Enter the Dragon: Chinese Invasion
of Tibet continues...

In Amdo, the nomadic life-style was completely disrupted by the confiscation of land and property, land ‘reform’ and the building of roads, plus the constant danger of the presence of foreign troops. But in mountainous Kham, things were a little different, though the constant of their culture and religion was the same.

Mountain-dwelling people can fight to defend their territory from invaders or foreign rulers, as Akbar and later his great-grandson Aurangzeb found, when the Pathan (Pashtun) Yusufzais, Afridis and Khattaks on the Afghan borderlands began to rebel against Moghul rule. Their campaigns taught them that the only way to firmly tackle it and force submission was to attack their villages, in addition to military and political actions.

The British in India, having created a North-West Frontier Province as a buffer province between their Indian empire and Afghanistan, faced the same problem in Swat and Waziristan.

They struggled to keep them under control, using the British and Indian armies against these aggressively independent hill-men, but refrained from attacking their villages. In exactly the same areas today, the Pakistan Army and the US Army are trying to control the population by force, but due to the likely adverse domestic political fallout in Pakistan, and the bad international publicity it will cause for the Americans, are trying not to kill non-combatants. The Chinese had no
such hesitation in eastern Tibet against the Goloks in 1954 and against all Tibetan communities in eastern Tibet in 1956.

To be continued...