History's graveyard
Over the centuries, many nations have tried--and failed--to secure a footing in the Afghan region
By the time he was 34, Alexander "Bokhara" Burnes could speak five languages and effortlessly blend in to the bazaars of imperial India or navigate the treacherous Hindu Kush mountains. The British adventurer was an experienced player of the "Great Game," the covert struggle between Russia and Britain for control of the mountain passes that led to India, whose cotton, grain, and other resources fueled Britain's global empire. Fought with spies and well-paid local warlords, it was the 19th century's Cold War, immortalized in verse by poet Rudyard Kipling.
But playing the Great Game took patience, and the British wanted quick results. In 1839, they were ready to act, and Burnes's orders were clear: "Take Afghanistan in hand and make it a British dependency." He rode into the Hindu Kush mountains, just ahead of 15,000 British and Indian soldiers and a baggage train 30,000 strong, including thousands of heavily laden camels. (One regiment's officers kept two camels to carry their cigars alone.) The army stormed Kabul and set up a puppet ruler. In Britain there was jubilation. "The glorious success . . . will cow all Asia and make everything more easy for us," wrote Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.
But the people of Kabul soon bristled under the British. At the end of 1841, Burnes was cut to pieces by an angry Afghan mob. The British panicked, making a catastrophic midwinter withdrawal. Betrayed by their local allies, 16,000 soldiers and hangers-on fled for the Khyber Pass. In their scarlet coats and tight regimental formations, the British were easy targets for tribal snipers. A week after the retreat began, lookouts at a British outpost on the other side of the pass spotted a single rider reeling across the plain. The badly wounded Army doctor was the sole survivor of the British expedition.
A linchpin. "It was the first real colonial defeat the British had suffered," says Thomas Metcalf, a history professor at the University of California-Berkeley. "It detracted from the British Army's sense of invincibility." But it wasn't the first empire to be bloodied in Afghanistan's mountain passes, and it wouldn't be the last. For millenniums, Afghanistan was "the main crossroads between East and West," says Frederick Starr, chair of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "This was a linchpin, not the end of the road." The remote kingdoms and oases of Afghanistan were a stop on the Silk Road between Europe and China, and the main route south into India. Missionaries moved through, too--as did conquerors. Alexander the Great brought Greek culture to the area, then nearly lost his army in the winter of 329 B.C. In later centuries, the Arabs and the Mongols swept in, remaining long enough to leave their mark but never long enough to unite the region.
By the time the British and Russians took an interest, Afghanistan was made up of a mass of nomadic tribes, speaking more than 20 languages and fighting each other over the 10th of the country that could actually be farmed. Britain's failure spared the region from colonization, but as a result, Afghanistan never had the kind of nationalization movement that can shape a common identity. "Afghanistan has been, and remains, a tribal society," says Azade-Ayse Rorlich, professor of history at the University of Southern California. "The undercurrent . . . is an enormous fragmentation unmatched by anything in Central Asia."
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