Читать книгу Proceed to Peshawar - George J. Hill - Страница 13

One

Background

You’ve a great game, a noble one, before you.

—Captain Arthur Conolly, in Bokhara (1842)

Go up the hill and ask. Here begins the Great Game.

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Long before the beginning of the Great Game—the contest for empire between Britain and Russia—other invaders had crossed Central Asia. As it was in the Great Game of the nineteenth century, the prize was India and access to the Indian Ocean. Darius I in 515 BCE and Alexander III of Macedon (Alexander the Great), in 326 BCE were the first whose troops crossed the Hindu Kush Range into India, but then turned back. They learned that getting there was hard enough, and staying there was even more difficult. And getting back home was deadly. Others learned the same lesson, the hard way.

Britain called this contest the “Great Game” and Russia referred to it as bol’shaia igra (tournament of shadows). Some in Britain thought it would lose this game if it did not control Afghanistan as a forward base to keep Russia at bay, and Russia thought it must control Afghanistan to launch its drive to the Indian Ocean. Britain also fought the expansion of the Russian Empire to the west, as well as to the south. The spoils of the greater contest once included the decaying empire of Turkey, and the Crimean War was also part of this struggle.

The notion of the Great Game draws on our recollections of other games. It is exemplified by Montaigne’s reference to le jeu, the game, in an expression paraphrased by Moorcroft, an early British explorer in Central Asia. The idea of “the game” includes both chance and skill; you have to take what you are dealt, and then play it to win. It is universally understood, because that is the game of life itself. The expression “great game” has become common. Perhaps this derives from Kipling’s popular novel, Kim, which referred to “the Great Game,” although more likely it is because the game of chance is so deeply imbedded in human activities. Kipling’s words resonate with our beliefs and aspirations. The term “great game” as used by Kipling has been traced back to the origin of the game of rugby, which in 1823 arose as a great game at Rugby College. After Kipling introduced the term “Great Game,” it became a metaphor for spying, or for any great contest. Winston Churchill supposedly “acquired in his adventures on the outposts of the British empire a fascination for the ‘Great Game’ of secret intelligence.”¹

I will use the term “Great Game” as Kipling referred to it, a game that was centered on Afghanistan’s border with India that Britain attempted to keep secure. Britain originally attempted to protect India by controlling Afghanistan—Britain’s so-called forward policy. But after losing two brutal wars with the Afghans (in 1839–42 and 1878–79), the British decided a better course would be to withdraw to the south and allow Afghanistan to be the buffer against Russia’s advance. The new British policy was to allow the ferocious border tribes—particularly the Pashtuns, who were then called Pathans—to defend their own territory. The tribes would thereby provide insurance against a Russian advance into India. In 1893 an agreement was reached between Mortimer Durand of Britain and the emir (king) of Afghanistan to fix the border between Afghanistan and India. Passing through the Pashtun territory, the intent of the Durand Line was to divide the tribes and prevent them from rising in unison.

Geography

The area that is now called Afghanistan is a landlocked nation in Central Asia surrounded by six other countries. Its borders were vague in ancient times but gradually became defined, and then shifted to their present lines. As it is with most countries, borders are based on geography and politics. The northern border largely follows the course of the Amu Darya River, which was formerly called the Oxus. In its eastern reaches, the boundary is the tributary known as the Panj River. These rivers separate Afghanistan from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, which were formerly Soviet socialist republics. Russia and Britain created the eastern border in 1873 to separate the Russian Empire from British India. It extends along a narrow corridor, called the Wakhan, to the province of Xinjiang in western China. It is some 150 miles long, narrowing to only seven miles at one point. In the east, the Pamir Mountains provide a natural barrier between Afghanistan and China. Iran is on Afghanistan’s western border, a boundary that has been contested in the past by both Iran and Russia. And the southern border, on which this book is focused, is with the provinces of Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province [NWFP]) of Pakistan. This border formerly extended farther to the south, but in 1893 it was fixed in its present location after an agreement was made between Russia and Britain; Afghanistan was simply told that this would be the border. The Durand Line, surveyed between 1893 and 1896, pushed the border about forty miles to the north, to the Khyber Pass. It placed Peshawar in India, and it affirmed the independence of Chitral from Afghanistan. Some in Afghanistan, especially the Pashtuns, who live on both sides of the Durand Line, have never fully accepted the southern border: they dream of uniting “Pashtunistan” and extending the border to the south again.

Afghanistan is a country of contrasts. With some 251,772 square miles, it is slightly smaller than Texas, with an average elevation of three thousand feet. The population of Afghanistan is about 28 million, slightly more than the 26 million in Texas. It is transected by the Hindu Kush Mountains, which are roughly in the center of the country, tapering down in the west. The highest mountain is Nowshak, at 24,557 feet, nearly 10,000 feet higher than the peaks of the Rockies in Colorado. Some of the area is good cropland and very lush, and other parts are arid. Sheep and goats graze the mountains up to ten or twelve thousand feet. One of the main crops is the opium poppy, from which Afghanistan produces much of the world’s heroin; some estimate it as greater than 90 percent of the world’s supply. It is also the world’s largest producer of hashish, the resin produced from the cannabis plants, from which marijuana is prepared. The country is divided by ethnicity—many groups have settled here and they have their own territories. Local government is largely based on tribal customs, which are male dominated and hierarchical. The country is Islamic, principally Sunni, except for the Shiites in western Afghanistan. The principal cities are the capital Kabul, Herat in the west, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, and Kandahar and Jelalabad, which are principally Pashtun cities, near the southeastern border.

Two provinces of Pakistan adjoin the south side of the poorly marked, roughly 1,500-mile long Durand Line. They are now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan Provinces; each province occupies about half of the length of the border. Formed in 1901 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province was originally called the North-West Frontier Province of India, and it retained that name after Pakistan was formed in 1947. Its present name was given in 2010, but it will usually be referred to in this book, as it was throughout World War II, as the NWFP. Immediately adjacent to Afghanistan within this province are the frontier regions and federally administered tribal areas. The trip described in this book in November–December 1943 was largely within the NWFP, but it ended in Baluchistan.

The capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province is Peshawar, a town that dates back to time immemorial. The province now consists of twenty-five districts. It includes what were formerly three semi-independent states to the north of Peshawar, that are now considered as provincially administered tribal areas: Chitral, the northernmost of the three, that was ruled by a hereditary mehtar (the ruler of Chitral); Upper Dir and Lower Dir, that were ruled by the nawab (the ruler of Dir) of Dir; Malakand (which in British India was an administrative district that included Dir and Chitral); and Swat, whose ruler was known as the wali (the ruler of Swat) of Swat. There are seven federally administered tribal areas: Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan, and South Waziristan. All the provincially administered tribal areas and federally administered tribal areas were traversed by the three Anglo-American officers in the fall of 1943, and all were identified by name as the travelers passed through them, except for Bajaur and Orakzai. The principal cities of the province, in addition to Peshawar, are Dera Ismail Khan and Abbotabad (where bin Laden was killed in 2011).

Baluchistan (meaning the land of the Balochis) is the province to the south of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. From its capital, Quetta, in the north, it extends from Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. It is the largest of Pakistan’s four provinces, with some 43 percent of its area, but because of its arid and mountainous nature, it is by far the least populous, containing only 7 percent of Pakistan’s population. About 70 percent of the Balochi people live in Baluchistan Province, and the rest live in Iran, to the west. The East India Company had informally occupied western Baluchistan in 1843; its territories came under the direct rule or Raj of the British in 1858 when the East India Company was dissolved. In 1872, having little choice in the matter, the Persians agreed to the present border—the so-called Goldsmid Line. Northern Baluchistan was added in 1879 from Afghanistan, including the formidable Golan Pass and Quetta in the north, and then the border was pushed a bit farther north by the Durand Line in 1893. Britain was not interested in direct rule of most of the area, and the chief commissioner for Baluchistan oversaw only the lands on the border with Afghanistan and the environs of Quetta. Most of the country was nominally independent, under the Khanates of Kalat and Las Bela. Baluchistan has continued to be restive, and the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda have been able to find a safe haven in Quetta.²

Historical Background

A vivid description of the ancient history of Afghanistan and the NWFP was given by Lowell Thomas:

Through Waziristan on the Way to High Asia . . . the land of another mighty range, the Hindu Kush, south of the Oxus River and beyond the northwest frontier of India—Afghanistan. The door is the Khyber Pass, a door that has refused to swing back to all save a few. . . . Throughout history, Afghan trails have echoed to the march of northern hosts that looked with lustful eyes on India’s riches. Scythian, Persian, Greek, Seljuk, Tartar, Mongol, Durani—these and others have plundered India through the Afghan door.³

The Mongol leader Teumjin, later known as Genghis Khan, set out at the head of the Golden Horde in 1206 to conquer the world. His empire eventually stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the border of modern Poland. In 1219–40 the principalities of Russia fell to the Mongols, and for the next two centuries they ruled Russia. Marco Polo passed through this region on his journeys in 1269–95, along what has long been known as the Silk Road.

In 1480 Russia broke free from the Mongols, as Ivan III (Ivan the Great), grand prince of Moscow, put several envoys of the Mongol leader to death. The Russians then began advancing to the south in the adventure that eventually became known as the Great Game. Meanwhile, the British role in India began with the East India Company, a joint-stock company that was granted a Royal Charter in 1600 to trade with the East Indies, but that mainly traded with the Indian subcontinent and China. The Afghans also had their eyes on India. Nadir Shah invaded India in 1738–39. His dynasty was known as Durrani—the “Durani” mentioned above by Lowell Thomas.⁴

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, explorers from Russia and Britain made wary contact with each other. Captain Arthur Conolly reached Bokhara, insulted the emir, and was beheaded there in 1842. Before he died, Conolly wrote to another officer, “You’ve a great game, a noble one, before you.” Rudyard Kipling seized the phrase, some fifty years later, and immortalized it in Kim. Kipling was born in 1865, and he made this the birth year of the fictional boy-spy, Kim, the hero of his novel. In January 1873 Russia acknowledged that the Wakhan, on the upper Oxus, “lay within the domains of the Emir of Afghanistan” and that “Afghanistan itself lay within Britain’s sphere of influence.”⁵ Nevertheless, Russia quietly continued to advance, and by 1875 it appeared that Russia would soon control the passes leading to Ladakh and Kashmir. In 1888 George Nathaniel Curzon, MP, visited the Oxus, Bokhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent. As Lord Curzon, he later became viceroy of India and was perhaps the most aggressive proponent of Britain’s forward policy.⁶

In 1892 a serious crisis had arisen in Chitral. The aging ruler had died and “family rivals fought for the throne,” producing “five successive rulers in three years.” The Durand Line was demarcated in 1893, dividing Afghanistan from India. When the British subsidy to the emir of Afghanistan was raised to 1.8 million rupees, Britain hoped it had control of the northwest frontier.⁷

However, in 1895, believing (probably correctly) that the Russians (or some others, such as the ruler of Swat or the ruler of Afghanistan) would move into Chitral if it could not be brought under stable rule, the senior British officer in Gilgit, Major George Robertson, set out for Chitral with four hundred troops. Robertson captured the citadel at Chitral, but was himself besieged. After enduring for six weeks, Robertson’s small force was relieved. Two weeks later, a much larger force under Major General Sir Richard Low reached Chitral from Peshawar, having fought its way through the Malakand Pass at 3,500 feet and then the snow-covered Lowari Pass. The campaign “included one future field-marshal, at least nine future generals and a number of knights. From a career point of view, Chitral was clearly a good place to have on one’s CV.”⁸ Winston Churchill saw action at Malakand as a young lieutenant, and wrote about it in his first book. As prime minister, he would later play the Great Game in earnest.⁹

In 1898 Curzon was appointed viceroy of India. Three years later, he created the NWFP from territory that was taken from Afghanistan when the Durand Line was drawn, and from the Punjab. In Afghanistan, Habibullah became emir; he would rule until 1919. The conflict between Russia and Britain got its name, the Great Game, in 1901 with the appearance of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim. While it is true that a Russian foreign minister called the conflict the “tournament of shadows,” and Conolly had called it “a Great Game” in a letter from Bokhara in about 1842, the world would never have known the conflict as “the Great Game” except for Kipling and Kim. Some say the Great Game ended with a secret agreement that was signed by Russia and Britain in 1907, and what has happened since then is a “new Great Game.” Others say that Russia was duplicitous: it did not really plan to leave the Great Game in 1907, and it continued even after the Revolution in 1917, as Lenin threatened to “set the East ablaze.” By this calculation, the Great Game did not end until Britain withdrew from India in 1947. A “new Great Game,” if one exists, would therefore date from 1947.¹⁰

Because so many people involved in this book were readers and admirers of Kipling and Kim, it could be said that he was the godfather of the trip itself. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was one of the most famous writers of his time. He had a gift for capturing the dialects of ordinary people—those from the British Isles (as they were called in those days) and those from the Indian subcontinent. Nearly every book about the Great Game or India or Afghanistan in the nineteenth century (and many since then) includes a quotation or two from Kipling. The two Americans in this trip mentioned Kipling more than once, and all three had doubtless read Kim. Lord Wavell’s anthology, Other Men’s Flower’s, contains more poems by Kipling than by any other poet, and Wavell was president of the Kipling Society in his later years. Gordon Enders admired Kipling’s famous boy hero so much that he called himself “an American Kim.” Albert Zimmermann owned a complete collection of Kipling’s works. He referred to one of Kipling’s heroes, the brave, fictional Gunga Din, in describing the Swat Valley in a letter to his wife. And Zimmermann’s British friend in India, April Swayne-Thomas, referred in her letters to places that appear in poems written by Kipling.¹¹

The boy hero of Kim was Kimball O’Hara, orphaned son of an Irish man who was a sergeant in the Indian army, and his Irish wife. The boy grew up as a preternaturally wise street urchin in Lahore, although he was, in fact, a “sahib, and the son of a sahib,” which gave him a special place in society. The Second Afghan War took place at about the time the events in the book took place, although it is not mentioned. At age thirteen Kim is recruited to be a successful spy in the Great Game. And the name of the young man, Kim, has become a metaphor for spies. That was true not only for Gordon Enders, whose travels are described in this book, but also for Harold A. R. Philby, known by his boyhood nickname as “Kim” Philby—the most successful spy of his generation, who played the game for the Soviet Union. It was also true for Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., grandson of the president, who played the game for America, against the Soviets. A copy of Kim is said to have been on the bedside of the chief American spy of his time, Allen Dulles, when he died.¹²

The viceroy, Curzon, feared that a secret treaty had been signed between Tibet and Russia. In 1904 he sent two expeditions into Tibet, and the British entered Lhasa on 3 August 1904. In 1919, desiring a greater degree of independence, Afghanistan declared war on the British in what is known as the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Zimmermann and Enders observed scenes of that war in November 1943. British military aircraft dropped bombs on Kabul and Jelalabad, and both sides then sued for peace. The war lasted only a month. The Treaty of Rawalpindi in August 1919 allowed Afghanistan to conduct its own foreign affairs.¹³

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin issued a call to set the East ablaze, hoping that the Communist Party of India would create a Socialist republic there. The British government issued stern warnings in 1922, and “the Soviets agreed to sign a declaration aimed at curbing once and for all their activities in India and elsewhere.” In spite of his agreement in the Atlantic Charter, Churchill fought to keep India in the empire, but after he was voted out of office India gained independence and partition in 1947.¹⁴

In 1933 Zahir Shah became king of Afghanistan at the age of nineteen, although for several years the actual rulers were the king’s uncles. In 1934 Afghanistan was admitted to the League of Nations, and in 1940 it proclaimed its neutrality in the war. Louis Goethe Dreyfus, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Iran since 1939, was given an additional appointment with the same title to Kabul. The first representative of the U.S. government to reside in Kabul was Major Gordon Enders, military attaché, who arrived in December 1941, followed by the chargé d’affaires, Charles Thayer, in June 1942. The first resident minister, Cornelius Van H. Engert, arrived in July 1942. The Americans were welcomed, for they appeared to have no territorial interests in Afghanistan, whereas the Afghans remained wary of the British, with whom they had fought three wars. By 1943, however, as the Axis appeared to be losing World War II, the Afghans saw the British and Americans as useful antagonists to Russia, their ancient enemy to the north.

At the same time that Enders, Thayer, and Engert were creating an official role for the United States in Afghanistan, the United States was also engaging officially in Tibet for the first time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had authorized an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) mission to Lhasa in 1942. Major Ilia Tolstoy, grandson of the famous author, and Captain Brooke Dolan II were dispatched with a framed photograph of FDR as a gift to the seven-year old Dalai Lama. They left Delhi in September 1942, assisted by the secretary of state for India, Sir Olaf Caroe, and FDR’s friend Suydam Cutting (then a captain in the OSS in Delhi), and arrived in Lhasa in December. The State Department sought to demonstrate American friendship and the War Department “was interested in a possible military supply route between India and China through the Tibetan mountains.” The mission was terminated in March 1943. The OSS chief in China, Milton Miles, was skeptical about the mission. Tolstoy and Dolan were operating independently, whereas he believed their mission should have been placed under his command. Perhaps because he understood China’s long-term interest in the territory of Tibet, he also thought the Chinese would oppose it.¹⁵

As viceroy, Wavell correctly saw that India would become independent, and he attempted to ameliorate the problems that he believed would (and did) ensue. Wavell was punished for his efforts by Clement Atlee, Churchill’s successor as prime minister, and was pushed into retirement. But independence could not be denied, and Lord Mountbatten presided over the final ceremonies of the handover from Britain and the partition of India on August 15, 1947. After Britain left India in 1947, “for the British, at least, the Great Game was well and truly over.” Sir Olaf Caroe, the last governor of the NWFP before the independence and partition of India, concurred.¹⁶