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A fairly standard British tactic in dealing with the tribal territories along the Raj/Afghan border was very specifically punitive and disproportion.
In the Tirah campaign of 1897-1898, the British marched a column of some 25,000 men into the Pathan tribal territory of the Afridi and Orakzai after they had closed the Kyhber pass and overwhelmed a couple of small garrisons on the southern edge of Orakzai territory. The commander, General Sir William Lockhart, was happy enough to engage the tribesmen in open combat the few times the Afridi or Orakzai tried to stand and fight, but was content to attack what today would be termed infrastructure when they did not.
Standard operating procedure was to drive off flocks/herds (saving a few for foraging purposes), destroy crops in the fields, cut down orchards, and dynamite the substantial houses of the village or town (these houses were designed as small fortresses due to constant infighting among the Pathan). There were specific orders forbidding the destruction of Mosques, although the Gurkhas did ring all of the trees in the sacred grove at Bagh with their Kukris. The idea was to inflict enough damage to force the Pathan leadership to submit to the terms of the Raj, which included the payment of a substantial fine in cash and in arms, and to demonstrate that there was no location, however remote, that was immune to the retaliatory touch of the British Empire.
How well did it work? The campaign bought thirty years of peace from the Afridi and Orakzai. Even when most of the Frontier went up in flames during the aftermath of the Third Afghan War in 1919, only the notorious Zakka Khel of the Afridi (a Khel is similar to a clan, a sub-divsion within the overall tribe) rose against the British; the rest of the Afridi and all of the Orakzai stayed home.
