IN THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES
FIGURE 1.1 Map of Afghanistan
CHAPTER ONE Descent into Violence
AFGHANISTAN’S STRATEGIC LOCATION, wedged between Persia, the weathered steppes of Central Asia, and the trade routes of the Indian Subcontinent, has long made it alluring to great powers. When Alexander the Great began his march into Afghanistan around 330 BC, locals witnessed a forbidding sight. Riding ahead of the invading force were scouts armed with sarisas—pikes up to twenty feet long, weighted at the base and projecting fifteen feet in front of the mounted cavalry. Agile soldiers armed with javelins surveyed the heights on both flanks. The core of Alexander’s army was a thick column of horsemen and foot soldiers that snaked along Afghanistan’s windswept roads. Some soldiers wore plumed helmets, purple tunics, and glistening armor. Alexander had begun his Asia campaign four years earlier, and the invasion of Afghanistan was a key part of his quest. His army had already swept through what is now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran before arriving at the edge of Afghanistan.1
One of the most interesting accounts of the campaign was provided by the Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus. He described Alexander gathering his soldiers together before their march into Afghanistan and addressing them with bravado:
In a new, and if we wish to confess the truth, insecure empire, to whose yoke the barbarians still submit with obdurate necks, there is need of time, my soldiers, until they are trained to milder dispositions, and until better habits appease their savage temper. Do you believe that so many nations accustomed to the rule and name of another, united with us neither by religion, nor customs, nor community of language, have been subdued in the same battle in which they were overcome?
It is by your arms alone that they are restrained, not by their dispositions, and those who fear us when we are present, in our absence will be enemies. We are dealing with savage beasts, which lapse of time only can tame, when they are caught and caged, because their own nature cannot tame them. Then you will hurry to recover what is yours, then you will take up arms. But how much better it is to crush him while he is still in fear and almost beside himself.2
Rufus wrote that the address was received with great enthusiasm by Alexander’s soldiers.3 The great Hellenic army entered Afghanistan from what is today Iran. They paused to found a garrison city, Alexandria-in-Areia, near Afghanistan’s western city of Herat, then marched south to the lower Helmand River Valley. The Helmand River, the longest in Afghanistan, stretches more than 700 miles from the Hindu Kush mountains in the north to the Helmand Valley in the south. Its waters, used by local farmers for irrigating crops, left behind rich soil to feed the orchards and date-palm groves that lined its banks. In this period, the valley was fertile and well populated, and Alexander’s army halted there to await the end of Afghanistan’s bitter winter before proceeding north. In the early spring, the army marched to the Kabul Valley, trekking across melting snow and ice, but the persistent, biting cold took its toll.
Rufus wrote: “The army, then, abandoned in this absence of all human civilization, endured all the evils that could be suffered, want, cold, fatigue, despair. The unusual cold of the snow caused the death of many, to many it brought frost-bite of the feet, to very many blindness of the eyes.”4
But in the Kabul Valley, the army finally found sustenance. Alexander’s Afghan campaign continued until the spring of 327 BC, when the army crossed the Hindu Kush into India. The Hindu Kush mountains form part of a vast alpine zone that stretches across South Asia. To the east, the mountains intersect with the Pamir range near the borders of China, Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and Afghanistan. They then continue southwest through Pakistan into Afghanistan, where they eventually descend into a series of minor ranges in western Afghanistan. Historically, the high passes of the Hindu Kush have been of great military significance, providing access to the northern plains of India for such conquerors as Alexander, as well as invaders such as Genghis Khan, Timur, and Babur. And they inspired the British travel writer Eric Newby, who wrote, during his trek through the Hindu Kush, “Here on the Arayu, one of the lonely places of the earth with all the winds of Asia droning over it, where the mountains seemed like the bones of the world breaking through, I had the sensation of emerging from a country that would continue to exist more or less unchanged whatever disasters overtook the rest of mankind.”5
Afghanistan was one of the most difficult campaigns that Alexander the Great ever fought. His adversaries were not conventional European armies but tribesmen and horse warriors who inhabited the steppes and mountains of the region. Both sides fought barbarously. Alexander’s army was technically superior to the local forces they faced, but it needed to clear and hold an expansive territory. The solution was to fight on multiple fronts in a constant war of attrition against the local Afghans, and to deal ruthlessly with the locals. The army sacked rebellious cities, killed or enslaved their inhabitants, and doled out savage reprisals. If not genocide, it was certainly mass killing. 6 Despite the bloodletting, his army failed to subjugate Afghanistan’s population, and his tenuous grasp on the region collapsed after his death in 323 BC.
Alexander’s march was eventually followed by the Islamic conquest of Afghanistan, which began around 652 AD, two decades after the death of the prophet Muhammad in Medina, when Arab armies from the Middle East captured Herat. But they failed to convert the recalcitrant mountain tribes, and their revolt preserved the loose conglomerate of Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others that had dominated before the rise of the Caliphate. In 122 AD, Genghis Khan and his Mongol army swept through Afghanistan and northern India, leaving behind a trail of devastation and creating an empire that stretched from China to the Caucasus. They depopulated territory, slaughtering civilians in an attempt to eliminate the possibility of rebellion, and they decimated cities such as Herat.
Marco Polo, the Venetian trader and explorer, trekked across Afghan mountains later in the century, remarking that “this kingdom has many narrow passes and natural fortresses, so that the inhabitants are not afraid of any invader breaking in to molest them. Their cities and towns are built on mountain tops or sites of great natural strength. It is a characteristic of these mountains that they are of immense height.”7 In 1383, the conqueror Timur began his Afghan conquest, again with the capture of Herat. He was the last of the mighty Mongol rulers to achieve a vast empire with territory stretching from present-day India to the Mediterranean Sea. The poverty, bloodshed, and desolation caused by his campaigns gave rise to haunting legends that inspired such works as Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. Early in the sixteenth century, the Mughal emperor Babur left present-day Iran and crossed the Amu Darya River, which would later serve as the border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan, captured Kabul in 1504 at the age of twenty-one. In 1522, he captured Kandahar and repeatedly tried to invade India, but he was never able to establish a firm foothold. He left behind traces of Persian culture—from language to music, painting, and poetry—that one can still see in Afghanistan.