Is Afghanistan really a ‘graveyard of empires’?
HISTORY SAYS NO
When President Joe Biden addressed the chaotic scenes unfolding in Afghanistan in advance of the looming final retreat of U.S. forces, he said that no amount of military force could have delivered a different outcome in a country “known in history as the graveyard of empires.”
The popular sobriquet — whose origins seem lost to time — lumps America’s failed war in with the bad fortunes of previous invaders, including the British Empire and the Soviet Union. It also serves to explain why the U.S. is retreating — so many others have also been turned back by a country of unconquerable warriors.
“What’s happening now could just as easily happen five years ago or 15 years in the future,” Biden said in his speech on Monday.
The term evokes images — which have been immortalized on canvas and film — of colonial forces limping home, as indeed they have. However, critics say that it oversimplifies the country’s history and the external political considerations that led to the retreats of the British, Soviets and Americans.
“Understanding Afghanistan as a graveyard of empires really misunderstands and misconstrues those (wars),” said Ben Hopkins, historian of Afghanistan and British imperialism at George Washington University.
In 2001, writing in Foreign Affairs, former CIA officer Milton Bearden said the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and Pakistan has “witnessed the traverse of the world’s great armies on campaigns of conquest to and from South and Central Asia.”
“All eventually ran into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribals,” Bearden wrote.
The late Afghan scholar Mohammed Kakar wrote in his book on the Soviet invasion that so many wars have been fought against foreign armies that “probably every settled square metre of the Afghan soil has cost the lives of Afghans.”
In 329 BC, Alexander the Great marched on what’s now Afghanistan with nearly 40,000 troops. The Greek general was shot with an arrow in his leg.
“It turned out to be the most difficult campaigning that he’d ever faced,” said Frank L. Holt, a professor at the University of Houston and author of a book on Alexander’s campaign in modern-day Afghanistan. “He got bogged down in the region just as all western invaders do.”
In 1221, when the Mongols under Genghis Khan conquered what was then the Khwarezmian Empire, they laid siege to Shahr-e Gholghola. There, the defenders killed his favoured grandson.
In 632 AD, after the death of the Prophet Muhammed, there was a considerable run of conquests from the Arab world. In Afghanistan, said Hugh Kennedy, a professor at the SOAS University of London, they faced stiff resistance from the Zunbils, who ruled in the southwestern parts of modern Afghanistan.
“The fighting in the Helmund Basin … was extremely fierce,” said Kennedy. “There’s a long tradition … of outsiders finding it very difficult to conquer these areas and establish an administration.”
These events certainly sound like they played out in a graveyard of empires. But they don’t tell the full story.
In the end, Alexander did form a Greek kingdom in the region. The Khwarezmian Empire collapsed, and the Mongols put several cities to the sword, killing everyone within. And, Islam eventually took root in Afghanistan.
The only time Afghanistan actually undid an empire was in 1722, when Mahmud Hotak, a Ghilji Pashtun leader, seized Isfahan, the capital of the Persian Safavid dynasty, and declared himself shah. Also under attack from Russia’s Peter the Great, the empire collapsed and never regained its former glory.
The “graveyard of empires” trope hangs heaviest over the imperial adventures of Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, especially because the end of the fighting coincides, roughly, with the overall decline of the first two empires.
The British fought three wars against Afghanistan. The first, from 1839 to 1842, the second from 1878 to 1880 and the final one in 1919. At issue for the British Empire, which controlled the Indian subcontinent, was possible Russian influence coming from the northern side of Afghanistan.
The most iconic moment of the first war was the annihilation of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians under the command of Maj.-gen. Sir William Elphinstone. In January 1842, they retreated from Kabul, heading for the British garrison at Jalalabad.
All but one British soldier, and a handful of Indian sepoys, died, some at the hands of Afghan soldiers, others from exposure.
But that’s not the whole story. Six months later, the British returned.
“The Army of the Retribution marches into Kabul, kills every Afghan they can get their hands on that they think had anything to do with the destruction of the Army of the Indies, burns down the bazaar, and then puts their man on the throne,” said Hopkins.
The second Anglo-afghan War saw the British representative, Sir Louis Cavagnari, and his compatriots, massacred in Kabul, plus a British contingent defeated at the Battle of Maiwand. In the end, the British won.
In 1919, in the threemonth third Anglo-afghan war, Afghanistan did win its independence and control over its own foreign affairs.
In 1979, the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan, the official reason being to support the pro-soviet government established via a military coup in 1978.
It led to a protracted war, until 1989, which saw Soviet forces clashing with the Mujahideen, who were backed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pakistani intelligence services.
Some scholars argue the fighting in Afghanistan was integral to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nivi Manchanda, a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, argues this doesn’t accurately reflect the history of the region or the motivations of failed colonial expeditions.
“The Soviets withdrew because Afghanistan became an increasingly expensive proposition for an empire that was crumbling from within,” Manchanda writes.
Why, then, does the idea of a “graveyard of empires” persist?
“Imagery,” said Hopkins. There’s a painting called Remnants of the Army, which hangs at the Tate Modern in Britain. It shows the sole survivor of Elphinstone’s force riding a bedraggled horse back to Jalalabad in 1842.
“It’s this image of imperial disaster that gets seared into the imagination,” Hopkins said.