Ben's Reviews > Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan: A Man to Match His Mountains

The US's 20-year debacle in Afghanistan could've been avoided if our leaders had read this book before plunging into an unwinnable forever war. (Haha, just kidding. Even if they had read this book, they wouldn't have cared.)

Seriously, though, this story demonstrates why Western imperial powers keep trying and failing to impose themselves through violence on the tiny, strategically important piece of the world that is home to the Pashtuns. It's never worked, and it never will.

Everyone knows at least the broad strokes of Gandhi's satyagraha campaign to drive the British out of India. Almost no one—myself included, until a few days ago—knows that he was joined in this cause by a Muslim from the blood-soaked mountains of what is now Afghanistan. Badshah Khan did the unthinkable: he united the tribal, blood-feud-obsessed Pashtuns (or Pathans as they were known then) into a coherent, organized, 100,000 man-and-woman army. This army opposed the mighty British Empire and proved that the courage of the Pathan was not bravado, but ran bone-deep—because this army faced the cannons, rifles, lathis, and jail cells of the British completely unarmed and determined not to hurt anyone.

There is no word to describe the British governance of the Frontier apart from Fascist. It was a police state where unarmed civilians were routinely beaten, jailed without charge, or shot, strict curfews were imposed, citizens were paid to inform on each other, the media was silenced, and the local resident ruled as an autocrat. Massacres were a regular occurrence, along with the pillaging and burning of villages. No one seems to really know how many people the British murdered there during the long freedom struggle, because no outside observers were allowed to see. It's ironic that the British were fighting Nazis on one continent while behaving like Nazis on another.

The British and Pathans probably could have gone on killing one another indefinitely. It took a movement of nonviolence to break the cycle. It took some of the most violent people on earth embracing nonviolence wholeheartedly. The greatest act of courage is not to be hurt and retaliate—as the US did after 9/11—but to not retaliate. This idea is so radical that it was never even suggested here in America after the 9/11 attacks. But the "savage," bloodthirsty Pathans of the frontier found the courage to do it. I wonder if we ever will?