The Role of the British Political Officer on the North West Frontier

[davidbfpo]

In 2009 Christian Tripodi contributed a paper to a RUSI meeting, it is a commentary on whether the past could guide the present; the actual title is 'British Policy on the North West Frontier 1977-1947: a suitable precedent for the modern day?'.

A taster:

The fundamental point, however, was not necessarily that British methods were possessed of inherent weaknesses. Any system of administration in an environment as testing as the North-West Frontier was and is bound to have its weaknesses exposed, as the contemporary Pakistani experience has illustrated. Rather, the point to be made is that those weaknesses had little effect in real terms because the British were afforded the luxury of being able, over time, to marginalise the tribal areas within their own strategic considerations. They could afford to persevere with a 'hands off' system of control and administration that was fully acknowledged to be faulty and lacking in imagination but which sufficed in the face of institutional conservatism; a state of affairs that one would presumably wish to avoid today.

Link:http://www.rusi.org/analysis/comment...4AB377DACA5CF/