File 3665/1924 Pt 3 ‘Arabia:- Situation 1924. Wahabi attack on Trans-Jordania; Hedjaz - Trans-Jordanian Boundary.’ [‎112r] (101/340)

4.
The risk, such as it is, of Trans-Jordan tribes,
exposed by the exclusion of Kaf from the Trans-Jordan
boundaries, being driven in self-defence to acknowledge
allegiance to Ibn Saoud, must be taken; merely to declare
jj an undefended Kaf to be within Trans-Jordan would be of
no avail *
5. To confine the protection of His Majesty’s
Government to tribes rather than to areas would, in all pro
bability, reeult in the protected tribes raiding kejd tribes
and sheltering, when the inevitable counter-raids took place,
behind Imperial Forces.
In any case, experience has shown that grazing
tii.es are useless as outposts to give timely warning of
impending attacks.
6. The idea of a buffer state seems impracticable;
Ibn Saoud attaches great importance, as was made evident
at the Koweit Conference, to having a clear road for his
i| trade caravans up the Wadi A seasonal or intermittent watercourse, or the valley in which it flows. Sirhan to Damascus, and his
desire to hold Kaf, or that Kaf should at least be neutral,
|J may well be inspired by economic considerations rather than
I by any aggressive policy in respect of Trans-Jordan.
7. A reasonable settlement might be to define the
eastern frontier of Trans-Jordan. For this purpose, the
definition framed by the Colonial Office should suffice;
to hold the railway and the cultivated land east of the
railway in the vicinity of Amman; and to organise a corps
of desert scouts whose information should enable any hostile
raid or concentration to be broken by air action before it
reached the points at which the attacks of 1922 and 1924
were first descried. Attacks on grazing tribes - which are
not