Afghanistan: the Great Game (Part I)

Afghanistan one of the most isolated barren landscapes on earth it's difficult to believe that any Empire would want to invade it and yet it's become the unlikely target and obsession of some of the world's greatest empires and superpowers in 1839 up these city walls above Kabul marched red-coated veterans of Waterloo in 1879 Highlanders charged to the sound of the bagpipes in 1979 Russian Special Forces swooped over these hills and their helicopters and in 2001 an american-led coalition invaded Afghanistan each of these invasions has ended in tragedy and humiliation and each has sparked a fierce Afghan resistance we have never ever liked to be conquered it's really easy to get into Afghanistan it's just getting out part is very difficult don't go into Afghanistan and get whatever you do involved in a tribal war starting with the British invasions of the 19th century how has this history forged the Afghanistan of today and what is it about this place and the paranoia and aggression of empires that has created repeated tragedy in these two films I want to explore what dragged these great nations into Afghanistan and why they found it so difficult to leave to sense some of the complexity of the Afghanistan the Victorian Britain chose to invade you don't even need to leave contemporary London I've come to Ealing for an evening of Afghan food music and traditional costume with a group of Afghans now resident here in West London in this room a dizzying array of ethnic groups Pashtun Taji Hazara Turkmen Norris Thani all Afghans and all holding different religious and political views the divisions and consequences of war have led to more than 5 million Afghans fleeing their countries since the 1980s I think for example Britain should remain in helmet until they will have the infrastructure in their proper way I think they should remain say you don't think the British should remain in Helmand the microcosm of Afghanistan is there in that room and some of these people and are sitting down together around a table and in those histories and the suspicions of who joined the jihad who came from which ethnic group and many of the fissures that continue to haunt Afghanistan today and all this complexity and Afghan history both ancient and modern so difficult to understand so often overlooked still matters deeply for all of us today and it continues to preoccupy commentators such as Akbar Ahmed who I've come to meet here in Washington DC professor I've met a Pakistani who once worked as an administrator on the northwest frontier with Afghanistan arrived in the States where he now teaches a day before the World Trade Center attack but his direct appeals the White House for caution fell on deaf ears I think on 9/11 the US administration had no idea about Afghanistan its tribes its history but it was so motivated so intensely motivated by a sense of anger a sense of revenge a sense of honor that at all costs it had to rush into Afghanistan I said many many superpowers have gone charging into a one Sun be very careful and that is the big problem that when you combine arrogance with a lack of knowledge of that part of the world you are almost guaranteed to run into trouble I sensed this tension myself when I moved across Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 I found a hospitable an attractive country but still deeply conservative isolated and difficult for a foreigner to understand it made me reflect on the super parents who have so often invaded the mountains of Afghanistan how often they get caught up in their own strategic games how easily they become out of touch failing to grasp the complexity and resistance of Afghanistan and I felt the same was true for the British in the 19th century when they came they were focused not on Afghanistan itself but its neighbors if I were a British Redcoat and standing on this wall in 1839 I would have been told that the reason I was here was the British India lay to the east and Russia lay to the north and Afghanistan was trapped between two expanding Empire Afghanistan a largely barren country but with rich Islamic civilization had long fought and traded with its Muslim and Asian neighbors but it had never encountered a non-muslim power as alien as Britain and yet in the 1830s Afghanistan was perceived as it is believed to be today to be an immediate threat to British national security a place for the politicians and Generals of Empire to fret about for hundreds of years all the conflicts had happened here in Europe and suddenly it exploded East Russia raced towards Japan Britain came into India and as these great empires expanded there was this zone in between West a blank space on the map with very very few towns a place of deserts and mountains and although these two empires was still four thousand miles apart they was that they were about to meet they were gonna meet here in Afghanistan as Britain and Russia stretched and flexed Afghanistan one of the most remote and impoverished kingdoms in the world found itself sandwiched between two empires who both claimed at least to be its friend Britain feared Russia might creep south towards British ruled India the jewel in the crown of the Empire in the second center of British political power but suspicions worked both ways the Russians were equally nervous about Britain moving north from its base in India sensing that these two empires would collide in Afghanistan the British government was hungry for intelligence on this blank space a spy was dispatched Alexander burns a man I believe to be one of our greatest ever political offices this is not a man actually in fancy dress he's in disguise one of dozens of British officers who made their reputations doing journeys which were almost suicidal Burns was one of the very first to study Afghanistan for British intelligence his spying mission was both extraordinary and brave in 1831 traveling undercover in disguise he surveyed the route all the way from India through Kabul to bahara and produced the first detailed accounts of Afghan politics he set off with no protection into one of the most dangerous and unknown parts of Asia a place where his predecessors had been killed way he was having to run the gauntlet of slave traders where he was a Christian moving through some regions which were fanatically Muslim and which were famous for killing infidels trying to rely all the way not on his sword but as he says in a letter to his mother on his languages on his charm on his politeness along with a suicidal danger of what Burns did was the incredible reward because when he returned back to London having completed this journey this nearly 12-month journey through largely unknown country he was a massive celebrity he returned 28 years old had an audience with the king was made a member of the Athenian club got a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society and the book burns rate travels to baccarat became an overnight bestseller but although it gave Britain a unique insight into this largely unknown land according to historian William Dalrymple his visit also terrified the Russians and had an unanticipated counterproductive effect there are British agents in Central Asia long before the Russians are taking any interest in cities like Bukhara and Kiva and it's only when Burns's travelbird journeys into poker is translated into french and becomes widely read in Moscow that the Russians think they should send an agent in to make sure the British are not manoeuvring and making clots in their backyard shortly after burns were sent back to Kabul in 1836 he spotted this Russian agent env kovitch and the Russians arrival terrified the British they became in turn very suspicious of Russia's ambitions in the country and this mutual paranoia led to more and more foreign intelligence operations around Afghanistan with rival officers like Vuckovich and Byrnes sending back countless reports on each other's activities the Russians called it the tournament of shadows the British now remember it thanks to Rajat Kipling's later rating as the great game one of my favorite books is Kipling's Kim which describes the great games through the eyes of this young English boy who's working on the Northwest Frontier as a spy it's incredibly dangerous work his intrigues with the Russians he's a secret agent he's the novel he's at arm's length from the British government but of course this was a game that had two teams and on the other side the Russians men like the kovitch traveling into Kabul developing relationships of the Afghan King returning with his own documents and maps the beginning of a whole tradition whereby whenever the British saw a Russian painter turn up in the city a Russian hunter turn up on the frontier they would immediately assume that this was a double game of espionage it was all these fears and suspicions of empire that were to turn Afghanistan into a battleground according to Britain's former ambassador to Moscow historian Sir Roderick Braithwaite they thought that the Russians are getting their agents into Kabul and we merciful stall them we've got to do something here these Russians allegedly coming over the friendships because the Russians had a mirror image view of us they saw our agents penetrating north of Afghanistan into areas of Central Asia which they thought their interest they believed that these guys would come with propaganda Islamic propaganda weapons money and stir up these places against the Russians so they were as terrified as we were by 1839 the British government was increasingly obsessed with the Russian threat key advisors men who'd never set foot in Afghanistan began to claim that Russia might use Afghanistan as a stepping stone for the invasion of British India Britain's man on the ground in Afghanistan Alexander Burns thought that Afghanistan should be left well alone but a small group of policy makers in the government of India had very different ideas they have gnawed burns completely in their minds Afghanistan was an empty failed state into which Russia would move the Hawks decided the answer was regime change to topple the sitting king of Afghanistan just Mohammad and replace him with our own man British intelligence felt they had the perfect candidate Shah Shuja the man who'd been living in British India for thirty years of bein and beautifully dressed a man who could be relied upon to do Britain's bidding to justify themselves they published a document claiming that dost Muhammad who was trying to keep his distance from both Russia and Britain was in fact disloyal to the British and represented an imminent and urgent threat to the British Empire the motives are always very mixed it's both the aggressive expensive Imperial instincts plus the terror that it's going to come up in spring or or somebody's gonna come and take it all away from you then the trouble with intervention is that you may or may not have iDate they divide the right target but you then tend to use the wrong means for dealing with it so were the Hawks right to fear Russia here in Moscow I've come to meet an eminent Russian historian of the period professor Tatiana zakharovna Cova I wanted to ask her if Russia was really preparing to invade Afghanistan as a bridgehead for an attack on India that was the time of colonization of smaller weaker States and that was a process all over the world not only in Great Britain and in Russia the same in France the same in another I mean great powers Great Britain at that time considered every step of Russia either in Europe or in Asia and maybe even in Africa as a Russian step towards India everything was considered as the Russians march to India with the British paranoid well it was just but to my mind was again kind of making a face to towards audience towards public opinion another thing is that that was a wonderful protects in the Parliament to demand more money for military purposes for keeping a big armies in India and so on the Hawks were obsessed with putting their man on the throne but their belief in a Russian threat was more faith than reality the dossier was torn to pieces in the British press everyone from the Duke of Wellington attacked the idea as madness but rather than calling off the mission these men pushed on and within a few weeks the army of the Indus was marching into Afghanistan as we know in our own time if you create a phantasm a horror figure of your own imaginings that figure could actually come into being you can imagine a threat into life just like the neo-cons had one to topple Santa was saying long before 9/11 and 9/11 gave the neocons the excuse they're looking for in the same way the hoax the russophobia disestablishment and similar and in Kolkata had been wanting to preempt the Russians in Central Asia as they wound their way through the narrow passes towards Kabul the British Army was supremely confident they'd never been defeated in Central Asia and many in the army were treating it as a game a lot of the young officers were behaving as though they were going on a grand picnic their generals were enraged these 22 year olds were traveling with camel trains piled with meth silver with Eau de cologne with exotic wines the 16th Lancers even managed to bring their own pack of foxhounds towards Afghanistan the army of the enders survived in Kabul in April 1839 and as they swag it into the city they had a little idea of the horrors ahead the British entered Kabul in squadrons the Royal Horse Artillery in gold the Lancers and Scarlet goons and flew the ostrich feathers on the hats of the envoy's with all the glory of a parade a victory parade but around them in the crowded Bazaar blank faces hostility suspicion Britain had taken a decisive step and placed an Army of Occupation in this distant an unlikely land but as the soldiers settled into life in Kabul their need for security made them live in protected compounds separate from the Afghan people and this only encouraged suspicions on both sides the English knew so little about the real life of Kabul if they came down to the city at all they traveled in armed groups seeing hostile Afghan faces glimpses of tiny windows blank mud walls and they had very very little idea about the rich civilization behind those doors largely hidden from and totally misunderstood by most British troops was a culture of extraordinary richness the culture of calligraphy miniature painting and poetry with sophisticated Afghan forms of law government and patronage the occupation dragged on and the British only became more and more entrenched and the Afghans began to get anxious the thing that really worried the Afghans was when the women began to arrive and European babies were born that the British were here to stay the British and the towers of their fort and the Afghans gazing back at them from their family compounds began to look at each other with deepening mistrust and in comprehension I've come to a rain-soaked Boston to meet a world authority on Afghan anthropology and history professor Tom Barr field appropriately I met him here in the Helmand restaurant and I wanted to ask him about some of the many differences between these cultures if you go to an Afghan feast people are very religious but they're religious at the end of the meal you thank God for having eaten a wonderful meal that's one of my Afghan friends said to me why do you Americans pray before the meal you haven't eaten it you have no idea whether God deserves the praise or not or the hosts but the lesson that I took from him is that we foreigners are too keen to praise the fact that the feast is here in the Afghans sake that's one more step let's eat the feast and decide whether it deserves it so the Afghans tend to look more at the outcome than at the intentions and that logic appears to apply to how Afghans choose the perfect leader the ideal ruler says to the Afghans that without me these foreigners would invade and occupy our country without me and my skill Afghanistan would not be independent I am defending a Muslim nation at the same time he turns the foreigners and says only I can keep control of the Afghans and I can only do that if you send me money and weapons by 1841 Britain's choice of ruler had proved a disaster once Shah Shuja was on the throne Afghans quickly saw him as weak as corrupt and worst of all as a puppet of a foreign non-muslim government in a courtyard in Kabul I asked Afghan academic Omar Sharif II about how Afghans perceived Shah Shuja when Sharjah Caitlyn and has era as a king the tradition was like you meant a coin with a poem that describes who you are and what you mean I am for sure the Great King are and I will rule the one who ruled from the depth of the sea all the way to the height of the skies Afghan saw that in the bazaar in the market they've changed the poem and the poem says this infidel Shastra he's nothing but the light of the eyes of the lords which of the British and burns which was Alexander bands if you're enough gun seeing a red Cosette British soldier in the street what would your reaction what the icon saw bunch of people in redcoats muskets on their shoulder they do not look like them do not talk like them do not think like them how they can laugh when you see the foreigners the British walking on the streets and they are not Muslims nobody really knew what was happening in Afghanistan optimistic British officers felt that with a bit more time and a bit more money they were going to be able to win and suddenly when rumors began to spread through the tea houses in the bazaars that British officers were interfering with Afghan women a match had been led which would spark an insertion C suddenly up and down the country Afghans began to feel that their culture had been insulted that their King was only a puppet and that they needed to fight for Afghanistan and for Islam against a foreign military occupation dost Muhammad the Emir the British had deposed to make wave for Shar Shuja was an exile but he and his family used the presence of non Muslim occupiers to mobilise Afghans by calling for a jihad and for many Afghans this action was the birth of the modern state of Afghanistan the moment around which they united as a nation by November 1841 Muslims and Kabul were ready to join this jihad but the British were taken completely by surprise even Alexander Burns our invoice so prized for his local knowledge completely underestimated how dangerous the situation had become Alexander Burns loved Kabul and Afghan culture he was used to walking through the streets as though he was at home in Scotland you'd asked him he would have said he could have trusted Afghans with his life but on that night in November 1841 he walked home to a city that had changed he looked into ayats that no longer greeted him and as he made his way back through the narrow streets towards his house he was seeing a hostility that he hadn't sensed before by dusk an armed mob had surrounded his house in one last attempt he walked out onto the balcony of his house and in his most confident manner in beautiful Persian appealed to their sense of hospitality of generosity their treatment of a guest but he got nothing back and in the end he had to send a desperate message to the British garrison asking for help and for the first time retreated back into his house knowing that the only thing that stood between him and death were the gates of his house Burns's home his paradise where he'd entertained for so long the Kabul that he loved had become a deathtrap Burns's last glimpse of a city that he loved and thought the most beautiful in the world with lot of gardens not a poetry but a last desperate sprint across his neighbors roofs hoping that he could find a way out but the crowd was everywhere he wrapped a turban around his head dropped down praying he wouldn't be recognized and for a moment he wasn't but then the cry went up Sikandar burns he was hacked down the next morning his head was on a pole in the bazaar the day before burns his death the British had been congratulating themselves on the peace and tranquility in Afghanistan the day after everything had collapsed a British trooper came staggering into the fort with five musket wounds in his body cuts to his head and shoulders stark naked having just escaped from the Afghan insurgents the food was lost the ammunition was running down and within three days of Burns's death the British generals were talking about a Treaty of surrender and a retreat from Kabul the British commander general elphinston tried to negotiate with the Afghans the Afghans offered him safe passage provided the British handed over their heavy weapons and retreated immediately to India it must have felt like an impossible decision if the garrison tried to stay they could starve and be wiped out but if they were to retreat could they really trust the assurances of their enemy I faced a similar dilemma on a smaller scale when I was the deputy governor in the south of Iraq after the invasion in 2004 our compound was under siege we were being attacked by satyrs militia and their commander came to us and said that if we agreed to leave our weapons and hand ourselves over to him he would take her safely out of the fort and back at the time I thought it was a trick it was a trick to Massacre us and I felt again the same thing when I read this history in Iraq we stayed and defended the compound but the British in Kabul in 1841 were deeply divided many young officers were determined to fight on that elphinston overruled them and ordered a retreat all the troops their wives and children were forced to leave the relative safety of their compound and to try and reach the British garrison in Jalalabad nine days march east of kabul they made painfully slow progress and after two days this straggling column of soldiers and civilians met their fate beneath this mountain this valley is the jaws of hell into this in midwinter the cream of the British army marched and they were treated as though they were in a slaughterhouse by the time they reach this Valley Horde Kabul they have spent two nights out in the open and three-foot snow in temperatures of minus 15 without tenths waking up to discover frozen corpses around them they staggered into this valley starving frozen with no supplies and 80 miles to go and observe that point that the attack began behind every Boulder was an Afghan with a musket taking careful aim able to pick off individually 3,000 people and kill them as they made their way through the valley and it continued not just for one or two miles but for five miles of a ravine by the time they reach the end of that Valley 90% of the british army have been extinguished a handful of soldiers managed to fight their way through but only to meet their fate later what we got here is the last stand of the 44th foot gundam up 50 men make it to the verge of gundam ugh they stand on this low hill and they have run out of ammunition they're relying only on their ballots and the picture we see here is half of them are dead and the batons are about to close in and end and end it with their swords thus the seventeen thousand men women and children who'd set out nine days earlier from Kabul only one made it to the British garrison in Jalalabad one man has made it on from there there's dr. Brighton and in his picture dr. Bryan is sitting on his old nag back to claps and he is seen limping towards Jalalabad and they assume he's only the first of thousands of troops to make it through and and the gates are opened and a party sent out and they realized he's the only one and that night the commanding officer orders the bugles to be sounded all like the wind was blowing very strongly and rather than billowing out into the plain of janela bat it blew back into the town and he said that the noise of the trumpets echoing amid the wail of the winds sounded like an elegy to the dead army the British Empire never had the never would experience a defeat like it first Afghan war was a major event for the Afghans we always see it through our perspective as the great imperial disaster but the Afghans this was their Trafalgar their Battle of Britain their Waterloo all in one they were the only non colonial power to see off a modern westernized Army in 19th century in in on the Magnificent scale that they did and completely destroy an entire Victorian army at the very peak of Britain's power for Afghans this had confirmed that they were a warrior nation one even capable of seeing off a great power like Britain but Western historians point to another legacy that resonates today the first time there's really a feeling of jihad inside Afghanistan is the first anglo-afghan war after that it never really goes away beginning with the British invasions Afghans begin to perceive themselves as fighting and outside non-muslim world now they had known this before when they raided India that was jihad you know you got to go into infidel lands and take home a lot of good stuff but inside Afghanistan you couldn't do jihad now when these foreigners invaded people that say yes we're fighting non-muslims the British government would have liked to cover up the extent of this tragedy but it was not to be almost every last grisly detail was immortalized in the best-selling diaries of Lady sail wife of one of the senior officers in the Kabul Army she was captured during the retreat and later released and her original Diaries and letters are kept here in the British Library I took a look at them with historian Jane Robinson well the book ran into several reprints in the first couple of years it sold seven and a half thousand copies which was huge and it was serialized in in The Times and the response to it was unprecedented I think because this was the first time that a woman a British woman had written from the theatre of war lady sales account of the retreat from Kabul was shockingly explicit to see women and children and soldiers and and camp followers in various states of decomposition and she actually describes it I see here that some of the text has been excised I think has possibly been too strong that this was horrific stuff subsequently we heard that scarcely any of these poor wretches escaped and that driven to the extreme of hunger they'd sustained life by feeding on their dead comrades and she knew that the army was doomed she does say earlier on I fear that nobody is going to survive this the newspaper serialization sparked a macabre fascination with the savagery of the Afghans she was a British representative in Kabul she was part of the establishment there part of the part of the Machine and the fact that she had been attacked by the Afghans it meant that the Afghans were particularly dusted ly because they had attacked what was most not sacred but almost sacred about Richard society but actually this extremely unfair because in fact the Afghans went out of their way to save all the women and children yes that's not what the audience got from this not at all what they saw was the sensation what they saw was the dead bodies what they saw was a kind perhaps to limit the damage to our Imperial reputation the British spun this as the story of heroism and bravery the way this was treated when it was published was indeed propaganda I think she was paraded before Queen Victoria there was a city named sale in Australia there was a ship named sail and Navy and she was promoted as a heroine she was made into a celebrity to try and distract I think we're defeated but we turn out of the defeat the fact that we're ready lions yes the British Empire had been humiliated and the defeat was seared into our historical memory creating a view of Afghanistan as a graveyard of empire an unconquerable learned but that's only part of the story because later that year the British sent an army of retribution which sought savage revenge for its losses and razed to the ground Kabul's historic bazaar but having dealt the Afghans a punishing blow instead of occupying the country they ended the first anglo-afghan war with a deal at this point they announced now we're going to withdraw but now you can see that if we want to come back we can do it you guys have not defeated us militarily now we need to cut a deal and they take dost Muhammad the ruler that they had dispossessed they say okay you can go back again so it's like dost Muhammad part 2 but he tells the British I understand your needs you must understand mine and the two sides come to a modus vivendi so yes the Afghans can claim a great victory but on the other hand the ruler they've put back in power understands what Britain needs to such an extent than when the mutiny occurs in India in 1857 so-called Sepoy Rebellion and the Afghans are urged to march on Peshawar to ally with the rebels those Mohammed says no I've signed an agreement with the British and besides I think they're gonna win the Afghans took enormous pride in their resistance to the British and the political settlement led to a period of confidence and relative stability during which time the British and the Afghans treated each other with a wary respect but the rivalry between Russia and Britain only continued to intensify a thousand miles from Afghanistan in 1854 the two powers fought a brutal war in the Crimea and if anything the fears of Russian ambition was growing then in the late 1870s Russians again appeared in Kabul a new generation of British Hawks decided the only response was again to invade again there was a public outcry again Imperial paranoia triumphed and once again a British Army this time 40,000 strong was marching into Afghanistan to prevent Kabul being taken the Afghan Emir signed an agreement with the British but a new end voice celui Cavanaugh Rhee another swashbuckling multilingual officer was installed in Kabul remembering that Byrnes had been massacred escaping from his unfortified house in the old city Cavanaugh he took up residency in this ancient citadel the Bala Hassan sir Louie Cavanaugh Rhee the new British envoy rode in on his elephant into this Citadel with a tiny escort he'd taken three lessons from the death of his predecessor Alexander Burns always lived within the fortified Citadel don't come in with a large army of occupation and never touched the local women but despite all his care he was soon hearing rumors that the Afghans wanted to kill him Cavanaugh he thought he'd learned from Burns that it was better to be Anabella hasar but this was actually the palace of the Afghan kings and his presence there also caused a fence here I met up with Prince Ali Suraj a member of the Afghan royal family whose palace this was people were not very pleased that a British ambassador had been put in the ballot itself why were they angry about that because it reminded them of the first time graphic and one day they forget here comes the British again you know and they're here to occupy Afghanistan once again we have never ever liked to be conquered we have accepted poverty because we want to be free did not understand the Afghan psyche they forget that they were in India and they took you know the East Indian company and all was so successful in India they figured I've kind of thought how do you people you know with baggy pants and turbans you know easy to rule easy to control but they forgot that Afghanistan as a nation of warriors I couldn't help asking him if we were making the same mistakes today there was an American now lots in which organization he told to me says our Prince Ali I have received a billion dollars from the United States I said what are going to do with this money he says well we're going to roll into the village and we're going to build things I said sir if we roll into the village you go to roll you out I said you roll up to the village then you send an emissary and send a minute talk to the elders they will do one of two things either invite you in or they will send somebody out to meet with you then once they invite you in you sit down and he talked to them but don't tell them what you're going to do ask them what they want respect if you do that you will have them in your pocket the Afghan King who'd negotiated with the British was seen as weak ordinary Afghans hated the deal he'd struck with the British and they hated the presence of Cavan re and Kabul finally then Afghan Regiment mutinied and marched on his residence Cavan re looked out on the screaming mob knowing the nearest reinforcements were hundreds of miles away he led a suicidal charge was killed and his mutilated corpse was put on display mortified by his death and desperate to salvage their credibility Britton launched another invasion into Afghanistan the commander of the lead column general Roberts was told your objective should be to strike terror and to strike it swiftly and deeply for weeks after the envoi was killed a Highland regiment had fought its way to the top of that Ridgeline in the next day general Roberts had seized Kabul he came here to the Citadel where he saw the blood spattered walls and the mangled corpse of the envoi and his comrades enraged general Roberts set up a gallows on the wall he hanged a hundred Afghans demolished the palaces of the Afghan nobility and at that point with honour satisfied many suggested he should withdraw but the Afghan King had been deposed the country was unstable Britain had taken responsibility for Afghanistan and leaving no longer seemed at option while general Roberts sat in Kabul the countryside was now in revolt suddenly a jihad had been called against them and when they looked out on a winter evening from their small camp in Kabul they could see right along this Ridgeline 60,000 watch fires burning from Afghans bent on their destruction it must have seemed as though history was repeating itself exactly on the one lesson that Britain should be taking away was never to invade Afghanistan this time unlike his predecessor general Roberts decided to stay and fight and he was able just to withstand the siege of his compound in Kabul but in Helmand province the Afghans completely defeated and wiped out another British unit this time in the Battle of Maiwand it's one of Afghanistan's most famous victories and I met a bre on an Afghan living in London at this British memorial to my wand history has it that the Afghans won because of the rousing battle cry of a young woman called Malalai she's an ordinary Afghan girl she's standing in the battle she can see that Afghan so losing and she stood there took a veil off and said if you love your country and if you're real Pashtun and if you don't want to be ashamed you have to go and fight the British remember wouldn't Elizabeth stood front of Spanish Armada give this the speech to the British Army to us that was equivalent to that and by revealing her face actually in some ways it's a kind of shame for her and her family everybody sees her face but she's going to die so it doesn't matter absolutely and she in fact she dies in the battle as well but the encouragement she gave to the Afghans there was immense unlike the massacre of the British Army in the retreat from Kabul my wand was not covered in a serialization in The Times so although a thousand British soldiers were killed this memorial in reading is almost all that remains and its meaning is now largely forgotten but ask enough gun and you get a very different response this battle like the retreat from Kabul is still the stuff of legend as a knife controlled as you learn how to walk you know about the battles we had with the British it is part of our DNA is part of a life my one is like a legend in Afghanistan I think in a way the British trying to justify this thing oh it was really semi hard day we didn't have as much as Afghans have superior firepower how can we have a British troops fighting in Helmand today are often warned by local Afghans that they will meet the same fate as befell their predecessors in Helmand at my wand we say that all doors are always open for invaders look for my Alexander the Great all the way to the British and today it's really easy to get into Afghanistan it's just getting out part is very difficult we always don't mind foreign invitees getting in there relaxing and feeling comfortable then we sorta fight this is a traditional way of doing things what do you think an Afghan village of feels they're fighting for for their home and country for their independence they don't like foreign invading army to come through the villages to do it with your mighty force and shall look on here I'm going to provide the peace and security this is a joke honestly is because nobody believed that Afghans wouldn't accept that as how can somebody bring peace with a gun and urine weapons you can't do that a thousand British soldiers been massacred at the Battle of Maiwand the war was turning against Britain but the response this time was immediate there followed one of the most celebrated marches of the entire Victorian era general Roberts with an elite band of Gurkhas and Highlanders set off from Kabul through unknown territory with no support 320 miles in 20 days in hundred degree heat arrived safe at Kandahar and won a decisive victory that brought the second anglo-afghan war to a close having won a victory the question was what would Britain do next all the fears all the pride that had dragged them into Afghanistan was still there they'd spent blood and treasure there were so many reasons to try to continue an occupation and yet they decided to declare a victory and get out and this is because despite all these fears the British Empire had a lot of people who knew the region well who spoke the language as well who understood their limits who understood that it couldn't be done and nobody summed it up better than general Roberts himself he said we have nothing to fear from Afghanistan and offensive though it may be to our pride the less they see of us the less they will dislike us after decades of battling Russian influence in Afghanistan the British Empire at the peak of its power bowed to Afghan realities and struck a deal with their opponent just as in 1842 Britain again allowed the most powerful Afghan leader to take the throne even though he was their enemy Abdul Rahman was an ally of the Russians and have been living on Russian soil but he was the only man who seemed to have the support and authority to control the country it's as though after 10 years of fighting the Taliban today the United States and marelize left Afghanistan and put the Taliban back in charge this extraordinary gamble paid off for his part the new king of the rahman demanded a massive subsidy and no internal interference in his country in return britain got control of afghan foreign policy and most importantly Abdul Rahman did not allow the Russians to threaten British India for Britain it was a perfect solution and even when Europe descended into the first world war Afghanistan remained neutral but this would change in the aftermath of that Great War as the great powers of Europe met here in Versailles here empires were broken up new nation states were created an Afghanistan although excluded from the negotiating table had its own ambitions for the first time Afghanistan so often on the receiving end of British firepower itself became the principal aggressor the new king of Afghanistan saw Britain exhausted by war facing unrest in India he called another jihad took his chance and invaded British India through the hiber pass although Brooklyn sawed-off this unexpected aggression they suffered twice as many casualties as the Afghans but was Russia no longer the threat of old Britain saw less need for an interest in Afghanistan and granted the Afghans full independence but what Afghanistan did without independence was the opposite of what the British expected the new king Armand Allah revealed himself to be a modernizing the British policy was really to keep Afghanistan locked in the Middle Ages the last thing they wanted was Afghanistan to change and modernize and then suddenly in 1919 modernity came British ideas came to Afghanistan against Britain's will and this great process of modernization came not through the empire came not through British bayonets but through an Afghan King King Amanullah ruled from this extravagant palace in a European style which he built on the outskirts of Kabul and he championed a new modernizing intellectual elite in Afghanistan but the country that he was determined to transform had changed little in the century that had passed since Britain first took an interest here it was a country with almost blanket illiteracy a fragmented country of isolated villages and mountain valleys under feudal rule the way Britain had found it and left it dreaming of modernity in 1927 our Malala embarks on a grand European tour the first such trip by an Afghan ruler the Afghan King arrived in Britain for a full state visit the flags were out and a slightly anxious British government responded in time-honored fashion by taking him to shop for guns and for cars which his impoverished country could hardly afford and when he toured the rolls-royce Factory he bought a fleet of cars to take back home it started a long love affair between Afghan Realty and rolls-royce and this car was later part of their fleet now owned by businessman Richard Rainsford for an Afghan possessing this car really shows that you're part of an international group you're no longer part of an isolated country at the other end of the world well that's right he was a very sophisticated man when he went to Europe in 1928 he was not just looking for rolls-royce cars he was looking ready to have means to be inspired by the West or how he could modernize he's very backward country and therefore the rolls-royce trip to the Derby works was part of that overall quest for inspiration and for modernization I like this at the time it's a pretty expensive Abril cost as much as our house in Fulham it's about 1,500 pounds of the chassis and another 1,500 pounds even more mm for the body depending on how exhausting the body absorbed by the excited ADA what would an Afghan I felt looking at this kind of car you'd be like looking at something river the space shuttle I measure to an Afghanistan farmer or peasant I think it's tempting today when we look at a car like this to imagine a menorah is some sort of corrupt dictator who was spraying money around on on Rolls Royces but in fact really this is part of his love of technology or machinery it's as though he's returning to the country with a jet engine or a new computer system he's coming back with whole new interests and in railways and printing machines and mining technology and medicine but for the Conservatives in Afghanistan this is all very dangerous and very dubious the big story that's spreading through the streets when he arrives as he's bringing back a new machine to turn human corpses into soup a Manilla was just beginning to discover how conservative his country still was wild rumors were circulating about how he had become a Catholic ate pork drank alcohol he became perceived as a foreigner in his own land attempting to impose a foreign ideology on his own people it's easy to laugh at a monitor and indeed there's a lot that you can laugh at him for for example he gathered the tribal elders and insisted they wore pinstriped trousers and western jackets but there was also a highly developed serious programme of reform that the most radical program for state transformation Afghanistan came from an Afghan he wanted parliamentary elections a progressive Constitution education particularly for women and in the end when photographs was circulated in the bazaar of his wife the Queen with her head uncovered with pearls over a plunging neckline he had to flee the wheels of that new Rolls Royce spinning vainly in the snow to exile in Italy it is ironic when today were concerned with a powerful hold of Islam and the problems of establishing democracy in that country that the only attempt in this whole period to modernize democratize Afghanistan didn't come from British rule but from the Afghans themselves so why did the British go into Afghanistan in the 19th century it wasn't really about Afghanistan in the end it's about the fears of empire fear of empty space fear of the Russians fear in the end about their own credibility their pride in the second film two superpowers come calling and these armies invade Afghanistan not just to protect their selfish strategic aims but also with the objective of bringing profound and social change and reshaping Afghanistan more in their own image and the results for the people of Afghanistan and their invaders was to be even greater horror and tragedy if you were going to pass a message to the American and British troops today what would you say to them mr. Davidson will use the room isn't one sorry as long as that big talkers in that station more children mom equally

Channel: HadiH

Views: 2,490,878

Keywords: Afghanistan, TheGreatGame, Rory, Stewart

Id: _m7uL4Q44ws

Length: 58min 47sec (3527 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2012