Graveyard of Armies
War in Afghanistan.

By Jack Walsh
October 6-8, 2001

fghanistan literally means, "Land of the Afghans." Strictly speaking an Afghan is a member of a tribe speaking Pushtu, one of Afghanistan's two official languages. However, there are at least seven principal tongues spoken within the country's recognized borders and the people there identify themselves mainly on the basis of language. This cultural diversity is not surprising for a region that for thousands of years has been the "Turnstile of Asia."

Afghanistan has been visited by many peoples and invaded by many armies. The ancient Persians and the Greeks of Alexander the Great attempted to leave their mark on the region's forbidding landscape. The Mongols and Timur ruled parts of Afghanistan for centuries. The Ottoman and Safavid Empires both tried their hands at invasion and rule. But it was the numerous Arab invaders who left the most lasting mark on the people of this strife-torn land — a belief in Islam.

Not as successful, but more in keeping with the historical track record, is the experience of the 19th century's greatest military power, Great Britain.

Fearing a Russian invasion of India via Afghanistan, Britain sought to establish Afghanistan as a buffer. Winston Churchill, in his A History of the English Speaking Peoples, describes the result of this First Afghan War.

A British expedition was dispatched in 1839 to Kabul and a British candidate placed on the Afghan throne. The result was disaster. The country rose up in arms. In December of 1841, under a promise of safe-conduct, the British garrison of some four thousand troops, accompanied by nearly three times as many women, children and Afghan camp-followers, began to withdraw through the snow and the mountain passes. The safe conduct was violated, and nearly all were murdered or taken prisoner. A single survivor reached India of January 13.

Britain launched its Second Afghan War in 1878 with the same objective as the first. After two invasions, the first one meeting with defeat highlighted by the massacre of the Legation staff in Kabul, a pro-British government was finally established in 1880 and agreed to let London handle their foreign policy decisions.

With the British army and people used up by the First World War, the brief Third Afghan War in 1919 ended with the British recognizing the independence of Afghanistan in foreign and internal affairs.

In the latter part of the 20th century, the Soviet Union would fight for control of Afghanistan's arid plains, un-navigable rivers, and towering mountain ranges, seeking a goal similar to that of the British of a century earlier. After ten years they only had lost fortune and blood to show for thier efforts. Many have called this experience the "Soviet Vietnam." While Vietnam was most likely not on the Soviet's minds at the start of their endeavor, as author Lawrence James points out, a more exact historical analogy should have been. Says James,

A similar lesson would be learned more painfully by the Soviet Union during the early 1980's, when it embarked on an imperial war of coercion in that former graveyard of British armies, Afghanistan.