A nation out of time

By Greg Myre

Associated Press

Driving across the wide-open plains of northern Afghanistan, my guide stopped to point out the crumbling mud walls of the ancient city of Balkh, a once thriving outpost on the fabled Silk Road, long ago reduced to dust.

A few miles farther, more cracked and uneven walls rose from the moonscape. Another archaeological treasure? No, the guide explained, those belong to impoverished farmers struggling through the latest drought.

In Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget what century you’re in.

From its ancient glories to its modern misery, Afghanistan is a timeless land, home to people who look as though they have walked straight off the pages of the Quran.

The men with long beards and flamboyant turbans, their faces deeply creased from the desert sun. The women shrouded in the mystery of their veils.

The otherworldly landscape features tabletop plains that stretch forever without yielding a blade of grass or a single tree. The bald, saw-tooth mountains have been the bane of invading armies throughout history.

Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane all sent their troops marching through Afghanistan, and the country didn’t begin to take its current shape until 1747, when Ahmad Shah Durrani drove out foreign forces, brought quarreling tribes under his control and established a dynasty that lasted more than two centuries.

Slumbering in isolation for decades or even centuries at a stretch, Afghanistan’s moments on the world stage come when foreign powers periodically feel compelled to subdue the chronically unruly Afghans.

English author Rudyard Kipling captured one such moment with his novel “Kim,” his tale of the 19th century Great Game, the secret battle between Russia and Britain to control and extend their empires in Central Asia.

“Now I shall go far and far into the north, playing the Great Game,” said Kim, the fictional 13-year-old British orphan in colonial India who is recruited as a spy.

Seeking to fill in the blank spots on the map, British and Russian army officers traveled the snow-blocked mountain trails and the harsh deserts, often disguised as traders or Muslim holy men.

Some returned as heroes, other died in battles with Afghan warriors, described by Kipling as “half-maddened with drugs and wholly mad with religious fanaticism.”

The British fought three wars with the Afghans from 1842 until 1921. The first was one of Britain’s greatest colonial debacles, when a contingent of 16,000 soldiers and their dependents were routed as they tried to retreat from Kabul, the Afghan capital, to the safety of colonial India.

Slaughtered in the narrow mountain passes, their blood turned the January snow crimson. Only one Briton, Dr. William Brydon, survived to tell the tale.

“It’s easy to enter Afghanistan, but it’s very difficult to stay there,” said Suleman Raja, professor at the University of Baluchistan, in the western Pakistani city of Quetta, near the Afghan border. “That’s a lesson that outsiders have had to learn over and over.”

But Afghans too have sometimes dismissed their own history.

An Afghan woman named Malalai became an enduring symbol of valor when she carried the Afghan flag forward during a battle with British soldiers in the second British-Afghan war in 1880.

The British eventually won that conflict. But in the heart of Kabul, a girls high school was built in her honor. Yet the Taliban shut the Malalai School almost immediately after coming to power in 1996, part of their blanket ban on girls’ education.

Throughout the 19th century, Afghan leaders proved adept at playing the Russians and British against one another, frequently swapping political loyalties and military allegiances to keep at bay the two most powerful armies of that era.

Today, the United States is looking to exploit that tradition of fluid alliances, looking for Taliban commanders and fighters who might defect.

The Russian and British designs on Afghanistan in the 19th century, along with earlier invasions etched deep in the Afghan psyche, left the country’s rulers deeply suspicious of foreign motives.

Abdur Rahman, the “iron amir” who ruled in 1880-1901, was so wary of outsiders that when the British extended their Indian rail line to the Afghan frontier, he described it as a “knife thrust into my vitals.”

The British proposed extending the railway into Afghanistan, which would surely have increased commerce in the impoverished, landlocked country. But Rahman refused, convinced the real motive was to establish a high-speed delivery system for British troops.

To this day, Afghanistan has no railroad, and two decades of war have reduced its limited road network to rutted tracks.

The Great Game waned in the early 20th century – though the Afghans and British fought one last war, ending in an Afghan victory in 1921 – and Afghanistan took tentative steps to join the modern world.

Roads were paved, newspapers founded, museums opened. Afghanistan signed treaties with Western countries.

A photo from the early 1900s shows the Afghan ruler Habibullah in a dark suit and tie, surrounded by 14 wives and consorts in white Victorian gowns.

His successor, King Amanullah, undertook a grand European tour in 1927-28. He was so smitten by the West, he returned to Kabul in a Rolls-Royce, and shocked his subjects by promoting Western dress, women’s education and a limit of one wife for each government employee.

The reforms didn’t take, and Amanullah abdicated a year later, rolling out of Kabul in his Rolls.

Afghanistan did enjoy one of its longest periods of stability when King Mohammad Zaher Shah assumed the throne in 1933 after the assassination of his father.

“Compared to the problems of today, this period was comparatively good,” said Mohammed Arif, who teaches international relations at the University of Baluchistan. “Many Afghans look back on these years with good memories.”

But the king was never regarded as a dynamic figure, and had trouble maintaining control when political turmoil surfaced in the late 1960s.

“He was generally seen as a decent, well-intentioned man,” Martin Ewans, a former British diplomat, wrote in “Afghanistan, a New History.” But, “for most of his reign he had done little more than occupy the throne, while the country was run by his uncles and cousins.”

Zaher Shah was deposed by a cousin, Mohammed Daoud, in a 1973 coup and went into exile, gone but never quite forgotten as Afghanistan descended into chaos.

Daoud was killed in 1978 in a communist coup. The following year the Soviet Union sent in troops to prop up the regime. Seemingly oblivious to the lessons of the Great Game, the Soviets expected a quick, decisive victory, but instead unleashed a war that has yet to end.

Zaher Shah, meanwhile, hasn’t set foot in Afghanistan for 28 years. But in recent weeks, Western diplomats, Afghan guerrilla fighters and journalists have streamed to his villa in Rome amid talk that the king, now 87, could return as a symbolic leader – a mere 68 years after he first ascended the throne.

Greg Myre covered the Afghan conflict between 1993 and 1999 while serving as AP bureau chief in Islamabad and news editor in Moscow.

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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