Article Review Fighting the Afgahans in the 19th Century
The Empire Stopper
The foreign powers that accept tried to control Afghanistan since the 19th century take all suffered for the effort. At present the U.Due south. is digging back in.
A group of British officers in Afghanistan in 1878. Credit... John Burke/Scientific discipline & Society Pic Library, via Getty Images
When the American author James A. Michener went to Afghanistan to research his work of historical fiction, "Caravans," it was 1955 and at that place were barely whatsoever roads in the state. Yet at that place were already Americans and Russians there, jockeying for influence. Subsequently, the book'due south Afghan protagonist would tell an American diplomat that one day both America and Russia would invade Afghanistan, and that both would come to regret it.
Michener's foresight was uncanny, but perchance that is not terribly surprising. Afghanistan has long been called the "graveyard of empires" — for so long that it is unclear who coined that disputable term.
In truth, no bully empires perished solely because of Afghanistan. Perhaps a meliorate way to put it is that Transitional islamic state of afghanistan is the battlefield of empires. Even without easily accessible resource, the country has still been blest — or cursed, more likely — with a geopolitical position that has repeatedly put it in someone or other's way.
In the 19th century there was the Great Game, when the British and Russian empires faced off across its forbidding deserts and mountain ranges. At the end of the 20th century it was the Cold War, when the Soviet and American rivalry played out here in a bitter guerrilla conflict. And in this century, it is the State of war on Terror and a constantly shifting Taliban insurgency, with President Trump promising a renewed military commitment.
Wars of the last iii "empires" to invade Afghanistan coincided with the age of photography, leaving a rich tape of their triumphs and failures, and an arresting chronicle of a state that seems to have inverse little in the past two centuries.
The British Empire
Over an fourscore-year period, the British fought three wars in Afghanistan, occupying or controlling the country in betwixt, and lost tens of thousands of expressionless forth the way. Finally, exhausted by the First World State of war, U.k. gave upward in 1919 and granted Transitional islamic state of afghanistan independence.
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It is hit, looking at these photographs, how little the rural Afghan landscape has changed between the early 19th and 21st centuries. The mud-walled fortifications of those days tin can still be seen throughout the country, and some of them are still in employ equally war machine facilities today. The fort in Kabul during the British occupation in 1879, shown below, looks very much like the famous Qala-i-Jang fortress in northern Afghanistan where the century's first American combatant, a C.I.A. amanuensis, was killed in 2001.
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The insurgents' clothes, and even that of many pro-regime militiamen, has inverse footling from the British period.
Ane of the books inspired by that menstruum was "Flashman," the starting time in a series of historical novels by the Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser. The book'south hilarious eponymous character, Flashman, is a caddish rake and self-described coward who manages to be the solitary survivor of the Battle of Gandamack, arguably the British army's worst ever defeat. Flashman is, of course, fictional, simply he has a thoroughly modern eye when he describes the nature of the British war against the Afghans.
"There were scores of little trivial chiefs and tyrants who lost no opportunity of causing trouble in the unsettled times," Flashman recounts. "Our ground forces prevented any big rising — for the moment, anyway — but it was forever patrolling and manning footling forts, and trying to pacify and buy off the robber chiefs, and people were wondering how long this could go along."
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The British lost that Battle of Gandamack, merely they were back in the next fighting season exacting vengeance, and somewhen defeated the Afghans. It was for many of them a sobering experience.
A British Army chaplain, M. R. Gleig, who witnessed information technology, chosen information technology "a state of war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close afterwards suffering and disaster, without much celebrity attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not 1 benefit, political or military, was caused with this war."
Sovietstan
The Soviet Union spent the postwar period pacifying and modernizing its Cardinal Asian republics with bully success. But information technology was mistaken in assuming that the same program could stick in Afghanistan. The Soviets invaded in 1979 to try to quell a brewing ceremonious war and prop up its allies in the Afghan government, and they limped out in 1989.
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The Soviets brought schools and roads, civil institutions and freedoms for women. But their occupation was unbearable to a generation of Afghan insurrectionists who declared a holy war and enjoyed the all-encompassing support of the Us, Pakistan and Saudi arabia.
It was a brutal war, on all sides. "Two Steps from Heaven," a novel by the Russian author Mikhail Evstafiev — himself 1 of the "Afgantsy," every bit Soviet veterans of that Afghan war are known — describes a set of arrangements amid perpetual conflict that seem conspicuously familiar today: "As the years passed, numerous military installations grew upward on the territory side by side to the palace. A chemical compound covered several square kilometers. It was guarded assiduously against the Afghans and, as was to be expected, Soviet power reigned supreme in that one specific part of Kabul."
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"The distance between the Afghans and the Soviets was measured in centuries," Evstafiev wrote. "A human being felt safe and secure only inside the garrison, surrounded by barbed wire, tanks and motorcar guns; fate had strewn Soviet military divisions all over Afghanistan, they were like islands in an ocean, lonely, far from the mainland."
The Soviets left the Afghan mural permanently disfigured with the bombed-out husks of tanks, and the globe itself seeded with more mines than anywhere else on the planet. When their client state in Kabul collapsed, what ensued was years of bitter ceremonious war that destroyed many of the cities, and led to the rise to power of the Taliban in 1996.
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The American Century
The kickoff American military battle of the 21st century was fought in Afghanistan shortly later the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Later on nearly 16 years of fighting a shifting host of militant groups and the new Taliban insurgency, and now even a local affiliate of the Islamic Land, in that location is no clear end on the horizon.
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That first battle, fought at the Qala-i-Jangi fort, featured American personnel on horseback, using lasers to guide bombs released from jet shipping.
Since and then more a million American servicemen and women take served in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan; two,400 of them lost their lives, along with another 1,100 NATO and other coalition allies killed. Afghan security forces lose three or four times that number just in a year now; the conflict killed more than than three,000 Afghan civilians in the past year, as well. American fatalities this year have totaled only xi, most of them Special Operations troops on counterterrorism missions. Other NATO fatalities: nix.
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Past 2010, equally American military numbers rose to 100,000, American and other coalition troops were in every one of the 34 Afghan provinces, often scattered — as the Soviets had been — in isolated fortresses. At present they are mostly restricted to a few major bases, and their numbers are estimated at effectually 12,000, including an influx of possibly some other 4,000 from President Trump's military commanders. The Afghan security forces, at the same time, take peaked at around 330,000 — roughly the same size they were during the Soviet flow.
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Many years afterward he had researched "Caravans," James Michener was asked which country he would most desire to revisit. His answer was Afghanistan, which his American diplomat character had described as "one of the world's great caldrons."
"I call back it every bit an exciting, violent, provocative place," Michener wrote. "Almost every American or European who worked in that location in the old days says the same."
And in these days, also, Americans seem committed to return to Transitional islamic state of afghanistan for many years to come.
"We are with you in this fight," the American military commander, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., told Afghans on Thursday. "We will stay with you."
The American century in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan is far from over; its book has not been written yet.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/29/world/asia/afghanistan-graveyard-empires-historical-pictures.html
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