Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans

A classic and highly influential ethnography, which explores political leadership among Swat Pathans - and which emphasizes the importance of individual decision-making for wider social processes. This study describes certain aspects of the society of the Pathans of the Swat valley in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Except where other reference is given, the material on which it is based was collected by the author in the period February-November 1954.

In the context of a review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan during September-November 2009, the performance and legitimacy of the Afghan government figured prominently. In his December 1, 2009, speech announcing a way forward in Afghanistan, President Obama stated that the Afghan government would be judged on performance, and "The days of providing a blank check are over." The policy statement was based, in part, on an assessment of the security situation furnished by the top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, which warned of potential mission failure unless a fully resourced classic counterinsurgency strategy is employed. That counterinsurgency effort is deemed to require a legitimate Afghan partner. The Afghan government's limited writ and widespread official corruption are believed by U.S. officials to be helping sustain a Taliban insurgency and complicating international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan. At the same time, President Hamid Karzai has, through compromise with faction leaders, been able to confine ethnic disputes to political competition, enabling his government to focus on trying to win over those members of the ethnic Pashtun community that support Taliban and other insurgents.

"The Wali of Swat was born nine years before his father carved out a centralized state in the stateless, unruly tribal area of the Swat Pathans on the borders of British India. The Wali later ruled Swat for twenty years, till it was merged with Pakistan in 1969. His recollections thus span the whole history of Swat State, and give a unique insight into its formation and development."--Jacket.

First published in 1976, this Routledge Revivals reissue presents an analysis of the Swat Pathans, the people of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, who belong administratively to Pakistan despite being a fiercely independent group, with their own codes and ways of life. Akbar S. Ahmed, who knows the Swat Pathans well through his family connections, presents a clear and sophisticated analysis of their complex society. The study provides an anthropological and critical re-examination of the ethnography of the Swat Pathans and the author suggests specific alternative models of social organization. The book also represents an important contribution to the general debate in the social sciences between the ‘methodological individualists’ and the ‘methodological holists’, and challenges some of the theoretical and methodological premises in anthropology. In particular the author is critical of Professor Fredrik Barth’s study of Swat Pathans, for he believes that the ‘Swat models’ have inadvertently become the basis for generalized, and often incorrect, understanding of models of Pathan socio-political organization in the social sciences.

With a new Preface and Epilogue written by the author after the fall of the Taliban explaining the extraordinary changes that have taken place since this book was first published in 1979, this ethnographic study describes the cultural and ecological adaptation of the nomadic Kirghiz and their agriculturalist neighbors, the Wakhi, to high altitudes and a frigid climate in Afghanistan.