Take, for example, Durand's treatment of Waziristan, for many decades since a cauldron of revolt. For reasons of topography — its ring of 12,000-foot peaks that towers above the Indus plain — the British wanted it for the Empire, and ignored the Amir's protests that, historically, its people had been integral to Afghanistan. Durand was incapable of taking these objections at face value, and thought the Amir was being irritatingly peevish. "Long interview with Amir today. He was very pleasant at first — but got sad and sore over Waziristan," he wrote in his journal on October 26, 1893. "However...I think he will give in." 

A week later, the Amir was "on high horse — Does not want money but honour etc — net result that he will have a bit of Wazir country — which I suppose I must give him." Thus, the emergence of Durand's less than brilliant solution: about half of Waziristan, a region of close tribal cohesion, became part of British India, while the rest stayed in Afghanistan. But even as Abdur Rehman accepted Durand's border, together with a stipend of 20 million rupees a year, he was already plotting resistance.

Early in 1897, the Amir convened a secret meeting of radical Pathan mullahs in Kabul. Those present crossed back into India, and, supplied by Afghan guns and ammunition, led the great jihad of 1897, a tumultuous rebellion that convulsed almost the entire northwest frontier and became the greatest challenge to British arms in India between the Mutiny and independence 90 years later. The young Winston Churchill, who sent dispatches to the Daily Telegraph about the revolt and its crushing by the aptly named General Sir Bindon Blood,  conveyed the sense of its magnitude. As he approached the front, he came upon a British supply caravan a mile and a half long, and asked the officer in charge how many days it might keep the British forces going. The answer: two days. 

However, the 1897 jihad was but the start of a Pashtun challenge to the frontier that has continued with few interruptions ever since. Meanwhile, in a further act with huge unintended consequences, the British attempted to minimise the harm the disgruntled tribes might do by granting them semi-autonomy in the Tribal Agencies, a buffer zone between the Durand Line and the "settled areas" of the Empire. Unfortunately, these no-go areas for the state became the perfect laboratory for successive waves of jihad. Until 1947, these storms broke against the British. Since 2001, the Tribal Agencies have provided the main safe havens both for the Afghan insurgency, and for Pakistan's own Taliban, the source of mayhem.

Recent books aimed at a general readership have unproblematically adopted the terminology used by Empire-era Britons and modern neoconservatives alike, referring to the jihadist enemy as "fanatics" in ways that assume their fanaticism was some kind of given, an a priori state. In fact, as Sana Haroon shows in her ground-breaking study Frontier of Faith (Hurst, 2007), in earlier centuries the Islam practised by Pashtun tribes was predominantly mystical, Sufi and pacific. In the works of writers such as Rahman Baba (1653-1711), it spawned not bloodshed, but an intense, lyric poetry.