{"id":22366,"date":"2018-10-29T08:00:47","date_gmt":"2018-10-29T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/?p=22366"},"modified":"2020-11-10T09:46:10","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T14:46:10","slug":"the-doormat-of-empires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/blog\/afghanistan-the-doormat-of-empires\/","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan – The Doormat of Empires"},"content":{"rendered":"
I first traveled through Afghanistan in 1963 at age 19. You could go anywhere. I met guys who bicycled from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul with no problem.\u00a0I saw women in full <\/span>tshadris<\/span><\/i> (the complete burqa with a mesh netting to see through) walking next to women in high heels, knee-length skirts, and beehive hairdos on the streets of Kabul. It was a wonderful, exciting \u2013 and peaceful \u2013 place.<\/span><\/p>\n I was back in 1973 and the end had begun. It\u2019s been a ghastly mess ever since. The U.S. military has been bogged down there for the last 17 years with no light at the end of the tunnel. Thus, we frequently see, from news magazines like <\/span>TIME<\/span> to journals like <\/span>The Diplomat<\/span><\/a>, the old bromide of Afghanistan being \u201c<\/span>The Graveyard of Empires<\/span><\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s a myth. Afghanistan has been steamrolled by conquerors for millennia.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n I spent considerable time in Afghanistan all through the 1980s with various groups of Mujahaddin fighting the Red Army of the Soviet Union. Take a look at this picture:<\/span><\/p>\n When my son, Brandon, was a senior at the Virginia Military Institute in 2005, one of his courses was on Modern Military History. In his lecture on the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan, the professor showed this photo slide of \u201cfour typical Mujahaddin fighting the Soviets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Brandon\u2019s hand went up. \u201cYes, Cadet Wheeler?\u201d the professor called on him. \u201cProfessor,\u201d Brandon responded, \u201cactually only two of them are Afghans \u2013 the man standing and the man in the middle, a commander named Moli Shakur. The man on the right is Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. The man on the left, who took Dana into Afghanistan, is my father. The picture was taken in November 1988.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Shocked, the professor stammered, \u201cAre you sure, Cadet Wheeler?\u201d Brandon answered, \u201cYes, professor. I\u2019ve known Dana all my life. Pictures like this are all over my father\u2019s study. And I recognize my own father.\u201d It was a pretty funny moment.<\/span><\/p>\n The Afghans are incredibly brave people. They had the guts to take on the Soviet Red Army face-up, armed initially with single-shot, bolt-action <\/span>pre-WWI <\/span><\/i>Lee Enfield carbines:<\/span><\/p>\n Photo by Jack Wheeler<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Nonetheless, as we\u2019ll see, the Soviets had them fully defeated by summer of 1986, until President Reagan began supplying them with Stinger missiles. So let\u2019s take a walk down the path of history to see how, for thousands of years, Afghanistan has been not the graveyard but The Doormat of Empires.<\/span><\/p>\n In 327 BC, Alexander the Great married a beautiful princess named Roxanne in Balkh, the capital of Bactria.\u00a0She was the daughter of the King of Bactria, Oxyartes, and Alexander had just conquered his kingdom. Bactria is now northern Afghanistan \u2013 Alexander\u2019s wife was Afghan.<\/span><\/p>\n Alexander subdued all of Afghanistan because, for over 200 years, it had been part of the Persian Empire he had vowed to conquer. The tribes of Afghanistan had been conquered by the founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus (599-530 BC) in the 550s. After Alexander\u2019s death in 323, Afghanistan was ruled by his general, Seleucus Nicator (358-281 BC) as part of the <\/span>Greek Seleucid Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Afghanistan\u2019s second-largest city (after the capital Kabul) is Kandahar. The city was founded by Alexander in 330 BC and is, in fact, named after him, from the original <\/span>Iskandaria<\/span><\/i> (Alexandria \u2013 <\/span>Iskander<\/span><\/i> being the Persian pronunciation of Alexander\u2019s name).<\/span><\/p>\n In 250 BC, the Greek governor of Bactria, Diodotus, saw his chance to break free of the Seleucids and established the <\/span>Greco-Bactrian Kingdom<\/span><\/i><\/a>. It expanded until it became known to the Romans as “the extremely prosperous Bactria of a thousand cities.” Under the rule of Demetrius Aniketos (Greek for “Invincible,” r. 200-180 BC), Greco-Bactria expanded to control present-day eastern Iran, Pakistan, and northwest India.<\/span><\/p>\n Under Menander Soter (Greek for “Savior,” r. 165-130 BC), the Greek kingdom expanded across northern India to what the Romans called the Menander Mons (Mountains of Menander), today\u2019s Naga Hills that form the border between India and Burma. The religion and art of the entire region was a syncretism known as Greco-Buddhism.<\/span><\/p>\n After a series of invasions by Hun-like nomadic peoples from China and Central Asia \u2013 the Yuezhi, Parthians, and Scythians \u2013 Greek rule of Afghanistan and northern India was reduced to a pocket of the Punjab and came to end under Strato II in 10 BC. <\/span><\/p>\n A branch of the Yuezhi called the Kushan came out on top and became so Hellenized in taking over Greek Bactria they adopted the Greek alphabet and Greco-Buddhism, worshipping Zeus and Herakles (Hercules) as a demigod.<\/span><\/p>\n The <\/span>Kushan Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a> expanded in the 1<\/span>st<\/span> century AD to control a vast swath of Central Asia and India. By the 3<\/span>rd<\/span> century, it was so huge that it fell apart \u2013 in the west to resurgent Persians known as the Sassanids (named after Sassan, grandfather of their founder Ardashir I, r. 206-241 AD).<\/span><\/p>\n The <\/span>Sassanid Persians<\/span><\/a> conquered what is now Afghanistan in the 240s, imposed their religion of Zoroastrianism upon the inhabitants, and incorporated it into a gigantic empire stretching from current Kazakhstan to Egypt. Their main focus, however, was war with Rome.<\/span><\/p>\n In 259, King Sharpur I captured Roman Emperor Valerian, and after killing or enslaving 70,000 Roman soldiers, flayed Valerian alive and kept his skin as a trophy. <\/span><\/p>\n Sassanid wars with Rome and Constantinople continued for 350 years, culminating in the Persian army of Khosrau II destroying Jerusalem in May, 614, slaughtering 90,000 Christians in cold blood and demolishing the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. <\/span><\/p>\n This prompted Emperor Heraclius in Constantinople to invade Persia in 621, wiping out Khosrau\u2019s army at the Battle of Nineveh in December 627, and terminating the Sassanids. <\/span><\/p>\n Unfortunately for mankind, the resultant anarchy made it easy for wild tribes to pour out of Arabia and seize Jerusalem, the whole Middle East, and Persia in the name of Islam 20 years later.<\/span><\/p>\n The main city of western Afghanistan is Herat. It is dominated by a huge ancient fortress known as the Citadel of Alexander, <\/span>Qala-e-Iskander<\/span><\/i>, because it was originally built by Alexander in 329 BC.\u00a0 In 652 AD, fresh from sweeping across Sassanid Persia, an Arab army seized Herat. From there, Arabs and Moslemized Persians began forcing Islam upon the peoples and tribes of Afghanistan. It took them 300 years.<\/span><\/p>\n Then, in the 960s, a group of Turkic slaves, guards of the Arab-Persian rulers, seized control of the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni.\u00a0The son of one of them, Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030), conducted a horrific reign of Moslem pillage and slaughter, directed primarily at Buddhist-Hindu India, prompting historian Will Durant to comment:\u00a0 “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.”<\/span><\/p>\n The Ghaznavid horror was ended by a far greater one:\u00a0The Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan (1162-1227). In 1220-21, Mongol butchers decimated much of Afghanistan, killing over a million people each in Herat and Balkh alone. A Chinese scribe with the Mongols registered surprise at seeing a cat in the ruins of Balkh \u2013 surprise that the Mongols left one single thing alive.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n Afghanistan has never recovered to this day.<\/span><\/p>\n As the <\/span>Mongol Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a> dissolved in the late 1300s, a new one arose, led by yet another horrific conqueror, Tamerlane (Timur-e-Lang, 1336-1405).\u00a0He was a Moslem Persian-speaking Mongol-Turk from near Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan dedicated to massacring entire cities \u2013 Moslem or infidel, it didn\u2019t matter to him.<\/span><\/p>\n In creating his <\/span>Timurid Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a>, his first invasion of Afghanistan was to wipe out a just-rebuilt Herat in 1370. Then he rebuilt it again from which to rule Afghanistan. By 1390, his subjugation of Afghanistan was complete. <\/span><\/p>\n 100 years after Tamerlane, a new conqueror arose.\u00a0Zahir ud-din Mohammed (1483-1531) was born in the Fergana Valley of current Uzbekistan.\u00a0Dreaming of ruling an empire like his great-great-grandfather, Timur, he adopted the nickname of Babar (“Tiger” in Persian), recruited an army of Tajiks, crossed the Hindu Kush, and captured Kabul in 1504.<\/span><\/p>\n He then made a deal with the new Shah of Persia, Ismail I, to divide Afghanistan in half, Ismail getting the west, him the east. With his back covered, he launched his completion of Timur\u2019s goal of conquering India.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n