The Dark Defile (41 page)

What comes of all our ’ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station—

A canter down some dark defile—

Two thousand pounds of education

Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—

The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,

Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,

No formulae the text-books know,

Will turn the bullet from your coat,

Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow

Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—

The odds are on the cheaper man.

Kipling also gave chilling advice to British soldiers in another poem:

When you’re wounded on Afghanistan’s plains

And the women come out to cut up what remains

Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Part
of the British policy was, in Churchill’s words, to make the tribesmen’s villages “hostages for their good behaviour.” When they rebelled the British punished them by destroying their crops, wells and fortifications. Churchill told how, as his column left the area, “not a tower, not a fort was to be seen, the villages were destroyed. The crops had been trampled down. They had lost heavily in killed and wounded and the winter was at hand.”

Even though Churchill approved of the campaign, he wrote home to his family, “
There is no doubt we are a very cruel people.”
Lord Roberts, the successful general of the Second Afghan War, wrote, “
Burning houses and destroying crops unless followed up by some sort of authority and jurisdiction, mean … for us a rich harvest of hatred and revenge.
”
³³

These risings had begun to take on a more overtly religious dimension. Not least responsible was Abdur-ur-Rahman, the emir in Kabul, who covertly encouraged the frontier tribes. He ensured the wide circulation of a book he had written, which emphasized that jihad was the highest duty of all Muslims and which extolled those dying in the fight who would be “
placed in the throat of green-winged birds who circle in the air and make their nests in the branches of the most blessed tree in Paradise.
”
³⁴

At the end of the campaign Churchill, who was nearly killed when a bullet went through his hat, praised the benefits the new roads driven into the mountains would bring in terms of trade: “
As the sun of civilisation rose above the hills, the fair flowers of commerce unfolded and the streams of supply and demand, hitherto congealed by the frost of barbarism, were thawed.
” But when the main British force left the frontier mountains behind them, together with their roads, their garrisons and a trail of destruction, they were also leaving a legacy of hatred and resentment among subdued but still defiant tribespeople.

ABDUR-UR-RAHMAN DIED IN 1901 and was succeeded by his short, obese, eldest son Habibullah. On his only visit to India in 1907 the nightlife enchanted him, and he was accompanied at parties by an attendant with a bag of jewels that he distributed to any woman who caught his eye. Despite such attractions, he remained levelheaded enough during the visit to refuse to endorse an Anglo-Russian convention, reached without Afghan involvement, which put an effective end to the Russo-British “Great Game.”

Among the key points of the convention, reached in the face of German and Turkish threats to the wider interests of the signatories, were that Russia agreed Afghanistan was outside its sphere of influence and agreed to confer with Britain about any matters concerning Russo-Afghan relations. In turn, the British agreed not to annex Afghanistan and not to interfere in its internal affairs. Also the British and Russians agreed, without consulting Persia, to divide that country into two spheres of influence, with the British zone including those parts touching the western border with Afghanistan. They also agreed that if a third party threatened Persia, they would each occupy their spheres of influence. Both Britain and the Soviet Union used this convention as the justification for jointly occupying Persia—by then known as Iran—and deposing its shah in the Second World War, citing German threats and the need to protect their oil supplies.
³⁵

Under Habibullah some progress was made toward development in Afghanistan. During the First World War Habibullah wisely resisted the Germans’ pressure to join the war on their side, although he did allow a German mission into the country for a brief time in 1915–16. It was said that German spies tried to raise jihad among Afghan tribesmen by claiming that the kaiser had become a Muslim and it was thus their duty to support him against the British.

Soon after the end of the First World War, Habibullah was assassinated near Jalalabad on a hunting trip. The killer is still unknown. Some said it was his brother Nasrullah’s doing, and he was imprisoned; others that it was a pro-Turkish, anti-British clique; yet others blamed the British. The upshot was that the emir’s third son, twenty-seven-year-old Amanullah, succeeded. Partly to divert the tribes’ attention from the internal factionalism, Amanullah proclaimed jihad against the British in the mosque in Kabul to enthusiastic cries of “death or freedom!” from onlookers. He called on the frontier tribes to rise up on his behalf, and his chief general, Nadir Shah, sent soldiers across the frontier on 4 May 1919, initiating the Third Anglo-Afghan War.

It was a short-lived affair. The British used old First World War fighter aircraft to attack the Afghans, aircraft so underpowered they could not get high enough to fly over the mountains; they flew instead along the valleys, where they were fired on from above by Afghan marksmen on the ridges. On 24 May an old Handley-Page bomber attacked Kabul. Amanullah protested to the British, pointing out how recently they had considered the bombing of civilians a crime: “
One of your
aeroplanes bombarded our royal palace … causing great excitement and panic among our loyal people. Many other favourite buildings in our … unprotected town were bombed. It is a matter for great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act and the bombardment of places of worship and sacred spots was considered a most abominable operation while now we see with our own eyes that such operations were a habit which is prevalent among a civilised people of the west.”

On the ground, the British forces soon repulsed the Afghans, who in early July sued for a truce. At the ensuing conference the British, exhausted by the First World War and fearing Communist influence in Afghanistan following the 1917 Russian Revolution, allowed Amanullah to remain on his throne and conceded that he would now control Afghanistan’s foreign policy.

Amanullah set out on a campaign to reform his country, basing his measures on those of Atatürk in Turkey. He insisted on men wearing Western dress and sometimes carried shears to cut off nonregulation items of clothing. He opened education to women and allowed them to choose whom to marry. Factories were established and foreign commercial advisers encouraged. On a visit to Europe in 1928 his queen, Soraya, appeared unveiled with bare arms and wearing a V-necked dress as her husband sought further development projects. Conservative mullahs used pictures of the queen to show how decadent the emir was becoming.

On his return Amanullah called for monogamy, the full emancipation of women and for all women to go bareheaded. Following his execution of five conservative mullahs who had protested, a rebellion broke out against him. Amanullah pulled back on some of his emancipatory reforms, but to no avail. He was soon in exile in Italy with his queen. Civil war followed. General Nadir Shah eventually established himself as king but was in turn assassinated in 1933. He was succeeded by his nineteen-year-old French-educated son, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who ruled at first under the guidance of his paternal uncles. Advised by other members of his family, in particular his cousin Daoud, he reigned for the next forty years until, in 1973 Daoud, who was eager to speed the pace of commercial and constitutional change, ousted him in a coup.

The forty years of Mohammed Zahir’s reign saw, in addition to a gradually increasing internal prosperity, major changes on both Afghanistan’s northern and southern borders. In 1947 the British departed, and modern India and Pakistan came into being. The Durand line remained as the border with Afghanistan, giving the Pakistanis the dominating heights the British had appropriated for themselves and continuing the partition of the lands of the local tribes, which explains the near inevitability of the fighting in Afghanistan spilling over the artificial frontier with Pakistan. The Pakistanis also continued with what had evolved into an arm’s-length British approach to the control of the frontier tribes. Nevertheless, tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan grew over the years in regard to transport and other costs for the transit through Pakistan of Afghan imports and exports, and more particularly about claims for Pushtun autonomy.

Afghans increasingly turned to Russia as a trading partner, and, as the Cold War intensified and Pakistan drew closer to the United States, the Russians were eager once more to expand their influence in Afghanistan, which again became a buffer state, this time between communism and capitalism, with both Russia and the United States competing for influence. The Afghan armed forces used Russian weapons, most of their officers were Russian-trained and the army’s technical language was Russian. The United States became directly involved in many aid projects in Afghanistan, such as that for the irrigation of the Helmand Valley.

After he came to power, Daoud, who had had Soviet support in his coup against his cousin, tried to resist Russian pressure for increased influence in Afghanistan’s internal as well as external affairs. His reward was to be deposed and murdered in April 1978 in a military-backed Russian-inspired coup, which led to the establishment of a Communist regime. Traditional tribal and Islamic factions rose in sporadic rebellion against the new government’s policies, such as land reform and female emancipation, until in December 1979 the Russians—claiming to be answering appeals from the people and government of Afghanistan and to be concerned about instability spilling over their own borders—invaded. Like the British in 1839, the Russian high command expected to be out of Afghanistan within a year, in the interim having pacified the country and helped the Communist government establish itself.

Instead, the Russians stayed for eight years, fighting an insurgency backed by the United States and Islamic countries that took advantage of the safe havens provided by the tribal territories on the opposite side of the Durand line in Pakistan. When the Russians finally departed on the eve of the breakup of the Soviet Union, more than 1.5 million people had died. Many more were refugees in Pakistan, and Afghanistan’s infrastructure had been destroyed, relegating the country to an almost medieval condition.

After the Russian departure, the previously Russian-backed president, Najibullah, clung to power. His forces successfully repulsed mujahideen attacks, in particular a four-month-long assault on Jalalabad—the only major battle into which Osama bin Laden is known to have led his Arab forces into action himself. However, Najibullah’s regime was overthrown, and he was murdered in spring 1992. A standoff between guerrilla leaders followed, foremost among them Rashid Dostum, Ahmad Shah Massud and the more fundamentalist Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. During this period fighting with heavy weapons took place in civilian areas without regard to who was caught in the crossfire, and atrocities were common. One of the most notorious was the attack by Massud’s men on the Hazara suburb of Kabul. Amid the rubble of the Kabul zoo, Hekmatyar kept one of the lions alive by sometimes throwing it a prisoner in the way of the Roman emperors.

Against this background the power of the Taliban began to grow as they were perceived as a relatively corruption-free movement with more regard for civilian welfare than any other group and with leaders whose lives were simple and followed religious principles, albeit fundamentalist ones. Many Afghans were prepared to accept the restrictions these principles placed on their freedoms as a price worth paying for the stability the Taliban brought to their ravaged country. The Taliban’s primary leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had been brought up near the site of the Battle of Maiwand, in which the Afghans had defeated the British, in a village whose inhabitants relished telling stories of the defeat of the infidel.

The Taliban took Kabul in the summer of 1996 and gradually increased their hold on the country. A few months earlier, Osama bin Laden, who had been out of Afghanistan for six years, returned. He had played no part in the founding of the Taliban and initially returned to an area near Tora Bora outside their control. His focus was on international jihad against the United States, that of the Taliban an internal one on Afghanistan. However the Taliban, perhaps influenced by the Pushtun code of hospitality and mindful of his role in the fight against the Russians, refused to surrender bin Laden to the United States following the first of his international attacks. Thereafter his name and that of the Taliban became synonymous to the wider public.

The coalition invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was thus an inevitable consequence of 9/11. British forces, still numbering among them a Gurkha regiment from Nepal as well as of course many Highlanders, followed the United States into Afghanistan, where they have lived and died for the past decade, over 160 years after British forces first entered the country.