Dan Snow's History Hit - Afghanistan: History Repeating Itself?

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

The collapse of the Afghan army and government and takeover by the Taliban has evoked many historical comparisons, but how valid are they? To find out Dan is joined by author, historian and friend of the podcast William Dalrymple to delve into the deeper history of Afghanistan. In particular, William and Dan discuss the First Afghan War which ended in one of the great catastrophes of British imperial history. In early 1842 a British force was slaughtered or died of exposure as they attempted to retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad. This defeat for the British remains a powerful symbol in Afghanistan even today. William explains what happened that terrible winter and how the events of Afghanistan's colonial past still influence its people and politics.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Following the events in Afghanistan this weekend, we decided to record an emergency, well, a couple of emergency podcasts, of which this is the first one. This is with William Dalrymple, the brilliant author, prize-winning, lauded, celebrated author, historian, who you'll have heard on this podcast many times before. He has been so influential writing his history of this part of the world that we know from leaked diplomatic cables that Hillary Clinton was furious that Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, was reading William Dalrymple, letting his head be turned by the deeper history of Afghanistan. And he's coming on to talk to me today mainly about the first Anglo-Afghan war. There were three of them. I guess there's now four of them, I suppose.

But the first Anglo-Afghan war, 1839 to 42-ish, ended in one of the great catastrophes of British imperial history. In 1842, right at the beginning of the year, a British commanded force, largely made up of East India Company troops, Indian mercenaries, if you like, and civilians, was ambushed as they retreated from Kabul to Jalalabad, around 90 miles away. Thousands and thousands of people were killed or perished in the terrible winter conditions. It is one of the most infamous, one of the greatest reverses in the history of European imperialism at the hands of local resistance. Tomorrow you'll be hearing from an American policymaker who was in the White House under President Bush and President Obama. But today it's all about William Dalrymple looking at some of the

deeper history. If you want to listen to other podcasts with William Dalrymple, if you want to watch History Hit TV, our digital history channel, it's like Netflix for history. It's unbelievable. It's really, really good. Hundreds of hours of history documentaries, a thousand podcasts on there, all without the ads. You just go to historyhit.tv. You get 30 days free if you sign up today. Head over to historyhit.tv as soon as you can but in the meantime here is william dalrymple the man the legend talking about the retreat and the defeat that will live in infamy william thank you so much coming back on history at this special emergency podcast it's a great pleasure to be here, Dan.

What did Afghanistan mean? What did it represent to the British rulers of the subcontinent in the middle of the 19th century? Well, the British rulers of India were not the British government in the mid-19th century. They were a militarised company, the East India Company, still run as it had been since before the time of the Battle of Plassey, from one office in Leadenhall Street, underneath what's now the Lloydsville, Richard Rogers sort of tin thing in the middle of the city. And from this single-story sort of wooden pub that occupied that site in about the 1620s. It had transformed into a Georgian office of about sort of 30 rooms. And then in the mid 19th century, it had expanded into this

enormous palace that looked a bit like Buckingham Palace with enormous pediment. And from that building was run the largest commercial empire that history had ever seen. There wasn't just a simple case of trading. It was an empire with an army 200,000 strong of Indian mercenaries. And at some point, the East India Company's ambitions had expanded out of dominating, particularly the Ganges corridor in India, up from Calcutta, up the Ganges, through what's now Uttar Pradesh towards Delhi, and extracting from that area the enormous amounts of textiles which were pouring out of Bengali looms. We had a million weavers in Bengal creating the equivalent of software today.

In other words, the highest-priced, most refined product around in the mid-19th century, which was incredibly good quality cotton and silks. And the eyes of the company had alighted on the Indus, which they thought they could do the same to again. They could use the Indus as a way of treading all the way from the coast of Karachi up into Central Asia and use that as a motorway in this period before railways had been built. And this coincided with fear in government that the Russians were moving south towards India. And this was quite true since the time of Peter the Great. Russia had been moving south at a rate of around 100 miles every decade.

By the 1840s, it reached something called the Orenburg Line, which was just to the north of all those caravan cities like Bukhara, Kiva, Tashkent, in what is now the Stans. And the Eastern Company was very good at manipulating government fears of foreign invasions to provide troops to create an umbrella under which it could expand its trade. So how far out of cynicism and how far out of genuine fear the company played up the anxiety that India was going to be suddenly invaded by Russia? This is the great game that Kipling wrote about, and then Peter Hopkirk, anyone listening to this that hasn't read Peter Hopkirk's wonderful book, should do so immediately, long before they ever buy a single copy of my books. It's a fantastic

introduction to the whole story. The East IndyCar manipulates the sphere of Russia and the fact that Russia could appear in Afghanistan, charge down the Khyber Pass, and then encourage every small Indian ruler to rise up against the British, to provide funds and money and an excuse to mount what is on the face of it a completely unnecessary and ridiculous adventure into Afghanistan in 1839. Ridiculous, partly because the East India Company has no border with Afghanistan. In between the East India Company, which has now in the 1840s gone as far as the Sutlej River, and Afghanistan is an enormous empire, the Sikh empire run by Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, who has employed ex-Napoleonic generals to train up his army

as the finest army outside the East India Company territories, the most modern with spectacular artillery. These cannons can still be seen today lining the lawns outside Chelsea Hospital where they lie to rest if anyone in London wants to see what the artillery looked like. And they leapfrog over the Punjab with the very reluctant permission of Ranjit Singh and flood into Afghanistan. with the very reluctant permission of Ranjit Singh, and flood into Afghanistan. And they install on its throne a slightly hopeless and disappointing grandson of the creator of Afghanistan, who is Amit Shah Durrani.

And Amit Shah Durrani had gobbled up an empire in the 1750s and 16s, which had brought together land which had previously been in three different empires, the Uzbek Empire to the north, the Safavid Empire to the west, and the Mughal Empire to the south. And he had taken this middle territory, which had not been united into a single territory. It had always been the extremities of other people's empires. It had never been the center of its own empire for about a thousand years. And there have been small kingdoms owning Herat or Kabul, but it hasn't been the center of a major empire for a bit. And it gobbles up these three territories and creates the Durrani Empire. Shah Shuja and his brother Shah Zaman have seen this territory collapse into small fiefdoms.

And Shashuja has taken refuge with the East India Company in the Punjab at Ludhiana. And he is the puppet that the East India Company install on the throne. And, of course, it doesn't go well. Like so many invasions of Afghanistan by the West, the armies march in. And everyone scatters, rather like they've done this week. There's very little resistance and you get this spectacular victory. But that only turns out to be the beginning of a much longer nightmare. And the East India Company soon finds that its garrisons are isolated.

It's midwinter and it all starts to go badly wrong. What's the fact that this puppet king had been put into his role, had been put in place by foreign troops? Was that an indictment? Was that domestically very delegitimising for him? Was the strategic aim of the mission undermined by the tactics, the presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil? Absolutely right. And what is a myth is that Afghanistan is necessarily the graveyard of empires because it's the part of all sorts of empires very successfully which run out of that region. So the Kushan Empire, which controls Afghanistan, quite a lot of Central Asia and India, for example, operates very successfully out of India in the first century AD. Later,

different parts of Afghanistan are part of very very successfully, of the Mughal Empire. And Kabul, for example, is a major Mughal trading center and summer capital. Today, we always think of the Mughals going to Kashmir for their summer because it happens to be part of India. It's part of the same nation state today, forgetting that, in fact, Kabul was a major summer capital too, and a lot of the Mughal emperors went to Kashmir for their summer. So it isn't that Afghanistan inherently cannot be governed but no western power has ever successfully governed there and every puppet who has been placed there by either the East India Company or the British Raj or the Russians or the Americans has found this sort of growing

nationalism and xenophobia exhibiting itself in incredibly dogged resistance. And this was as true in 1839 as it has been now. And just to jump ahead to the parallels, what is astonishing is that basically we put the same guy in twice, because Hamid Karzai is the direct descendant of Shashu Dremel, who we put in in 1839. I mean, only someone who'd never read a history book could possibly have done that. But that seems to be the case with Tony Blair and indeed George W. Bush. Well, we'll come on to your relationship with Hamid Karzai in a second, William, because I know that's a remarkable tale. But tell me first about Afghanistan,

the revolt breaking out, the wheels starting to fall off, and how this spirals quickly into the greatest disaster of the 19th century British Empire. Well, in all sorts of ways, it's amazing it went wrong as quickly as it did, because the British sent up to administer Afghanistan a bunch of people who, on the face of it, were quite well qualified to do so. MacNaughton, who's the British governor, is a fluent speaker of Arabic and Persian. In fact, on his way into Afghanistan, he sits on howder, on his elephant, translating the Arabian Nights. And his deputy, who he doesn't get on with, is a man called Alexander Burns, who was one of the great travellers of the 19th century,

gold medalist to the Royal Geographical Society, who travelled to Bukhara, written best-selling book, which was translated into a whole variety of European languages. And these people were not ignorant of Afghan history or the ways of Islam or the manners that they should follow, but they behave every bit as badly as any subsequent invader. And particularly Alexander Burns, who is basically kept out of a job by his boss, becomes a serial womanizer and makes the huge mistake of seducing the mistress of one of the leading chieftains in his coalition. And you can see this is not going to end well. And it is literally Alexander Byrne's libido that kicks off the rebellion when it finally comes, because he has seduced the mistress of one of the leading warlords. She

is in his house and he turns up in the middle of the night with the militia to get her out. He's insulted, and he comes back with more troops. And this kicks off a rebellion which no one has foreseen, which turns out to be incredibly successful. The East India Company canto is immediately outside Kabul on the plane where the American embassy now lands. They literally built the American embassy where we've seen all the helicopters leaving from this week. That is on the site of the British cantonment of 1839. And the rebellion kicks off and the East India Company cantonment is sitting as if it were in a field in Bengal. It's actually surrounded, as the American embassy now is, by mountains on every side. And the insurgents just take cannon, put them on top of the mountains, begin to bombard from mountains down onto the plain, this completely indefensible cantonment. And it becomes clear within a week that far from having superior weaponry and being in a very

dominant position, the East India Company has a completely indefensible position. And then winter sets in and the snow begins to settle and the passes block up. And these guys realize there's no help coming from India. And they have no option but to negotiate a retreat. And the Afghans say, fine, no problem, we totally understand. We'll allow you to march out with your weapons into the snow. And the negotiations go on surprisingly long. The British are surprised by how the negotiations seem to be dragging over a period of weeks. But what's actually happening, of course, is the Afghans are setting up ambushes, booby traps, and straightforward blocks along the exit route. And so when, on the 6th of January 1842, the East India Company troops march out of Kabul into the snow, it's a bloodbath. For six days, they reach holly hedges, which have

been fortified, ambush positions. Women and children are seized at night from the tents. The men are cut down with Kaiba knives, as they call them, these very, very long, sharp Afghan gutting knives. And at the end of the day, after six days of marching, one British man makes it through to Jalalabad of the 20,000 who left Kabul six days earlier. And this is Dr. Brydon on his horse. And he only survives because he is a reader and he's put a copy of, I think it's the Palmal magazine or something, into his foraging cap so that when they try and swipe it, it lands on a copy of the Palmal Gazette or whatever it is in his hat, but doesn't pierce his skull.

And he stumbles into Afghanistan. And in fact, there are lots of other survivors because, of course, the East India Company doesn't count its own Indian troops in its tally. And many, many sepoys, both then and later, turn up. For example, there are 20 or 30 sepoys that make it through to Hardwar at the next Kumbh Mela and who are immediately arrested and accused of desertion. at the next Kormella and who are immediately arrested and accused of desertion. But it is famously the most disastrous moment of not only East India Company history, but probably the most terrible defeat of any Western power in Asia until Singapore.

Listen to Dan Snow's history. I've got William Dalrymple on talking about disaster in Afghanistan. More after this. OK, Tristan, you've got 50 seconds. Go. Right, so Dan's given me a few seconds to sell the Ancients podcast. What is the Ancients, I hear you say? Well, it's like Dan's show, except just ancient history. We've got the groundbreaking new archaeological discoveries. This seems to be the oldest known dated depiction of the animal world,

as far as we can tell, anywhere in the world. We've got the big names. It's one of those great things, Pompeii. It's kind of forever rising from the dead and from destruction. We've got the big topics. The man destroys seven legions in a day. No one in history has done that. Subscribe to the Ancients from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts from.

Oh, and Russell Crowe, if you're listening, we would love to have you on The Ancients. Spread the word, people. Spread the word. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows

or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. It's clearly a disaster in the short term, but did it matter in the long term? These great empires like the Roman Empire, for example, expeditions into Scotland or parts of Germany, or the British Empire in the 19th century with reverses in Afghanistan and Sudan, does it affect the big picture? It did matter, actually, because it's certainly true that the East City Company just sinks back to its former territories, that despite the enormous losses, 1842 does not mark an end to British rule in India. But it is the same regiments which had been deserted by their officers in 1842,

which rise up in 1857 at the greatest colonial uprising to take place anywhere in the 19th century, which the British still call the Indian Mutiny, and the Indians know as the First War of Independence. And it is literally a bunch of veterans from Afghanistan who rise up in Mirra in 1857 on the 11th May and murder their officers. So yes, it does matter because it causes the largest anti-colonial revolt in history, ends the East India Company, ends the Mughal Empire, and marks the beginning of the British Raj. And what about Afghanistan? What happened there after this first Anglo-Afghan war? Did it come to fulfill the darkest nightmares or darkest predictions of those from the British East India Company? So Afghanistan does very well under Dost Muhammad, who is again in a close parallel with

today. Dost Muhammad, who is ruling India when the company invades and puts Shah Shuja on the throne, Dost Muhammad simply comes back and rules it for another 15 years after 1842. He actually becomes quite a reliable British ally, and certainly he doesn't invade again, and he keeps the Russians out, as he promised to do. And of course, it's actually a myth that Russia was ever planning to invade India. There was some mutterings of it when Napoleon sent a plan to the Russians at Tilsit. There's this famous occasion when Alexander the Tsar of Russia and Napoleon meet on a barge and make an alliance, which is the moment that war and peace opens after Tilsit. And supposedly, there's a British intelligence agent hanging on under the barge, listening to what's happening.

That's always the story that I've seen disputed by scholars. Anyway, certainly the idea that there was a plan cooked up by Napoleon and the Russians to invade Afghanistan had some basis. And in the National Archives of India, there are still some captured plans, which were seized from Napoleon's carriage, I think, on the retreat from Moscow and eventually found their way to India. The Russians and the French were in their distant dreams planning an invasion of India. From that point, it'd never really been an even remotely realistic option. So the Russians, of course, don't go into Afghanistan until disastrously in the 1980s. The historical parallels, particularly with the first Anglo-Afghan war this week, just feel so powerful, so relevant. How should we approach

that history? The world is different now. History never repeats itself perfectly. And yet, how should we approach that history? And I ask you as someone who's spent a lot of time with policymakers, Barack Obama, Hamid Karzai, sometimes are the historical parallels almost too good to be true? There's certainly a very, very strong argument to be drawn from history that a Western colonial adventure in Afghanistan, putting a puppet on the throne, is not going to go down well. I mean, what's interesting in this case is that, as I say, the guy we put in, Hamid Karzai, after 9-11, is literally the direct descendant of Shashu Jalmuk, the guy the East India Company put in in 1839. Not only that, but the

foot soldiers of the Taliban are the Gilzai tribe who brought down Shah Shuja in 1842. So you can argue very strongly that beneath what we see when we look at Afghanistan on our television screens, which is westernized, democratic, modern Afghanistan being attacked by tribal savages with Islamic fundamentalist and Islamist views. Beneath that lies a very old tribal fissure that the Barakzai and the Popalzai, Popalzai is a sub-tribe of the Barakzai, which is what Karzai is from, are basically the landlords, the toffs of Afghanistan. gilzai are the nomads, the herdsmen, and the dispossessed of Afghanistan. And we're, in a sense, missing the main story, which is that we put the landlords back on the throne in 2001, and the peasants have risen up against them. And so suddenly,

what seems a very simple case of sort of Islamic fundamentalists against modern Democrats actually turns out to be an age-old tribal feud, which we could have anticipated if we'd known history a bit better. What reception do you get, William, from the policymakers you meet, the presidents that you hang out with? Do they want to hear what you've got to say? Are they going to act on anything? Well, it was very interesting. When I went to Obama's White House, people had read the book, but up to that point, they hadn't known any of this stuff. And it came as a huge surprise to them. A lot of boys of my generation read Peter Hopkirk. So we knew these stories as classic sort of boys' own adventure stuff in the Himalayas. And all sorts of public school boys have read this,

then gone off in their gap year to wander around Pakistan or Afghanistan and put Pashtun hats on and swagger around on their return. But there's no similar culture in America. People just didn't know this history. What was most interesting, though, was the reaction of Karzai, who turns out to be the most incredibly charming guy and was haunted by this parallel.

It was something he knew. He obviously hadn't broadcast it. And so when he read the book, it was given to him on his way to Washington. He read it during a flight where he's off to meet, I think, Obama and Hillary Clinton for the first time. And he took from this book the fact that he couldn't be seen to be a puppet

and that whatever he did in terms of policy, he had to sound anti-colonial in his speeches and he had to criticise America and had to be seen not to be in the pocket of the West. So from that moment, he altered his tone and began to make a whole series of very anti-American speeches aimed at his domestic constituency and attacking them for clumsily bombing villages and alienating people and so on. I didn't know any of this, but when WikiLeaks happens, a whole load of emails from Hillary Clinton emerged on the front page of the New York Times saying, how can we stop Karzai reading this book? I don't know who this guy is, but he's completely changed Karzai's attitude towards us. And Karzai is suddenly very cold

and hostile. And I had this very extraordinary moment when I was called to Kabul by Karzai, and it was Ramazan. So in a sense, it's the holiday season in any Islamic country. People only work, if they work at all, half a day and they fast. In the evening, they have iftar, which is the break of the Ramadan fast. And Karzai and I met for six nights for fruit and a non-alcoholic drink in the evening after he's had his iftar. And the deal was that he could quiz me about the first Afghan war and the details of what happened to his forebear, in return for which I got to ask him questions for the same amount of time. In the end, I had this six-hour interview with Karzai, which I think is the longest

he's ever given, which made it into the New York Times magazine, a big cover story called How Is Hamid Karzai Still Standing, which is online if any of you are interested to read more. But it is an interesting example, and probably a fairly rare case, of someone who actually genuinely tries to alter their policy, having read a history book. And Karzai has remained popular. And interestingly, this week, Karzai remains in Kabul. He just put out a video of himself with daughters, because he has always kept open communication with the Taliban. He's always said that they are loyal Afghans. He understands why they're fighting and that they should come into his big tent. Now, Ashraf Ghani, who in many

ways is a much more brilliant figure than Karzai, he's taught at Columbia, he's been in the World Bank, he's an anthropologist, a PhD, and he's also a historian. And indeed, Ashraf Ghani pointed me towards the places in Kabul where I could buy the old Afghan chronicles and epic poems about 1839 or 1842. And there's this wonderful shop in Jawi Shire in the old city that he sent me to on my first morning in Afghanistan to buy all these old Afghan stories of resistance against the British. But Ghani did not learn the lesson and associated himself far too closely with the invading Americans. And as a result, he is now, we believe, in Tajikistan on his way to Oman. I feel sorry for Ashraf because he was very kind to me, and I would not have been able to write this book without the assistance he gave to find the primary sources. But there's no question that he lacked charm and the diplomacy

of Hamid Karzai, who always kept the big tent, who always understood that he must bring tribal Afghanistan with him. And Ghani spent too long in the West. I mean, just to give a small example of manners, Ghani used to have a footstool next to his chair. And if you had a private audience with Ghani, he would ask, do you mind if I take off my shoes? And he'd put his feet up on the footrest. Now in Afghan and in Indian culture, that's a huge insult to point your feet towards your guest. So he picked up these things when he was in America. And another thing I saw was that these tribal leaders would come in to see him, and they'd be waiting in the courtyard of the ark. And Ghani would say, you've got 10 minutes, and tell them that they had to hurry up

and deliver their petition. These guys would have walked in from some distant corner of Afghanistan, and they needed to be treated with respect. They were tribal elders. Karzai was very good at that. Karzai would give huge honor and time to some backwards illiterate tribal elder who'd walked in with a petition from a distant part of Afghanistan, and so kept this coalition of tribes together. But Ghani alienated them. And there were stories of Ghani even throwing things at people, throwing ashtrays at people that he didn't like and losing his temper and being rude.

And in an odd way, that is terribly important. He managed to just piss off much of the coalition and didn't keep the big tribal tent with all the different chieftains who needed appeasing, who needed chatting to, who needed honouring in the way that Karzai did. There's been a lot of blame aimed at Biden, quite rightly, over the American withdrawal. But there is a reason that so many people chose not to die for Ghani and his government. And I think his rudeness and academicity was a major part of that. Another person we haven't spoken about is Abdullah Abdullah,

who is the leader of what used to be the Northern Alliance, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan. He also is a historian who understands history. When I went to his house in Kabul, he actually had some pictures which he'd bought at auction done by the Delhi Company School artists who accompanied the Mount Stewart- Elphinstone expedition in 1809, the very first British exploration of Afghanistan. It only got as far as Peshawar, which then was the summer capital of Afghanistan, now in Pakistan. But these very important pictures were sitting there in Abdullah Abdullah's house. And I just read a scholarly paper by Gerry Losty of the British Library about other pictures of these, and there they were sitting in Abdullah Abdullah's

house. So in odd ways, the history is interplaying with the present in all other pictures of these. And there they were sitting in Abdullah Abdullah's house. So in odd ways, the history is interplaying with the present in all these people's lives. William, thank you so much. Where can people read more about this story? So my book is called Return of a King. I suppose what I bring to the table that hasn't been there before is the Afghan side of the story.

This is for the Afghans what basically the Battle of Britain is for us. It's the big obsessive story of resistance of which we're enormously proud. And just like the Brits can't hear enough about Spitfires and D-Day, so the Afghans have always wanted to hear the story of their defeat of the East India Company and the British. And that is exactly what these chronicles have done. I worked on them with my wonderful diary translator, is exactly what these chronicles have done. I worked on them with my wonderful diary translator, Bruce Whannell, who died last year. And this is the first time I think that you've had the Afghan voice. Other books I'd recommend on the history, Peter Hopkirk, we've mentioned The Great Game. You Can't Beat for more modern history and what happened with the Taliban in the 90s.

Ahmed Rashid's Taliban, which sold like a million copies in the week after 9-11. And for more recent stories of the CIA and the negotiations behind the scenes, and particularly the role played by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, which have been sponsoring and sheltering the Taliban, you should read two books by Steve Cole, one called Ghost Wars, and the other more recent and extraordinary piece of reportage called Directorate S, S for Sugar. It's about how the ISI, while maintaining an alliance with America and getting the F-16s they needed to fend off India, succeeded in arming and sheltering the Taliban. And it's no secret that the Taliban high command has always been based in Quetta. And every communication signed by the Taliban in any

diplomatic or any other maneuver or military message is always signed by the Quetta Shura. So this is not exactly a secret. The Pakistani intelligence community have been guiding, sheltering, and forming the Taliban resistance and trying to influence it as far as they possibly can. And so for that, yes, Deep Cole probably is the book I'd recommend. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Bye-bye. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all of our gods and fish. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal.

It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out. Ready to get your parts.