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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." Still, the tribes had one thing in common: "a passionate distaste for foreigners of any kind," says Karl Meyer, coauthor of Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. It was a trait one modern empire came to understand too late. The Soviet Union, eager to have a friendly state on a sensitive border, began taking an increased interest in Afghanistan in the 1970s. In 1979, the U.S.S.R. moved troops into the embattled country to prop up a tottering Communist regime. The Soviets were naively optimistic. "It'll be over in three to four weeks," Leonid Brezhnev blithely declared. The winter invasion turned into a military and political catastrophe. Afghanistan's people dropped their internal quarrels and united against the Soviets. International reaction was swift as well. After watching the U.S.S.R. prevail in a string of small-scale regional conflicts, American policymakers were convinced that this was a dangerous new development in the Cold War. The CIA began funneling funds and weapons to Afghan mujahideen resistance fighters through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, who in turn supported fundamentalist groups that would later coalesce into the Taliban. The Red Army was out of its element. Its heavy equipment and cautious tactics, designed for war on the open plains of Northern Europe, made it an easy target for guerrillas armed with lightweight American missiles and intimate knowledge of the rugged mountains. Soviet troops were dazed and demoralized by the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of the mujahideen. Over the next decade, thousands of coffins would arrive in the U.S.S.R., signs of defeat even the Soviets could not hide from their nation. "Politically it was much more of a disaster for them than Vietnam was for us," says Georgetown University historian David Goldfrank. "The Afghanistan intervention was key in bringing down the Soviet regime." With the Soviets humiliated, the United States had little interest in staying around. "The moment things were over, the U.S. dropped them completely," Meyer says. The Soviet withdrawal left Afghanistan ruined, with 1.5 million dead, millions more refugees--and the nation strewn with up to 15 million land mines. Significant foreign aid never materialized. "When the CIA pulled out, there was toasting at Langley, but it was regarded as betrayal and abandonment by Afghanistanis," says Meyer. "The Afghanistanis didn't regard themselves as pawns or proxies or mercenaries--they saw themselves as partners and allies." But the chance for friendship was lost, and now another world power faces the challenge of Afghanistan. |
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