ABSTRACT
The historiography of North-West Frontier affairs during the 1930s tends to focus almost exclusively upon the activities of that notorious firebrand, the Fakir of Ipi. The initial spark for the Fakir'ss rabidly anti-British rhetoric was, on the surface, a superficially unimportant event: the apparent kidnapping in early 1936 of an under-age Hindu girl by a Muslim student. The campaign in Waziristan and the army's reintroduction into the tribal areas during and after raised again the broader debate of a 'civilian' or 'military' approach to the tribal problem, a subject that had been touched on briefly by the 1931 Committee. Parsons' critique of the army's abilities may have irritated many on the other side of the civil-military divide but in his opinion such matters disguised a far deeper malaise. The ethnic debate notwithstanding, any obstacles to any meaningful application of the Sandeman system in North-West Frontier and Waziristan in particular revolved around a familiar series of financial, political and diplomatic concerns.
