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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781487590864 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division |
| Publication date: | 12/15/1961 |
| Series: | Heritage |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 238 |
| File size: | 363 KB |
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Where the Bear Met the Lion
Afghanistan 1978-92
By Khalil R. Rahmany
AuthorHouse LLC
Copyright © 2014 Dr. Khalil R. RahmanyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-5794-6
CHAPTER 1
The Heritage
Long ago, in a time called prehistory, the ancestors of modern man roamed the earth, hunting great beasts and grubbing for roots.
Embryonic clans wandered the endless, lonely world for countless millennia—memories of past, of origins, faded forever.
A few, perhaps, walked the high place of desert and forest and mountains, where three vast continents converged, the place of the ibex, arid bear, and tiger.
Thousands of years of wanderers had passed when one small migratory clan ended its ancient journey here in Neolithic times. Settlement had quietly come to the land we now call Afghanistan.
Other settlements, based on domesticated animals and crude agriculture, appeared and developed in the fertile valleys along the lower slopes of the harsh mountain ranges and along the ancient Oxus River.
With the coming of the Bronze Age, the inhabitants embarked on—and sometimes received—daring trading expeditions by which the Afghan commodity, a semi-precious blue stone called lapis lazuli, found its way to the advanced civilizations of the Indus Valley Harappa, Babylonian Mesopotamia, and even the isolated early dynastic Egypt; before the first pyramid arose, Afghan lapis lazuli was there.
Regardless, the place from which the stone came was practically unknown to the outside world. What is probably a reference to the region appears in a prototype of the Rig-Veda, the earliest known Hindu scriptures, which could date back to 2000 BC, but the reference is sketchy at best. The enigmatic passage breathes of a descent upon the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia. The fathers of the Sanskrit canticles, spells, and rituals that would become the Vedic literature were Aryan, a name encompassing the entire Indo-European race and language family, whose deepest roots are among the semi-nomads of Transcaucasia and the Afghan plateau. The verses of the first Indians mention only fleetingly the place of their ancestors.
A later, slightly more detailed reference appears in an ancient Indo-Greek script, believed to have been written by Herodotus in 1500 BC, though there is no indication that the Greeks knew of their own Aryan ancestry. The name "Bactria" is first used here, which refers to the semi-arid steppe between the Oxus and the north flank of the Hindu Kush, the name given to the mountains that split Afghanistan. Also described is a thriving city in the wilderness south of Bactria, the primeval city called Kubaha, which, quite probably, may have evolved into modern-day Kabul.
Afghanistan in those days was known to the outside world as little more than a rugged, troublesome trade route between the Mediterranean and the Far Orient, a geographical obstacle to overcome. And for a thousand years, even that image was almost exclusive to the painfully infrequent caravan merchants and the few who would hear their tales. While magnificent kingdoms advanced and crumbled, while glorious dynasties flourished and died away, the high plateau sustained a shroud of irrelevance and utter remoteness.
Finally, in the sixth century BC, the region achieved historical significance when the Persian Achaemenid conqueror Cyrus the Great thought enough of the land to seize it and its sparse population as part of a very memorable empire that dominated the "civilized" world from Libya to Transcaucasia to India.
Roughly two hundred years later, the immortalized Macedonian, Alexander the Great, swept across Asia Minor and defeated the armies of Darius III, a successor of Cyrus, and then turned his own armies eastward, toward the riches of India. On a grand campaign of conquest, the Afghan plateau was merely consequential, although it was here, in the Pamir Mountains, that Alexander found a wife, Roxana.
It is believed that Alexander knew of and used the Khyber Pass and the narrower Malakand Pass to invade India. For centuries to follow, invading armies from either direction would recognize the strategic importance of the Khyber (a rugged crack in the mountainous barrier that, coupled with the untamed deserts of Baluchistan in the south, geographically isolates India from the west). The Khyber, always remembered in the legends of the merchants of antiquity, has been both a blessing and a curse to the peoples of the plateau.
The Greeks ultimately receded, but they left behind an outpost city and a heritage. Even today, much of Afghanistan architecture, custom, and even genetic origin is a legacy of the Greco-Bactrian period.
This would be an ongoing element of Afghanistan's cultural evolvement. Centuries upon centuries of invasion by military exoduses from every direction would create a mosaic society of unparalleled color.
Displacing the Greeks was a confederation of Scythian-related nomadic tribes called Yueh-chih, who had migrated from the Kashgar area of Chinese Turkestan to establish their Kushan Empire, of which Bactria became a desirable part. The Yueh-chih brought with them Gandharastyle Buddhism and its notable art form, as well as an appreciation of exotic goods from faraway places. Very commerce-minded, the Kushans were able to obtain their foreign treasures by allowing, even advocating, a vital link of the imperial silk route to exist in Afghanistan, as well as further north in Turkestan. Merchants from an emerging Rome, from China, and from India all rendezvoused at caravansaries in Afghanistan.
Kushan strength was short-lived, however, and for centuries past anno Domini, Central Asian territory would be wrestled between the warlords of Persia, Parthia, Anatolia, Turkestan, and even the Huns of the far north. The golden age of the exchange of wares and ideas between East and West was slain by the ruthlessness of kingdoms and men. Trade was frozen, and the Silk Road, for a time, vanished.
It was a dark period.
Under God, Judaism had been scattered to the ends of the earth. Christianity had been exiled by the fiercely corrupt of a fallen Rome.
Finally, near the end of the sixth century after Jesus, there came for the people of the land a final prophet. The distant sands of Arabia saw the birth of the messenger, Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the word of Allah) was carried forth on the mediums of war and later on its vestiges. From a dim cave in a mountain-locked hamlet called Mecca, the message, in a single generation, reached the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia. Its gateway to Asia was, naturally, the Afghan plateau, and it was here that Islam found a people that would become among its most dedicated followers.
Paganism fled. Buddhism and Hinduism retreated. Even the pre-Achaemenid native religion of Zoroastrianism, considered a predecessor of the Muslim belief, bowed to the swell of Islam. It was a time of religious awakening, unprecedented in that part of the world, and the words of the Quran came to be perhaps the greatest influence of all upon the Afghan people and what was to be their nation. So profound was the effect upon their laws, customs, morality, and government that the history of Islam is, in a sense, the history of the Afghans.
These were the Middle Ages. Eurasian civilization had shifted dramatically. While most of Europe staggered blindly through its dark age, the rising Muslim world entered a classical period. Alexandria and Baghdad became the intellectual centers of the world, and their Central Asian satellites, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Balkh, basked in brilliance.
The nearby city of Ghazni also prospered when it became the capital of a magnificent empire that spanned from Persia well into India. The empire reached the apex of its advance during the rule of the sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi but continued to grow when the Ghaznavis were succeeded by the Khwarezms.
Suddenly, in 1216, the civilization was overwhelmed by the mounted hordes of a savage conqueror from Mongolia, whose name, even today, causes a shudder in the hearts of those whose ancestors fell to him: the terrible Genghis Khan. Scores of Asian cities were plundered and left in ruin. As the Khwarezms escaped to the distant Caspian Sea, the resplendent cities of Bamian, Herat, Ghazni, and Balkh were virtually destroyed. It seemed the Middle Ages had run its course. Just as the people of the plateau had been razed and left in devastation, Europe was experiencing a Renaissance, and China was again looking westward. The death of Genghis Khan left no united power in Central Asia, and so, after centuries of abandon, the Silk Route of old again felt the footsteps of East-West trade. A few decades after Genghis's barbaric scourge, the storied Venetian explorer Marco Polo, en route to the Kublai Khan's palace in Cathay, arrived with his uncle's in Balkh. Among the oldest cities in Asia, Balkh was once known by the Arabs as the "Mother of Cities," an exquisite, fortified trace of civilization in the high desert. Marco found it an uninhabited, blackened ruin of crumbled mosque and palace. Not all the region was destitute, however, and Marco's expedition is reputed to have stayed a full year in an agreeable Badakhshan, a few days east of Balkh.
Conclusive recovery came late in the fourteenth century by the unlikely means of a second Tartar-Mongol invasion. Emerging from the city of Samarkand, Timor the Lame ("Tamerlane" to Europeans) stormed across Eurasia in the grand style of Genghis Khan before him, leaving in his wake heaps of rubble and towers of skulls. Timor's vandal hordes penetrated as far west as Byzantium and the Sahara, as far north as Moscow, and as far east as Delhi, from which he exported elephants back to Samarkand for the arduous undertaking of erecting the magnificent structures that would make Samarkand the jewel of Asia. Also delivered to Central Asia were the scholars and artisans of the kingdoms Timor defeated.
As a result, the Timurid Dynasty following Timor's death became the renaissance of the plateau and was a time of enlightenment, revival, and peace. When the dynasty effectively came to an end in the early sixteenth century, an Uzbek tribesman called Babur, who claimed descendance from Genghis and Timor, gained control of the region, making Kabul the seat of his principality. Following the conquest of the Delhi sultanate, ruled by the last Afghan sultan over India, Babur's capital was moved to Agra in the year 1526, and the Mughal Empire was created. The empire would see its most glorious years under Babur's grandson, Akbar.
But the high plateau would not share in the glory. The gravity of India's charm made Afghanistan rather inconspicuous in comparison, and the region soon drifted well outside Mughal interest.
For two hundred years, tribal khans lorded over local areas, while a very lax claim to territory divided the Mughals and the Persians, if only in theory.
Finally, after decades of isolated uprisings against Persian dominance, which had remained significant, the Ottoman Empire invaded Persia from the west, and a band of Afghans overran the capital of Esfahan in the east. The instability promised to reach crisis proportions, so a Turkmen Afghan named Nader advanced from the north to reunite the kingdom. He was remarkably successful and within years achieved the title of shah.
After pacifying the Ottomans, Nader Shah turned an army of kinsmen and Persians against the Mughals, yet with apparently no intention of supplanting the rulers. Having seized the treasures of Delhi and Agra, the shah returned to Persia, leaving the Mughals to contend with the simpler problems of recent French and British colonialism of India.
Nader was assassinated by his subjects in 1747.
Eventually, all the Afghan commanders left the country. Persia was returned to the Persians.
One former commander, a Pashtun called Ahmad Shah Abdali Durrani, decided to return to his birthplace, the high plateau, where tribal khans lorded over local areas as they had for centuries. In Ahmad Shah Abdali Durrani, the Afghan tribes at last found a ruler, and for the first time, the ancient mountain people who had lived on the land since the beginning of history stood and claimed their motherland and their right to self-determination. The mosaic of peoples who shared a common heritage, united under one of their own, and Ahmad Abdali was, from that day onward, Ahmad Sha Baba—Ahmad Shah, our father. There was born on that day the kingdom of Afghanistan, land of the Afghans.
CHAPTER 2Genesis of a Modern World
The death of Ahmad Shah in 1772 plunged the young nation into disarray. Though sons and grandsons tried to assume inherited rule, the transient lineage of kings was ignored by the stoutly autocratic Afghan tribes.
Finally, in 1826, an Afghan named Dost Mohammad won recognition as amir, the accepted ruler over the Afghan khanates. Fortunate was this granting of power, for it was under Dost Mohammad that the sovereign of Afghanistan would first be challenged.
At this time, two great empires had rushed upon the borders of Afghanistan. In the north, Czar Alexander I, encouraged by his ally Napoleon Bonaparte, had marched the armies of Russia into the Muslim regions of Central Asia. Only the Emirate of Bukhara successfully resisted conquest and presently distracted the Czar's rampage south toward India.
In the south and the east, the British Empire had triumphed over France in total colonization of India and now stood impatient at its mountainous western extremity, where a tribal army held them in check at the Khyber Pass.
Of the two empires encroaching intentions, it was England's colonial ambitions that proved the most immediate threat. Although it may be that Britain was provoked because it believed that Dost Mohammad sought Russian assistance to liberate Peshawar (an Indian border town) from the Sikhs (the fierce Muslim-Hindu syncretism with whom Britain had allied), it is far more likely that the czar's aggression compelled the British to try to seize Afghanistan before rival Russia could. In any case, the British East India Company in 1839 attacked the Khyber Pass with force. The outgunned Afghan tribesmen were overrun.
In April, Kandahar was captured; the following July, Ghazni. In August, Kabul was occupied, and the British army placed on the throne Shah Shuja, the unpopular Afghan whom Dost Mohammad had ousted. Dost Mohammad was now exiled.
Victory was fleeting, however. The aristocratic arrogance of the British toward their conquered subjects evoked a massive rebellion. Hundreds of British and Indian troops were massacred in the valleys of Kandahar and Kabul. Much of Kabul was burned to the ground, a sacrifice preferable to subjugation. The Afghans retook the land. Their Amir Dost Mohammad, returned.
Twenty years later, the Amir'sthird son, Sher Ali, inherited Kabul. In 1878, the new Amir invited a Russian envoy but denied British missionaries entry into Afghanistan. This, of course, angered the British, and the Anglo-Indian forces again invaded, taking Kabul in 1879. Sher Ali was driven from the capital and, weeks later, died in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan.
Though decades had strengthened the British army since the last fated occupation of Afghanistan, the British Parliament nonetheless would now seek friendly cooperation with the Afghans. Sher Ali's son, Yaqub Khan, was granted his father's throne and, in mutual respect, signed with the British the Treaty of Gandamak, which gave the Afghans full domestic sovereignty and gave the British an embassy in Kabul. Although the treaty, perceived as obligatory by Yaqub Khan, gave Britain legal authority over Afghanistan's foreign policy, this authority, in practice, would be idle. Yaqub and his successor would continue to manage all policies, and the treaty would simply assure Russia that an act of ambition against Afghanistan would be met by the British army.
Yaqub Khan would not long rule. British arrogance had not been forgotten, and British/tribal conflicts again erupted, and Yaqub Khan fled. When Britain finally withdrew, a cousin of Sher Ali, Abdurrahman Khan, assumed rulership.
Abdurrahman's legacy would be the modern borders of Afghanistan, the products so vital to powerful nations and so meaningless to the Afghans and their ancient neighbors, yet necessary to Abdurrahman, who daily confronted the surges of a modern world that would loom ever nearer. The Oxus River and the peaks of the Pamir would serve as the border with Russia. An imperceptible boundary would be drawn in the east and the south. In 1893, the Treaty of Durand was signed, and the border, the Durand Line, was declared, splitting the Khyber Pass, placing Peshawar permanently outside Kabul's influence and politically dividing many tribes. These tribes, once unalterably connected, have since evolved culturally on opposite sides of a border and today commonly have separate names: the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and the Pathans of Pakistan (former West India).
Abdurrahman's domestic success was prouder. His swelling army eventually balanced the might of the tribal chieftains, encouraging peaceful community between tribe and central government and bringing a more significant sense of national unity to the diverse peoples of Afghanistan.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Where the Bear Met the Lion by Khalil R. Rahmany. Copyright © 2014 Dr. Khalil R. Rahmany. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse LLC.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, ix,Acknowledgments, xi,
Chapter 1 The Heritage, 1,
Chapter 2 Genesis of a Modern World, 7,
Chapter 3 The Intrigues of Daoud, 20,
Chapter 4 In the Spirit of Genghis Khan, 32,
Chapter 5 The Bear and the Lion, 54,
Chapter 6 Logic and Foresight, 78,
Chapter 7 Where Men Live Free, 91,