How Afghans gave Indian Subcontinent Various Religions and Culture over Thousands of Years

History

Excavation of prehistoric sites suggests that early humans lived in northern Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago and that farming communities in Afghanistan were among the earliest in the world. After 2000 bc successive waves of people from Central Asia moved into the area. Since many of these settlers were Aryans (speakers of the parent language of the Indo-European languages), a people who also migrated to Persia (now Iran) and India in prehistoric times, the area was called Aryana, or Land of the Aryans.

By the middle of the 6th century bc the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid dynasty controlled the region of Aryana. About 330 bc, Alexander the Great defeated the last Achaemenid ruler and made his way to the eastern limits of Aryana and beyond. After his death in 323 bc several kingdoms fought for control of his Asian empire. These kingdoms included Seleucids, Bactria, and the Indian Mauryan Empire.

A. Buddhist Period:

About the 1st century ad the Kushans, a central Asian people, won control of Aryana. Buddhism was the dominant religion from the 3rd century to the 8th century ad. Ruins of many monasteries and stupas, or reliquary mounds (structures where sacred relics are kept or displayed), from that period still remain. They line what was once a great Buddhist pilgrimage road from India to Balkh, in northern Afghanistan, and on into Central Asia.

Kushan power was destroyed at the end of the 4th century ad by a Turkic people of central Asian origin called the White Huns or Ephthalites. After the Ephthalites, the area was divided among several kingdoms, some Buddhist, some Hindu.

B. Islamic Period

In the 7th century ad Arab armies carried the new religion of Islam to Afghanistan. The western provinces of Herāt and Sistan came under Arab rule, but the people of these provinces revolted and returned to their old beliefs as soon as the Arab armies passed. In the 10th century Muslim rulers called Samanids, from Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan, extended their influence into the Afghan area. A Samanid established a dynasty in Ghaznī called the Ghaznavids. The greatest Ghaznavid king, Mahmud, who ruled from 998 to 1030, established Islam throughout the area of Afghanistan. He led many military expeditions into India. Ghaznī became a center of literature and the arts.

The Ghaznavid state grew weaker under Mahmud’s descendants and gave way in the middle of the 12th century to the Ghurid kingdom, which arose in Ghur, in the west central region of present-day Afghanistan. The Ghurids in turn were routed early in the 13th century by the Khwarizm Shahs, another central Asian dynasty. They were swept away in about 1220 by the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan, who devastated the land.

Near the end of the 14th century the central Asian military leader Tamerlane (Timur Lang) conquered the region of Afghanistan and moved on into India. His sons and grandsons, the Timurids, could not hold Tamerlane’s empire together. However, they ruled most of present-day Afghanistan from Herāt.

The period from the Ghurid through the Timurid dynasty produced fine Islamic architectural monuments. Many of these mosques, shrines, and minarets still stand in Herāt, Qal‘eh-ye Bost, Ghaznī, and Mazār-e Sharīf. An important school of miniature painting flourished at Herāt in the 15th century.

A descendant of Tamerlane on his father’s side and Genghis Khan on his mother’s side, Babur (Zahiruddin Muhammad) took Kābul in October 1504 and then moved on to India, where he established the Mughal Empire.

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, Afghanistan was fought over by the rulers of the Mughal Empire, centered in India, and those of the Safavid dynasty, in Persia. Usually the Mughals held Kābul and the Persians held Herāt, with Kandahār frequently changing hands. The Pashtun tribes increased their power, but they failed to win independence.

C. An Afghan Empire:

In the 18th century, Nadir Shah, the king of Persia, employed the Abdali tribe of Pashtuns in his wars in India. Ahmad Shah, an Abdali chief who had gained a high post in Nadir Shah’s army, established himself in Kandahār after Nadir Shah’s assassination in 1747. An assembly of tribal chiefs proclaimed him shah, and the Afghans extended their rule as far east as Kashmīr and Delhi, north to the Amu Darya, and west into northern Persia.

Ahmad retired from the throne in 1772 and died in Kandahār, whereupon his son Timur Shah assumed control. The Afghan empire survived largely intact through the next 20 years. He established his capital in Kābul to draw power away from his rivals in Kandahār, as well as to be closer to his richest province, the Punjab of India. Following Timur’s death in 1793, palace rivalries and internal conflicts led to the disintegration of the empire. Two sons of Timur, Shah Shuja and Shah Mahmud, fought over the remnants of the Afghan empire, with Shuja finally going into exile in India and Mahmud withdrawing to Herāt, as a number of other small principalities emerged throughout Afghanistan.

Dost Muhammad Khan emerged as the new ruler, or emir, in Kābul by 1826. Among the most pressing problems he faced was repelling the westward encroachment of the Sikhs, who gained control of the Punjab and the region up to the Khyber Pass, including the important trading post of Peshāwar. In 1837 Dost Muhammad’s forces defeated the Sikhs at Jamrūd, but failed to recover Peshāwar. This conflict and the arrival of a new Russian envoy in Kābul made the British, who were allies of the Sikhs, extremely nervous about the security of the western frontier of their growing empire in India. These events played out during the so-called Great Game between the Russian “bear” and the British “lion,” with both empires vying for regional dominance and Afghanistan becoming caught between them. In 1838 Lord Auckland, the British governor-general of India, ordered military intervention in Afghanistan to protect British interests, thereby setting off the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842). With British and Sikh manipulation and support, Shah Shuja returned to Afghanistan to overthrow Dost Muhammad, as a British garrison was established in Kābul and elsewhere south of the Hindu Kush mountains.

A revolt by Dost Muhammad’s son Muhammad Akbar Khan led to the forced withdrawal of the British garrison from Kābul in the winter of 1842. Ambushed during the retreat, nearly all of the some 4,500 British troops and their 12,000 camp followers were killed. Dost Muhammad was able to return to Kābul, from where he spent the next 20 years reunifying parts of Afghanistan until his death in 1863.

Dost Muhammad designated his third son, Sher Ali, as his successor, but civil war erupted as rivals to Sher Ali vied for control. Sher Ali defeated his rivals, notably his brother Afzul Khan, by 1868. At the same time he tried to maintain good relations with the British Raj (British-ruled India). However, the Russian conquests in Central Asia had brought that empire to the Amu Darya river on the northern border of Afghanistan by 1847. The negotiations of a Russian envoy in Kābul renewed the unease of the British, who consequently invaded Afghanistan, instigating the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880). Sher Ali was deposed in 1879, but the British, realizing the difficulties of ruling from within Afghanistan, in 1880 invited a nephew of Sher Ali, Abdur Rahman Khan (Afzul Khan’s son), to rule at their behest. However, the British limited his power beyond the borders of Afghanistan by securing control of Afghan foreign relations.

Known as the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman recognized the threat from the expansionistic Russians and the defensive British. As a result he allowed the foreign delineation of his borders to encompass a smaller territory than he actually considered to be Afghanistan. The emergence of the present-day configuration of the country, with its narrow panhandle of the Wakhan Corridor projecting to China on the northeast, is an example of the establishment of a classic buffer state, in which, to avoid inadvertent conflict, the borders of the Russian and British empires were to have no contact points in common. Similarly, the establishment of the Durand Line, the southeastern border of Afghanistan, divided the territory of the militant Pashtun tribe into two halves, with one half under the control of the British Raj, and the other inside Afghanistan. This divide-and-rule policy allowed some nominal control of a difficult region, but problems related to the tribally unpopular (and for them, unrecognized) border have continued to the present day.

D. Modern Afghanistan:

Abdur Rahman Khan extended his control throughout the territory within the new boundaries of Afghanistan. His son, Habibullah, who reigned from 1901 until 1919, took the first steps toward the introduction of modern education and industry. Habibullah’s son and successor, Amanullah, initiated a brief war, the Third Anglo-Afghan War, in 1919 to end British control over Afghan foreign affairs. The resulting peace treaty recognized the independence of Afghanistan.

Amanullah was determined to modernize his country. In 1926 he took the title of king. His reforms, including efforts to induce women to give up the burka, or full-length veil, and to make men wear Western clothing in certain public areas, offended religious and ethnic group leaders. Revolts broke out, and in 1929 Amanullah fled the country.

Order was restored in 1930 by four brothers who were relatives of Amanullah. One of them, Muhammad Nadir Shah, became king, but he was assassinated in 1933. His son, Muhammad Zahir Shah, succeeded him. Power remained concentrated in the hands of Zahir and the royal family for the next four decades. In 1946 Afghanistan joined the United Nations (UN).

In 1953 Muhammad Daud, a nephew of Nadir Shah, became prime minister. Daud began to modernize Afghanistan rapidly with the help of economic and especially military aid from the USSR; the modern Afghan army was largely created with Soviet equipment and technical training. The United States declined to assist in this process. Social reform proceeded slowly because the government was afraid to antagonize conservative ethnic group leaders and devout Muslims. Relations with Pakistan deteriorated after Daud called for self-determination for the Pashtun tribes of northwestern Pakistan.

In 1963, hoping to halt the growth of Soviet influence and to improve relations with Pakistan, Zahir Shah removed Daud as prime minister. In 1964 Afghanistan adopted a new constitution, changing the country from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. The armed forces still depended on the Soviet Union for equipment and training. A severe drought in the early 1970s caused economic hardship, and the popularity of the regime declined.

E. End of Monarchy

In 1973 Muhammad Daud overthrew the king in a coup. He declared Afghanistan a republic with himself as president. Daud announced ambitious plans for economic development and tried to play the USSR against Western donors, but his dictatorial government was opposed both by radical left-wing intellectuals and soldiers and by traditionalist ethnic leaders. The leading leftist organization was the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which had been founded in 1965 and in 1967 split into a pro-Soviet Parcham faction and a much more radical Khalq faction. The two groups joined forces in 1976 to oppose Daud.

F. Leftist Coup and Soviet Invasion

In April 1978, after Daud launched a crackdown against the PDPA, leftist military officers overthrew him. PDPA leader Noor Muhammad Taraki became prime minister, subsequently assuming the title of president as well. Taraki and his deputy prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, both members of the Khalq faction, purged many Parcham leaders. Taraki announced a sweeping revolutionary program, including land reform, the emancipation of women, and a campaign against illiteracy. In late 1978 Islamic traditionalists and ethnic leaders who objected to rapid social change began an armed revolt against the government. By the summer of 1979 the rebels controlled much of the Afghan countryside. In September Taraki was deposed and later killed. Amin, his successor, tried vigorously to suppress the rebellion and resisted Soviet efforts to make him moderate his policies. The government’s position deteriorated, however, and on December 25, 1979, Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. They quickly won control of Kābul and other important centers. The Soviets executed Amin on December 27 and installed Babrak Karmal, leader of PDPA’s Parcham faction, as president. Karmal, whom the Soviets considered to be more susceptible to their control, denounced Amin’s repressive policies, which reportedly included mass arrests and torture of prisoners, and promised to combine social and economic reform with respect for Islam and for Afghan traditions. But the government, dependent on Soviet military forces to bolster it, was widely unpopular.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played out in the waning days of the Cold War, as the leaden economy and political repressions of the Soviet Union were just beginning to show signs of strain. Despite the Soviet Union’s own domestic difficulties and high-level internal advice against such a move, the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan’s government and eventual full military invasion was a long-considered and reasonably well-thought-out plan. From its earliest foreign aid in construction of military-quality bridges and highways, to its progressive planting of special agents within the Afghanistan bureaucracy and military, the Soviet Union displayed an unremitting interest in expanding its influence in the country and moving farther south toward the warm-water ports and hydrocarbon riches of the Persian Gulf. Afghanistan’s location along part of the Soviet Union’s southern border made the installation of a Soviet-friendly government there all the more desirable. The leftist coup of 1978 in Kābul seemingly assured that the Soviets would not lose the strategic position that they had patiently established through expensive and pervasive efforts over the prior quarter-century. Elsewhere in the country, however, there was only minimal support for the emerging Communist government in Kābul; opposition to it mounted nationwide, eventually even including significant portions of the Afghan military. The Soviet Union’s large-scale military intervention aimed to protect its interests in the region by helping the Soviet-installed government to put down this widespread opposition.

Nevertheless, resistance to the Communist government and the Soviet invaders grew spontaneously throughout Afghanistan so that by the mid-1980s there were about 90 areas in the country commanded by guerrilla leaders. The guerrillas called themselves mujahideen (Muslim holy warriors). They had gained prominence by their fighting prowess rather than through the customary routes within traditional social structures. The resistance was roughly organized into seven major mujahideen parties, largely of Sunni background, based in Peshāwar, Pakistan, in the 1980s. Other mujahideen parties were based in Iran. The mujahideen were sustained by weapons and money from the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China. By the mid-1980s the United States was spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year to aid Afghan rebels based in Pakistan.

During the 1980s Soviet forces increasingly bore the brunt of the fighting. By 1986 about 118,000 Soviet troops and 50,000 Afghan government troops were facing perhaps 130,000 mujahideen guerrillas. Although the Soviet troops used modern equipment, including tanks and bombers, the mujahideen were also well armed, and they had local support and operated more effectively in familiar mountainous terrain. In 1986 the United States began supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles able to shoot down Soviet armored helicopters.

The effects of the war on Afghanistan were devastating. Half of the population was displaced inside the country, forced to migrate outside the country, wounded, or killed. About 3 million war refugees fled to Pakistan and about 1.5 million fled to Iran. Estimates of combat fatalities range between 700,000 and 1.3 million people. With the school system largely destroyed, industrialization severely restricted, and large irrigation projects badly damaged, the economy of the country was crippled. Despite some negative reaction, the presence of so many refugees in neighboring Pakistan and Iran actually improved Afghan relations with those countries. In addition, many of the refugees improved their lives considerably by leaving Afghanistan and the dangers of war therein. Because the majority of the refugees were religious, their fellow Muslims in Iran and Pakistan accepted them, even while the Iranian and Pakistani governments were striving to bring about the fall of the Communist regime in Kābul.

In May 1986 Karmal was replaced as PDPA leader by Mohammad Najibullah, a member of the Parcham faction who had headed the Afghan secret police. In November 1987 Najibullah was elected president.

G. Soviet Withdrawal

When Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985, he gave high priority to getting Soviet troops out of the costly, unpopular, and apparently unwinnable war in Afghanistan. In May 1988 Afghanistan, Pakistan, the USSR, and the United States signed agreements providing for an end to foreign intervention in Afghanistan, and the USSR began withdrawing its forces. The Soviet withdrawal was completed in February 1989. See also Soviet-Afghan War. H. Civil War

The mujahideen, who did not sign the agreement concerning the Soviet withdrawal, maintained their fight against the Afghanistan central government with weapons that they continued to get from the United States via Pakistan. They rejected offers from Najibullah to make peace and share power, and refused to consider participating in any national government that included Communists. Thus the civil war continued. The United States and Pakistani sponsors prompted the Peshāwar-based rebels to besiege Jalālābād, a strong point for Najibullah in southern Afghanistan. After months of fighting, however, the Afghan government scored a clear victory. A March 1990 coup attempt also failed to bring down Najibullah. He continued to receive Soviet food, fuel, and weapons to help maintain his control. However, rebels persisted in terrorizing the civilian population by rocket bombardment of Kābul and other cities. Finally in late 1991 the USSR and the United States signed an agreement to end military aid to the Kābul government and to the mujahideen rebels.

In 1992 as the resistance closed in on Kābul, the Najibullah government fell, in part because of the defection of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek from northern Afghanistan whose militia had served the PDPA government. Two mujahideen parties from Peshāwar, both considered fundamentalist, joined forces with Dostum and Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik military commander, in the north and central mountains of Afghanistan. They won control of Kābul, and Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, became interim president from July through December 1992, taking office as full president in January 1993. A strong attempt was made to keep the Pashtun leaders, who traditionally held the power in Afghanistan, out of the most important government positions. Kābul was besieged beginning in 1992, first by various mujahideen groups and then by the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, which sought to reestablish Pashtun dominance in the capital.

The Taliban emerged in the fall of 1994 as a faction of mujahideen soldiers who identified themselves as religious students. The movement started in the south and worked its way toward Herāt in the northwest and Kābul in the east. It made outstanding military gains using armor, heavy rocket artillery, and helicopters against government forces. The Taliban’s stated mission was to disarm the country’s warring factions and to impose their strictly orthodox version of Islamic law. Some experts suspected the Pakistani government of supporting the Taliban, in order to keep the combat within Afghanistan and out of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, which is a major part of the Pashtun homeland. During the many vagaries of shifting alliances, as Afghans sought a new political equilibrium, one fundamentalist and one moderate party from the Peshāwar-based mujahideen groups contributed considerable personnel to the Taliban.

The term of Rabbani’s government expired in December 1994, but he continued to hold office amid the chaos of the civil war. Factional fighting since the beginning of January 1994 kept government officers from actually occupying ministries and discharging government responsibilities. Most cities outside of Kābul were administered by former resistance commanders and their shuras (councils). In June 1996 Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had resigned as prime minister in 1994 to launch a military offensive against forces loyal to Rabbani, again assumed the post, this time to help Rabbani’s government fight the Taliban threat. Despite their efforts, the Taliban took Kābul in September 1996. By that time, the capital had been devastated by the civil war.

Rabbani and Hekmatyar fled north to join the northern-based anti-Taliban alliance led by the military commanders Massoud and Dostum. The alliance was a coalition of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras who were opposed to the Pashtun-dominated Taliban. The alliance took the name United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, commonly known as the United Front or the Northern Alliance. Massoud was the military commander of its chief political wing, Jamiat-i Islami (Islamic Society). The Taliban advanced north toward the mountain strongholds of the Northern Alliance and by the late 1990s had taken control of almost all of Afghanistan. Northern Alliance forces held a small portion of the country’s territory in the north. I. Taliban Regime

After taking over Kābul, the Taliban created the Ministry for Ordering What Is Right and Forbidding What Is Wrong to impose and enforce its fundamentalist rules of behavior. The Taliban’s laws particularly affected women, who were ordered to cover themselves from head to toe in burkas (long, tentlike veils), forbidden from attending school or working outside their homes, and publicly beaten if they were improperly dressed or escorted by men not related to them. The Taliban also made murder, adultery, and drug dealing punishable by death and made theft punishable by amputation of the hand. Many of the laws alarmed human-rights groups and provoked worldwide condemnation. Most countries did not recognize the Taliban regime as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.

In 1998, after terrorist bombings struck U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States launched cruise missiles at alleged terrorist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The camps were reportedly connected to an international terrorist ring allegedly run by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi Arabian expatriate named by U.S. officials as the mastermind behind the embassy bombings. Bin Laden was active in the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation forces during the 1980s, and toward the end of that war he established al-Qaeda (Arabic for “the Base”), an organization based in Afghanistan that, according to U.S. officials, connects and coordinates fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups around the world. Al-Qaeda also supported the Taliban regime, with its special forces, called the Arab Brigade, fighting alongside Taliban troops in the civil war against the Northern Alliance.

On September 9, 2001, pro-Taliban suicide bombers assassinated Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance. Two days later in the United States, terrorists hijacked passenger airplanes and deliberately crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, killing thousands of people (see September 11 Attacks). The U.S. government identified bin Laden as the prime suspect behind the attacks. Mullah Muhammad Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, refused U.S. demands that the Taliban surrender bin Laden. The U.S. government built an international antiterrorism coalition, securing the approval of many nations for a war on terrorism. American and British forces began aerial bombings of al-Qaeda camps and Taliban military positions on October 7. The Northern Alliance, meanwhile, continued its front-line offensive north of Kābul and other strategic areas. Many Afghans fled to refugee camps in border areas of Pakistan and Iran to escape the bombings, adding to the millions of Afghans already displaced from more than two decades of war.

While the United States and Britain continued the aerial bombardment in November, Northern Alliance forces captured several strategic cities, including Kābul. In late November hundreds of U.S. marines landed near Kandahār in the first major infusion of American ground troops into Afghanistan. The Taliban surrendered Kandahār, their last remaining stronghold, by December 10. The U.S.-led offensive then focused on routing out al-Qaeda forces holed up in the rugged Tora Bora cave region of eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. In March 2002 U.S. troops undertook a mission, known as Operation Anaconda, to clear Taliban and al-Qaeda forces from the Shah-i-Kot Valley, in the vicinity of Gardēz in eastern Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the whereabouts of bin Laden remained unknown.

J. Afghanistan After the Taliban

United Nations-sponsored negotiations in Bonn, Germany, resulted in agreement on December 5, 2001, among four major Afghan factions to create an interim post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai, a widely respected Pashtun leader, was chosen to head the interim administration, which took power in Kābul on December 22. An international peacekeeping force maintained a measure of law and order in the capital.

J.1. Transitional Government

Karzai’s administration was given up to six months to prepare the country for the introduction of a broad-based, multiethnic transitional government. In January 2002 international donors—including more than 60 countries, major development institutions, and nongovernmental organizations—pledged more than $4.5 billion in aid to Afghanistan over a period of five years. In April deposed Afghan king Zahir Shah returned to Afghanistan, ending nearly three decades of exile, in order to serve a symbolic role in the country. In June he formally convened the loya jirga, or grand council, which was responsible for electing a transitional government to rule the country for 18 months, until general elections scheduled for 2004. The loya jirga elected Karzai interim president of Afghanistan.

J.2. New Constitution

In January 2004 the loya jirga ratified a new constitution and Karzai signed it into law. The new constitution created a strong presidency, a two-chamber legislature, and an independent judiciary. It recognized Islam as the country’s sacred religion but guaranteed protections for other religions. It also recognized equal rights for women and language rights for minorities.

The adoption of the new constitution paved the way for elections, originally scheduled for June 2004 but then postponed due to the continued lack of security in many parts of the country. The Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies, who had regrouped as a military force despite new U.S.-led offensives to combat them, were waging a sporadic guerrilla campaign against the Karzai government and the international forces stationed in the country. In March 2004 Pakistan conducted a military operation along its border with Afghanistan in an attempt to flush out the insurgents.

About 18,000 non-Afghan troops were stationed in Afghanistan in 2004 to fight Taliban forces and offer protection for the Karzai government. Of these, about 8,500 were U.S. troops, and about 3,000 soldiers came from other coalition partners. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stationed about 6,000 troops in Afghanistan. NATO took charge of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in August 2003 and for the first time played a military role outside of Europe. The ISAF was authorized by the United Nations Security Council to act as peacekeepers in the Afghan capital, Kābul, and surrounding areas. By the end of 2005, about 19,000 U.S. troops and about 9,200 ISAF troops remained in Afghanistan.

In October 2006 about 12,000 of the 20,000 U.S. troops then serving in Afghanistan became part of the ISAF forces as NATO reportedly assumed primary responsibility for international military operations in Afghanistan. The remaining 8,000 U.S. troops were assigned to counterterrorism efforts and to training Afghan security forces as part of Combined Forces Command Afghanistan. The ISAF consisted of about 31,000 troops and faced an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Taliban fighters in October 2006.

J.3. Presidential Election

Afghanistan held its first-ever presidential election on October 9, 2004. Large numbers of Afghans turned out to vote in the election, which was largely free of the violence threatened by the country’s former Taliban leaders. Karzai won 55.4 percent of the vote, easily beating 15 other candidates in the first round of voting. His victory was officially announced on November 3, following an investigation into charges of electoral fraud. According to a three-member United Nations panel set up to examine the complaints—made mostly by the losing candidates—the election’s “shortcomings…could not have materially affected the overall result.”

Karzai’s top goals after forming a new government included curbing the power of regional warlords, building an effective national security force, and pursuing national redevelopment plans. Uniting the country despite its longstanding ethnic, religious, and regional rivalries remained one of Karzai’s highest priorities.

J.4. Parliamentary Elections

Elections to the lower house of the National Assembly took place in September 2005, and in December 2005 President Karzai used his constitutional powers to appoint the members of the upper house. On December 19 Afghanistan’s first democratically elected legislature in more than 30 years officially convened. The new legislature represented a wide spectrum of the country’s political groupings and factions, including former warlords and former Taliban officials.

J.5. Continued War Against a Taliban Insurgency

Despite its initial defeat following the U.S. invasion of 2001, the Taliban regrouped, using remote areas of Pakistan for refuge and staging sporadic guerrilla attacks in areas of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. By 2007 the Taliban adopted tactics that included suicide bombings and roadside bombs, while also besieging remote U.S. and NATO outposts in the countryside. In June 2007 U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates expressed cautious optimism that the military campaign was having success against the resurgent Taliban. Defense Department officials said they believed NATO operations had helped thwart a planned spring offensive by the Taliban.

However, Afghan civilian support for the U.S. and NATO military operations waned in the spring of 2007, particularly after a series of attacks that resulted in civilian casualties. In early May, following an April ground attack and air strike on a small village in western Herāt province in which about 50 civilians were reportedly killed, Afghan president Karzai told U.S. and NATO officials that civilian deaths had reached an “unacceptable level.” About a week later lawmakers in the upper house of parliament, the Meshrano Jirga (House of Elders), passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire with the Taliban and for setting a date for the withdrawal of foreign troops. Many of the legislators cited an incident in March in which a U.S. Marine Special Operations force opened fire on civilians lining a highway as the marines fled the scene of a suicide bombing attack. The incident in the eastern Afghanistan province of Nangarhār resulted in the deaths of 19 Afghan civilians and the wounding of about 50 others. A U.S. military commander later determined that the marines had used excessive force and he referred the incident for a possible criminal inquiry.

By June 2007 the Associated Press reported a death toll of 2,300 in insurgency-related violence in 2007 alone. The International Red Cross said that violence was occurring throughout Afghanistan. The Department of Defense reported nearly 400 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, and the United Kingdom reported the deaths of 60 British soldiers during that same period.

United Nations (UN) figures showed that the death toll in Afghanistan totaled more than 8,000 people in 2007, including about 1,500 civilians. The average monthly death toll soared to 566 from an average of 465 in 2006. About 230 troops from the U.S.-NATO coalition were killed in 2007, the highest yearly number since the war began.

As 2008 began the director of national intelligence for the United States, Michael McConnell, reported that the security situation for the Afghan government had deteriorated. McConnell told the U.S. Congress that the Taliban had made inroads in the western part of Afghanistan and around the capital, Kābul, as well as in southern Afghanistan. In July 2008 the number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan exceeded those in Iraq for the second straight month, with 46 U.S. personnel killed in Afghanistan compared to 31 in Iraq. By August the total U.S. death toll for 2008 was around 100. A U.S. Defense Department report found that Taliban attacks on U.S. and NATO forces increased by 40 percent in 2008 compared with the previous year. The same report noted two distinct Taliban insurgencies, one based in Kandahār in southern Afghanistan and another in eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents often obtained refuge in neighboring Pakistan’s rugged North-West Frontier Province.

The insurgency was described as a loosely organized alliance of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, foreign fighters, and Afghan warlords. The forces operating in northeast Afghanistan and around the capital were led by former mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was believed to be allied with the Taliban but not formally part of the movement. The insurgency in the east, southeast, and southern parts of Afghanistan was thought to be led by remnants of the original Taliban, foreign fighters, and al-Qaeda.

The Taliban was also establishing shadow, or parallel, governments in regions where they exerted control or where the central government in Kābul had only a loose hold on security. In some cases the shadow governments consisted of judges and other officials, along with finance and defense councils. Some experts estimated that the insurgency controlled as much as 40 percent of Afghanistan. Many Afghans reportedly welcomed the security that the Taliban provided from criminal elements or saw the Taliban as an alternative to corruption in the central government. In some cases the Taliban provided services that the government could not. Still others gravitated toward the insurgents in response to U.S. air strikes that often mistakenly killed civilians.

In August 2008 a U.S. air strike on a suspected Taliban compound in the village of Azizabad near Herāt killed a large number of civilians. The Afghan government, backed by a United Nations investigation and accounts from independent observers, alleged that more than 90 civilians were killed in the attack. The U.S. military initially dismissed the charges, saying that at most only 6 or 7 civilians were killed, but a subsequent military investigation concluded that 30 civilians, including women and children, had died. U.S. air strikes increased 31 percent from January 2008 to September 2008 compared with the same period in 2007. During the first nine months of 2008 U.S. and NATO aircraft flew about 14,000 missions and dropped about 3,000 bombs. U.S. military officials said the air strikes were necessary because ground troops were thinly dispersed throughout the country. As of mid-November 2008, there were about 65,000 allied troops in Afghanistan, of which about 36,000 were U.S. troops.

The U.S. role in Afghanistan became an issue during the U.S. presidential election with Democratic candidate Barack Obama promising to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, in part to strengthen the ground presence and make the U.S.-NATO coalition less reliant on air strikes. Following a November air mission that mistakenly strafed a wedding party in the village of Shah Wali Kot in southern Afghanistan, killing 40 civilians, Afghan president Hamid Karzai called on President-elect Obama to cease all air strikes that might risk civilian casualties. The same month Karzai extended an invitation to Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, promising him safe passage if he agreed to negotiate a peace settlement. Omar was believed to be based in Quetta, Pakistan. However, the Taliban rejected the overture.

Once in office, Obama followed through on his promise and committed an additional 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total to 53,000. Obama said the increase was necessary due to the deteriorating security situation. He also promised a review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan while saying that he believed the conflict could not be resolved “solely” through military means. In the meantime the United Nations released figures for the civilian death toll in Afghanistan in 2008, reporting that it rose 40 percent to 2,118 from 1,523 in 2007. More than 50 percent of the deaths were caused by the insurgents, while 39 percent were caused by pro-government forces.

J.6. 2009 Presidential Elections

Afghanistan held its second presidential election in August 2009. The weeks preceding the election saw a rise in insurgent violence. The day of the election, August 20th, was one of the most violent days since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. The wave of violence contributed to a voter turnout estimated to be only 35 percent.

The preliminary results showed Karzai winning approximately 47 percent of the vote and former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah winning approximately 33 percent of the vote. With no candidate winning more than 50 percent of the vote, a run-off election seemed likely. There were also numerous accusations of voter fraud leveled against Karzai and his followers. As a result, Abdullah threatened to not accept the outcome of the vote, raising the possibility of additional violence.

Contributed By:

John Ford Shroder, B.S., M.S., Ph.D.

Regents Professor of Geography and Geology, University of Nebraska. Editor, Himalaya to the Sea: Geology, Geomorphology, and the Quaternary and other books.

The Great Game in Asia

Throughout the nineteenth century, Great Britain was obsessed by the fear that one of the other European powers would take advantage of the political decay of Islamic Asia.

At first it was France. Then it was Russia that moved along the caravan routes of the old conquerors and threatened to establish a new world monarchy on the ruins of the ancient ones. British governments were worried by the implications of the continuing march southward by the Russian empire in Asia. In the early part of the century, the focus of strategic concern was Constantinople. Later, as czarist armies overran Central Asia, attention shifted to Persia, to Afghanistan and to the mountain passes of the Himalayas. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was a common assumption in Europe that the next great war-the inevitable war-was going to be the final showdown between Britain and Russia.

The history of Russia's attempt to move into Afghanistan, Iran and other neighboring countries; of how Britain tried to stop Russia from doing so; and of how the war between the two of them did not take place, gains interest and possible significance from the American decision in our own time to contest Russian expansion on much the same battlefield.

II

Supposedly it was a British officer who first called it the Great Game. He played it exuberantly, and lost it in the terrifying way in which one lost in Central Asia: an Uzbek emir cast him for two months into a well filled with vermin and reptiles, and then what remained of him was brought up and beheaded. The phrase "the Great Game" was found in his papers and quoted by a historian of the First Afghan War. Rudyard Kipling made it famous in Kim, and visualized it in terms of an Anglo-Indian boy and his Afghan mentor foiling Russian intrigues along the highways to Hindustan. These activities of the rival intelligence services are what some writers mean by the Great Game; others use the phrase in the broader sense in which it is used in this article to describe the whole of the Anglo-Russian quarrel about the fate of Asia.

The nature of that quarrel has been variously described. The Great Game arose from a complex of disagreements between Britain and Russia, and the weight to be assigned to each of the causes of the rivalry between them is still a subject of dispute among historians.

In the beginning, in 1791, when the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, opposed czarist annexation of Ochakov, a strategic port town belonging to the Ottoman Empire, it was for fear that Russia might become too powerful and might upset the existing balance of power. But for a long time thereafter, that fear was forgotten as Britain and Russia both fought for their lives against Napoleon. It was not until 1815, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, that British fears of Russia began to revive. At that time Russia appeared to be the strongest land power in the world. Ever since the reign of Peter the Great she had planned to become a great maritime power too. Foreign observers saw the military strength of Russia through a magnifying glass, and this exaggeration of Russian strength gave rise to exaggerated fears.

Perhaps the most unrealistic of these fears was that the Russians would march across Asia to attack the British position in India. Originally this had been Napoleon's idea. It was typical of his genius to see that the series of triumphs in the eighteenth century that had led Britain to establish her power on the far side of the world had brought with them a certain vulnerability, in that the British lines of communication and transportation had become long and thus especially subject to disruption. Although Napoleon succeeded in persuading the mad Czar Paul of Russia that he should swoop down across these lines to attack the British in India, it was not within the range of Russia's capabilities at that time to undertake such a campaign. Thus, Russia was not able to exploit Britain's vulnerability. The Russian armies pulled back when the Czar Paul died, and the road to India was not attacked. But Napoleon's conception was so vivid that decades later it sprang back to life in the minds of the British leaders who had defeated him.

It was odd that it should do so, because until then-with the abortive personal exception of Czar Paul-it seems never to have occurred to the rulers of either Russia or Britain that Russia's expansion southward in Asia bore any relation to British interests. The grand dukes of Moscow had begun their campaigns of expansion into Asia centuries before Britain had arrived in India, and the wars that they waged with such frequency against the empires and khanates of Asia would have taken place even if Britain had never existed. Moreover, even the frontiers across which the Russians marched in western and central Asia at the beginning of the nineteenth century were far distant from the Indian border.

The British did not take any particular interest at that time in the areas into which Russia was expanding. They neglected to study the geography and politics of Persia, Afghanistan or the Himalayas. As to western Asia, it was assumed that Russia would someday take over Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire, but the few people in Britain who thought about it were not alarmed by the prospect.

Indeed, until the wars of the French and American Revolutions, Russia was regarded by the British as their natural ally; and despite the several difficulties that arose between them in the years between 1789 and 1815, this was the opinion that most Britons seem to have held at least until the end of the Napoleonic wars.

It was only at the end of the 1820s, when Russia seemed to be abusing the prerogatives that flowed from her military strength by annexing substantial additional territories from the Ottoman and Persian Empires, that British leaders became sufficiently alarmed to view this continuing expansion south-eastward in Asia through Bonaparte's eyes. Books appeared in England discussing the Russian threat to India. In 1829 Wellington, then Prime Minister, corresponded with the President of the India Board about the invasion route the Russians might follow in the event that they planned to move into Afghanistan and from there to attack India.

From that time on, there always was a body of opinion in Britain that saw in every Russian move in Asia a threat to Britain's interest in India, no matter how farfetched that might seem to be as an analysis of the motives behind the Russian move in question. Later, and especially after the Indian Mutiny, British leaders developed a related fear that the mere threat of a Russian attack would encourage the Indians to rise up and expel the British, whether a Russian attack actually ever materialized or not.

In 1830 Lord Palmerston became the British Foreign Secretary and began his long career as the shaper of British world policy. It is his name that is associated with the traditional British policy of upholding the territorial integrity of the Ottoman and other Islamic rulers in Asia against encroachment by any of the European powers-which in practice meant, by Russia. Thus Islamic Asia was called into service as a vast buffer against Russian expansion. Palmerston's chief object in doing so is said to have been his fear that if the Asian regimes collapsed, the struggle between the outside powers to pick up the valuable pieces would lead to a general and disastrous European war-the nineteenth-century equivalent of what today would be a world war, in that all of the great military powers of the time would have been drawn into it.

But there are other explanations, too, for Palmerston's policy. In 1832 Great Britain moved further in the direction of democracy, by enactment of a Reform Bill that somewhat enlarged the franchise; while Russia in the 1830s and 1840s, by her brutal repression of popular revolts in Poland, Hungary and elsewhere, moved further in the direction of establishing herself as the world's chief enemy of freedom. The ideological differences between the two countries became an increasing cause of friction between them. Britons in ever greater numbers came to object to Russia not merely for what she did but for what she was. The Russophobia soon outgrew the particular political differences between the two countries, and became a cause in its own right of Britain's determination to stop Russian expansion in Asia, despite Lord Palmerston's wise advice that Britain should have neither perpetual friends nor perpetual enemies. Historians have been at some pains to explain the genesis and development of this unique phenomenon; but whatever the explanation, it is undeniable that one of the real factors determining British policy throughout much of the nineteenth century was "an antipathy toward Russia which soon became the most pronounced and enduring element in the national outlook on the world abroad."1

Another factor that began to assume genuine significance was an economic one. In the beginning, a British presence was established in Islamic Asia for strategic national security reasons; but once that presence was established, patterns of trade began to develop modestly at first, but then more importantly. After the Anglo-Turkish Trade Treaty of 1838 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, trade with the Ottoman Empire in particular became a matter of major economic importance for Great Britain, and the Turkish market became Britain's third best customer in the world. Russia's designs on the Ottoman Empire thereupon became a threat to Britain's economic as well as her political interests. Moreover, while Turkey was an open market for British manufacturers, Russia had erected a high tariff barrier that excluded British goods, so that Russia became an enemy on free-trade grounds.

Unarticulated was another point. The configuration of the southern seacoast of Asia is such that narrow stretches of land and water can dominate and choke off traffic at quite a number of points so that Britain, as a sea power with worldwide interests, required that the whole of the coastline be held in friendly hands.

Russian efforts to take over Persia, with its seacoast, were therefore a threat to England's commerce and position in the world.

Britain, then, by the middle of the nineteenth century had at least nine reasons for opposing the continuing Russian expansion in Asia: (1) it would upset the balance of power by making Russia much stronger than the other European powers; (2) it would culminate in a Russian invasion of British India; (3) it would encourage India to revolt against Britain; (4) it would cause the Islamic regimes of Asia to collapse, which in turn would lead to the outbreak of a general war between the European powers in order to determine which of them would get what share of the valuable spoils; (5) it would strengthen a country and a regime that were the chief enemies of popular political freedom in the world; (6) it would strengthen a people whom Britons hated; (7) it threatened to disrupt the profitable British trade with Asia; (8) it would strengthen the sort of protectionist, closed economic society which free-trading Britain morally disapproved of; and (9) it would threaten the line of naval communications upon which Britain's commercial and political position in the world depended. To these the British Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister Lord Salisbury added a tenth toward the end of the century, when he observed that England would have to stop Russia from acquiring Constantinople because, having made such an issue of it for so long, England would lose her reputation as a formidable power if she finally yielded the point. An eleventh reason for British opposition to Russian expansion in Asia emerged only in the first part of the twentieth century, when it was discovered that there was oil in the areas that Russia threatened, and that the possession of oil was of considerable military and economic importance.

III

Sometimes as a cold war and sometimes as a hot one, the struggle between Britain and Russia raged from one end of Asia to the other for almost a hundred years. From west to east on the map, the principal battlefields were the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the khanates of Turkestan in Central Asia, and the mountainous areas, such as Afghanistan, that stretch around the frontier of India.

In defense of the Ottoman Empire, Britain prevailed. She kept Constantinople and the Straits out of Russian hands; and in the Crimean War (1853-56) and at the Congress of Berlin (1878) Britain undid the results of Russian wartime successes against Turkey.

Britain was ineffective, however, in defending the Persian Empire. In decades of fighting in the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia conquered the Transcaucasus frontier and made final her annexations of Georgia, Circassia and parts of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Observing that Russia was more to be feared than was Britain, the Persian shahs fell under the influence of their czarist neighbor, and by the turn of the century Russian hegemony in Persia was almost complete. If the reason that Russia did not exploit the situation by establishing a position on the Persian Gulf coast was a fear of the British reaction to such a move, it nonetheless can be said that Britain salvaged at least her minimum security needs from a losing situation.

And, in the last half of the nineteenth century Russia threw herself into the conquest of Central Asia: the khanates of Khiva, Bokhara and Kokand in western Turkestan, and the Turkoman tribal region then called Transcaspia. Britain did nothing other than protest.

Britain reacted violently, however, to any hint of Russian meddling in the areas on the frontier of India. In reaction to the presence of Russian agents there, Britain twice invaded Afghanistan, in the First Afghan War of 1838-42 and the Second Afghan War of 1878-80; and when Russia encouraged Persia to move against Afghanistan, Britain took decisive action-in 1838 and in the Anglo-Persian War of 1856-57. When Russian border patrols reached the Afghan frontier, in the Penjdeh crisis of 1885, Britain and Russia themselves nearly went to war.

At the end of the nineteenth century, it was discovered that there was another way in which Russia could get at Britain in Asia. Exploration teams reported that it would be possible to invade India through mountain passes in the region of the Pamirs, the "roof of the world." Advancing over the high plateaus, the Russians got there first and claimed it as their own; and when a British expedition finally arrived to investigate, the Russians turned it back. Not long after the British and Russian governments reached an agreement in 1895 to compromise in this Pamirs crisis-the Russians kept the line of the frontier, but the British were given the mountain passes-information was received of further Russian intrigues in the high Himalayas, this time in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama sought to throw off the last vestiges of Chinese authority. The British government of India heard of contacts between the Russians and the Dalai Lama in 1900 and 1901, apparently made with a view toward offering Russian aid and establishing Russian influence. To counter these developments, the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, dispatched a British mission in 1903-04 which fought its way to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, and, as the Dalai Lama fled, established British control.

What was so especially frightening about the Russian expansion in Central Asia was its persistence and seeming inevitability. The Russians were constantly fighting on their frontiers, against mountain and desert tribesmen if not against regular armies. Even in periods of nominal peace the fighting continued, as it did in the 1830s and 1840s in the Caucasus, where tens of thousands of czarist officers and troops received their firsthand schooling in warfare.

When they failed, they kept trying until they succeeded. In 1840 a Russian campaign to conquer Khiva met with disaster because Khiva was too far away and the logistical support of the expedition was inadequate to meet that challenge. The next time the Russians took great care in the preparation of their expedition; and on June 10, 1873, Khiva fell to them.

As each region was conquered, the Russians brought in logistical support, built roads and railroads, and organized themselves in such a way as to facilitate their going on to conquer the next adjoining territory. Even though this was not done in pursuance of some overall master plan for the conquest of Asia, to the outside world it bore the aspect of the carrying out of such a program.

Again and again, the Russians claimed that their military incursions were merely punitive expeditions, sent out to secure the frontier against attack; but the territories into which the expeditions were sent were always annexed, and then themselves had to be defended by the sending of expeditions into the territories beyond them. The Russian government often claimed that these conquests were undertaken by overly ambitious Russian officers on the spot, in violation of orders from the czar and his ministers; and by and large, present-day Western historians accept the validity of these claims. Skeptics are in a position to point out, however, that the territories conquered in alleged violation of orders from St. Petersburg were never returned to their rulers, that the officers who supposedly violated orders were promoted, and that the officers who succeeded them in command continued to carry out the expansionist policies of which their government claimed to disapprove.

Perhaps the Russian advance would have seemed less menacing if it had taken place all at once. The conquest of Central Asia, for example, was a gradual encroachment over the course of many decades which must have seemed to contemporaries to be a series of separate conquests: a particular oasis occupied in one year, a certain city conquered the next year, a tribe of alleged marauders brought under control the year after that. Moreover the Russians seemed constantly to be pushing outward in all directions and to be prepared to keep on going until somebody stopped them.

There is another aspect to the situation, however, which the British Prime Minister Lord Melbourne pointed out in the 1830s when he was shown a map of Russian expansion and urged to take alarm at it. He said that "a map of England with her acquisitions during the same period would make a very respectable figure and colour no inconsiderable portion of the globe."2 Viewed through distrustful eyes, the course of British expansion in Asia would indeed have been a cause for alarm.

How much this is so may be illustrated by a comment made long afterwards. On March 14, 1933, Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Prime Minister of India, wrote one of a series of letters outlining the history of the world for his teenaged daughter Indira, who grew up to become Prime Minister herself. In the letter in question, he discussed the traditional rivalry between Russia and England in Asia, and wrote that "the possession of India especially brought the British right up to the Russian frontier, and they were continually having nightmares as to what Tsarist Russia might do to India."3

In the nineteenth century Britain rounded out her position in India by the conquest of Sindh and other frontier areas, by the "forward policy" of conquering Afghanistan, and by the maintenance of a network of representatives and intelligence agents all across Asia. If the czar's government pictured these India-related activities as taking place on, in Nehru's words, "the Russian frontier," they were bound to see them as a dangerous series of acts of aggression. But the British government did not see them that way at all.

IV

What the British government did see-and the British public did not-was how Britain, in its struggle against Russia, could support the independence and territorial integrity of regimes such as the Ottoman and Persian Empires, which were cruel and unjust, denying their subjects even the most elementary of human rights. It was natural to wonder why Britain would risk war to keep in power rulers of whom all civilized persons must disapprove. Palmerston's enthusiastic response was to attempt to reform the regimes that Britain supported. It was an attempt that met with little success; and by the end of the century British leaders despaired of making any significant improvement in the governments of their Asian allies: if it could not be done in Turkey, Persia was not even worth trying, and the khanates were hopeless from the start.

A more traditional attitude, usually associated with the Tory Party and with the Foreign Office, was to consider the question of which foreign governments to support in the light of British interests rather than in the light of moral principles. If limited to the question of Asian policy at that time, this is a point of view with which it ought to be difficult to quarrel, for there was no effective alternative which British officials were aware of. Britain was obliged to deal with the governments that did or that might exist. That left her with a choice between deplorable allies and a deplorable adversary, a choice between evils, between a sultan who committed atrocities against Armenians and a czar who committed atrocities against Jews. Moral considerations were inapplicable in such a situation, and to introduce them into the discussion of foreign policy therefore was to mislead.

Yet there were many in Britain at that time-as there are in the United States today-who were not happy supporting a foreign policy not grounded in moral principle. The result was that a British political leader could not be sure that he would be able to rally enough domestic support to pursue a foreign policy that was in the best interest of his country.

For Russia, the introduction of the moral issue into foreign policy was a source of strength. She could use the rhetoric of liberation to justify her incursions into the territory of her neighbors, and not worry about the pull of her own domestic public opinion when she annexed or otherwise dominated the provinces that she then conquered, supposedly to free them, but in fact merely to bring them under her own rule.

Even abroad, the introduction of moral considerations into foreign policy issues worked against Great Britain. In 1907, when Britain settled her differences in the area by yielding most of inhabited Persia to Russia, the Persians attacked Britain but not Russia, for "tyranny was accepted from the Russians as natural to them, whereas Great Britain was expected to behave in accordance with her liberal traditions."4

V

The real issue was whether Britain could afford to preserve the Islamic regimes of Asia not in the moral sense but in the political and economic ones. The very qualities that made it so attractive to Britain to make a buffer zone of these decaying empires brought drawbacks. The empires made an ideal buffer zone because they were too feeble to threaten or to hurt the Great Powers; but that meant that they were also too feeble to defend themselves against Russian encroachments, and that Britain would have to do it for them. Thus, they drained British resources rather than adding to them. By the last half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman and Persian Empires were not able to meet even the internal challenges to the viability of their governments, which became especially clear when the administration of their finances fell apart. Successive British cabinets failed to supply a solution to these problems and failed to persuade the governments in question to take their own remedial action.

The sultans of Turkey, in particular, knowing how much the British needed to prop them up, exploited that need in such a way as to avoid making the needed reforms. They felt free to resist the demands of foreign creditors and of foreign powers because they felt that Britain would be obliged to defend them against any attempts at enforcement. How to deal with this sort of blackmail by a weak client state is a problem that Britain was not able to solve in the nineteenth century any more than the United States has been able to do so in the twentieth century.

Especially frustrating was the case of Persia which at Russian instigation moved against British interests in protecting the integrity of Afghanistan. Britain thus was obliged to take military action against Persia, while at the same time trying to preserve the strength and integrity of Persia as against the Russians. To be forced to attack a country one intends to defend is a paradox-a paradox not unfamiliar to the government of the United States today as it attempts to decide how to deal with an Iran that has held Americans as hostages.

Another familiar aspect of that problem sprang from the rivalry of the countries Britain undertook to protect against Russia. The problem of how the United States should deal with the Greek-Turkish and Arab-Israeli conflicts, while at the same time shielding all of the countries in question against the Soviet Union, was foreshadowed by Britain's problem of what to do about Persian attacks against Afghanistan when both of them were countries she wanted to defend.

Attempts by Palmerston and other British leaders to persuade Persia that Russia was her real enemy fell on deaf ears. Whereas in Europe, if Russia had attacked and defeated several weaker countries, those countries would have banded together against Russia, the Asian regimes with which Britain was dealing at the time were too weak to be capable of any such response. In their world the weaker bowed to, instead of combining against, the stronger.

Yet if a country was willing to stand up for its independence against Russia, it also was likely to stand up against Britain, and the British therefore distrusted it. Such was the case of Afghanistan, against which Britain unwisely fought two wars in the nineteenth century and a third war in the twentieth century. These were dreadful, bloody debacles, and at some point in one of the disastrous retreats through the passes leading from Kabul to Jalalabad, some surviving British officer must have wondered whether it would not have been a better thing if it were a Russian army that the fierce Afghani were allowed to hack to pieces rather than a British one. Indeed, the young Disraeli had pointed out after the First Afghan War that Afghanistan could provide the finest possible barrier against Russian invasion if only Britain would stop interfering in its affairs.

The moral of this seems to be that it is best to leave to a local power the responsibility for defending both its interests and one's own. It is, of course, a defect of this policy of acting through regional surrogates-such a policy as was adopted for the United States by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1969-73 Administration-that a power strong enough to act in such a capacity is likely to have ambitions of its own. The effective alliance that Britain finally contracted in order to defeat Russia in Asia was the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902, which freed the Japanese to fight the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. In the short run this was a success for Britain, in that Japan destroyed Russian power in the Pacific; but then, some decades later, Japan also went on to destroy in the Pacific the power and presence of Great Britain.

To the mind of so skeptical and clear-sighted a statesman as Lord Salisbury, the most reliable policy for England was one that she could carry out herself without having to rely on others. Some of the strategic elements necessary for doing so were either available or already in place. In 1798 Nelson had won control of the eastern Mediterranean for the British navy; and in that same year the first of a series of agreements was negotiated between Britain and the local rulers along the Persian Gulf coast which, during the nineteenth century, assumed the form of a virtual British protectorate of the entire coastal route to India. Partly by accident and partly by design, Britain also ended up occupying Egypt and the Suez Canal. In order to further his plan for Britain to take her fate into her own hands, Salisbury also obtained Cyprus from Turkey, explaining that it was in Turkey's own interest that British forces should have the use of a location of such strategic importance.

But Salisbury's hopes were dashed when it proved impossible to have British officials take charge of the administration and obtain a sort of protectorate over the Ottoman Empire. It was the 1880 elections, bringing Gladstone back into power, that, in Salisbury's view, destroyed the possibility of accomplishing such a program. Gladstone, who was on record as believing that the Turks were antihuman, washed his hands of the Ottoman involvement. The Turks, unable to stand on their own, turned to the new power of Bismarck's Germany as their protector. When Salisbury resumed his tenure of the Foreign Office in 1885, he lamented that the change could not be undone. Gladstone's government had given away the British influence at Constantinople-"They have just thrown it away into the sea," he exclaimed, "without getting anything whatever in exchange."5

What this meant was that while British interests still required that Russian expansion be stopped on the Ottoman and Persian frontiers, London was not able to guide Ottoman and Persian rulers so that they would take effective measures to ensure their own survival, in their own interest and in Britain's. In large measure, then, by the end of the nineteenth century Great Britain had lost control of the elements upon which her destiny as a power in Asia depended. If, for example, Russia were to descend from the interior of Asia upon the Persian coast, it was not clear how Britain, with only her fleet, could counterattack.

Lord Curzon, having become Viceroy of India, made a show of strength by a naval tour of the Persian Gulf coast. Lord Lansdowne, then Foreign Secretary, warned off Britain's adversaries by proclaiming in 1903 that "we should regard the establishment of a naval base or of a fortified post on the Persian Gulf by any other power as a very grave menace to our interests and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal."6 President Jimmy Carter recently made a remarkably similar pronouncement about the Persian Gulf; and then as now, the question raised by such a pronouncement is that of what substantive strength lies behind the warning.

For Britain, a naval power whose homeland was far from Asia, the question was where and how she could bring her own particular strength to bear upon an adversary moving out from the interior of the great Eurasian land mass. In a more general sense, the question was how to bring British political objectives in line with the resources and strategies that were available to accomplish them.

VI

At the beginning of the Anglo-Russian rivalry, after the Napoleonic Wars, it appeared that England and Russia were the two remaining Great Powers in the world, but that they were powers of a completely different kind. Britain was something new, as the greatest maritime and commercial power the world had ever seen. Russia appeared as a giant empire of the traditional type with a land army that overshadowed all other land armies in the world. It was not entirely clear how the two countries could get at one another, unless the British landed or the Russians put out to sea. The leaders of Great Britain never really came to grips with the fact that British power was inadequate in kind as well as scale to accomplish many of the strategic objectives that Britain had set herself. If Russia had been as militarily effective as she was believed to be, there would have been no way for mere wealth and a fleet to have stopped the czarist armies in the interior of Eurasia.

The wealthy British had subsidized their continental allies to do much of their land fighting for them in the Napoleonic and other European wars, but the rotting Islamic empires that were their allies in Asia lacked the fighting power to do the job. Moreover, for London to incite them into fighting losing campaigns from which Britain had no ground forces to extricate them would weaken rather than strengthen the British cause. Indeed when Britain failed to defend Persia in the Russo-Persian War of 1826-28-a course of inaction which Britain was fully justified in taking because Persia had started the war and the 1814 mutual defense agreement obligated Britain to defend Persia only against aggression-the Shah concluded that Britain was an unreliable ally, and in effect he went over to the Russian side.

Although Britain's economic strength was great, competitors existed, and by the second half of the nineteenth century France, Italy and Germany were able in large part to supplant her in the financial and commercial life of the Islamic world. However, Britain did maintain a network of representatives and intelligence agents all across Asia; and because the Russians were not as strong as they were thought to be, this network was able to play a role in helping to deter or stop the Russian advance.

The point at which it was believed that Britain could exercise maximum pressure was Constantinople. From there her warships could enter the Black Sea and with impunity bombard the coast of the Crimea, as was done in the Crimean War. However, if the Russian forces then withdrew from the coast into the interior, there was little that Britain could do; she could land troops on the shore as an invasion force, but there was no reason to suppose that a small expeditionary force of this sort could conquer the vast land mass of Russia when even the great Napoleon with all his forces could not do so. Fortunately for the British and for their French allies, the Russians obliged them by not retreating when the Crimean War invasion took place, thus allowing the allied powers, despite their own abysmal military performance, to inflict a shattering defeat on the Russian Army.

It was only Russia's strategic blundering that had made victory in the Crimean War possible; and England's leaders ought to have seen that, unless against all odds such blunders were repeated, it would be difficult if not impossible to project Britain's power into the areas where Britain proposed to contain Russian expansionism. As Lord Salisbury said in another context, it was not possible for the British Navy to sail over the Taurus mountain range.

The brilliant success of Salisbury's diplomacy kept his countrymen from following this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. In the war-fevered year of 1878, as Britons whipped up their martial enthusiasm with the Jingo song in their music halls, Salisbury won Britain's greatest victory at the Congress of Berlin by the sheer force of his intellect. As A.J.P. Taylor has written, "Great Britain won a bloodless victory with a music-hall song, a navy of museum pieces, and no land forces at all. . . . Moreover, she won without a reliable continental ally. . . . The resounding achievement of 1878 weakened the effectiveness of British policy in the long run; for it led the British public to believe that they could play a great role without expense or exertion-without reforming their navy, without creating an army, without finding an ally."7

It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that Britons were shown that it was not possible to run a successful foreign policy on the cheap. The chief powers of Europe had formed themselves into rival blocs that excluded and were to a certain extent directed against England. The Boer War had exposed the weakness of Britain's military resources and her lack of preparedness. Russian railroad construction in Asia had come close enough to India so that the threat of invasion finally became plausible. In a seminal essay, Sir Halford Mackinder, the prophet of geopolitics, outlined the implications of some of the changes that had occurred in the world. The development of the railroad and other means of rapid land transportation, he wrote, had transformed the relationship between sea power and land power. Formerly it was a navy that made a country's armed forces mobile. Now the speed of railroads gave the advantage to land powers operating on interior lines, for they were able to concentrate their forces by sending them rapidly along the straight line which constitutes the shortest distance between two points, while a seagoing adversary must sail all around the circumference and arrive at the field of combat too late. Mackinder taught his followers to look at the map with new eyes and thus to see that Russia occupies the pivot area controlling the Eurasian continent, where most of mankind lives, and that this pivot area was inaccessible to Britain's kind of power. It was a gloomy message that he preached: in effect he said that Britain had placed her bet on yesterday while Russia had placed hers on tomorrow.

Britain was saved from the necessity of having to invent a new strategy to support her nineteenth century objectives because new developments obliged her to abandon most of these objectives. The rise of new powers-Japan, Germany and the United States-transformed the structure of world politics, making what had been a bipolar world into a multipolar one. In this new world England, her weakness exposed by the Boer War, and Russia, her weakness exposed by the Russo-Japanese War and by the Revolution of 1905, no longer appeared to be threats to one another. As Walter Bagehot wrote, the fear of Russia was an idea that belonged to "the pre-Germanic age."8 It was Germany that Britain had to fear now, and that Russia had to fear as well.

In 1907 Britain and Russia entered into a treaty that composed their differences in Asia. Tibet was neutralized; Russia abandoned her interest in Afghanistan and left control of its external policy to Britain; and Persia was divided into three zones, with Russia taking over the substance of the country and England its seacoast. Most historians use the same phrase in describing the effect of this treaty. They write that the Game was over.

But it is not entirely true. The Russians went beyond what was allowed under the Persian terms of the treaty-British officials claimed they were not reporting all of the treaty violations to their own people, for fear of the effect on the necessary Anglo-Russian alliance against Germany. After the Russian Revolution, Russia disappeared from the areas in contention for about four decades, so that her willingness to abide by the other terms of the 1907 agreement was not put to the test. By the time that the Soviet Union appeared on the scene, the British already were packing to go home, so that again the matter was not put to the test. The United States has now taken over, in large part, the British position in terms of influence and interest in the Middle East and southern Asia, and the question of ultimate Russian intentions in that area of the world is still unresolved.

VII

It has often been complained that Russian political intentions are difficult to fathom because of the closed nature of her society. As a seventeenth century British visitor to Russia remarked, "Such is the disposition of the Russes that they will not indure to have the secrets of their state bee made knowne."9 Moreover, even when the private communications of Russian government leaders are made known, as were those of some of the czarist ministers after the Bolshevik revolution, it is more difficult than it is with most countries for foreign observers to judge how much weight should be assigned to the advice of particular ministers.

Nonetheless, Western historians in the past half-century seem to have established that the Russian government did not harbor many of the wilder ambitions that were ascribed to them during the nineteenth century. They tend to believe that, as against the British, Russian policy in Asia was essentially defensive. It is thought that when Russia put pressure on Britain in such sensitive areas as Afghanistan, the Pamirs and Tibet, it was to keep the British from attacking the Russians once again in the Black Sea. "To keep England quiet in Europe by keeping her employed in Asia; that, briefly put, is the sum and substance of Russian policy," wrote George Curzon nearly a century ago, in words that historians quote with approval.10 The British fear that the Russians intended an invasion of India is dismissed as a baseless nightmare, which the Russians from time to time took advantage of in order, again, to distract the British from attacking them in Europe.

At the beginning of the Great Game, British fears of an attack on India were certainly unwarranted. Russia at that time lacked the financial resources, the transportation facilities, the ability to develop supply routes and even the maps, through hitherto uncharted sections of Central Asia, that a successful invasion of India would require. Later, after Russia had developed some of these capabilities, it still was not clear why Russia would want to invade British India except to counterbalance a British move against Russia in some other part of the world. British fears, in this respect, then, were irrational. The obsessive nature of these fears is suggested by a prediction that one of the leading English statesman of the twentieth century made about the politics of the twenty-first century: in a book published in 1930, Lord Birkenhead predicted that in 2030 A.D. India would still form an integral part of the British Empire, but that Russian agents still would be scheming to subvert that rule and to win India for Russia.11

Western historians who have exposed the extent to which the leaders of both powers were motivated by unrealistic fears have been able to provide an explanation of the rivalry between Britain and Russia in terms of mutual misunderstanding. According to one of the most recent and brilliant studies of the period by a British historian, "It is apparent now that the lasting hostility between Britain and Russia was based on a quite unreal fear in each of the other's supposed aggressive intentions."12 This is an elegant explanation, and one that would have provided a text upon which an eighteenth century philosophical ironist might have amplified to preach the folly of human political behavior. For ourselves it might well provide a useful reminder of how often Russian strength has been exaggerated and Russian intentions misunderstood; and of how much of the time Russia acts out of mistaken fear of our intentions rather than out of aggressive intentions of her own that are directed against us.

But while this provides an explanation of the Great Game which is in some respects true, it is not the whole truth. Russia may not have intended to engage in expansionism as against England. Undeniably, however, the czarist empire engaged in expansionism as against the Islamic Asian regimes on the Russian frontier-and intended to do so. On a regular basis Russian forces prepared to invade these neighboring areas, did invade them, conquered them, and annexed them. By definition this is expansionism. And in the context of nineteenth century opinion this was not a policy for which the Russians necessarily had to apologize.

New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States were frequently cited as examples of successful expansionism that served the cause of civilization. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, in a passage not untypical of the views held by many Americans and Europeans at that time:

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drove the savage from the land has all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori-in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. . . . it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.13

For the United States to conquer or occupy everything in its way, until it had filled out a continent and created a commonwealth that stretched from one ocean to the other, was a national destiny that seemed manifest. There was no reason for the Russians to think that their destiny was any less clear.

The Russian Imperial Chancellor, Prince Gorchakov, set out his country's aims and objects in 1864 in terms that were not dissimilar to those used by British and American leaders with respect to their own objectives. He argued that the need for secure frontiers obliged the Russians to go on devouring the rotting regimes to their south. He pointed out that "the United States in America, France in Algiers, Holland in her colonies-all have been drawn into a course where ambition plays a smaller role than imperious necessity, and the greatest difficulty is knowing where to stop."14

What was clear was that the Russians were not going to stop of their own accord anywhere near their then existing frontiers. In 1828 a high British official wrote of the Russians in Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia that "they will be compelled, as we were in India, to make new conquests to secure those they have already made."15 A half century later, the author of a classic American travel book about the then-recent Russian conquests in Turkestan wrote that "as far as one can foresee, Russia will be compelled in the future to advance still further."16 A decade and a half later, after Russia had made further conquests in Central Asia, George Curzon visited the region and was convinced that the czarist advance had to continue, and that Russia was "as much compelled to go forward as the earth is to go round the sun. . . ."17 Not even Soviet historians, who have access to the czarist archives, claim that czarist expansion in Asia was undertaken for the purpose of thwarting Britain. It had begun before the British came to Asia, and would have continued whether the British had arrived or not.

Had Britain not acted against the threat of Russian expansion, it is possible that internal weaknesses would have inhibited the growth of the Russian empire anyway. It is not possible to prove whether that would have been true or not. But no responsible British statesman, even had he been fully aware of the true extent of Russian weakness, could have gambled that such weakness alone would prove sufficient to halt the Russian advance.

If one assumes that Russia would have consolidated her hold on all of those areas in which she endeavored to assert her influence had not Britain presented her from doing so, it was a formidable empire indeed that the English kept from being created. On the basis of such an assumption it can be said that, had it not been for British opposition, Russia in substance and perhaps in form would have taken all of Persia, including its coastline. Whether and where Russia would have chosen to stop in annexing other coastal areas along the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean is a matter for speculation. Mesopotamia, Afghanistan and Tibet would have come into the Russian sphere of influence, even if they were not formally annexed into the Russian empire. Constantinople and the Straits would have fallen into Russian hands, though the fate of other Ottoman lands, such as Arabia and Syria, would have been less easy to discern.

Such an expansion of the Russian empire by its very nature would have endangered the British world position, whether or not the Czar and his ministers intended that it do so. A Russian empire that stretched from the Balkans and the Mediterranean on the west to the Pacific on the east, and that stretched so far that its next neighbor on the north was the Arctic and, on the south, Antarctica, would have overshadowed the countries of Europe to such an extent that the balance of power would surely have been overthrown. From the British point of view, therefore, the dangers to which Russian expansionism gave rise were real ones; and England was right to seek to contain the Russian advance.

From the Russian point of view, the British threat was equally real. The British opposed them everywhere, created alliances against them, and, in the Crimean War, invaded them. Whereas it was not true that Russian expansion was directed against Britain (for Russia was merely conquering neighboring areas that she coveted), British expansion most definitely was directed against Russia. Britain did not covet for herself territories such as Afghanistan-into which she intruded herself and that she defended against Russia-nor did she take any great interest in them for their own sake; for as Lord Salisbury wrote, "nobody pretends that it matters to us whether they are held by Hottentots or Esquimaux."18 All that Britain cared about was that Russia did not get them.

Canadians and Australians were allowed to fill out their continents from ocean to ocean. The United States was allowed to do it; no European power took a stand on the Mississippi, claiming that if the Americans went on, they would make themselves the most powerful country in the world, and that such a development had at all costs to be prevented. Only the Russians, in Asia, were singled out. And it was not irrational of them to fear the designs of Great Britain, which had deliberately placed herself between the advancing Russian armies and the warm seacoasts of the south. Russians had said that it was their historic destiny to reach the Indian Ocean, but Britain had prevented them from achieving it.

The Great Game in Asia, then, was played for real stakes, and not merely for the imaginary ones-the unjustified fears and mutual misunderstandings upon which historians nowadays tend to focus. Of the many causes of the Anglo-Russian rivalry, some were irrational and some lapsed with time and circumstance, but the initial cause, suggested by Pitt in 1791, remained valid as long as the Game was played-the danger that Russian expansion would overthrow the balance of power and result in czarist domination of Eurasia if not the entire planet. Queen Victoria claimed that "it is a question of Russian or British supremacy in the world".19 That may be too simple a way of putting it, but it is not very far from the truth.

1 John Howes Gleason, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950, p. 1.

2 Philip Ziegler, Melbourne: A biography of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, p. 319.

3 Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History, New York: The John Day Company, 1942, p. 594.

4 Sir Reader Bullard, Britain and the Middle East, From Earliest Times to 1963, London: Hutchinson University Library, 3rd rev. ed., 1964, p 59.

5 Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury, London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1921 Vol. II, p. 326.

6 Bullard, op. cit., p. 54.

7 A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954, p. 250.

8 Walter Bagehot, The Collected Works, London: The Economist, 1974, Vol. 8, p. 306.

9 Samuel Purchas, quoted in M.S. Anderson, Britain's Discovery of Russia, 1553-1815, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1958, p. 41.

10 George N. Curzon, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question, London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1967, p. 321.

11 F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, cited in I.F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644-2001, London: Jonathan Cape, 1979, p. 242.

12 G.D. Clayton, Britain and the Eastern Question: Missolonghi to Gallipoli, London: University of London Press, Ltd., 1971, p. 126.

source: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/33619/david-fromkin/the-great-game-in-asia

13 Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1979, p. 464.

14 Arthur Swinton, North-West Frontier: People and Events, 1839-1947, London: Hutchinson, 1967, p. 142.

15 Lord Ellenborough, President of the India Board, citing the views of Sir J. Malcolm. J.A. Norris, The First Afghan War, 1838-1842, Cambridge: The University Press, 1967, p. 24.

16 Eugene Schuyler, Turkistan, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966, p. 284.

17 Curzon, op. cit., p. 319.

18 Lady Gwendolen Cecil, op. cit., p. 152.

19 Clayton, op. cit., p. 139.