by Sarah Chayes
Thus explained, Ighraq’s huff is a little easier to understand. Getting smacked in the face with a riding whip, after he had preserved the Muslim line from the invincible Mongols, was a breach of honor he could not bear. No amount of “reasoning” on Jalal ad-Din’s part could bring him back to the army.
The result of Ighraq’s rage was even more devastating for the Muslims than Achilles’ wrath had been for the Greeks—for they did end up taking Troy. The Muslim defense against the Mongols crumbled. “The Sultan’s strength was broken by Ighraq’s defection,” writes Juvayni, “and the highway of honor and success was closed to him.”37
The weakened Jalal ad-Din knew he could not possibly hold his own against the Mongols now, so he withdrew to Ghazni. This time Genghis Khan went after him in person. Sultan Jalal ad-Din made for the Indus River, the border with the “land of the Hindus.” He hoped to cross it and rebuild his fragmented army on the other side, but the lightning Mongols were too quick. Genghis Khan caught up with him at the river’s edge, and another epic battle was fought. Jalal ad-Din, Juvayni says, was “left between water and fire”: the Indus River at his back and the Mongols in front of him.
The dashing sultan fought hard, but he was going to lose. At last, he called for his spare horse, jumped astride and, shouting a war cry, spurred it forward into the Mongol front—charging like a crazy man, forcing the Mongols back inch by inch. Then, dropping his shield, Jalal ad-Din spun his horse around in the few yards of space he had just cleared and urged it, in a flying leap, off the bank and into the Indus River, some thirty feet below.
Juvayni has Genghis Khan so astonished at this feat that he rides to the riverbank and remains fixed there, watching Jalal ad-Din strike off for the farther shore. When some of the Mongols want to jump in the water after him, Genghis Khan stops them, with an immortal line: “Such sons should a father have.”38
A lot of the Muslims were killed in this action, their blood turning the Indus a proverbial red. Cousin Khan Malik broke away and tried to escape northward to Peshawar, but a Mongol detachment cut him off and killed him. Eventually, Ghengis Khan did order one of his generals, Bala, to take a detachment and ford the river to resume the chase for Jalal ad-Din.
While Chinggis Qa’an was waiting for him, Bala crossed the River Shin [Indus] and pursued Jalaldin-Soltan and Qan Melik to the land of the Hindus. There he lost them and was unable to find them again though he searched right into the heart of the land of the Hindus.39
In fact, the Mongols did not get anywhere near the heart of India. Men and ponies, so tough in the harsh climate of their windswept steppes, could not withstand India’s humid heat. Jalal ad-Din got away. But he never was able to regroup. Though some of the old Ghurid fortresses in the central Afghan mountains held out for years—the historian Juzjani battling away in one of them—nothing further barred the Mongols from establishing their empire. It stretched from Hungary in the west all the way across China. And it changed the world.
It is difficult to convey what the impact of the Mongol conquests must have been, for nothing like them has taken place in modern history. For the sheer psychological effect, think back to September 11. Remember how you felt as you watched those buildings collapse, or smelled the cinder in the air. Now imagine it was not two buildings but all of Manhattan that was razed to the ground, with just such scientific precision, “till the walls were level with the streets.” And imagine the whole population of New York being driven outside the city like a herd of animals by wild-looking men, frightening savages to your eyes, and then butchered, systematically.
All of Central Asia’s fabled cities suffered this: Merv, Bukhara, Herat, Samarqand. It took these places half a century to begin to recover. Some never did, their remaining populations scattering to nearby villages, sand or grassland eating up their ruined walls. In volleys of lengthy footnotes, scholars skirmish now about their likely locations. What the impact on their people must have been is beyond imagining. I wonder how many went mad.
Very slowly, some cities did return to glory. Very slowly, the great Central Asian culture sprouted again from its roots, like a field after a forest fire. The father of historian Juvayni won service with Genghis Khan’s son and first successor, becoming the finance minister for all of Persia. A generation later, Juvayni himself got a job with Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu, ruler of the Persian part of the empire. Hulagu eventually appointed Juvayni governor of Iraq. The historian ordered much reconstruction, rebuilding cities and digging new canals.
Like Alexander the Great, in other words, the Mongols used locals to administer their conquered territories. Like Alexander, the Mongols learned from these locals, adopting their ways. Hulagu Khan revived the flourishing and original Muslim research in mathematics and astronomy. Along with administering provinces, Juvayni wrote his history. The juris doctors launched into their debates again, and the Persian poets began to sing again.
Another useful, if schematic, way to think of the Mongol conquests is, indeed, as a tidal wave. Like a tidal wave, the gigantic force of these conquests hurled people, belongings, animals, and ideas far and wide in front of them. After fighting Mongol besiegers from inside a cragged central Afghan fortress for four years, the more sober-styled historian quoted above, Juzjani, moved down to India along with much of the population of modern Afghanistan. There the floodtide of refugees laid the foundations of Muslim culture in the subcontinent.
As a tidal wave does, the Mongol conquests left everything topsy-turvy, jumbled, and mixed up in their wake.
Kandahar, for example, settled back into its age-old frontier role, marking the boundary between the Mongol empire and India to its south. And it seems that the Mongol and Turkic troops who continued fighting on this Indian front began marrying in with the Hindu girls they brought back as booty. The result was a new group called the Qara’una. “What seems to have most struck the Iranian historians writing in the time of Hulagu,” writes the expert on this group, scholar Jean Aubin, “was the Qara’una’s lack of discipline.”40Yaghestan—what a surprise. And so the Kandaharis’ Persian blood was becoming mixed as Turkic people, Indians, mountain Ghurids, and some “Afghans” began settling in the oasis.
While all of this was slowly shaking out, it happened all over again. Consciously imitating Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, a tribesman born near Samarqand, conquered all of Central Asia in the fourteenth century.41
In 1383, and it is well known this time, Tamerlane besieged and captured Kandahar, and pulled down its defensive wall. He smashed up the old citadel of Zaranj too, that oasis about four hundred miles west of Kandahar that had been the early Muslim Arabs’ garrison town. And just as Genghis Khan would have done, Tamerlane systematically tore up the complex irrigation system between the two cities. Time out of mind, it had spread the water from the great Helmand River out across that sullen land, making a garden of it.42
Ever since then, the place has been a desert. On maps today it is called Rigistan, “Sandland.” In the 1970s, Americans dug some new canals near the ancient town of Bost. The invading Soviets deliberately mined the sluice gates on these canals, seeking—as Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had—to ruin local agriculture. In 2002, one of the policy papers we did at Afghans for Civil Society was an assessment of the socioeconomic impact of repairing one of those canals.
Tamerlane’s son Shah-Rukh moved his palace from the old Central Asian capital of Samarqand to Herat, northwest around the Ring Road from Kandahar. There, under his patronage and that of his successors, Persian painting reached its pinnacle. Artists, turning mere paper into gemencrusted cloth-of-gold with the points of their pens, weaving into their landscapes Chinese forms that came westward in the Mongols’ wake, illustrated copies of the famous epic poems. One of their favorites was the eleventh-century Shahnama, or Book of Kings, which, wishfully, sang the Persian heroes’ exploits against the Turanians of Central Asia.
Though in real life the Persians lost the fight, they also won. For, like Alexander and the Ar
abs, the Mongols ultimately came around to Persian culture. Like the legendary phoenix that Herati artists painted into their books of verse, Persia rose flourishing again and again from the ashes.
Perhaps there is hope in this for Afghanistan.
CHAPTER 23
FIGHTING WITH THE PEN
SPRING 2003
IN THE SPRING OF 2003, I was still clinging to the hope. I still thought that somehow, if I just worked hard enough, if I redoubled my activity, argued more persuasively, forced the messages through to people who counted, I could help shake something loose on the warlord issue. I wore out the road to Kabul, explaining Gul Agha Shirzai’s cynical and dangerous behavior to U.S. and Afghan officials. My favorite interlocutor was the constructive and ever-cheerful senior diplomat Bill Taylor, at the U.S. embassy. From our startingly frank exchanges, from what Qayum and President Karzai’s chief of staff were saying, it was evident that the pressure was rising, slowly, to remove some of the worst offenders.
Too slowly for my liking.
One day in April I found myself in the departure “lounge” of the Kabul airport, which looked something like the bar scene from Star Wars, outlandishly garbed foreigners sticking out like visitors from an alien planetary system among the Afghans, whose regions of origin were gaudily proclaimed by their disparate headgear. I was awaiting the UN flight back to Kandahar. Behind me in line was a beanpole, her potentially unruly hair cropped in a severe 1930s bob, called April. April Witt.
She was a Washington Post correspondent, fresh off the national desk. Most of her professional experience had consisted of holing herself up with stacks of financial documents during drawn-out investigations into white-collar crime. She might spend nine months on a single story, she told me. She had hardly ever reported overseas, but there she was, barely three days in country, heading to Kandahar because she was sure that was where the story was.
I liked this April Witt immediately.
ICRC water engineer Ricardo Munguia had just been murdered. For the entire flight April pumped me for the context, forcing me to crane around to maintain eye contact, since there was just one seat to a row in those tiny planes. Not that it took a huge effort to get me going. I was still boiling over about the assassination. I was still dumbfounded by Gul Agha Shirzai’s response. I was struggling to contain a head of steam, as though truth has a force of its own: if I could just communicate it, get it exposed, it would automatically bring about the right decisions. I had to keep slowing myself down and backtracking to make sure April was with me.
I remember her echoing, with an effort to hide her dubious tone, “Warlordism actually encourages terrorism…? Close that loop for me.” I took a breath, and spelled it out.
My basic point was that our friends the Afghan warlords were profiting from terrorism. It provided employment for their trigger-happy acolytes, as well as ample opportunity to plunder their countrymen. And in Shirzai’s case, it allowed him to exploit the contradictory relationship between Pakistan and the United States. The Kandahar governor was aware, as U.S. decision makers apparently were not, of how different Islamabad’s agenda was from Washington’s. Simpleminded he may have been, but he had figured out that his old friends, the Pakistanis, were running circles around his new friends, the Americans. And he saw how he could stay in favor with both by acceding to just enough of their demands to keep them on a string. Warlordism encouraged terrorism because a warlord like Gul Agha Shirzai had a material interest in maintaining at least some terrorism so that the Americans would continue to “need” him, and because it drove the harried rural population into the arms of the terrorists out of exasperation or powerlessness.
When we touched down in Kandahar, I packed April off to see Zabit Akrem. She and I chatted a few more times—I remember having her over for dinner and introducing her to Mullah Omar’s cow. But she was basically on her own. And she wrote a bombshell.
AFGHAN GOVERNOR STRAINS TO SHED WARLORD IMAGE, it was headlined.1 According to the article, Gul Agha Shirzai topped a short list of provincial governors whom members of the Karzai administration wanted removed. April had extracted some remarkably daring quotes from Kabul celebrities whom she interviewed on her return from Kandahar: “The reason they want to replace him,” Shirzai’s long-term aide and now the minister for urban development told her, “is because he is still—with all his delicate qualities—considered a warlord.” April caught the minister’s smile as he added: “He is trying to conform to the rule of law. He’s not 100 percent successful…sometimes he himself breaks it.”
This was absolutely unheard-of gumption for Afghanistan. Especially in someone who had worked side by side with Gul Agha for almost a decade. Everyone was talking about it. I was aware that this minister’s name was in the ring as a possible replacement for Shirzai. The decision must have been all but made, I exulted, and this was his bid for the job. The rat.
I was quoted in the article too, with the Akokolacha story. Ahmad Wali Karzai was in there, making a mild point about the distance between government and the people. Akrem complained about nonpayment of his policemen, and jokingly threatened to wrap Shirzai up and deliver him back to his pals the Americans at the airport.
Thus was our private alliance aired in public.
April got Shirzai’s factotum Khalid Pashtoon to admit that customs revenues, in the amount of several million dollars a month, never made it to Kabul. And Ali Jalali, the jolly, rotund Afghan interior minister, said he had told U.S. officials—Qayum Karzai’s words almost verbatim—“that in many cases their short-term military goals might undermine their long-term political priorities.”
Then there were the glinting gems that April deftly inserted into the setting of her article. For example: Gul Agha “no longer blows his nose on the tail of his turban in front of visitors….” When I first read the piece, I was disappointed that it did not quite “close the loop” between warlordism and terrorism as I had done for April on the plane. But I soon realized that her subtle but dastardly humor was every bit as effective as a policy rant would have been.
Meanwhile, April’s questions on the flight had refined my own thinking. If she had needed me to close the loop, then maybe others did too.
I decided the time was ripe for another Letter to Washington, one of the occasional reflections on the situation in Kandahar that I wrote up every few months when the situation seemed to warrant it. Expressly advertised as my personal views, not those of Afghans for Civil Society, they were sent out to contacts in the U.S. Congress or the executive branch with an interest in Afghanistan.
“Terrorism and Warlordism, Closing the Loop,” I quoted April.
I took aim at a widely accepted thesis, which I had heard over and over again from U.S. and Afghan officials, journalists, and humanitarian personnel as a justification for the passive policy toward the warlords. The theory went like this: as unsavory as they are, the warlords provide security as well as reinforcements we need in the fight against terrorists. The truth, I argued in this Letter to Washington, was the reverse. Warlords like Shirzai were actually the source of in security. Their economic and political interests were bound up in lawlessness and ongoing extremist activity, which guaranteed their continued—fantastically beneficial—alliance with U.S. forces. Therefore, I wrote, though warlords might gamely gird up and sally forth with the Americans on their anti-Taliban raids, they had no intention of completely eradicating the insurgents. Shirzai’s delayed operation against those who had killed Ricardo proved my point.
These warlords are old hands, I suggested, practiced in the skill of playing one foreign patron off against another. Nothing they did or said was to be taken at face value. Think of Gul Agha Shirzai as operating a valve, I directed my readers, carefully regulating the flow of extremism, but never fully cutting it off.
Then came the matter of who Shirzai’s other patron was. I decided to forgo the customary euphemisms and circumlocutions, and finally tackle this biggest and most incomprehensible riddle of
U.S. foreign policy.
“How Pakistan Is Playing the United States to Its Benefit” read my next heading.
I began by noting the remarkable consistency in Pakistani strategy regarding Afghanistan over the past thirty years, namely, the use of religious extremists to gain control of the country or at least to provoke instability. Despite some cosmetic changes since 9/11, I argued, there is no reason to believe that that strategy has significantly altered.
So why, again and again, has U.S. policy come down in favor of Pakistan and its agenda? Largely because of Pakistani skill in exploiting U.S. inattention, I wrote. And I spelled out the current equation as I saw it:
Despite the proven danger and destructiveness of this policy to Pakistan itself, Pakistan is still using extremism as a tool to further its regional agenda….
Pakistan’s agenda is exclusively regional and tactical. The Pakistani government is not part of a Bin Ladin–style Islamist International.
Therefore, Pakistan has no interest in Al-Qaeda members. In fact, Pakistan regards Al-Qaeda with distaste because Al-Qaeda has an agenda of its own.
The raw material Pakistan likes to work with is former Taliban or Hizbi-Islami members who, lacking a deeply rooted independent ideology, are more easily manipulated.
U.S. attention, by contrast, is riveted on Al-Qaeda. (And is now being distracted away from Pakistan by the focus on Iraq.) American policy makers don’t care much about former Taliban or what they might be up to.
I concluded that, given Gul Agha Shirzai’s close links to Islamabad, to which he openly admitted and which were demonstrated by the frequent presence of Pakistani military personnel in his office and his regular trips to Islamabad, it was perfectly conceivable that he had received a Pakistani directive to delay action against the insurgents who had blown away Ricardo. I had no direct proof of this, and I indicated as much. But it fit the pattern.
