AFGHANISTAN AND THE ‘GREAT KILLING’
THE last part of MM Kaye’s epic love story of Ashton and Anjuli — “The Far Pavilions” — takes place in Afghanistan and culminates with the massacre of the British envoy and his party in Kabul in 1879. The novel, first published in 1978, dramatizes some events of “The Great Game” played by the Russian and British empires in the 19th century as both were expanding their spheres of dominance. Afghanistan found itself as the “corn between the upper and the lower millstones.” The country’s ruler, the Amir, tried to impress on both Russia and Britain that “his people would certainly object to foreign soldiers marching into their country, whatever the pretext, as they had never at any time been kindly disposed toward interlopers.”
Likewise, Ashton warned his friend, Lt. Walter Hamilton, that the Afghans would not take kindly to any foreign presence in their country and that “no Amir of Afghanistan could possibly guarantee the safety of such foreigners even in his own capital.”
After the slaughter, the spy, Sobhat Khan, observes that Louis Cavagnari, the military administrator and envoy who leads the British delegation in Kabul, “for all his cunning and his great knowledge” of Afghanistan, “did not know the true heart or mind of Afghanistan, else he would not have persisted in coming here. Well, he is dead as are all whom he brought here with him. It has been a great killing; and soon there will be more . . . much more.”
Indeed more killings have followed as other interlopers like Cavagnari who didn’t know the true heart and mind of Afghanistan intervened.
A hundred years after the killing of Cavagnari, Russian tanks crossed the border to Afghanistan to ensure that Kabul remained an ally of the Soviet Union. But armed resistance grew, eventually forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops.
Now, the Americans are packing up, after nearly 20 years of military presence in Afghanistan and thousands of casualties. “[O] ur reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear,” US President Joe Biden said on April 14 when formally announcing that US troops will be withdrawn within the next few months. The US president admitted that a 2008 visit to Afghanistan convinced him even more that “only the Afghans have the right and responsibility to lead their country, and that more and endless American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government.”
The United States has been engaged in the affairs of Afghanistan at least since the time of the Soviet occupation. In those Cold War days, the primary goal for the United States was to help the local resistance frustrate the Russian military campaign. One way that the US government helped deepen the resistance was to incorporate anti-Soviet, jihadist messages in school books that were smuggled into Afghanistan through Pakistan.
“In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempt to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation,” Joe Stephens and David Ottaway reported for the Washington Post on March 23, 2002. The US Agency for International Development (USAid) spent $51 million on school books that taught children “to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines.”
We all know what happened. The bearded Muslim men who shot down Soviet military aircraft were hailed as freedom fighters by the so-called free world but the exit of the invaders didn’t make the rebels bury their grenade launchers and go home to their families. The fighting, the training, the USAid-funded “Alphabet
for Jihad Literacy,” and the victories inspired more violence, beyond Afghanistan. The monsters created to beat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan became the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Islamic State and more. The shared values and worldview united the men of different ethnic backgrounds.
As the US military exits from Afghanistan, China is likely to assume a bigger role in this “graveyard of empires.” Though precisely such reputation, Yun Sun of the Washington, D.C.based Stimson Center, writes, “Constantly deters China from direct intervention that would undermine its current advantageous hedging position with both the Taliban and Kabul” (China’s strategic assessment of Afghanistan, April 8, 2020).
The Great Game once described the geopolitical rivalry of Russia and Britain. During the Cold War, the “game” was played by the United States and the Soviet Union. Now there is China. Russia and India too have interests at stake in Afghanistan.
In the novel, Ashton and Anjuli leave Kabul in search of the “Far Pavilions” of their dreams. Afghanistan, as predicted by Sobhat the spy, was indeed to see more killings. The exit of the US military will spell a new era for this hard-tried nation. Hopefully — finally — it will be one of peace and prosperity.