Afghanistan- The Graveyard of Empires

Recently Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, told us that the Australian commitment in Afghanistan was likely to become deeply unpopular and that it was a long way from over. Rudd is recognised Australia wide as that rare phenomenon in Australian politics, an intellectual. And one presumes that as a former diplomat he has a fair knowledge of history. (If our diplomats are wanting in that department you could probably argue that when it comes to foreign affairs we'd be in more than a bit of a mess) But our Prime Minister seems somewhat lacking in his knowledge of Afghan history. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have sent more Australian troops there.

Okay, it wasn't his fault. We ended up there because Chimpo, aka The American Imbecile aka George W. Bush was running the U. S of A, and he didn't really have his eye on Afghanistan after 9/11. We all know now he was more interested at getting at Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq because, in Bush's immortal words, Saddam had tried to poison his Daddy. (One wonders about his morality of starting a ten year war because he was trying to stay in Daddy's good books, after wiping out his brains with cocaine for forty years but that's not the topic of this post, and Bush is gone, so ...) He only went into Afghanistan because that was where most Americans thought Osama Ben Laden was, and Ben Laden, not Saddam Hussein, was responsible for 9/11.

So that brings us to Afghanistan. At last count ten Australian soldiers are dead in Afghanistan, because John Winston Howard (let's put the blame where it really lies) invoked the ANZUS Treaty and followed America into Afghanistan, then concentrated all his attention on the Bush family feud in Iraq, to the grave detriment of the situation in Afghanistan. Those soldiers died fighting the Taliban. Bush, Howard, and probably Rudd and Obama would have us believe that the Taliban arose out of the Mujahadeen irregular forces that resisted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1975 onwards. (What they no longer wish to remind us of is that the Mujahadeen i.e. the Taliban and/or Al-Quaeda were cheerfully funded and supplied with arms by the CIA and once the Russians had gone said Mujahadeen turned round and bit their financial benefactors on the bum.)

What Howard/Bush/Rudd/Obama haven't told us is that Afghani bandits have been around for centuries, since the time of Alexander the Great, and that imperial forces invading Afghanistan ever since, with the exception of the Mughals, have had a really, really bad time there and have always lost. Its not for nothing its called the graveyard of empires. And that brings me to my narrative of that first European force, the British, who confronted the nineteenth century equivalent of the Taliban. The following is based on the account of the First Afghan War (1839-42) given by Boyd Hilton in A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846, Oxford, 2006.

Lord Auckland, India's Governor General (1836-1842) perceived an exaggerated Russian threat to India out of what is now modern day Iran and decided the best way to counter the Russians was to erect an alternative buffer state in Afghanistan. (This was part of what was known at the time and ever since as The Great Game). Unfortunately, this meant the British being involved in tribal warfare in Afghanistan, something they simply didn't understand, and in a series of rapidly changing alliances one might argue are analogous to the situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan today. Basically, just like the present Afghan War, the idea was that local forces should bear the brunt of most of the fighting, in a plot hatched to replace Dost Muhammad, the pro-Persian Emir of Afghanistan in Kabul. This was done easily enough by the British and their Hindu allies. The emir was replaced by a pro-British puppet. The British, however, could not leave well enough alone (a common problem in Victorian India) and they interfered with local tribal practices. The result was a riot and the British Consul at Kabul was shot, then hacked into pieces. The stranded British garrison opted for a retreat to the safety of Jalalabad.

Thus began one of the greatest defeats in British military history up to that time. Major-General William Elphinstone, the commander of the British forces, underestimated the effect of snow and frost-bite on his troops in the cold mountain passes of Afghanistan. Worse, he was surprised by the fanaticism of the supporters of the supplanted Emir Dost, who, in January 1842, attacked the British troops with knives, not guns, and wiped out 12,000 to 16,000 British troops in Jagdalak Pass. Only one white survivor, a medical officer, made it back to Jalalabad.

British honour was impugned. The British Army marched on Kabul, blew up the bazaar, randomly and collectively punished some nearby villages then left, leaving their puppet Shah Shuja without protection. He was, of course murdered and Emir Dost was back in Kabul.

As Hilton has noted, the Afghani bandits were 'oblivious to the conventions of chivalrous warfare.' (p.571.) The West, for the first time, had 'met the equivalent of today's suicide bomber'. (ibid.) A similar fate would meet the Russians in the twentieth century, though it took longer for the Afghanis to rid Afghanistan of them. One has to wonder what Kevin Rudd means when he tells us this new (well, relatively new) war is a long way from over.