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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yaacov who wrote (7801)	10/30/2001 7:11:11 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 23908

I have heard of the Great Game. Interesting to see if the game turns out differently now that the players are on the same side. >>Throughout the 19th century and into the early part of the present one, the rivalry between Great Britain and Imperial Russia on the Indian frontier was one of the crucial subtexts of world politics. Originally described as the "Great Game" by an imperial servant named Sir John Kaye, it was immortalized under this name by Kipling in "Kim." The Grand Trunk Road on which the action of this story occurs--an immense highway leading from the borders of Afghanistan to Bengal--was (before partition) one of the great economic and cultural arteries of the globe. The British, who more or less controlled it, were perhaps sublimating, or as we would now say "projecting," their own expansionist desires when they became obsessed with the Russian menace to it. Nothing would do, it was felt, but a line of buffer states to insulate India from the rapacious bear. This was the same folie de grandeur that had animated the Mogul emperors, who wanted frontiers on the Hindu Kush. Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, commencing with the nucleus of Afghanistan, radiate their narrative outward in time and place. All British attempts to penetrate and occupy Afghanistan, Tibet and other neighbors had the precisely opposite effect of drawing Russia into a closer engagement with its own southern tier. And Russian literature, too, became inflected by the romance of empire and the "white man's burden." Dostoevsky was perhaps the most fervent believer in Russian manifest destiny, while Count Leo Tolstoy, who saw service as a soldier in both the Crimea and Chechnya, drew the opposite conclusion that empire was corrupting of both rulers and ruled. There's a romance and dash to the place names--Samarkand, Bokhara, Trebizond, Erzerum, Lhasa--and also to the characters, mainly but not exclusively English. Alexander Burnes, a relation of the poet who spelled his name without the "e," became known locally as "Sekunder Burnes," the name Sekunder being the Afghani corruption of the still-remembered Alexander. He, along with an entire British expeditionary force, was put to the sword by Afghan fighters, who established early on that their country and people were indomitable. It took some time for this to sink in to certain British skulls (and, later, certain Russian ones too).<< tournamentofshadows.com I hope we, which used to be on the other side the last time the game was played, learned the lesson the easy way. They seem to be extraordinarly cautious, which suggests that they did. I fear most of our military do not really understand these people. Understand, for example, that they can put their hands on their hearts, and swear, with all apparant candor, total lies, with perfectly straight faces. Understand that they never forget, they never forgive, and they never give up. And even if they are not always indomitable, sometimes forget, sometimes forgive, and sometimes give up, they do believe their own PR. It is a very bad thing to believe your own PR.