The Rest Is History - 87. Afghanistan - Part 1

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

In the first of a two-part series exploring the history of Afghanistan, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook examine the nation’s complicated relationships with empires and discuss its role in the ‘Great Game’. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us. That was Tony Blair on the 2nd of October 2001,

five days before the American and British invasion of Afghanistan. And now we all know how that story ended up. So, Tom, we thought we would devote this week's podcast to a survey of Afghan history, didn't we? Explain some of the background to the events that we've been seeing in the last few days and to ask some of these sort of big questions about can empires ever intervene in Afghanistan? Is it an inherently lawless and violent place or is that just a series of kind of cliches? And also this episode will serve as an introduction to a much more focused episode, which will follow tomorrow with Willie Dalrymple, looking specifically at the episode that people often kind of compare to what's going on today, which is the first Afghan war, absolutely calamitous disaster in the history of British

imperialism. But yes, but I think, I do think that the talk of Afghanistan as a graveyard of empires, of which obviously, for obvious reasons, there's a great deal at the moment, occludes the way in which Afghanistan has also been a great womb of empires. which imperial powers kind of gestate within Afghanistan. And then they kind of come out down the Khyber Pass, invade northern India, settle there, become kind of enervated and soft. And then the cycle repeats. I mean, that's an equally kind of resonant pattern that you can trace through history. Yeah, it is, isn't it? And also when people say, oh, they talk about the sort of medieval barbarism of the Taliban and so on. I mean, actually, the irony is that in medieval period, Afghanistan was actually a very sophisticated and civilized place. And indeed an ancient history as well. So let's put it into a bit of context. And actually, I know we both agree about this. The single most important thing is to get a sense of geography because geography comes before history famously yes uh and so actually as we're sitting here i've got a map right in front of me and crucially it doesn't

just show the cities it shows the mountains because afghanistan is quite a kind of odd country uh i mean it's not it it's it's not i think a kind of natural nation state in the way, say, that England might be. Denmark. Denmark. You can trace the contour. So Afghanistan has a massive range of mountains running right the way through the middle of it. And the key cities kind of basically exist in relationship to that. So the northern kind of flatlands, the north of these mountain range in very ancient times was known as Bactria. And the southern range, the kind of deserts that you have there were known as Arakozia. So you've got Herat in the far west, you've got Kandahar in the far south,

and you've got Kabul in a kind of a valley which links to what is now Pakistan. But you have these massive mountains in the middle and that is really the kind of the key factor, I think, that you have to bear in mind. I mean, wouldn't you agree? I think absolutely geography is destiny. And actually the geography because it's because of that geography that you have the ethnic mix so the ethnic mix is a massive part yeah of the um of the story modern afghanistan

certainly so pashtuns what are they about 40 and then you've got tajiks hazaras uzbeks and other smaller groups of people so in other words it's not one homogenous kind of community of Afghans. It is competing people who speak different languages. And often, you know, their antagonists are each other rather than outsiders necessarily. And that reflects the fact that it's a crossroads and strategically absolutely key coming from all kinds of directions. So India, we've mentioned, and it's kind of very obvious at the moment, but also there are trade links to China, to the Stans, to the north, and I think crucially to Iran. So I think Persia is absolutely massive, massive influence. And if Ali Ansari was here, who did that kind of wonderful podcast for us

on the ways that Persia has influenced history, I would have no doubt in saying that Persia is probably the kind of decisive influence on the way that what is now Afghanistan has evolved. And really, what is now Afghanistan first emerges into history with the great Persian Empire. So that's the empire of Cyrus the Great. Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great emerges in the 6th century BC, endures until Alexander conquers it.

And Bactria, as I mentioned, is the kind of the northern lands that lie above the kind of central mountain range in Afghanistan, and then beyond that, Sogdiana into what's now Uzbekistan. Those are satrapies or provinces of the great Persian king. And from the point of view of what happens when the Persian Empire falls, what's interesting about it is that it's a place where greeks get exiled so miletus the great city on the aegean um on what what's now turkey the milesians rebel against the persians and um city gets destroyed and the milesians get exiled to sogdiana so north of of bactria but other greeks get exiled into bactria into afghanistan it's what's now afghanistan so that's the sort of Siberia then. It's the sort of Persia's Siberia. You get sent there if they're putting you out of harm's way

as a sort of punishment. Yeah, absolutely. And it means that, although, I mean, they become kind of loyal subjects of the Persian king. And the Bactrians, you know, people talk about how Afghanistan is a land that is the graveyard of empires. It isn't the graveyard of Persian imperialism.

I mean, it remains a part of the Persian Empire for two centuries, basically. Which is why when Alexander turns up, he takes for granted that now that he is the great king, he's conquered the Persian Empire. These lands belong to him. Well, so this is an amazing story, isn't it? So Alexander has conquered Egypt, the Levant, the Persian heartland, and the Persian king Darius has been killed. And the guy who killed him, Bessus, his base is in Bactria. And he's shot off to Bactria and says, I'm the great king now.

And he goes off to his heartland, sort of over the Afghan mountains. And Alexander does what most normal people would say. I've finished now i'm the great king i should go and enjoy myself in the palace but alexander follows him doesn't he goes all the way over the mountains past carpool um this crazy expedition and captures besters and yeah which which which in complete contravention to everything that you read in the newspapers is a roaring success right i mean it takes him a very long time but he wins yes he does he does and also he he um with the the modesty for which he's famed he founds an enormous number of cities all named um alexandria after himself some of which are you know famous cities to this day so

um kandahar is um is one of the cities that he founded. Is that Alexandria in Arakozia? Yeah, but Kandahar, obviously, is a Kanda. You can see the kind of the derivation. Ghazni, which becomes a crucial, a really, really important city in the early years of the Muslim conquest. That's Alexandria in Opiana. Even beyond Afghanistan. So further north, you've got Alexandria, Eskete, Alexandria the furthest, which is kind of the outer limits of Greek civilization.

And then you have this city, Alexandria on the Oxus, which after Alexander has died and his general Seleucus takes over the kind of the vast bulk of the Persian Empire, there's this kind of renegade satrap who basically casts off his loyalty to the distant Seleucid Empire and establishes this kingdom, this Bactrian Greek kingdom that survives for centuries. And actually it's independent long after Greece and the Macedonian realms have been conquered by the Romans. This is, yes, it's like something from a video game, isn't it? It's like something from a strategy game. Well, I think it's like a science fiction story. It's kind of like those science fiction stories where there are earth colonists on Mars and then the Earth blows up and you've only got this colony left. So there's this amazing city that they found, I think, in the 70s that were being excavated by French archaeologists when the Soviets invaded in 1979 and they had to stop.

And then they went back in the 90s and again they had to stop. But it's this extraordinary Greek city. So that's in the, looking at the map, it's the kind of the northeast region of what is now Afghanistan in the shadow of the mountains. And it's this great Greek city with theaters and with temples. It's kind of an amazing image of Kibale, who fans of the World Cup of Gods will remember. The worst wedding of all time. So she's portrayed. Is it called Ikanum?

That's right, yes. Which means Lady Moon in Uzbek, apparently. Right. And they found bilingual coins, I read. Amazing. So half in one side is in Greek and the Pakistan, but includes a lot of what is currently Afghanistan. And in complex ways that I would not want to tease out because I'm really not qualified to do it. Greek cultural artistic influences inform the development of buddhist art yeah which is starting to come up from north india into what is now afghanistan and there's all this kind of that the smart that the smile of apollo becomes the smile of the buddha that's absolutely fascinating

i think yeah it is fascinating and it's very complicated and very controversial so i so the listeners can't see this but i can see that you're nervous about it which tantalizes me well it's it's it's much debated and i i wouldn't want to pretend that i but at this point tom i mean there's a couple of things that occur to me one is that um alexander did conquer afghanistan so you can't not conquer as the persians are done as the persians are done and the second thing is that it's not it's clearly not ludicrously violent and lawless, because as you say, the Greco-Bactrian kingdom lasts for centuries. Yes, and it gets destroyed by nomadic raiders coming in from the north, which is another kind of perpetual theme,

that Afghanistan on its northern flank is open to nomadic armies. And that's what wipes out um i can um yeah but also the idea that afghanistan is that you see very much in the newspapers now afghanistan is kind of presented as the antithesis of of kind of western values and so on but obviously there's a point in ancient history it was a a haven of western art and religion and people stripping off in the gymnasiums and doing what they do. And into the early Middle Ages as well. So it becomes one of the great centres of Buddhism. And the famous place is Bamiyan with the two extraordinary sculptures there that go up, I think, in 550 AD, 610.

And you get records of Chinese travellers, you know, Buddhists who are coming. And they report that, you know, there are multitudes of monasteries there in Bamiyan that Buddhism has become, I think, kind of arrives there, 1st, 2nd centuries AD. And by the 6th, by the seventh centuries, it's become this great center for Buddhist civilization. So absolutely, it's a meeting place as well as a place where people kind of clash and fight. Because the Silk Road is basically skirting the northern flank

of Afghanistan, isn't it? So the Bukhara, Tashkent, Kiva, Samarkand. I mean, they're to the north, but obviously their influence must come south and into the... But Bamiyan is in the mountains. And I think it's on a road that enables the kind of, you know, there's a mountain route that takes you to China as well. So that's its significance. And that's why people from China,dhists from china come and and meet there but then of course um it's not good news for buddhism in the long run because um with the emergence of

islam you have islamic armies turning up and actually take quite a long time for what will become afghanistan to be Islamized. So the first great Islamic kingdom has as its focus Ghazni, which is Alexandria in Opiana, this Alexandrian foundation. And this is the kind of the first great Islamic kingdom. But even even then it's it's um it's open to all kinds of invasions 1150 it gets sacked by this terrifying tajik conqueror who calls himself the world burner the world burner it's very world burner kind of game of thrones type nickname well it's so okay so it's so game of thrones he he makes the the inhabitants carry the earth of their sacked city to his capital which is a place called firoz co in the mountains of gore i'm just reading that off i have no idea

where that is but it sounds great and they they carry this the soil of uh garsney all the way to firoz co in the mountains of gore um and you know what the uh the world burner does then um he covers them with the soil or something no he butchers them and he mixes their blood with the soil and he uses it as water to build victory towers wow that is yeah that's so if we're giving the impression that this is all you know that in the medieval time it's all hippies hanging out yeah it is all people It's all people painting exquisite miniatures. There's an enormous amount of slaughter going on. Yes, but as there is everywhere, to be fair.

I mean, it's not like there's not lots of slaughter elsewhere. But I think the sense that at any moment, terrifying hordes of invaders, kind of Dothraki type invaders, sweep down. I mean, that is, you know, you compare it to a computer game. That is the jeopardy that might strike at any minute. And of course, the famous ones are the Mongols. So when do they, what point do they pitch up? So they've conquered China, presumably, and they haven't yet gone to Europe. No, I think that Afghanistan is the first target. Oh, right.

I think. Because of the wealth of its citizens and so on, I suppose. No, because they insult Genghis Khan's ambassadors. Oh, that's absolute folly. I think Genghis Khan sends ambassadors saying, let's be friends. People always do that with the Mongols, don't they? Don't they do that in Baghdad and places like that? They say, ah, they're inconsequential.

We can just insult them with impunity. They singe the beards of the Mongol ambassadors and send them back to Genghis Khan. That's reckless. Which is not sensible. Right. It all goes horribly wrong. So you mentioned the Hazaras.

So they are kind of almost certainly Mongols who are part of this kind of suite. And they're up in the mountains. And they become Shia Muslims. Yeah. And that's why the Buddhas of Bamiyan survive. Because the Shia are much more tolerant of statuary and visual representation. Yeah. If they were Sunni muslim perhaps they'd be less tolerant of the uh of the statues but there they are so that's a part a further part of the kind

of the mix of of uh of what will become afghanistan so at this point there's no sense of afghanistan as afghanistan it's merely a province of other people's empires, by and large. I'm not sure that people would even be thinking in terms of provinces. I mean, it's peoples, it's cities, and you have this kind of constant swirl of empires that rise and fall. So you also have Timur. So that's Tamerlane. Tamerlane, Timur the Lame, hero of Marlow's great play, is it not, Passing Brave to be a King and Ride in Triumph through Persepolis.

But he also rides in triumph through many of the great cities of Afghanistan. One of the cool things that his troops do is that they toboggan down the side of a mountain on their shields. That's very impressive. It's very impressive, isn't it? It's both fearsome and um and pleasingly childlike yes exactly so so these kind of you know these these cycles of um kind of terrifyingly imperially minded um warlords coming from the north uh culminates in uh the moguls but before

you go on to the moguls tom the tamil the tamerlane timur am i not right in thinking that um under the timurid rule herat or afghanistan was was a very successful buoyant place in the herat in particular which is an alexandrian foundation alexandrian area i think um that rob i mean robert byron the great writer, sort of classic early 20th century travel writer, in his book, The Road to Oxyana, he says, you know, Herat is amazing, it's beautiful, it's the Florence of the kind of eastern world and they are all sort of, you know, doing astronomy and, you know, building lovely minarets and all this sort of stuff.

So at that point, Afghanistan is actually, or what becomes afghanistan is very civilized right i i think it's yeah it's it's this fusion of of um all these various peoples who've come down and and persia so right you know these are these are great monuments to the enduring influence of persian. And Herat, Kandahar, you know, these are, it's easy to go from the heartland, the Persian heartlands up, you know, there are no mountains in the way blocking you off. And so the Persian influence is so strong and so overwhelming that that's really what these cities and monuments do. I think, although I've never been to them, I mean,

it's a kind of enduring dream to go and visit them ever since probably not i wouldn't i wouldn't book a holiday not the time now not the time now no um but yeah i mean and in a way when when i suppose when you you know you kind of conjure up images of uh of central asia those are the you know the the great mosques the great towers the great monuments those are what come into into your mind and absolutely i mean that's a crucial part of the history of what will become afghanistan and we keep saying what will become afghanistan because it hasn't yet become afghanistan uh and that's really why it it's it's the moguls yes sorry i took you off in the moguls.

Who are kind of the link between that medieval world and the world of the early modern that will become, in due course, the world of British India and indeed of Tsarist Russia. So the key figure of the moguls, the founder is a guy called Babur, who claims descent from both Genghis Khan and Tamburlian he's i think he's kind of contemporary of henry the eighth francis the first charles v all those kind of early 16th century guys in in europe um and he is he feels that he he basically identifies with um not with he doesn doesn't look south, he looks north.

So he feels that he's been exiled from Samarkand, the towers of Samarkand. He wants them back. And he has this kind of irredentist yearning. He wants to reclaim them. But instead, he ends up conquering Kabul. Right. And this is really where Kabul enters the the story and kabul provides easy access down into the the flatlands of the south into into the the punjab and so to pakistan basically yeah into what will become pakistan um and he conquers kabul and he praises it a place where you can go in a single day to a place where

the snow never falls and in two hours you can also reach a place where the snow never melts. Something for all tastes. And he spends two decades basically consolidating his rule in Kabul and then he does what anyone would do after two decades of consolidating rule in Kabul. He conquers Delhi. Right, wow. So he's very, I mean, little known in the West,

but obviously an enormously impressive empire builder. To go Kabul to Delhi is a, I mean, that's not a small, you know, that's not a small hop. It's quite a leap. Yeah. And so from that point on, the Mughals basically are centered in Delhi. Yeah. Kabul becomes peripheral.

I mean, it serves as a summer capital. So on occasion, the Mughal emperors will go up to Kabul to get away from the heats of the Indian plains. But it's not the centre of gravity. And that, of course, is basically what then sets up the great dramas of the 18th and 19th century. Yeah, so that gives you a sense, doesn't it, of Afghanistan being pulled in different directions. So you've talked about Persia,

but obviously then India. I mean, presumably once you've got the Mughal Empire, then the centre of gravity has moved south towards India. And you get a sense, don't you, of the this is at that point that you made about the crossroads being pulled. And there are different cultural influences, but obviously there are different imperial powers who see this as an important part of their sort of, you know, which is starting to expand southwards. You've got the decaying empire of the Mughals in North India.

Which is being eaten by the East India Company. Yeah, but also by Persia. And you'll remember the episode on the East India Company where this terrifying Persian conqueror, Nadir Shah, suddenly storms out of Persia, defeats the Mughals at the Great Battle of Karnal in 1739 and captures Delhi and basically carts off the entire Mughal treasury to Persia. And that enables Nadir Shah to establish himself as probably the ruler of the greatest empire of the 1750s.

You know, he's this incredible power. And one of the kind of the warlords who gets absorbed into his empire is a guy called Ahmed Khan. And he is a Pashtun from the region of kandahar so he is in the kind of the south of the kind of the great central mountain range of of afghanistan and he rather like the ottomans kind of take uh you know conquer children into uh into their train and train them to be Janissaries. He's the son of a conquered opponent who is in the train of Nadir Shah. And in 1747, Nadir Shah is assassinated in northern Persia. And Ahmed Khan is with a kind of posse of fellow Pashtuns. And they grab the Koh-i-Noor, which is, you know, the great diamond that Nadir Shah had taken from the Mughals.

And he takes it and a whole load of treasure up to Kandahar. And he uses the treasure. He parcels the treasure out to all the kind of various warlords. And he establishes himself as the big cheese. And this really is where Afghanistan starts to emerge. I mean, Afghanistan is not a word that the Afghans themselves use, but Afghan is the Persian word for Pashtun.

So you've got a Pashtun empire or kingdom for the first time. And the word Afghan is an ancient one in Persia. So the Sassanid Empire, which is the great empire that emerges on the eastern flank of the Roman Empire in the third century AD. In those early years, back in the third century AD, you have inscriptions referring to Afghans as the people who, you know,

who live around what will become Kandahar. And, um, intriguingly, just as in the West, you have kind of, you know, the Irish or the Scots or whoever lay claim,

uh, to a descent from biblical figures. So we'll say to the Afghans. Who are they descended from? Well, they, they claim to be descended from somebody called afghana who is the grandson of the biblical king saul and who was the uh the chief general

under solomon is that i don't remember him no it's completely made up right he's a completely made up figure to explain why they're called afghans. But you do... Saul wouldn't be the person I'd choose because isn't he... Yeah, he comes to a horrible end. Yeah. He's not the first person from the Bible I'd choose to dissent from. Well, whatever.

But he's still biblical, which is quite classy. And so through the 16th and 17th centuries into the 18th century, you do have these traditions that the Pashtuns are actually descended from the Israelites. The lost tribes of Israel I did not know that that's a very um that's that's bizarre I don't think something the Taliban really major on no actually no I can't

imagine from the tribes of Israel but uh but that was that was a kind of enduring um story and so you you you know it's it's so interesting how in the Islamic world, as in the kind of early medieval Christian world, this kind of desire for emergent peoples, emergent empires to lay claim to this kind of ancient pedigree is, you know, it's something that kind of joins East and West. Really interesting. kind of joins east and west really really interesting um and it becomes important for this guy uh ahmed khan um who takes on the name duri duran the pearl of pearls and he disguises the fact that basically his tribe is taking over by changing um the name of his tribe to durani so you know pearl of of pearls. I might choose that. Pearl guys. I start referring to myself as that.

I think that's a good one. Yeah, it's a magnificent title, isn't it? And so he established this kind of Durrani kingship, which basically, you know, wedged in between Persia, wedged in between the Mughal Empire, wedged in between Russia. It's starting to uh the mogul empire wedged in between russia it it's starting to take on some of the lineaments of modern afghanistan it's actually larger than than modern afghanistan so it includes a large chunk of what is now pakistan but it's a very

you know it's it's for the first time you're getting a kind of afghan polity um and uh you know and and and durian is very successful durian durian is perhaps we haven't had a durian reference for uh many episodes i'm glad that we i wouldn't have expected this would be the place we get it in but uh yeah unexpected development surprised me and do you know how he dies um he's eaten by a wolf no he's no no no. He has an ulcer on his nose and it goes septic. Oh, that's kind of banal but also horrible. His nose gets eaten up, ulcerates.

Right, okay. I'm sure there's some metaphor there but I don't know what it's for. So this sort of cues up the great game because the great game is coming, isn't it? It does because what happens is that his descendants, his son and his grandson, they lose territory to the emergent Sikh empire. Yeah.

And you remember we had Satnam Sanghera on. We did. Talking about the iniquities of imperialism. Unbelievably formidable the Sikhs are. Well, and we asked Satnam, how did people feel about Sikh imperialism? And we know how the Afghans felt about Sikh imperialism, which is namely that they weren't in favour of it. Right. Because the Sikhs nicked a vast swathe of their territory.

And so the son and the grandson of Duryodhana were very keen to get it back. And they failed. Yeah. So that's part of the context. And as you say, this is part of a much larger game, which involves, of course, Persia to the south, Cyrus Russia to the north, but now increasingly, what we have described as British India. Yes, of course, because I mean, this is the great game, isn't it? And some of our listeners will have read those books by Peter Hopkirk. Wonderful books. I remember reading them when I was a teenager and just being utterly captivated.

These stories of British agents or East India Company agents kind of crossing these mountain passes and descending on these carnates. They're basically James Bond figures. They are. And anyone who has read Willieie dalrymple's return of a king will know that this is absolutely the the kind of the the context for the first british invasion of afghanistan which goes horribly wrong and which we will willie will be on tomorrow's show yeah talking about that so i hope that this first half of today's episode has served basically to kind of set that

up um so do make sure if you've uh you know do make sure to tune into that episode tomorrow with willie um because uh i hope we've kind of provided the setting for it um i think we should have a break now and i think that when we we come back we should look at not the first afghan war because willie will be talking about that, but about the second and third Afghan wars, and then the history of Afghanistan in the 20th century and into the 21st. Yes, a very dark but fascinating story.

We'll be back soon. See you then. See you then. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman, and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment

and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. It appears that, as the result of two successful campaigns, of the employment of an enormous force and of the expenditure of large sums of money, all that has yet been accomplished has been the disintegration of the state which it was desired to see strong, friendly and independent. That was Lord Hartington, Secretary of State for India in the Liberal

Government, writing in 1880 after the Second Afghan War of 1878 to 79. And Dominic, it has a certain kind of echo there, isn't there? So the Second Afghan War, they go in and basically it goes much better than the first one. Yes. So the great game, basically for people who don't know, is this sort of strange game of chess between Tsarist Russia, which is expanding to Central Asia, and British India. And the British in particular are paranoid that the Russians are going to use Afghanistan as a kind of launch pad to attack India. Come down through the Khyber Pass, as so many had done before. So it becomes incredibly important to them to keep Afghanistan as a kind of neutral buffer state. And they're absolutely paranoid about Russian influence.

So the first Afghan war, which we're going to be talking to Willie Dalrymple about tomorrow, they send this mission, which goes horribly wrong and becomes the great defining debark of kind of mid-Victorian imperialism. It's this immortalized in paintings and literature and all that sort of stuff. Then the second war, now this is one that you don't often see referred to in kind of newspaper columns now because it was a success, relative success anyway. They want to basically, the Russians have penetrated through Central Asia. They've taken Bukhara. They've taken Samarkand and Kiva and all these kind of Silk Road carnates.

And the British want to force on the Afghans a British mission. So basically, the Russians won't have the ear of the Afghan king. And the Afghans say, well, no, we don't want, we can quite happily live without British sort of diplomats in Kabul telling us what to do. So the British make, they have two goes. So in 1878, they have what seems to be a success and they install a guy called Sir Louis Cavagnari. But then he's massacred.

So they have to come back in 1880. This is where Dr. Watson is involved, Sherlock Holmes, in the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers. He's shot in either the leg or the shoulder, depending on which Conan Doyle story you read. It kind of moves about during the Holmes canon. But this is actually quite successful. So the second mission is successful.

And in 1893, there's a thing called the Durand Line, which is the line between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I know all about this. Do you? Is it from cricket? No, it isn't. It's to do with birdwatching. That's an unexpected term.

Yeah, it is. So the Durand Line is named after Sir Mortimer Durand. It is indeed. He was the guy who did it. And the reason that they commissioned him to do it was because he was a keen birdwatcher. And so he could combine touring the mountains with birdwatching. Well, this is a fascinating thing. You know, everyone knows about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the end of the First World War. The legacy lingers because this divides the Pashtun people between the northwest frontier of what becomes Pakistan and Afghanistan.

And actually, that creates a lingering sore in Afghan politics. So even in the 1970s, later than 1970s, there are Afghan politicians who still want the revision of the juror online and this explains by the way this is one of the factors in pakistani intervention and influence in 1970s 1980s afghanistan yeah and it means it explains why it's impossible for afghan politics to be divorced and separated from what's going on in northern pakistan exactly exactly because the pakis because the pakistani government are always going to be intervening because they are always anxious about keeping that borderline they don't want they don't want to lose those provinces um to afghanistan and it's all the thought of samultim and durand who well from india and he retired to rock and um to rock but he retired to rock in Cornwall. Sort of David Cameron holiday destination.

Yes. And wrote books about cormorants. Right. So he lived happily ever after anyway. Classic British imperial story. So that's the second Afghan war. That's Dr. Johnson's... Dr. Johnson's...

Dr. Johnson. Can't imagine Dr. Johnson fighting in an Afghan war. That's Dr. Watson's Afghan war. And it's after that that you have the most famous, probably the single most famous thing ever written about Afghanistan, which is the man who will be king, Kipling's short story. So in that story, you have these two characters. I mean, you must know this, Tom.

Pichi Karnan. It's a fabulous story. And Daniel Dravot. And off they go to Kafiristan, which, interestingly, in the story is pagan. And in reality, it was pagan. It was not yet. So Kafirs are people who are non-Muslim. Exactly.

And there was a place called Kafiristan. It's now Nuristan. And famously, it all goes wrong. You know, and the story is often seen as this great metaphor for British imperialism. Yeah, absolutely. But that kind of creates that image, doesn't of afghanistan as lawless and as a place where adventurers can go and carve out carve out a kingdom but they'll then it'll end horribly and they'll be killed on a bridge and crucified and yeah and all the terrible things that happen to

the two characters michael cain and um and sure glory yeah um so then there's a third afghan war british anglo-afghan war this is one that the Afghans actually unusually start. So at the end of the First World War, I don't know why they waited until the end of the First World War. I do not know. They'd had the best part of five years when they ought to have struck and they wait until it's over and then they decide to make their move when the British are no longer distracted.

And it's really a sort of internal Afghan thing. There's a leader called Amanullah Khan, and he's trying to shore up his power base. So he decides to launch a little invasion of British India. The British hit back. They use air power. It's one of the first instances of bombing of a city. So a single plane goes and bombs Kabul. Of course, there's great panic and terror among the local population. And it's a tactical British win. They fight back the invasion. But for the Afghans, it's quite a moment because they've kind of gone toe-to-toe with the British.

They have asserted their independence. They forced the British to agree that they'll no longer influence Afghanistan's foreign policy, which the British had been doing in the late Victorian Edwardian period. And it sort of paves the way for – the interesting thing is that paves the way for actually what's quite a golden period for Afghanistan. So Amanullah, I mean, he's a kind of almost an Ataturk figure, isn't he? Absolutely. He wants to be –

I mean, the irony is that they've banished the British, but actually he is the kind of – he wants to westernize Afghanistan. He does, exactly. banished the British, but actually he is the kind of, you know, he wants to westernize Afghanistan. And the totemic policy, which is obviously a fracture line that runs through modern Afghan history right the way up to the present day is around the emancipation of women. The veil in particular. You're absolutely right about education and the veil. And that runs right through Afghan history from Amanullah, right through the most famous exponents, I suppose. Well, one of the most famous is Mohammed Zahid Shah, who was king from 1933 to 73. He's another modernizer.

And you can see Afghanistan exactly as you say, in the context of other countries that are trying to do the same thing, that have this sort of pressure to's this pressure to modernise, to build universities, to build schools, to westernise, because Western values are seen by elites as modernity. But also the inevitable kickback. Of course. So Amanullah gets kicked out, doesn't he?

He does indeed. There's a civil war at the end of the 1920s. And he has the first, he's the first person to be airlifted out. Yes. So the British send a plane and get him out. Exactly. So that's sort of setting up a bit of a template. But actually, you know what?

Zahir Shah, who rules from 1933 to 73, he's pretty successful. So for 40 years, there is a much more gradual period of modernization. So they start to build universities. They import foreign advisors. This is the sort of heyday in the 60s of the hippie trail of Afghanistan being actually a peaceful place that you go on the way to India as a sort of sidetrack from India. In 1964, there's a constitution that has universal suffrage, that has women's rights, political parties and so on. So Afghanistan is not by any means, it's not a basket case.

It's not a kind of metaphor for violence and lawlessness in the sort of early Cold War. But as in so many places. What goes wrong? Well, the pressures grow. You have university educated elites who are pushing for greater change. You have people in the countryside who are more resistant to change, who feel they're being left behind,

who become anxious about what they see as corruption and so on. And so basically, in 1973, the king's cousin, who is a man called Mohammed Daoud Khan, who I think is, I would say, is a pretty disastrous figure in Afghan history, he launches a coup. So the king is away. He's gone to India for an eye operation, and he's gone to recuperate on the island of Ischia.

Oh, Italy, yeah. Yes, and he's in Ischia, and his cousin launches this coup and sets himself up as – now, you mentioned Ataturk. Dawud undoubtedly sees himself as a kind of Ataturk. He is going to be the father of the nation. I think he has a title like father of the nation or something. And he is going to drag Afghanistan, kicking and screaming, into the light of the kind of modern age.

So scrapping the veil, for example, is one of his sort of trademark policies. And there's also an element of he's previously been quite a pro-Soviet figure. So Afghanistan has always trod a balancing, sort of trod a tightrope between the USA and the USSR in this period in the Cold War. And it's said of Dowd that he liked to light his American cigarettes with Soviet matches. That's the way to balance the communist and the capitalist blocs, isn't it? But, I mean, as is often the way, when you've had one coup, well, why not have another?

He only lasts five years, and then the communists, the local communists, turn against him. And then you have this incredibly confused, bizarre period where the communists, there local communist party, the PDPA, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, is in charge. And it's under these fellows who are constantly plotting against each other and kind of killing each other. And the communist party itself is riven with factionalism. By this point, the monarchy has been terminated. It's gone.

Yeah. Zahid Shah has been kicked out in 73, and it hasn't been, Daoud wasn't king, he was the dictator. So the Communist Party itself, and this is really important, because it tees up some of what we see to this day, is divided between different groups.

So there are two main factions. There's one called the Kalk, which is very popular among rural Pasht pastures the kind of people now who support the taliban and the other um faction is called parjam and that's more popular among that they're urban they are tagics uzbeks and so on they're university educated so you have that tension which is right there just like this day sorry like brexit that wasn't yes yes i suppose so the guardian readers and the daily express readers is that your sort of claim your well i'm just trying to put it in it's a terrible it's a terrible comparison forget it anyway anyway

they all they all start killing each other um the leaders. So the first leader, Taraki, he is suffocated after a coup. The next guy comes in, Havizullah Amin. He's got an MA in education from Columbia University. Oh, fatal. But he's a very bad man. You'd think that makes him sort of slightly weak and weedy. Quite the opposite. He is a very brutal man.

So he says, you know, we must really drag afghanistan into the modern age and he arrests tens of thousands of people he has a personality cult now here's a really interesting and important thing that will surprise some listeners i think the soviet union are not at all encouraging this they don't like this at all why not because they can i mean the people in the soviet union in the late 70s uh they're all aged 184 they're kind of they're kind of brezhnev gromyko kosegin they're old men and they know you know you don't rush things you don't charge in they're very actually very small c conservative and they're constantly saying to i mean don't do this is madness you know you're

going to completely upset everything you're going to provokemin, don't do it. This is madness. You know, you're going to completely upset everything. You're going to provoke a massive reaction. And do you think that, because I think it isn't, Macmillan is advising Douglas Home, don't invade Afghanistan. I mean, it's kind of, you know, it's a kind of passing message from British Prime Minister to his successor. Don't invade Afghanistan. Whatever you do, don't do it.

There's surely very little chance of Charlie Douglas Home invading Afghanistan. Well, exactly. But this is obviously a kind of, you it's it's it's prime minister from prime minister don't invade afghanistan it's the same thing it's a kind of folk memory in russia you know well do not invade it but this is a complete misapprehension in the west and continues to this day that the soviet union invades afghanistan because they're kind of you know they're like hitler in the 1930. This is not the case at all. Armin is constantly saying, because his policies provoke such resistance in the Afghan countryside, and it creates a massive insurgency, and he's constantly saying to the Kremlin,

send me loads of troops, come and help me kill all these people. And the Kremlin are constantly saying saying no we this is the last thing we want to do is get involved in afghanistan i mean at one point they but the kgb decide this guy's complete loose cannon this is 1979 this guy's complete loose cannon we'll get his chef to they get a chef to poison him but disastrously they don't tell the soviet embassy so the soviet doctors save him so he's been poisoned by the chef. So we get to the end of 1979. It's all really kind of everything's going to pot.

Now, already the United States and Pakistan are funding the insurgency. So this is before a single Soviet tank has rolled across the river. And the insurgency is Islamist. Yes. So Islam is obviously part. Well, it's not islamist islam is a huge part of it and islam proves a very good way of transcending the tribal and ethnic divisions i mean that's the power of the class traditions and the class exactly so islam is what binds it binds you in opposition to the infidel invader. But as you say, really important to emphasize that the divisions are not just between

Islam and secular modernity. It's class, ethnic, I mean, rural and urban. All those things run through Afghan history, or modern Afghan history. So you get to the end of 1979. Now, the

conversations the Soviet guys have are so fascinating you can read about them online and declassified documents they know it's like vietnam they absolutely know that and for a long time the red army and the kgb their analysts have been saying the last thing we should do is send troops to afghanistan this is this would be a very very bad move and again and again gromiko and kasigan who are the two kind of i mean brisnev is basically a walking corpse so they're the kind of decision makers they say no this is a very, very bad move. And again and again, Gromyko and Kosygin, who are the two kind of – I mean, Brezhnev is basically a walking corpse, so they're the kind of decision-makers. They say, no, this is a very, very bad idea. We shouldn't do it.

And the reason they do it, Tom, is because they're so alarmed by the insurgency and by Pakistani and US-funded insurgency. So it's a classic. But also the Iranian revolution has happened by now. Yeah, of course. So they're worried about Islamlam islamism coming up through afghanistan into central asia so they invade afghanistan as the least worst option and the plan is you know they don't want to conquer it and kind of sow salt on the in the

ruins of kabul and parade the skulls of their defeated enemies all they want to do is get in kill armin who's clearly a complete head case install a friendly government get out and forget all about it and as we all know as they had feared as some of them had feared it goes rambo horrendously or james bond gets involved in the living the elite of the american spy agencies and special forces yeah yeah and it's a horrible, horrible war. The Soviet Union at their peak have 110,000 troops in 1985. It's a classic Vietnam pattern.

They hold the cities. They launch search and destroy missions with helicopters. But it doesn't really work, partly because of the terrain that we've talked about. Partly because, you know, as we've seen in the last 20 years, particularly in the countryside, a lot of people just hate the thought of a corrupt urban government following the orders of its kind of foreign puppet masters. You get Muslim volunteers coming in from funded by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, most famously Osama bin Laden.

You get American. I mean, the Americans are putting in, at the peak, $600 million a year. This guy, Charlie Wilson. Charlie Wilson's war is paid by Tom Hanks. Yeah, and all the people who subsequently will be excoriated as the enemies of America are fated as friends of freedom. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at one point, Reagan welcomes Mujahideen to the White House.

Now, these are not the Taliban. A lot of these people are the people the Taliban will be fighting against. Well, they're warlords, aren't they? They're warlords. So they also have... They're kind of feudal figures, a lot of them. Exactly.

They're kind of tribal leaders leaders gangsters um but i mean warlords is exactly the word i mean the classic one's marshall dustin yeah he changes sides about every i mean he's still involved now isn't he he's yes the taliban occupied his palace and you know trying the turning the gold taps and things but i mean he he has changed sides so often he's an uzbek and he has changed sides. He's very popular in the Uzbek community, but I think... And in Northern Afghanistan. So there's also the geography kicks in again, that the Taliban heartlands are in the South, right?

Yeah, exactly, around Kandahar. Yeah. So the Russian invasion, I mean, it's utterly brutalising for all involved. It definitely sort of destabilises things in Russia itself, and particularly actually in Ukraine, about one in four of the soldier the red army soldiers ukrainians but the casualties are enormous i mean you know there's at least a million afghans some say two million die um actually among the soviets the official figures say about 14 000 but it's probably much more it's just a horrible horrible war as it ends horribly doesn't it with it doesn't bula yes

although he lasted longer i have to say i mean quite a few people have pointed this out online in in recent days the russian the soviet client regime lasts longer than the the coalition backs but he ends up he ends up being um tortured and castrated he does in a telegraph pole yeah although he falls there's a slight hiatus, a slight confusing story. He's toppled, but then he hangs around Najibullah. And he does an extraordinary thing, actually, Tom. He hangs around after he's toppled in 1992 by the warlords. But then he hangs around in Kabul translating the works of Peter Hopkirk into English.

That's unexpected. Yeah. He comes really interested in Afghan history, translates the great game. The Taliban pitch up in 1996. And as you say, they mutilate, torture, castrate him, and that's the end of him. So the Taliban, so people often say the Taliban are medieval, but that's not right. The Taliban are very modern. The Taliban originate in reaction to the chaos of the Soviet war and its aftermath, and in particular the warlordism. So they've got appeal among ethnic Pashtuns.

They appeal among people who think there's too much corruption. There's sort of depredations of the warlords. They provide basic services. There's also a kind of class element. Yeah. And of course they are the people rising up against the Afid elites. Yeah. And there's also a kind of weird sexual dimension to it that often doesn't get covered in the Western press, where the narrative is almost entirely about women.

And the way in which women are secluded under the Taliban. It's notorious. It's the thing that the Taliban are most notorious for. Because what that also means is that men are separated from women. And so there's this lengthy tradition in Afghanistan, and this kind of seclusion of women is one that goes back many, many centuries of men taking young boys and training them as dancers. And the boys kind of dress up in female dancing silks and bells and things. And this is kind of an accepted part of Afghan culture. But the warlords who defeat the communists in that incredibly brutal war, they use this tradition basically as a way to kind of engage in paedophile rape.

And so for large numbers of Taliban supporters, the anxiety is what's going to happen not to their daughters, but to their sons. And Mullah Omar, I foundational myth around the emergence of the Taliban is that he takes two men who are raping a boy and he executes them, he hangs them. And this is what provides the lights, the moral fuse that enables the Taliban to burst. And this is something that has been a kind of rumbling source of discontent in Afghanistan throughout the period of the American occupation, is that basically the Americans have been turning a blind eye to the way in which a lot of their kind of Afghan supporters have been carrying on this tradition.

Well, I think the story of the Taliban for a historian is a fascinating story, because clearly, you know, they haven't survived for as long as they have. They haven't survived defeat by the Americans or apparent defeat in 2001. And then all this long period of the insurgency, just because they are sort of supervillains. They have an appeal. They're rooted in that kind of southern Afghan, Pashtun, rural kind of heartland. But also their Islamism allows them to bring in other people as well. So people who've been radicalized and so on. And as you say, I mean, there's a fascinating, I read a fascinating report yesterday by the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.

I've written in 2009, very prescient, in which the author, who is a French specialist on the Taliban called Gilles Deron-Sorot, he basically says, you know, the Taliban, we're completely underestimating them. They're anti-corruption. They provide rural services.

They have the rhetoric of resistance to infidel invaders. They play on people's distrust of the cities and a modernity and obviously they appeal to people's kind of rural ethnic kind of traditional identity and that's something that clearly hasn't had an appeal and had a potency that the coalition um forces just never really managed to overcome. And the coalition forces were always playing the game that previous colonial invasions have played, which is to occupy the cities.

Afghans don't want to meet modern westernised armies in the field. I mean, that's true going all the way back to 1842 they melt into the countryside and then they just you know slowly throttle the cities and that's basically what's happened this time around as well and also of course all the money that flowed into you know flowed into afghanistan the aid, the American money and so on. It created a great sense of corruption, which again played into everything that the Taliban had been saying since the 1990s. And of course, it's true. You know, they have this incredible slogan on the slogan on the Ministry for Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue. Throw reason to the dogs.

It stinks of corruption. Wow. Yeah. Very anti-enlightenment yes so tom obviously we've gone on far too long and uh it's been a real whistle stop tour but i think it'd be weird to end without a few reflections about intervention and imperialism so do you think the afghan the fate i mean it has been a failure there's no doubt about it i mean there's no way you can spin it as a success joe biden was always against continuing the afghan occupation and the intervention he famously was a critic of it from a very quite an early stage do you think he's right do you think he's been sort of do you think the collapse of the afghan government proves the intervention just doesn't work western intervention in this? I don't feel qualified to opine on that

because I don't know enough about the state of Afghanistan to know whether it would have been possible for a stable government to be established for some of the corruption and the things that were offensive to many Afghans to be cured. And I don't know whether it would have been possible for those routes to go down had, you know, the Americans retained their presence there. But I have no doubt that it was an imperial venture. I mean, it seems to me absolutely part of a continuum reaching back, you know, to the first Afghan war. And in a sense, the, you know,

the great trauma in the West is what will happen to women. And that's been a bone of contention in Afghanistan, as we've said, for at least a century. It's the kind of the great lightning rod for tension between westernized elites and people out in the fields. And in a sense, that fusion of kind of realpolitik, you know, we've got to be in Afghanistan to stop Al-Qaeda bedding down or whatever. And we've got to be in Afghanistan to promote the cause of female emancipation and to preserve gender equality. That is absolutely part of the imperial tradition. It is. It's a fusion of idealism and realpolitik that was part of British imperialism and remains today

part of American imperialism. But it's arguably a weakness i would say um if you're half idealistic half rail policy you can sort of fall between two stools i mean what i would say um is either you do it properly or you don't do it at all and i think you know we talked before about the united state in a previous podcast the united states is an anti-imperialist empire yeah it was anti-imperialist imperialism and in a way you know had we talked before about the United States in a previous podcast, the United States is an anti-imperialist empire. Yeah. It was anti-imperialist imperialism.

And in a way, you know, had they gone in, in 2001, and said, we don't care if you call us imperialists. Basically, we're here for 50 years, maybe here forever. We're going to treat Afghanistan as a colony, and we will rule with ruthless determination or whatever. Yeah, they'd still be there now. Well, because as we've said, you know, it's perfectly possible to conquer Afghanistan.

Yeah. If you, you know, if you kind of frog march people carrying the soil of their native city and then mix it with their blood. I mean, the option is always there. We weren't going to do that. But I do think, I mean, I do think it's striking that, you know, back in the homeland,

particularly the American homeland, opposition to imperialism is probably more passionate than it's ever been. And in Britain as well. I mean, imperialism has become a completely dirty word. And yet, at the same time. Yes. Well, you can go down somebody's timeline tom twitter timeline and and and tweet a sent at 8 a.m says i really really need to hurry up with decolonizing this curriculum and demolishing the statue of a victorian general and tweet b sent 20 minutes later says we've got

to do something about we must do something about afghanistan shameful that we've run away and you sort of think well come on yeah i mean there's a clear contradiction um here and and i suppose it's i mean i'm sure the taliban were aware of those contradictions i mean they do you think they've been following the decolonization of the curriculum i i i think that that some of them are kind of sophisticated spokesmen well they are much more who are now on twitter unlike say donald trump, you know, I think they're perfectly capable of, obviously, of working out what the state of morale is in Washington. Yeah. I mean, I actually think the parallels, you know,

I'm so glad we did that Vietnam podcast before this because I think the parallels and the themes are uncannily similar, just as they were in the Soviet invasion. And the irony is that, you know, George W. Bush and Tony Blair said, uncannily the themes are uncannily similar and just as they were in the soviet invasion and the irony is that you know george w bush and tony blair said we have absolutely learned the lessons of the past we've definitely not repeating the mistakes of the soviet invasion and yet the soviet client state survived longer after the departure of soviet troops well i think i mean i think that that photo of the helicopter over the american embassy will appear on many, many, the cover of many, many textbooks.

Yes, it will indeed. The decline of America and the decline of the West. It will indeed. Right. So that's the broad sweep. Tomorrow, we'll go deep into the most famous episode, I think, of imperial failure in Afghanistan, which is the first Anglo-Afghan

War. Welcome back, William Dalrymple. Tom, are you hoping for a word in edgeways this time? No, I don't think there's any point because, Willie, the story that he has to tell is such an extraordinary one, and he is so well qualified to tell it that I feel it would be presumption on my part to intrude in any way. There is one last thing i would like to say which is that on the topic of western imperial engagements and the damage that they can do um on monday and tuesday that's the 23rd and 24th i will be doing a walk i'll be walking 50 miles in 24 hours and among the causes that i'm raising money for is uh um of Yazidi refugees. Yazidi is a religious minority in northern Iraq who basically have had an absolutely terrible time of it recently and can't go back to their homes. So if you could in any way find it in yourselves to support that walk,

the details are on my pinned tweet, which at holland underscore tom and the links are there so uh thanks thanks very much for that it's a great cause do please support the ian botham of history podcasting thanks a lot bye-bye bye-bye Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.