by Tim Newark
The never-ending conflict on the North-West Frontier was part of the Great Game – the strategic rivalry between the British and Russian Empires – in which the British feared a Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan. The Russians had effectively conquered the Muslim states of Central Asia and it seemed only a matter of time before they would exploit the continuing tribal conflict on the North-West Frontier to grab the Jewel in the Crown from Queen Victoria. But this was a chimera that played better in London clubs as an excuse for increasing arms expenditure in India, because the reality was that Russian influence on the Pathan tribesmen was negligible. The volatility of the region was down to the tribesmen themselves and their hunger for weapons.
The Pathan tribesmen, among them Afridis, Wazirs and Mahsuds, lived on the fringe of the British Empire. As such, they enjoyed none of the benefits of their neighbours to the south, who thrived on the trade and industry of British-controlled India. They lived in a mountainous land of poor agriculture and had to rely on their wits and weaponry to grow rich. For centuries, they had lived primarily as raiders, stealing goods from their neighbours. In the early twentieth century, their one great advantage was their proximity to the imperial frontier, which meant they could benefit from smuggling arms to and from India and then, latterly, illegal drugs. They were one of the largest and most aggressive groups of organised criminals in the world.
The fury of the Pathans was not always directed at outsiders. For most of the time, it was aimed at themselves, as feuding tribes and families competed with each other to dominate the region and gain the most from their criminal activities. ‘A rifle to a hill Pathan is literally the breath of life,’ noted a British Commissioner in 1901. ‘If, for instance, I have a breech-loader and my enemy with whom I am at a blood feud has none, he must get it or go under. There are no two ways about it.’ Such a necessity for weaponry meant that the majority of the Pathans remained poor, as any excess income in their community was spent on guns.
The Pathan desire for modern European-manufactured rifles was fed at first by a network of smuggling across the border from India or outright theft from Indian Army depots. ‘Coffins had been successfully employed to convey rifles across the frontier under the very eyes of unsuspecting militia patrols,’ said one reporter. ‘In Calcutta, rifles had been strapped under goods-wagons destined for Peshawar, whence they were secretly carried off by natives on arrival. Ammunition had gone through the Khyber cleverly concealed in bales of merchandise. Bolts had disappeared mysteriously from arms-racks.’
British soldiers sometimes succumbed to selling their rifles to dealers, netting up to £25 for a Martini-Henry. In 1898, a Private Gilchrest of the Royal Scots Fusiliers was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for selling a rifle-bolt to an undercover Border Military Policeman. Such were the rewards from the illicit trade that a substantial number of weapons were also imported through the Middle East.
‘Some think they are imported from Birmingham or Belgium, and thence find their way via the Persian Gulf to the Indian frontier,’ surmised a correspondent in The Times. ‘Some imagine that they are obtained from the Amir’s workshop in Cabul [sic]; and some believe they are stolen in India, and sold for fancy prices across the border. Probably from each of these sources the supply is maintained; but, whencesoever they get them, it is certain that the Afridis now possess Martinis in large numbers, and have besides an apparently unlimited stock of ammunition. They have too, a good many Sniders, the bullets of which inflict frightful shattering wounds; and in the recent operations they obtained forty or fifty Lee-Metfords, and made uncommon good use of them.’
As the British tightened up their control on the flow of illicit weapons from within India to the North-West Frontier, so the trade route from the Middle East became more important. In April 1899, George Roos-Keppel, then a captain on Special Duty in the Kurram Valley, told the Secretary of the Government of India that he had bought two carbines, one made in London, the other in Birmingham, from a tribesman who claimed he could supply him with many more. These hadn’t come from India, but from the longer route via the Persian Gulf. It was well worth their while. A weapon bought at the port of Muscat in Oman could be sold for many times more by the time it reached the Pathan tribesmen.
As word got back to Europe of the fortunes to be made selling weapons in Muscat for shipment across the Gulf to the North-West Frontier, so Belgian, French and German arms dealers joined the British, who already had a strong presence there. These European gun sellers professed they had no idea where the weapons ended up, only that the Arabs had a bottomless desire for them. Rather than depending on native dhows, the ruthless merchants were helped considerably when the Hamburg-American Packet Company started operating steamers across the Gulf from 1906. Afghan arms caravans awaited the arms shipments on the other side, on the Makran Coast of Persia, present-day Iran.
The influx of wealth into the region saw an inevitable increase in piracy. A British Consul in Basra received a report of a typical incident. Early one morning, a commercial vessel was boarded by two Arabs. ‘A watchman was, as usual, on duty on our barge,’ wrote the British commander of the SS Barala, ‘but before he had an opportunity of calling out for assistance two men held him up, one pointing a rifle at his head and the other a dagger, threatening him at the same time that if he dared to shout they would kill him.’
More Arabs boarded the barge and removed a large quantity of cargo. The Briton despaired at the lawlessness of the area, knowing that the local Ottoman Turkish police would do very little about it. It certainly added to the perception that the entire Persian Gulf was riddled with corruption.
By 1907, some 94,000 Martini-Henry rifles had arrived from the Persian Gulf into Afghanistan for sale to Pathan warriors. A year later, it was estimated that a further 30,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition were arriving each year. An example of the far-flung network was revealed when a large number of breech-loading rifles, disposed of by the Australian government of New South Wales after the Boer War, ended up on the North-West Frontier with the New South Wales stamp still on them. Not only did such a significant influx of modern weapons threaten security on the North-West Frontier, but, if these arms got into the hands of dissidents within India, it could also fuel a rebellion against British imperial rule within the entire subcontinent.
Through diligent intelligence-gathering, it was Roos-Keppel who reported to the Government of India the exact route taken by some of these arms smugglers from the North-West Frontier. His agent in the Khyber underlined how difficult it was to get these facts.
As a penalty of 2000 Rupees and the burning of the offender’s house has been fixed by the tribe to prevent information concerning the method of the trade reaching the ears of the government, first-hand information is not yet easy to acquire.
But the agent learned of a trip undertaken by a Pathan tribe – the Adam Khel Afridi. They had previously stood aloof from the business of arms smuggling, preferring to manufacture their own weapons, but this trade was being undermined by the superior, cheaper European guns flowing into their realm from across the Middle East. From their richest merchants, they gathered 48,000 rupees and 56 tribesmen set off in September 1908 on the long journey. They travelled in smaller, separate parties, with the money hidden in their clothing. In Karachi, one group was caught changing their silver for gold and were arrested for suspected arms dealing. The rest set sail for the port of Sohar in the Gulf of Oman. They then marched 14 days to Muscat.
‘On arrival at Muscat they found themselves in a market which offered free trade in rifles and ammunition at cheap rates,’ said the agent.
They selected the rifles, paid for them, had them wrapped in bundles, but they could not take them away. The Muscat traders told the Adam Khel to leave them behind and travel to a point on the opposite shore of the Gulf of Oman outside Persian government control. There, they might have to wait up to three months before they would see their valuable cargo. The Pathan tribesmen must
have wondered at the wisdom of this in a region renowned for its lawlessness. But they had little choice. The Muscat traders said the delay was ‘rendered necessary by the vigilance of those who sought to hamper the trade’.
The Adam Khel did as they were told and found a spot on the Persian coast where the people lived in caves and sold them camels. After waiting for about a fortnight, several rowing boats appeared, bearing their consignment of guns. The relieved Afridis were impressed by the honest business dealings of the Muscat traders. With the bundles loaded on their camels, the caravan set off in early January for the land route to Kabul.
‘The caravan marched for four months,’ said the agent, ‘encountering many difficulties in the shape of difficult roads and lack of water, but nowhere suffering from attack.’ At one stage, they went three days without water, but, eventually, they reached Kabul. The camels were sold in the market and the tribesmen were each given ten rupees to cover their expenses.
Altogether, the Adam Khel expedition brought in about 1,000 rifles and 120 pistols, reported Roos-Keppel. In Muscat, they had bought a German-made Mauser rifle for 80 rupees. Back home on the North-West Frontier, it sold for 320 rupees. A British-made Martini-Henry rifle was bought for 55 rupees in Muscat and sold for 200 rupees. The cost of importing each weapon was roughly fixed at 20 rupees above the Muscat price. ‘The success of the venture has greatly elated the Adam Khel,’ concluded the Khyber agent. A similar venture on a larger scale was planned for the following autumn.
Gun smuggling was turning into a gold rush. Something had to be done, and in 1909 the Indian government, spurred by reports such as that received from Roos-Keppel, took military action. The Royal Navy supplied five warships to blockade the Makran Coast, which ran from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. Consignments of weapons were seized from native dhows and they interrupted the flow of weapons to the extent that Pathan arms dealers lost considerable sums of money. It resulted in them turning to their traditional methods of raising cash – with an upsurge of raids across the North-West Frontier in 1910.
The naval action created a sense of tension in the Persian Gulf and, when sailors from HMS Hyacinth landed at Dubai to search for illicit weapons in December 1910, they were attacked by a gang of locals. Five of the seamen were killed and nine wounded in the clash. A possible explanation for this was shortly after published in The Times of India, which said that the Arab press was exacerbating the situation by claiming that the British were so fed up with the illegal arms trade they were going to carve up Persia and then annex Arabia:
These apprehensions have induced an increasing anti-foreign feeling, which has been intensified by the belief that our measures against the arms traffic are intended to lead to the disarmament of the Arabs, who cling to their rifles as their most cherished possessions.
‘The Press demands that renewed attempts shall be made to suppress the Muscat traffic itself,’ concluded the article.
Such was the money to be made from selling illicit arms in the Middle East that it attracted some of the most unlikely arms smugglers. Charles MacFarlane was a draper from the Isle of Wight. Owing to ill health and domestic difficulties, he sold his business in November 1911, raising £900. In a pub on the Strand in London, the ex-draper met members of a syndicate that had conceived a plan to sell British guns to the Ottoman Turks. Swept up by tales of the fortunes to be made, MacFarlane invested part of his money with an ex-army officer and the next thing he knew he was sailing on the Esmerelda with the amateur arms dealers to a port somewhere west of Tripoli.
On the way, MacFarlane lost £215 gambling with the syndicate. Once in North Africa, the draper, the ex-army officer and his associates travelled 100 miles inland with their cargo of guns to a Turkish fort. Having arrived there and deposited their weapons, they were forcibly recruited into the Ottoman army by a Turkish officer, the deal presumably having gone badly wrong.
The ex-army officer and another member of the syndicate were killed in a subsequent combat. MacFarlane lost touch with the survivors and, alone, broke and suffering from sunstroke, he was put aboard a ship back home by some kindly Arabs. A year later, he was telling his extraordinary story to a bankruptcy court in London. No doubt much of this tale was elaborated to present himself in a sympathetic light, but what it does underline is the extent to which illegal arms dealing had become a widely known get-rich-quick scam in Edwardian England.
By 1911, the Royal Navy patrols in the Persian Gulf had gained the upper hand in their war against the gunrunners. Part of this was thanks to their use of advanced communications technology.
‘Wireless telegraphy may be said to have almost doubled the effectiveness of the squadron for its present purpose,’ noted a special correspondent for The Times embedded with the patrol fleet. ‘Very few dhows can escape its vigilance. Every one met with is overhauled and thoroughly searched. If arms are found, they are immediately seized and the dhow taken in tow.’ It was painstaking, tedious work. One ship searched 97 dhows before making a single arrest, but it proved to be one of the largest captures recorded – more than 2,000 rifles and piles of ammunition.
For the crew of the smaller boats deployed, it could be a challenging mission, as The Times reporter made clear:
It is no child’s play for a young officer and a crew of 12 or 14 men to be turned out for a cruise of several weeks’ duration, come fair weather or foul, in a small cutter or pinnace, with little or no shelter from the fierce tropical sun or from the sudden squalls which constantly lash those wind-swept waters – and sometimes a Hobson’s choice between an ugly sea outside and the dubious refuge of a creek with a party of truculent Afghans on the shore ready to receive them with loaded rifles.
Arnold Keppel was the 8th Earl of Albemarle, a British soldier, and a distant cousin of Roos-Keppel, to whom he dedicated his book, Gun-Running and the Indian North-West Frontier. He joined a 1,000-strong expeditionary force that landed on the Makran Coast in April 1911. Consisting of British Indian Army units, including the 104th Wellesley’s Rifles, armed with two machine-guns, and the 32nd Mountain Battery, it was led by Colonel Walter Delamain. Their mission was to push through the Marak Gorge, held by tribesmen loyal to the Baluch gunrunning gang leader Mir Barkat, and provoke a confrontation.
‘For mile after mile the column forced its way through the deep sand which filled the bed of a shrunken stream,’ recalled Arnold Keppel. ‘The day was hot and the heat was accentuated by the funnellike defile into which the sun shone at an almost vertical angle.’ The gunrunning bandits had withdrawn before the advancing British. ‘Suddenly a muffled shot was heard somewhere ahead, another, then another.’
Scouts located some tribesmen in the gorge hidden behind sangars – piles of stones turned into field fortifications. The vanguard of the 104th Rifles immediately engaged them until the main force arrived, supported by the 32nd Mountain Battery. Under their covering fire, the British Indian units pressed the bandits back.
Each line was successively carried, while the intermittent ‘cough, cough’ of the machine-guns followed the retreating force across the open spaces. Each shell from the ten-pounders as it burst on the hillside laid bare a conspicuous round bare patch of blue clay. Many burst right over the sangars.
The fight lasted for almost three hours until midday. By then, three sepoys had been injured, with eight of the 200-strong bandit gang killed and twenty-four wounded. One of their leaders had been especially conspicuous, wearing a red puggaree scarf around his hat, and was shot through both thighs. Their chief, Mir Barkat, was not present, but it was judged that the clash had dented his reputation and reduced his ability to recruit more men.
Back in London, there was some criticism of the measures taken to stop the gun smugglers. ‘The cost of the preventive operations in the last two years, exclusive of the operations this season, has been £220,000,’ said one critic, speaking to the Central Asian Society. ‘It seems bad policy to incur the cost of these endless preventive measures, which must be indefi
nitely continued … I say nothing of the extraordinary position created by the mobilisation of a British squadron to prevent the transit of arms, some of which are still being shipped in the Thames.’
This was the problem – too many Europeans were making too much money out of the business. The Sultan of Oman was willing to stop the trade, but he wanted to be compensated for the £20,000 of annual revenue he would lose. The lack of willingness displayed by the British government in London to grasp this problem and crack down on their own arms manufacturers meant that the army of the Indian government would continue to suffer. ‘We shall see our soldiers shot down with rifles some of which were made in England, and exported from England,’ said the critic. ‘It was in 1897 that the existence of the traffic was revealed, and it was in 1907 that, too late, the first really practical steps were taken to prevent it.’
A further twist to this crooked business was exposed by a colonel who had served on the North-West Frontier. He wondered how the tribesmen found the money to buy all the modern arms flooding into the region. ‘They were not a wealthy people,’ he said, ‘but they must have spent many thousands of pounds upon the purchase of these arms.’
A great deal of this money came from the Indian Treasury. The subsidies from the Indian Exchequer [used to buy the compliance of the tribesmen] were almost invariably laid out in the strengthening of their military position – so that we not only supplied the tribesmen with arms of British manufacture, but we gave them the money to buy them.
Despite the evident hypocrisy of the situation, the direct action of the British Indian government in the Persian Gulf did have some impact on the gun smugglers and made the cost of buying guns from Muscat rise to a price where it became less attractive to the Pathans. Nevertheless, it was a sad reality that the commercial interests of British and European home governments outweighed the security concerns of their colonial governments and those serving on the frontiers of empire. The same clash of interests between home and colonial governors would create even more tension in the world of illicit drugs smuggling.