On Afghan Plains

National Review Online, September 24, 2001

Afghanistan is, say those here who tell the U.S. to do nothing, a graveyard of empire, a land where American soldiers should not go, a mountainous desolation filled with a savage race of warriors that we would be crazy to challenge, a place, as Kipling so often described it, of terrifying cruelty.

 When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come up to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

 It is a landscape, runs the argument, where technological advantage counts for little. These, we are warned, are the fearless guerrillas who could shoot down a Soviet attack helicopter or defy the best of Imperial Britain.

 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!

 The Taliban understand the deterrent power of their country's daunting image. Speaking to the press on Friday, the Afghan regime's ambassador to Pakistan seemed to revel in the country's bloodstained past, "So the only master of the world wants to threaten us, but make no mistake: Afghanistan, as it was in the past — the Great Britain, he came, the Red Army, he came — Afghanistan is a swamp. People enter here laughing, are exiting injured."

 The ambassador's message is as clear as his grammar is shaky, but the truth, needless to say, is rather less forbidding. For a would-be invader, the lessons of Afghan history are not quite so bleak as myth would suggest. Contrary to legend, and for all the undoubted ferocity of the country's defenders, history shows that it is possible to mount a successful attack on Afghanistan. Those fearsome tribesmen can be beaten in a fight. The Soviets often achieved this during their long conflict with the Afghans, and, what is less well known today, so did the British in the course of theirs.

 Britain's first (1838-42) and second (1878-80) Afghan wars saw a good number of battlefield victories by Queen Victoria's troops. The problem, however, then as now, was that winning battles was not the same as winning wars. For all their formidable reputation, the redcoats proved no more successful than the Red Army in establishing any lasting authority over this troublesome territory

 It was a failure that was symbolized for generations of Britons by Dr. William Brydon. The Victorians often took a mawkish pleasure from images of their own failure, so long as that failure was either heroic or tragic. Dr. Brydon, clinging to his pony as he made it into Jalalabad in January 1842, managed to be both. Battered and bruised, the brave surgeon was the sole survivor of a British exodus from Kabul. 16,000 people, the scraps of an army and its camp followers, had fled the Afghan capital the week before. Dr. Brydon was the only person to reach safety. It was possibly the most humiliating moment in the history of the Empire, and a defining moment in the creation of the West's image of the invincible Afghan.

 Poor Dr. Brydon had, in the most horrifying way imaginable, been taught the other main lesson of Afghan history. Don't stay too long. Where the both the British and the Soviets went wrong, militarily speaking, was not in their initial onslaught, but in their attempts to impose alien rule on the country. Afghanistan may be a fissile half-state filled with a number of feuding ethnic groups, but, as much as its Pathans, Uzbeks, and Tajiks may loathe each other, they tend to hate the interfering outsider far, far more. And in their hatred, they have always had an ally in the country's brutal terrain. Those who want to control Afghanistan have to declare war on geography itself.

 The story of the Soviet intervention is well known, but in its failure (if not its motivation) it was not so different from those two British attempts well over a century ago. In 1838, the British succeeded in installing their own puppet ruler in Kabul. The sybaritic and cruel Shah Shujah failed to win any indigenous support, and the English presence was quickly seen as an intolerable infidel insult. "The mullahs," noted one officer, "are preaching against us from one end of the country to the other." It was an almost inevitable consequence of the invaders' arrogance that political ineptitude and cultural insensitivity were accompanied by military incompetence. In a country used to the politics of endless rivalry, the utterly predictable (except it seemed, to the Brits) betrayals, treachery and slaughter followed in due course. It was not so long later that Dr. Brydon was making his melancholy way back to Jalalabad.

 Significantly, however, in terms of current debate in the U.S., it has been forgotten that the last stage of the war, a punitive expedition, went relatively well for Britain. It was an example of how a carefully defined mission with clear and limited objectives can succeed as much in Afghanistan as anywhere else. Shah Shujah was dead (killed, naturally, under a flag of truce) by the time that the British returned to Kabul but the Afghan capital was reoccupied long enough for them to proclaim a somewhat unconvincing victory and return to the comforts of their Raj.

 Britain's second Afghan war followed a similar course. Attempts to reduce the country's independence again came to nothing, despite the occupation of Kabul on a number of occasions (at the end of the first of which, Queen's Victoria representative was murdered in the now traditional way). The invaders also fared little better in the rest of the country, which remained uncontrollable despite some notable British victories, which the Afghans, in their stubborn way, simply chose to ignore.

 London at last got the message. Pride saved by some conventional military successes, the British withdrew, having managed to leave Kabul in the hands of a new ruler, Abdur Rahman. Rahman was (genuinely) independent enough to satisfy local sensibilities, militarily competent (he managed to impose something roughly resembling unity on the country) and not actively hostile. So far as neighbors of Afghanistan are concerned that is about as good as it gets. Thereafter problems on the frontier with British India rarely rose much above a state of vaguely criminal disorder, periodically and effectively policed by the occasional intervention by Her Majesty's military.

 Today's challenge for America is more complicated, and more dangerous than anything ever faced by the British. Much of the solution probably lies in the shrewd and cleverly oblique approach recently advocated by James Robbins on NRO. Nevertheless, if as seems likely, some U.S. troops see action in Afghanistan, the real lesson of history is that they can prevail against this supposedly invincible enemy.

 But they mustn't try and run his country.