My experience in Afghanistan
Image: The author and friend stopping to cool off along the Kyber Pass, surfboards ready for our next surf.
We knew, even then, that we didn’t want to be identified as American so we put a map of Australia on the van, believing that we would be better received. My, how things have changed.
I spent some time in Afghanistan as a very young overland traveller in 1972 with a couple of mates in an old 1958 Kombi.
Afghanistan is known as the “graveyard of empires.” We experienced a strong sense of this in 1972 as part of an epic overland trip when we entered Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass that links Kabul to Peshawar in Pakistan.
Throughout the pass we saw numerous plaques dedicated to fallen British military groups and as we looked up there was the inevitable Pashtun warrior, brightly dressed with mandatory ammunition belt and Jezail rifle slung across the shoulder and belt holster for sword or scimitar. They were the forerunners of today’s Taliban.
Small stone forts and flat-roofed fortress-like houses were scattered across the area’s barren hills. Brightly decorated trucks crawled along the winding dusty roads while men and boys strolled casually along the dusty roads or on horseback with rifles and muskets draped casually over their shoulders.
The Khyber Pass is a 53-kilometer mountain pass through the Hindu Kush mountain range, stretching through the Suleiman mountains to the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Khyber Pass has a long and violent history. Conquering armies have used the Khyber as an entry point for their invasions and it has been a part of Silk Road trade route for centuries.
In the Pushtu language, the name Pashtun denotes honour, goodness, bravery, loyalty and dignity. Pashtuns are renowned and respected fighters who are said to battle to the death over three things: wealth, women and land. They were the forerunners to today’s Taliban.
The word “Taliban” is Pashto for “students” — signifying Pashtun people studying Islam in Afghan and Pakistani madrasas, or religious schools. It was one of the factions fighting a civil war for control of the country following the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and subsequent collapse of the government.
It originally drew members from so-called “mujahideen” fighters who, with support from the United States, fought Soviet forces in the 1980s.
The Taliban emerged in the early 1990s in northern Pakistan following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. It is believed that the predominantly Pashtun movement first appeared in religious seminaries — mostly paid for by money from Saudi Arabia — which preached a hard-line form of Sunni Islam.
Afghans describe their country as “the graveyard of empires”. It started with Alexander the Great over 2,000 years ago in 326 B.C., when Alexander and his army marched through the Khyber to reach the plains of India.
While Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire relatively easily, it took him years to pacify the region of Afghanistan, a region later he swore to avoid at all costs.
More recently in the last three centuries, British, Soviet, and American superpowers have trained their sights on this land, determined to impose upon it a new world order. Such endeavours began with confidence and ended with catastrophe.
In the 19th century, Afghan warriors gave the British a savage trouncing. The British left Afghanistan in 1919, after 80 years of frustrating warfare. During the Afghan Wars the pass was the scene of numerous skirmishes between Anglo-Indian soldiers and native Afghans.
The British army’s retreat through the steep mountain gorges became a nightmarish battle against the Afghan fighters who used handmade Jezail rifle (also known as the Afghan Long Rifle) to snipe at the column of 16,500 troops and camp followers. Soldiers were shot down from hundreds of meters beyond the effective range of their own smoothbore muskets.
This YouTube video takes you to the scene of the Jezail shooters.
Similarly, the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The Soviet Union gave up trying to pacify Afghanistan in 1988.
And now in 2021, it’s the turn of the United States.
After 9/11, the U.S. insisted Afghanistan turn over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The Taliban, then Afghanistan’s rulers, said they would turn him over if the U.S. produced evidence that he was guilty of masterminding the 9/11 attacks. Otherwise, they said, it would be an insult to Islamic justice.
The Taliban even suggested a compromise — they would give bin Laden to a third country, where he might get a fair trial.
President George Bush would have none of it. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, even though the Bush team had no real evidence against bin Laden and they experienced a rerun the of the British and Soviet experience for the following two decades.
This week the government in Kabul, set up by the U.S. government, fled on helicopters… an eerie replay of the fall of Saigon in 1975.
The Afghans joined a list of local peoples around the world who, against all odds, would use irregular tactics to inflict losses on better-equipped forces. If the retreat from Kabul symbolized colonial British folly, the Afghans’ jezail firearms came to symbolize the home-grown skill and tenacity that would earn them a place among the great guerrilla fighters in history.
Image: Ornate weapons are commonly bought and sold in Afghanistan
We were lucky to be there during Afghanistan’s longest period of relative peace and stability under King Zahir Shah (1933–73). We were young, ignorant and bullet proof early hippy travellers.
Thus, few of the people I spoke with doubted the country’s basic stability, and only much later did we discover that beneath the apparent calm, leftist and Islamic political parties were both feverishly making plans to overthrow the government. Less than a year later, in July 1973, former Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan staged a coup against Afghanistan’s last king, Mohammad Zahir Shah.
Most of Afghans with whom I came in contact with were generous, hospitable people, keen to practice their English and share a mint tea. There was a hint of political rumblings but I and most of the fellow travellers were blissfully unaware of how political change was brewing. On July 1973, former Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan staged a coup against Afghanistan’s last king, Mohammad Zahir Shah.
Image: Pashtun Afghans were generous and hospitable to us in 1972.
A durable peace seems to depend on devolving power to the ethnically divided provinces to truly embrace Afghanistan’s ethnic and linguistic diversity. In the broader international perspective, Pakistan, India, Iran, Russia, China and the United States each view each other’s involvement in Afghanistan with suspicion. Ultimately, it seems that unless all stakeholders agree to not use Afghanistan’s territory against one another, it’s very unlikely that peace and stability could come to Afghanistan.
#Afghanistan #Taliban #Pashtun