The Great Game

body_image_group

In the win­ter of 1823, in the Polish-Lithuanian town of Kroz, a group of high school stu­dents who called them­selves the Black Brothers were arrested by the czarist police for con­spir­ing to cir­cu­late poetry resist­ing the Russian occu­pa­tion. They had not man­aged to post a sin­gle poem, but they were tried and sen­tenced to death. Later their death sen­tences were reduced to life­time ser­vice in the army of the czar, and one of the con­victed con­spir­a­tors, Jan Witkiewicz, who was fif­teen years old, was posted as a pri­vate sol­dier to Orenburg on the Ural River at the fron­tier of the Russian empire, beyond which lay lands ruled by Kazakh and Kyrgyz tribes.

Jan Witkiewicz belonged to the impov­er­ished gen­try (his father was a court offi­cial in the Duchy of Samogitia, in the west­ern part of Lithuania). He was well edu­cated and spoke sev­eral European lan­guages. He quickly picked up a num­ber of Kazakh dialects, as well as Pashto, Persian, Arabic and Turkmen, and within a few years had pro­duced sev­eral hand­writ­ten dic­tio­nar­ies, and he became indis­pens­able as an inter­preter for the local army com­mand and the czarist bureau­cracy. When Witkiewicz was twenty-one, in the fall of 1829, the cel­e­brated Prussian explorer and nat­u­ral­ist Alexander von Humboldt (“the most famous man in Europe” except for Napoleon, accord­ing to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) jour­neyed across Russia. In the course of his search for dia­monds and other pos­si­ble riches in the Ural Mountains, he stopped in Orenburg and was sur­prised to find one of his own books on the table in the local mil­i­tary head­quar­ters. The book was Essai Politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, an account of his Mexican sojourn, and it belonged to Private Jan Witkiewicz. Witkiewicz was out on patrol but Humboldt inquired about him and was moved by his story to write two let­ters to Czar Nicholas I, rec­om­mend­ing him for pro­mo­tion (both let­ters, ele­gantly ren­dered in French, can be found in the Military Historical Archives in Moscow). Witkiewicz was raised to the rank of mas­ter sergeant, and then lieu­tenant. In 1836, at the age of twenty-eight, he was trans­ferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and dis­patched to Persia and Afghanistan as a Russian agent.


On his arrival in Kabul in Afghanistan, Witkiewicz learned that the British had already installed an agent of their own, a Scot named Alexander Burnes, who had been there for sev­eral months. Witkiewicz’s arrival and then his stay in Kabul, where he lodged in the house of Abdul Samad, min­is­ter to the emir, were reported to be the cause of the migraine headaches that Alexander Burnes began to suf­fer in that year.

The source of the migraine headache intel­li­gence was James Levis, a deserter from the British army pos­ing as an American trav­eller named Charles Masson, and who had been recently employed as a spy for the British East India Company. Levis’s real tal­ent was not spy­ing; he was an ama­teur archae­ol­o­gist who had dis­cov­ered the vast ancient city founded by Alexander the Great on the plains of Bagram north of Kabul, a site that, although only par­tially exca­vated, has yielded thou­sands of ancient coins and arti­facts of Hellenic, Roman, Chinese and Indian ori­gin. Today a good part of Bagram Plains lies buried under a mas­sive air base built by the Russians in 1980 and aban­doned by them in 1989. Americans took it over in 2002 and since then it has grown at least twice as large.

The objec­tive of the British agent Alexander Burnes was to keep Afghanistan within the British sphere of influ­ence. The objec­tive of the Russian agent Jan Witkiewicz was to draw Afghanistan into an alliance with Russia and pos­si­bly Persia. The objec­tive of the emir of Kabul, Dost Mohammad, puta­tive ruler of Afghanistan, was to play off the British and the Russians against each other. 

In May 1838, Jan Witkiewicz trav­elled from Kabul to Kandahar and then Tehran, Iran. A year later, in 1839, he arrived in St. Petersburg and reported to his bosses at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who pro­moted him to the rank of cap­tain. Two weeks later, Jan Witkiewicz was found in his hotel room, dead from a gun­shot wound to the head. He was thirty-one years old.

The offi­cial cause of Witkiewicz’s death was sui­cide, but the pis­tol found in his hand was fully loaded: no shot had been fired from it. The dead body of his ser­vant lay in the next room, the skull hav­ing been split open by an axe or a sword. All of Witkiewicz’s papers, diaries and hand-drawn maps had dis­ap­peared. On the desk lay a note of farewell to his fam­ily, writ­ten in an unknown hand in Russian, not Polish.

Three days before his death, Witkiewicz had encoun­tered Alexander Zan, an old friend, in the street in St. Petersburg, and in the con­ver­sa­tion that ensued, he men­tioned the gifts that he had brought from Afghanistan and spoke of his debrief­ings at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “If the English ever got me in their hands,” he said to Zan, “they would tear me apart.”


By this time, the British were mov­ing to depose Dost Mohammad, emir of Kabul, from the Afghan throne and to replace him with a pup­pet leader con­tent to co-operate only with them. The gov­er­nor gen­eral of British India issued a procla­ma­tion call­ing for an inter­ven­tion to pro­tect Afghanistan “against for­eign inter­fer­ence and fac­tious oppo­si­tion.” An army dis­patched from Punjab marched on Kabul in August 1839, and Dost Mohammad fled north­west to the hills of Bamian.

A new emir, Shah Shujah, scion of another branch of the rul­ing house, took the throne, but it was soon evi­dent that he was inca­pable of con­trol­ling the net­work of tribes and clans beyond the city of Kabul. His only sup­port was the British Army of 4,500 men who set­tled into the city with their camp fol­low­ers: some 12,000 ser­vants, sup­pli­ers, enter­tain­ers, sex trade work­ers and fam­ily mem­bers, along with a “vast quan­tity of bag­gage … One brigadier required sixty camels to carry his per­sonal kit and junior sub­al­terns went to war with any­thing up to forty ser­vants apiece,” wrote Lady Florentia Sale, an officer’s wife. Most of the British occu­piers took up res­i­dence in a can­ton­ment on the out­skirts of Afghanistan, a mil­i­tar­ily inde­fen­si­ble posi­tion at pre­cisely the same spot occu­pied today by the nato International Security Assistance Force. Fox hunt­ing, polo play­ing and horse races were the pop­u­lar pas­times of the British in Kabul in 1839.

Within two years, the British mil­i­tary and polit­i­cal posi­tion in Afghanistan had eroded as they grad­u­ally lost con­trol of Kabul to tribal war­riors and got encir­cled in the can­ton­ment. On November 2, 1841, Alexander Burnes, the British agent who suf­fered migraine headaches, was killed by Afghan war­riors in his res­i­dence in the city. British accounts of his death say that he tried to fight off his assailants with the help of his Sepoy guards, but they don’t make clear why Burnes had stayed iso­lated in a city over­run by war­lords, instead of mov­ing to the can­ton­ment. Afghan accounts sug­gest that Burnes tried to hide from the attack­ers among his harem, which was the second-largest in Kabul (the emir’s harem was the largest).


In December 1841, Sir William Macnaghten, the offi­cial British envoy, opened nego­ti­a­tions with some of the rebel chiefs, to whom he offered bribes in return for their sup­port of the new emir. At the same time, he opened talks with Akbar Khan, the son of the deposed emir, Dost Mohammad. Akbar Khan sus­pected Macnaghten of double-dealing. When they met on December 23 in a field out­side the can­ton­ment, he shot Macnaghten dead, appar­ently with a pis­tol that Macnaghten had recently given him.

Now the Afghans cut off sup­plies to the can­ton­ment, and the British began to run out of food. They pre­pared to with­draw to Jalalabad, a for­ti­fied town with a British gar­ri­son, 145 kilo­me­tres to the east.

On Thursday, January 6, 1842, in a col­umn sev­eral kilo­me­tres long, more than 16,000 British sol­diers and civil­ians marched out of Kabul. The British believed that they had secured pas­sage for the retreat in return for the £190,000 left behind in the trea­sury, but Afghan war­riors began attack­ing the col­umn as soon as the British rear guard exited the can­ton­ment. “The day was clear and frosty, the snow nearly a foot deep on the ground; the ther­mome­ter con­sid­er­ably below freez­ing point,” recalled Florentia Sale, who was taken pris­oner by the Afghans.

A week later, on January 13, Dr. William Brydon, the sole sur­vivor of the retreat, strag­gled into Jalalabad. When asked where the army was, he replied, “I am the army. ” Later, in his account of the retreat, he wrote: “I was pulled off my horse and knocked down by a blow on the head from an Afghan knife, which must have killed me had I not had a por­tion of a Blackwood’s Magazine in my for­age cap. As it was, a piece of bone about the size of a wafer was cut from my skull … see­ing that a sec­ond blow was com­ing, I met it with the edge of my sword, and I sup­pose cut off some of my assailant’s fin­gers, as the knife fell to the ground; he bolted one way, and I other, minus my horse, cap and one of my shoes …” What became known as the First Anglo-Afghan War was nearly over.

Blackwood’s Magazine, a copy of which Dr. Brydon had stuffed in his cap as pro­tec­tion against the cold, was founded in 1817 in Edinburgh by William Blackwood. It was pub­lished con­tin­u­ously for 163 years and was always pop­u­lar with Britons abroad. (Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first pub­lished in three con­sec­u­tive issues of Blackwood’s in 1899.) The mag­a­zine was noto­ri­ous for its scathing lit­er­ary reviews and acer­bic polit­i­cal com­men­tary; it was a Blackwood’s reviewer who den­i­grated the poetry of John Keats, Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt by labelling it the “Cockney School.” An essay in the June 1835 issue con­demns mem­bers of the House of Assembly in Lower Canada as “pen­ni­less dem­a­gogues whose com­mand of the pen extends no far­ther than to make the mark of the cross.”

In the years of the First Anglo-Afghan War, sub­scribers to Blackwood’s were offered essays on “The Chartists and Universal Suffrage,” “French Literature of the Eighteenth Century” and “The Life of a Speculative German.” The author of “War with China and the Opium Question” wrote in response to the Chinese ban on imports of opium man­u­fac­tured by the British in India: “Option for peace there is none, unless we con­sent to drink the cup of degra­da­tion and infamy to the very dregs, so deeply drained dur­ing a cen­tury almost of pros­trate mean­ness and abject sub­mis­sion.” Three months later, in June 1840, another writer, in “The Opium and the China Question,” described China as “an inor­ganic mass — some­thing to be kicked, but which can­not kick again.”

In May 1842, four months after the dis­as­trous with­drawal from Kabul, Blackwood’s car­ried a review of The Narrative of the Campaign of the Army of the Indus in Sind and Kaubool, in which R. H. Kennedy tried to come to terms with the dis­as­ter. “Indian char­ac­ter, in its native state,“ he wrote, is “alto­gether per­fid­i­ous.” The Persians he described as “naked wretches,” “horse-eaters,” “ragged rob­bers” accom­pa­nied by a “wretched crowd of frost-nipped and foot­sore Russians.” The Afghans who destroyed a British army are con­sis­tently referred to as “rob­bers and beg­gars.” In a sig­nif­i­cant pas­toral aside, Kennedy describes a “noble orchard” (with­out nam­ing the orchardists) in which the British army rested dur­ing the inva­sion and march to Kabul: “Fine stan­dards of the size of forest-trees, apple, pear, peach, apri­cot and plum, were sur­mounted and over­hung with gigan­tic vines, which, wreath­ing round the trunks and extend­ing to the remotest branches, fes­tooned from tree to tree in a wild lux­u­ri­ance of growth, such as I had never dreamt of see­ing in fruit-trees and the vine. It was the first month in spring, and they were cov­ered with blos­soms which per­fumed the air, and pre­sented a fea­ture of hor­ti­cul­tural beauty sur­pass­ing descrip­tion.”


In the fall of 1842, a sec­ond British army marched into Kabul and remained long enough to res­cue a few British pris­on­ers and to destroy the Great Bazaar in the cen­tre of the city by burn­ing it to the ground. Dost Mohammad, the emir deposed by the British in 1839, returned to his throne in Kabul in April 1843.

In the decades fol­low­ing the First Anglo-Afghan War, the Russians extended their sphere of influ­ence south­ward toward Afghanistan. They absorbed Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand and Bukhara three years after that. Khiva became their pro­tec­torate in 1873. By this time the Russian expan­sion stopped at the north­ern bank of the river Amu Darya, a more or less nat­ural geo­graphic fron­tier of Afghanistan. During the same period, the British advanced on Afghanistan from the south, absorb­ing ter­ri­to­ries some of which had his­tor­i­cally been part of the Afghan domain. They took con­trol of Sind in 1843, Kashmir in 1846, the Punjab in 1849 and Baluchistan in 1876.


The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878 – 1880) took a now-familiar course. Russia sent an unin­vited diplo­matic mis­sion to Kabul, and the British responded with an unin­vited mis­sion of their own. A new emir of Kabul, another of Dost Mohammad’s sons, tried to shun both the Russians and the British. Britain sent another army to march on Kabul. On July 20, 1880, near the vil­lage of Maiwand, north­west of Kandahar (the biggest city in south­ern Afghanistan), a British force of 2,500 was severely mauled and forced to retreat. The vic­to­ri­ous Afghans, whose casu­al­i­ties were per­haps three times higher than those of the British, took pos­ses­sion of the British bag­gage train and aban­doned guns.

One of the casu­al­ties of the bat­tle of Maiwand was a white mon­grel dog named Bobbie, owned by a sergeant in the 66^th Regiment. Bobbie recov­ered from her wounds and returned to England, where she was dec­o­rated (along with human sur­vivors) by Queen Victoria, with the Afghan War Campaign Medal, in a cer­e­mony in Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Bobbie died soon after in a traf­fic acci­dent. Stuffed and mounted, with her sil­ver medal, she can be seen at the Regimental Museum in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where she is listed in the cat­a­logue under “relics.”

The Afghan War Campaign Medal— engraved by Randolph Caldecott, the well­known illus­tra­tor of children’s books — dis­plays Queen Victoria’s pro­file on one side and, on the other, an ele­phant car­ry­ing a gun and accom­pa­nied by cav­alry.

Britain’s defeat at Maiwand was embed­ded in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion of the coun­try to this extent: the wound that caused Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s amanu­en­sis and friend, to leave India and take up res­i­dence at 221b Baker Street, was sus­tained while Watson was serv­ing as the sur­geon of the 66^th at the Battle of Maiwand.

The British won sev­eral bat­tles in the Second Anglo-Afghan War but were nev­er­the­less forced to leave Afghanistan again, and in April 1881 the last British troops marched out from Kandahar. For the rest of the nine­teenth and most of the twen­ti­eth cen­turies, until the Russian inva­sion in 1979, Afghans were able to keep their inter­nal affairs more or less under their own control. 

The Battle of Maiwand is com­mem­o­rated by the world’s largest cast-iron lion, sculpted by George Blackall Simonds and unveiled in 1886 in Forbury Gardens, Reading, England, where it can be seen today. The ten-metre beast strides awk­wardly over the top of a ceno­taph. A minor con­tro­versy erupted when claims were made that “lions don’t walk like that.”

In Kabul, the bat­tle of Maiwand is com­mem­o­rated by a street named Jaid-e-Maiwand, at one end of which a com­mem­o­ra­tive pil­lar designed by Ismatulla Saraj was erected in the 1950s. It was sev­eral storeys high and car­ried bronze plates on all four sides. The mon­u­ment, Maiwand Avenue and most of Kabul were destroyed when the American-supported Mujahideen armies, hav­ing defeated the Russian-supported regime, began fight­ing among them­selves.

In the years of anar­chy that fol­lowed Russia’s with­drawal in 1989, civil­ians were rou­tinely mur­dered, raped and looted — not just in Kabul and Kandahar, but right across the coun­try. After sev­eral years of may­hem, the Taliban move­ment formed in Kandahar in 1994 and their forces began mov­ing against the frag­mented Mujahideen. Two years later, Kabul fell into Taliban hands.

Ghullam Hazrat owns a kite shop located in the ruins of a three-storey build­ing of which only the front wall remains stand­ing, about a hun­dred metres from the site of the Maiwand bat­tle mon­u­ment in Kabul. In the sum­mer of 2003, he said he believed that defence­less folks would always choose any kind of order over unre­strained vio­lence and chaos. That’s why, he said, a lot of Afghans sup­ported the Taliban. After the reign of the Mujahideen war­lords, the dis­ci­plined and god-fearing fun­da­men­tal­ists of the Taliban (who con­demned and almost elim­i­nated the opium indus­try) seemed to offer relief.


The “noble orchards” of Afghanistan eulo­gized in Blackwood’s Magazine by R. H. Kennedy in 1842, once famous through­out south­ern Asia, have dis­ap­peared in the decades of vio­lence trig­gered by the Russian inva­sion of 1979. Maiwand Avenue, bridges, fac­to­ries, whole vil­lages, schools, libraries and hydro­elec­tric plants have dis­ap­peared as well, and with them have gone the ancient irri­ga­tion sys­tems.

In 2001, American-led forces deposed the Taliban regime and installed a new pres­i­dent but were unable to estab­lish a last­ing peace or to carry out recon­struc­tion on a mean­ing­ful scale. Most of the war­lords ejected by the Taliban were per­mit­ted to reclaim their domains. The coun­try sank into a sea of cor­rup­tion.

Today, poppy cul­ti­va­tion is aggres­sively pro­moted by Afghan war­lords allied with Americans; at the same time it is dis­cour­aged by the Americans, the new Afghan gov­ern­ment, the British and the Canadians. The Taliban has retreated into areas of the coun­try beyond the con­trol of the gov­ern­ment, and it too has taken up the cul­ti­va­tion of the poppy. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has esti­mated that in 2007 the pro­duc­tion of illicit opium in Afghanistan will exceed world demand.

Joma Khan, a farmer in Helmand province in the south — once con­sid­ered Afghanistan’s bread­bas­ket— com­plained in February 2007 to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting: “The gov­ern­ment is telling us not to grow poppy but they’re not help­ing us. They promised to give us saf­fron seeds, but they never deliv­ered.”

Villagers in Nangarhar province in east­ern Afghanistan reported that unmarked planes sprayed their fields with defo­liants to kill the pop­pies. The spray­ing also made them sick and killed their live­stock. The U.S. denied any knowl­edge of this activ­ity, though it con­trols the Afghan air space.


On Saturday, March 4, 2006, in the impov­er­ished vil­lage of Shinkay in Kandahar province, not far from the Maiwand bat­tle­field of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, a group of Afghan vil­lagers met with a detach­ment of Canadian and Afghan sol­diers. Shinkay was the fifth or sixth vil­lage the Canadians had vis­ited that day. Lieutenant Trevor Greene of the Seaforth Highlanders, a Vancouver reg­i­ment, removed his hel­met and put down his weapon before sit­ting to talk with vil­lage elders. Moments later a young man approached him from behind, pulled an axe out from beneath his robe and struck Greene in the back of the head. The Canadians gunned down the attacker instantly.

“We have launched an inves­ti­ga­tion into the case, and we want to get com­plete infor­ma­tion about the attacker,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope to reporters.

The vil­lagers said noth­ing.

Weeks later, some of the vil­lagers talked to an Afghan jour­nal­ist with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Haji Mohammad Esa said that the man who attacked Greene was Abdul Karim, the sixteen-year-old son of a poor cob­bler, a quiet boy and a loner. Esa sug­gested that Karim might have been angry. “Our vil­lage has been searched more than forty times over the past four years,” said Esa. “Foreigners accuse us of being Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Taliban and al-Qaeda accuse us of hav­ing links to the gov­ern­ment. We do not know what we are being pun­ished for.” Another vil­lager, Ghulam Mohammad, said: “They just break down the door and enter the house. That has made peo­ple very upset.”

Neither Ghulam Mohammad nor Haji Mohammad Esa saw any dif­fer­ence between the Canadians, the British and the Americans.

Trevor Greene was flown to the town of Landstuhl, Germany, at the edge of Pfälzer Wald, the largest remain­ing for­est in west­ern Europe, where the American mil­i­tary hos­pi­tal is located. Later he was taken back home to Vancouver, where he is recov­er­ing from exten­sive brain injuries. Greene has a degree in jour­nal­ism, and he speaks Japanese and French. He has writ­ten a book about home­less peo­ple in Japan and another about the van­ish­ing sex work­ers of Vancouver, pub­lished in 2001, in which he pre­dicted much of what has come into the news dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion and trial of Robert Pickton.


On February 26, 2007, sui­cide bombers tried to assas­si­nate Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice-president, dur­ing a visit to the American air base at Bagram (site of the ancient Alexandrian city dis­cov­ered by James Levis in the early 1800s). Three Americans — two sol­diers and a con­trac­tor — died in the attack, along with twenty other peo­ple who were work­ing at the base. In his analy­sis of events lead­ing up to the attack, the British-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali stated in CounterPunch.com that Ahmad Wali Karzai, kid brother of Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed pres­i­dent of Afghanistan, “has become one of the largest drug barons in the country.”