. He is not incorrect about this. He is not arguing the merits and demerits of the war, he is merely addressing the potential success or loss against Germany.

He really has and had no stake in the matter of Islam or Islamism but his assessment buttresses the long held argument that the wars of attrition in the NWFP FATA area led by the Faqir and the mainland violent resistance led by Muhammad Jauhar were more threatening to the British than Ghandi.

To further this argument, if Orwell has offered us the British view of who was the bigger and more potent threat to them... and they viewed Ghandi as a non-threat and even scoffed at the assessment that pacifist resistance dislodged them then what does this say about the approaches of "Frontier Ghandi" Ghaffar Khan?

Perhaps it is better to look at Afghan Nationalism in that Amanullah Khan would later argue from his den in Italy that he truly secured Afghan independence (and in a way he did) and that was because he never lost a war or a skirmish with the British.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

More on Orwell:
http://www.biography.com/people/geor...29833#synopsis

[BarakzaiAbdali]

So to recap:
The subject matter under discussion is the concept of Pacifist resistance as espoused by Khudai Khidmatgaar and Bacha Khan in contrast to the active resistance of say Taurangzai, Faqir of Ipi, and various Afghan Kings. Which approach has more of an evidence basis?

I want to offer some more fruit for discussion and hear your thoughts. Up to now we have information that the British (ala Orwell) viewed Ghandi as a nonthreat. Orwell gives his reasons above in strong detail and logic.

To now offer up more evidence, let us bring a person that Marxists and socialists revere. In fact many secular militant organizations and leaders even in our part of the world viewed Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara with admiration. His colleague Alberto Granado said that in a conversation with Guevara he had, Guevara would go on to say to him, when Granado proposed the pacifist approach to liberation:

" A revolution without guns? It would never work. - Guevara

Interestingly enough people view Che as a historical success but having fallen short of the mark on his Pan Latin American revolution.

I would beg to differ. He appeared to not view Cuba as some independent nation that would survive all on its own. His excursions into Latin America, where he would be captured and killed showed that he viewed a Pan Latin American independence movement as paramount to his venture.

What we see now in the recent Colombia election, in Bolivia, in Venezuala shows that Guevara's efforts were not all in vain... and in some ways the combination of Vietnam and various Latin American problems and insurgencies drained the ability of Yankees and the British to keep a secure boot on the neck of Latin America - leading to these more irreverent towards the North American governments arising.

So was Guevara incorrect or correct? When taken together with Orwell, perhaps we can see that Orwell would have agreed with him.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I will wait till people have read Orwell's essay to offer up more discussion as I want to hear the thoughts of others on what Orwell has to say (once again emphasizing the role of Orwell in the Indian occupation) and how this impacts their view of passive resistance and Ghandi and by extension Frontier Ghandi.

[Smarty]

[

[afghan]

How do you get rid of a state with gandhi approach?. After creation of pakistan, he was arressted and his workers staged a peaceful march in charsada against his arrest. Abdul qayyum khan ordered army to stop them. Army with tanks cornered them at babrra and slaughtered more than 600 of peaceful sheeps. This put them in place and they started talking about accepting existance of pakistan. They did give false hopes to afghanistan by making some visits, but in 2008 we discovered that all they wanted was recognition and acceptance in pakistan, and share in rule. Now that they are accepted as pakistanis, they have even sold themeselves to military establishment.

THERE IS NO BACHA KHAN NOW, neither any one protesting the paki establishment, the true warriors of waziristan have no control over their homes as they have been targeted forced to leave their towns. Do you think thats what bacha khan wanted? don't fall into paki lies.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

How do you get rid of a state with gandhi approach?. After creation of pakistan, he was arressted and his workers staged a peaceful march in charsada against his arrest. Abdul qayyum khan ordered army to stop them. Army with tanks cornered them at babrra and slaughtered more than 600 of peaceful sheeps. This put them in place and they started talking about accepting existance of pakistan. They did give false hopes to afghanistan by making some visits, but in 2008 we discovered that all they wanted was recognition and acceptance in pakistan, and share in rule. Now that they are accepted as pakistanis, they have even sold themeselves to military establishment.

So then yes this is interesting right? We have Tuarangzai and Faqir Ipi's definition of khpalwaaki/Azaadi and then we have the theoretical definition being offered by defenders of Bacha Khan. I am still unsure of what that definition of independence was or is. Was it Pashtun independence? Was it British Indian independence in Totality? It appears that the goal posts have changed with time and circumstance.

[Smarty]

Faqir of Ipi and Germans during WW2

British governor of NWFP even sent their agents in the guise of mullahs to convince faqir of ipi to not make contacts with german intellegence. More than 40 thousands troops were stationed in north waziristan to counter faqir during world war, when these troops were much needed in europe. Faqir was threat, not peaceful politician like bacha khan. Bacha khan could be arrested at any time and his followers could be killed without expecting any violent response from them. He was piece of cake.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Faqir of Ipi and Germans during WW2

British governor of NWFP even sent their agents in the guise of mullahs to convince faqir of ipi to not make contacts with german intellegence. More than 40 thousands troops were stationed in north waziristan to counter faqir during world war, when these troops were much needed in europe. Faqir was threat, not peaceful politician like bacha khan. Bacha khan could be arrested at any time and his followers could be killed without expecting any violent response from them. He was piece of cake.

Yes, what I think is more interesting is that up to now we have various diaries and civilian officer British logs of who they viewed as a problem and how they would deal with neutralizing that problem (e.g. Lord Cunningham's memoirs)... but Orwell offers the first view into the military command structure's viewpoint of the matter making it all the more important.

One of the arguments offered by the ANP pamphlet that I read was that mullahs were employed by the state with money to propagate against problem makers. An example is that Cunningham mentions working with Sherpao's father to get mullahs in Charsadda area on board to the British machinations and designs.

What is interesting enough is that this then threatens the passive resistance argument on two levels. One is that it was deemed a non military threat and then on top of that it was deemed as a form of propaganda that was considered easy to neutralize.

This makes logical sense right? I mean no one can say a word about Faqir and Tuarangzai whether he is a communist, liberalist, religionist, Taliban, up, down, left or right because they provided tangible concrete proof that they were willing to take up anti British arms and risk their life and limb. Therefore, it would be extremely hard to catch or propagandize that these people were against Islam or secretly working for the British.

This then proves Orwell's theorem in a practical historical real world sense.

[gadoonwal]

THERE IS NO BACHA KHAN NOW, neither any one protesting the paki establishment, the true warriors of waziristan have no control over their homes as they have been targeted forced to leave their towns. Do you think thats what bacha khan wanted? don't fall into paki lies.

afghan,stari mashaya.


Do,nt follow what the son of paki army say against bacha khan.
Smarty ,s entire family is serving in pak army.
They hate the word afghan and pashtuns.
He is recnetly trained in kakol army training center.
pashtunised jatt of laki marwat is making fool of pashtun here,be aware