Even so, the victors remained uneasy about Darius’s escape, and there were still remnants of the Persian grand army that had to be rounded up and disarmed. These matters preoccupied Alexander and his allies even as another crisis matured farther to the east. The Greeks and Macedonians were slow to appreciate the threat posed in what we now call Afghanistan, and reluctant to make this problem their top priority.
Known in antiquity as Bactria, Afghanistan emerged as a danger zone in direct response to Alexander’s mounting power throughout the Middle East. From the perspective of the native peoples, Alexander and his followers represented an intrusive, alien culture offensive to local traditions.42 Alexander was later decried as an “unbeliever” who brought evil to the East and drenched the land with blood.43 Many Persians rejected Alexander’s claims of legitimacy as a liberator; they questioned the sincerity of his efforts to respect Persian religion and to promote a true partnership with local princes.44 So, as the invaders battled deep into what is modern-day Iraq, and their forces occupied the entire region, Bactria became the refuge of what Alexander called, in turn, a rogue regime that harbored warlords and terrorists. Using rhetoric that still resonates today, Alexander denounced these men as lawless savages, the enemies of civilization. In what he called a new and dangerous world, Alexander warned his followers that these resourceful criminals would continue to exploit differences of religion, language, and culture to rouse attacks against innocent victims. They must be confronted with overwhelming military force, and stopped; their leaders must answer—dead or alive—for their crimes.45 Not to act was to jeopardize the safety of Greece itself. “This is a noble cause,” proclaimed Alexander to his armed forces, “and you will always be honored for seeing it through to the end.”46 Then, backed by unbridled support, the most powerful leader of the time led the most sophisticated army of its day against the warlords of Afghanistan. Ask those ancient Greek and Macedonian ghosts to reflect upon our situation today, and they might feel strangely at home. The old dictum “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (The more things change, the more they remain the same) ought to be the official motto of Afghanistan.
When in turn the British, Russians, and Americans each seized Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, they occupied a city founded by Alexander himself and still bearing the Arabic version of his name. When U.S. troops charged on horseback against the Taliban strongholds of Mazar-i-Sharif, they rode past the crumbling walls of Alexander’s main camp, and the capital of the Greek kingdom that endured there for centuries. When American newspapers printed datelines from Ai Khanoum accompanied by photographs of a Northern Alliance gun emplacement on the heights of this remote village, practiced eyes could see the ruins there of an ancient city where Greek settlers once wrestled in the gymnasium, watched tragedies in the theater, worshiped the gods of their ancestral pantheon, and warred for control of Bactria for nearly nine long generations.47 This book moves back and forth between modern Afghanistan and ancient Bactria to tell the story of an extraordinary place and the people who have struggled there. Its purpose is to place our present ordeal into a broader perspective, to provide a useful historical and cultural background for those who ask: Into what long history have we suddenly thrust ourselves and our armed forces? On what sort of ground—savage, sacred, or civilized— have we pitched our tents and taken our stand against terrorism?
We cannot answer such questions without facing up to a few challenges. First, it does no good to whitewash the present or the past. War is an ugly business, one of the most repugnant actions to which we humans regularly resort en masse. This is why every group convinced of its necessity works so hard to justify it to others. We rally to the conviction that a given alternative would be even uglier: terrorism, tyranny, starvation, or whatever else the abstracted enemy might be. When war looks like the lesser evil, we can embrace it warmly as though it at least has a good heart beneath its horrid exterior. To that end, we historically have found our greatest heroes in war, giving courage and sacrifice their most recognizable milieu in matters military rather than artistic, political, or philanthropic. Whatever else war might achieve for good or ill, whether in victory or in defeat, its extreme nature produces heroes whose glory helps us to ennoble the conflict. We need to believe that brave soldiers do not die for nothing, a sentiment that lies behind some of the grandest and most moving speeches ever made, such as Lincoln’s remarks at Gettysburg and Pericles’s oration at Athens. If lost lives were worth something, then the struggle that claimed them must be worthier still.
The emotional process is understandable, but wars and warriors thereby become difficult to judge dispassionately, much less to criticize. We meet that crisis head-on when we try to understand objectively the war in Afghanistan waged by Alexander, one of history’s most heroized leaders. Alexander deserves our admiration for many of his personal qualities, such as his bravery, tactical genius, and tenacity. But to glorify the king and his conquests beyond their due cannot help us today: that path only blinds us to harsh realities that are easier to forget than to face again. If, for example, we indulge in the kind of ersatz history popular just a generation or so ago, we would see Alexander’s invasion through the wistful eyes of men like Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn (1869–1957).48 This gentleman-scholar argued tirelessly that Alexander was a high-minded prince of peace who was the first human to believe in the unity and brotherhood of all mankind. The wars conducted by Alexander had no base purposes such as egomania or greed, but rather the heartfelt desire to bring love and the benefits of a superior civilization to the wretched natives of ancient Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Military conquest never had a kinder, gentler, or nobler objective than the one attributed by Tarn to Alexander: “Alexander’s aim was to substitute peace for war, and reconcile the enmities of mankind by bringing them all—all that is whom his arm could reach, the people of his empire—to be of one mind together: as men were one in blood, so they should become one in heart and spirit.”49 Furthermore, Tarn insisted that in one place, and one place only, his hero’s dream of peace and world brotherhood eventually came true: that place was allegedly Afghanistan!
The charming past recreated by Tarn answered all his wishes for the kind of world he could not himself enjoy in the first half of the violent twentieth century.50 Tarn’s worshipful vision of Alexander’s world remains popular today in some circles, but it ill serves those who want an honest appraisal of the past as a signpost for the future.51 Tarn’s sanitized and sanctified account of Alexander’s campaigns in and around Afghanistan must give way to the uglier version presented in these pages. Beneath the whitewash, bloodstains run deep.
Second, we must acknowledge that the wars waged in Afghanistan by Alexander, Britain, the Soviet Union, and now the United States share some salient features that may not bode well for our future. For example, all these invasions of Afghanistan went well at first, but so far no superpower has found a workable alternative to what might be called the recipe for ruin in Afghanistan:
1. Estimate the time and resources necessary to conquer and control the region.
2. Double all estimates.
3. Repeat as needed.
Afghanistan cannot be subdued by half measures. Invaders must consider the deadly demands of winter warfare, since all gains from seasonal campaigns are erased at every lull. Invaders must resolve to hunt down every warlord, for the one exception will surely rot the fruits of all other victories. Invaders cannot succeed by avoiding cross-border fighting, since the mobile insurgents can otherwise hide and reinforce with impunity. Invaders must calculate where to draw the decisive line between killing and conciliation, for too much of either means interminable conflict. Finally, all invaders so far have had to face one more difficult choice: once mired in a winless situation, they have tried to cut their losses through one of two exit strategies:
1. Retreat, as did the British and Soviets, with staggering losses.
2. Leave a large army of occupation permanently settled in the area, as Alexander did.
Neither option seems acceptable to the United States, which must therefore learn from its predecessors’ mistakes and seek another path.
That process must take into account the same problems encountered throughout Afghan history, beginning in antiquity. As one scholar has adroitly observed in a study of Alexander’s cities, “the requirements of imperial