The Minaret of Jam is thought to be all that remains of the ancient city of Firozkoh, capital of the Ghurid empire. The Ghurids, a Persianate culture, at the height of their empire, controlled territory extending from Nishapur in eastern Iran, to the mouth of the Ganges.
The writing on the minaret is eroded. An engraved date has become ambiguous. The minaret perhaps commemorates a military victory of the Ghurids over the Ghaznevids, at Lahore, now in Pakistan. Or perhaps, it commemorate a military victory of the Ghurids over the Chauhan dynasty in India, twenty years later and further east.
After the Mongols invaded, Ogedei son of Genghis razed the Ghurid capital, to put down a rebellion. This was eight hundred years ago. The location has been the capital of nowhere ever since.
The victory minaret, all that remains of a city, is in present-day Ghor province, Afghanistan, supposed Graveyard of Empires. Afghanistan, where empires supposedly go to die.
I do not intend to romanticize the violence of what an empire is, in this piece. Except to the purpose of saying, what graveyard of empires? Why is it claimed that Afghanistan has an exceptionalism about empire? How is Afghanistan more resistant or more deadly to empire than anyplace else?
I have just named two times, under the Ghurids and the Ghaznevids, where Afghanistan was the cradle not the grave of large empire. And the time where the Mongols were hardly brought to ruination for having invaded the place.
Graveyard of Empires — Alexander the Great, the British, and the Soviets, intended to suggest what will happen to the Americans for having invaded — is an impoverished Afghan history.
Afghanistan, a poor country with a rich history, has the rich history taken from it, and a poor one handed back.
Where, in the Graveyard of Empires story, is Darius the Great, who successfully established the satrapies that Alexander would successfully conquer two hundred years later?
Where is Mahmud of Ghazni, the first Sultan, who brought Islam to the Ghurids, so that they would later build a minaret to commemorate their conquering of his sixteenth successor?
Where, in the story, is Babur?
Afghanistan is, literally, the graveyard of the emperor Babur. His tomb is in a garden on a hill in Kabul.
Babur had taken Kabul when he was about 21. From Kabul, he started advancing to the east, in his mid-30s. He had taken Delhi in his mid-40s. He died at his capital of Agra, modern-day India, three years later.
Of all the cities Babur had ever conquered, Kabul was his favorite, so his graveyard is in his garden there.
Afghanistan is not the graveyard of Babur’s empire, though. “We conquered the world with bravery and might,” Babur once carved into a rock, “but we did not take it with us to the grave.” This was true. His empire lasted another three hundred years.
The empire was finally subjected by the Marathas, the British East India Company, and internal corruption. None of these are the fiercely independent mountain tribesmen of the Graveyard of Empires story.
You have to be working pretty hard at selectivity, to put together Afghanistan, graveyards, and empire in one story, but omit the Mughals.
Here is a version of a popular story about Alexander, and the soil of Afghanistan. Graveyard of Empires, it says, comes from something in the dirt.
Once upon a time, Alexander the Great conquered most of the places in the world. But when he reached Afghanistan, he was very slow there. And he could not advance there typically as he was advancing in other countries.
And his mother sent him a letter, that why you are so lazy in that country?
In answer, he sent a bag of soil from Afghanistan. And he told her that you spray all this soil, and collect your relatives, to sit under and talk together. But when they sit on that carpet under which the soil of Afghanistan was sprayed, they suddenly started fighting against each other.
Then his mother, which was very wise lady, understood that the people of this country is warrior.
When a child is born in this country, in our tradition, that his father buying a gun for him. Because of that, everyone is very warrior, and like war, and will not obey any person who is not according to his wish.
— Major Alami, in Warlord of Kayan
The soil of ancient Greece, by contrast, evidently contained magical pacifistic and cooperative qualities. Modern American and Russian soil would evidently contain the same.
That, or the story of the soil of Afghanistan, with its magical special properties, is a romanticizing myth.
“Afghanistan is easy to march into but hard to march out of,” Alexander said. Or at least, Alexander said, as quoted by Margaret Atwood, who was quoting her father, in 2001.
“It is easy to get into Afghanistan. The problem is getting out again,” the Duke of Wellington said, in 1842. Or at least, the Duke of Wellington said, according to nine places on the internet.
We are a myth-telling people ourselves.
“The day was clear and frosty;” the Lady Florentia Sale recorded, of Thursday, January 6, 1842, “the snow nearly a foot deep on the ground; the thermometer considerably below freezing point.”
She was under siege, at the time, in the British cantonment at Kabul. Her husband, in command of the British garrison at Jalalabad, was under siege as well.
The British in Kabul, that morning, had exploded large gaps through their protective walls, as exit for the large number of people attempting an escape.
At half past nine, a force of about 4,500 fighting men and 12,000 camp followers began their retreat, from Kabul, through 90 miles of winter mountain, to Jalalabad. The soldiers had been on half rations for weeks at this point; the camp followers on less. They halted for the day at 4 pm, unsheltered, unfed, and without fire, having made six miles.
Beginning on the morning of Friday, January 7, the record becomes unbearable to read. It is of the total annihilation of the retreat, over a week, during the first Anglo-Afghan war. Florentia Sale survives, for being one of the few hostages negotiated for on the 9th. She describes herself as lucky, about a passage through a narrow gorge on the 8th, for having taken no more than a musket ball to her arm.
The following sentences, from British military chaplain George Gleig, are popular for expressing the pointlessness of that war, and by extension our own.
So ended a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, and brought to a close, after suffering and disaster, without much of glory attaching either to the government which directed, or the great body of the troops which waged it…. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war.
The passage preceding this, however, describing a small part of the revenge razings, burnings, and slaughter in Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Ghazni, and numerous villages, inflicted by the British Army of Retribution in the fall of 1842, does not get quoted nearly so much. The passage is of Kabul. Florentia Sale’s husband is mentioned.
[T]hen followed the blowing up of the bazaars, the burning of the chief’s houses, the destruction of the city gates, and last of all, a conflagration which spread everywhere till the waters of the river stayed it….
The work of destruction began upon the 7th of October. It continued all that day and the next and throughout both nights and, indeed, till the mountains of the Bootkak shut it from them, the soldiers of Sale's brigade saw the whole face of the sky red with the flames which they had contributed to raise.
World burner, the Ghurid ruler Ala al-Din Husayn was called. World incendiary. He was given the epithet for his act of retribution on the city of Ghazni, at a time when the city, for its cosmopolitan assemblage of art and learning, could stand for the world. The historian Minhaj Siraj Juzjani, born in the Ghurid capital, writing in Delhi, describes it:
Ala ud Din took the city of Ghaznin by storm, and during seven nights and days, fired the place, and burnt it with obstinacy and wantonness.
The chronicler states that during these seven days, the air, from the blackness of the smoke, continued as black as night; and those nights, from the flames raging in the burning city, were lighted up as light as day. During these seven days, likewise, rapine, plunder, and massacre were carried on with the utmost pertinacity and vindictiveness.
“I directed the city of Ghazni, with its citadel and the whole of its works, to be destroyed,” General William Nott wrote, in September 1842.
”Far-famed Ghazni was a heap of smoking ruins,” the artist Lieutenant James Rattray said, of the last time he had seen the location depicted in his work below.
Neville Chamberlain, a young ensign in the army at the time, recorded for September 7, “Burning the town and mining the citadel.” For September 8, “Blowing up the citadel and bastions of the fort, and burning the town.” For September 9, “Burning the gates of the town, and bringing away the sandal-wood gates of the tomb of Mahmood."
Mahmud, in 1024, had plundered the Somnath temple in Gujarat, and taken away the sandalwood temple doors. This was one of his seventeen raids on India. The temple doors were installed, by legend at least, as the doors of his tomb. They can be seen in the James Rattray work above.
When Nott destroyed Ghazni in 1842, he ceremoniously carried the doors back to India. This was a subject of partisan debate in parliament, with an intellectualized distance from the destruction: parliament debated idolatry. The doors proved to be inauthentic.
After burning Ghazni, Nott moved north, burning forts and villages along the way, to meet up with General George Pollock at Kabul, which they burned together. They burned the towns of Istalif and Charikar, to which the people of Kabul had fled, and then headed for exit through the Khyber pass, burning Jalalabad as they went.
The route to Jalalabad would have had the remains of some sixteen thousand persons fallen along the way, with many remains still visible on the ground. Afghanistan is assuredly a graveyard of empire.
But the Army of Retribution under Pollock had successfully crossed the Kyber pass against opposition on the way in. It had met up with Florentia Sale and the other hostages, burned what it wished, and successfully made its way out.
Alexander the Great had spent a winter in Ghazni, except Alexander called it Alexandria. Other Alexandrias are thought to be at the current Herat, Farah, Kandahar, Bagram, and in Takhar province.
Afghanistan, cradle and grave of empire. Afghanistan, summering and wintering place of empire. Afghanistan, building and burning place of empire. Taking from two thousand five hundred years of history, you could tell about any story or lesson about empire and Afghanistan that you want.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the capital city, Kabul, was largely depopulated and destroyed, after years of factional civil war.
Nearly sixteen years later, a rebuilt Kabul has a population of perhaps 5 million, but no sewage system. It might be the largest city in the world in that state.
Alexander strewed Alexandrias with libraries behind him as he went. Mahmud of Ghazni collected historians and poets, along with the plundered gold and jewels. Babar and his successors built gardens with symbolic mountain streams at their center. They were bringing some Kabul to the plains.
As an invading people, Americans have simply no pride. The river through Kabul, which Babur loved for its purity, is a garbage and sewage canal today. Conquered cities with symbolic filths running through their center, are for us good enough.
The Afghan nationalist and theorist of nationalism, Mahmud Tarzi, had a plan for moving Afghanistan from absolute to constitutional monarchy.
There would need to be an educational system that could produce a government bureaucracy. To start this, Tarzai imported teachers from India. A British Indian high school curriculum was adopted.
The Indian teachers, under British influence, had unsuitable notions of Afghan history, however. They believed the story, “Afghanistan Is Not a Real Nation, It Is Just a Collection of Warring Tribes”, for example.
You cannot produce a government bureaucracy by teaching that story. You cannot unify a nation with it. You cannot create a professionalized military under government control.
A nation must control its own history, Tarzi decided. In the wary choosing, what to take from the British, and what not to accept, the British version of Afghan history was rejected. Tarzi taught history and geography himself.
In the Treaty of Gandamak, at the conclusion of the first phase of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Afghanistan gave up control of its own foreign affairs. In the Third Anglo-Afghan War, Afghanistan regained control of its foreign affairs, as a fully independent state. Mahmud Tarzi took the highly symbolic position of Foreign Minister.
In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan. Since that time, Afghanistan has once again not controlled its own foreign affairs. It does not now control its own military. It has not had fully sovereign and independent control over any of its affairs at all. Since that time, Afghanistan has not controlled its own history.
“Zeila, the Fair Maid of Cabul” is the story, in six cantos, of the forced unveiling of said fair maid, by a gallant and noble British soldier, and their later final embrace in the snows, on the 1842 retreat. Everyone will tell their own romantic stories, according to their own political needs. Many of the Afghan women in the camp following would need explained by some poetic device or other. Zeila had fallen from the sky, in canto the second, and he had gallantly caught her in midair. (She fainted. And she had actually only fallen from a horse.)
The poem has obvious problems, beyond its way with rhyme. It’s got a whole lot more Afghan history in it, though, and a whole lot more interest in that history, than Graveyard of Empires does.