A terrible week…
One thinks about this really terrible week. One wonders what one can do as a historian… for the many, many families in this country and abroad who have lost friends or have loved ones in New York in this awful week.
A deeply personal note. Nikko my son was a good college friend … of a 25 year old graduate of Cornell. Nikko’s friend was an employee of the bond firm of Cantor, Fitzgerald…he was a man who had just reached the security of a good job and who was just starting his life. On the burning roof of the north tower last week Nikko’s friend stood talking to his mum as the building went down under him; and, his mum watched this horror on TV.
Are there really words to describe this? And when my son Nikko phoned his friend’s parents last night….. he said to me that this was the hardest, the very hardest telephone call that he had ever made in his young life.
… and the monstrous thing about this horror truly is that this is an early wake up call for America. It is the wake up call of much worse moments to come perhaps when the closet door of nuclear and biological weapons swings open and the weapons of mass destruction are available to terrorists. But what strikes one most as a historian… is that few people know the enemy here. Quite simply the enemy world wide are religious fundamentalists. The enemy are religious fundamentalist bigots be they Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish or Sikh.
A historian of India and Afghanistan, as a person immersed in the 19th and 20th centuries presence of these places what is deeply disheartenting to one personally is looking at our political and military leaders at this moment. In a welter of confusion they appear to be about to embark on a journey without end. This is a journey that will have an unhappy end chiefly because of a the total lack of knowledge about Afghanistan with corollary references to the Indian sub continent… from which area much of the area’s politics stem.
It would be profitable at this moment to step back. It would be prudent to remind ourselves with some humility that during the 19th century the British in their innumerable wars of the 19th century suffered their single greatest military defeat of the whole century where? In Afghanistan. In Afghanistan the British lost an entire British Army which tried to retreat from Kabul on January 6, 1842. In gently falling snow this was an army of sixteen thousand five hundred souls which began a retreat from Kabul. The army was utterly obliterated by the Afghanis. In one of the greatest military defeats in history a single man survived the entire retreat. A single survivor of that army reached Jalalabad. (See: Vol 1, Enclyclopedia Britannica)
Similarly, in the 20th century the only war the Russian Army ever lost was in Afghanistan. And do not forget this was a huge modern army with helicopter support, medvac procedures, jets, napalm, sources of supply and resupply that were only hundreds of miles distant not thousands of miles. In a brutal ten year long war not even Russian spetznaz troopers could defeat the mujahadin.and this is the terrain that America proposes to enter in Afghanistan.
In this terrain beware the easy answer because in this place there are none.
With the strategic assassination of Ahmed Shah Massud last week, in the one tenth of Afghanistan not ruled by the Tailban, this “Afghan Question” becomes a far more complicated issue than most people suspect. The assassination of Massud was simply the preamble to the attacks in New York. There is a script here. Make no mistake there is a script and as a country at this moment we must read this script very carefully.
What one has to suspect is that people or persons unknown at this moment wish to draw America into a land war in Afghanistan. This is the landscape of martyrs and in the political terrrain of both Pakistan and Afghanistan there are thousands of willing martyrs, if not hundreds of thousands of martyrs. And remember too that this place is the most brutal on earth for any "occupying power" when one recalls that the British never did manage to “pacify” the Northwest Frontier in over a blood-stained century of trying. In this landscape America will have to be prepared to garrison each valley and cliff top. In this landscape there are uncounted thousands of mountaintops and valleys …. it is a moon-like landscape of utter desert-like desolation both political and physical. (for background See: kashmiri-pandit.org
Be warned Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush. This impossible landscape is where some of the greatest soldiers of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have failed utterly. Be warned that the only hope America has in this terrain is to seek out moderate middle class Afghani exiles and to form a carefully crafted "government in exile" to take over the country after the Taliban and their deeply foul fundamentalist assassins are exterminated beyond both the reaches of the Khyber Pass and along the valleys beyond Kandahar on the Quetta border.
Strangely, there is a precise and exact historical example of the present moment. One can find this historical reference by any citizen of this country in the library. Look in the Encyclopedia Britannica under the text entry “Assassins”. There was a historical figure one finds in this text entry and he was called the "old man of the mountain". For literally a century and half he and his followers terrorized the entire middle east in the 11th to 12th centuries -- by means of carefully organized assassinations, whence the name "assassin" (literally hashish eaters “hahashiyyi”) comes. It was a group whose activities were only brought to an end by the Mongols who obliterated this secretive archipelago of murder. (See: Vol. 2 P. 553 , Enclyclopedia Britannica, 1945)
As a nation we must think. We must think very hard what we are going to do at this moment. And what we must do are enlist the majority of people of good heart in these countries in and adjacent to Afghanistan on the Indian sub-continent. And never forget in this equation that the Afghanis have fought their oppressors successfully to a standstill over a period of over two centuries. America must enlist people of good heart to our side. To do anything less Mr. President is will lead to a long very road of woe and to the utterly fruitless spending of immense treasure and lives.
Clark Worswick |
