Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  The Russians had relatively little trouble subduing Siberia from the 1550s to the 1600s and Central Asia from the 1860s to the 1880s, because the terrain in both places was relatively flat and accessible. In between came the conquest of the Caucasian isthmus wedged between the Black Sea and the Caspian. That was tougher going. The Caucuses had some of Europe’s tallest mountains, and they were home to obstreperous tribesmen, mostly Muslims, who had raided their more settled neighbors for centuries. “Every man was a born rider, a keen swordsman, and a good shot,”50 wrote the English author John F. Baddeley, who traveled in the region during the late nineteenth century. Another English traveler, Lesley Blanch, who arrived in the twentieth century, described their violent code of conduct: “Vengeance, vendetta, or kanly, was often pursued through three or four generations, decimating whole families, till there was no one left.”51 Constantly warring among themselves, these mountain peoples would unite to repel outsiders.

  General Alexei Yermolov, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars, tried to impose order on this unruly region, much as the Americans were to do with the trans-Mississippi West, when he was appointed its administrator in 1816. He began by erecting the fort that grew into the city of Grozny (“Menacing”). To deal with Chechens who sniped at his construction crews, he left a cannon at a predetermined spot not far from the city walls. When the Chechens rushed out of hiding to claim the seemingly abandoned gun, they were mown down by grape and canister shot. This was indicative of Yermolov’s brutal methods, which were decidedly not of the population-centric school. “I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains or fortresses . . . ,” he declared in a classic expression of the “scorched-earth” approach to counterinsurgency practiced by Assyria, Nazi Germany, and many other autocratic states over the ages. “Condescension in the eyes of the Asiatics is a sign of weakness, and out of pure humanity I am inexorably severe. One execution saves hundreds of thousands of Russians from destruction, and thousands of Mussulmans from treason.”52

  For a time Yermolov did manage to bring about a semblance of pacification. But in the end he generated more rebellion than he suppressed. Leo Tolstoy, who as a junior officer served in the Caucasus, wrote that the inhabitants’ feelings toward the Russians became “stronger than hate”: “it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them—like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves—was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.”53 That repulsion manifested itself in the gazavat that broke out in 1829 in Chechnya and Dagestan, which together had a population of about 200,000.54

  Neither Ghazi Muhammad, the first imam, nor his successor, Hamzat Bek, had much luck in rallying the highlands tribes. Tribal elders did not accept their authority to impose a puritanical version of sharia law that banned dancing, music, and tobacco. In 1834 Hamzat Bek was assassinated by tribal rivals.55 Shamil, who had escaped the Russian assault on Gimri two years earlier, became the third and last imam. He had a good deal more success in fomenting a broad-based, long-lasting insurgency against the “infidels”—one that would continue to inspire Chechen rebels against Russian rule well into the twenty-first century.

  MUCH LIKE TOUSSAINT Louverture, another dispossessed freedom fighter of aristocratic lineage, Shamil was born to a nobleman in Gimri around 1796. He was a childhood friend of the slightly older Ghazi Muhammad, who helped him learn Arabic and instructed him in Islam. A skilled horseman, sword fighter, and gymnast, Shamil cut an impressive figure, standing six feet three inches and appearing taller still because of his heavy lambskin cap, the papakh. His flowing beard was dyed orange with henna, and his face was, in Tolstoy’s telling, “as immovable as though hewn out of stone.” His force of personality was such that one of his followers said that “flames darted form his eyes and flowers fell from his lips.”56 The escape from Gimri gave him a superhuman aura—an impression only heightened in 1839 when he escaped another Russian assault on another aoul by sending a raft loaded with straw dummies floating down a river while he and a few followers went in the opposite direction.57

  To keep a desperate resistance going against overwhelming odds required the ability not only to inspire hope but also to instill fear. Shamil was a master of both. He traveled everywhere with his own personal executioner, chopping off heads and hands for violating the dictates of Allah and his humble servant, the Commander of the Faithful in the Caucasus.58 He did not hesitate to slaughter entire aouls that did not heed his demands.

  When a group of Chechens, hard-pressed by the Russians, sought permission to surrender, they were so afraid of his wrath that they conveyed their request through Shamil’s mother, thinking this would make him more amenable. Upon hearing what she had to say, Shamil announced that he would seek divine guidance to formulate an answer. He spent the next three days and nights in a mosque, fasting and praying. He emerged with bloodshot eyes to announce, “It is the will of Allah that whoever first transmitted to me the shameful intentions of the Chechen people should receive one hundred severe blows, and that person is my own mother!” To the astonished gasps of the crowd, his murids seized the old lady and began beating her with a plaited strap. She fainted after the fifth blow. Shamil announced that he would take upon himself the rest of the punishment, and ordered his men to beat him with heavy whips, vowing to kill anyone who hesitated. He absorbed the ninety-five blows “without betraying the least sign of suffering.” Or so legend had it.59

  This street theater—or more accurately the tales told about it, which no doubt improved in the telling—helped animate Shamil’s followers to maintain a fierce resistance. Indeed modern-day Chechen rebels such as the late Shamil Basayev, alleged architect of the 2005 Beslan school siege that killed over 350 people, continue to be inspired by the original Shamil’s penchant for theatrical violence even if they have never been able to match his military success. He mobilized over ten thousand murids to conquer much of Chechnya and Dagestan and inflicted thousands of casualties on Russian pursuers. But just as extreme ferocity can backfire for a counterinsurgent, the same is true for an insurgent. Over time, his ruthlessness cost Shamil popular support—as it did for more recent Chechen rebels. Tribal chieftains who did not want to cede authority to this religious firebrand turned for support to the Russians. So did many ordinary villagers who balked at his demands for annual tax payments amounting to 12 percent of their harvest.60 Even some of Shamil’s top lieutenants defected, notably Hadji Murad, who went over to the infidels in 1851. He tried to return to the murids the following year but was killed by Russian troops—a tragic story that formed the basis of Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad.

  The Crimean War further damaged Shamil’s cause by flooding the Caucasus with fresh Russian troops, raising the total from 30,000 to 200,000, to deal with the threat of an Ottoman invasion.61 The British, French, and Turks—Russia’s enemies—talked of aiding the murids but did little. A British envoy who visited the region in 1855 was appalled that Shamil and his followers were trying to create “a new Empire in the Caucasus, based upon the principles of Mahomedan fanaticism and domination.”62

  In Iraq between 2007 and 2008 the success of the American “surge” was made possible by waning support for Al Qaeda in Iraq and an influx of American troops, but it still took the arrival of a new general with a fresh concept of counterinsurgency to deliver the coup de grâce to a faltering insurgency. Much the same thing happened in Chechnya and Dagestan in the 1850s. The Russian precursor of David Petraeus was Prince Alexander Bariatinsky. He took over as viceroy of the Caucasus in 1856, following the accession of his childhood friend as Tsar Alexander II. In contrast to the reactionary predecessor, Nicholas I, the new tsar was a modernizer and a liberal. He encouraged Bariatinsky to try a more conciliatory approach. Whereas Shamil traveled with his executioner, Bariatinsky traveled with his treasurer, doling out bribes to tribal leaders. Those elders also received more autonomy within the imp
erial system and protection from the fanatical murids. “I restored the power of the khans as a force inimical to theocratic principle,” Bariatinsky explained.63 In addition, he encouraged Muslim clerics to denounce Shamil as an apostate and to preach a doctrine of nonviolence. To address local grievances, he issued orders to allow women and children to escape from besieged aouls instead of simply killing everyone as in the past. He even sponsored greater educational opportunities for women. “I believe it is important,” Bariatinsky wrote, “to win the greatest possible devotion of the territory to the government, and to administer each nationality with affection and complete respect for its cherished customs and traditions.”64

  Like all great counterinsurgents, even the most liberal, Bariatinsky did not limit himself to such “hearts and minds” appeals. Building on the work of his predecessor Mikhail Vorontsov, he undertook large-scale clear-cutting of forests to flush out the murids, and he built bridges to reach their mountain aeries. He also issued his soldiers rifled weapons, which were considerably more effective than the flintlocks employed in the past. Rather than undertake futile punitive expeditions, he launched a systematic reduction of all rebel strongholds in Dagestan.

  The final push began in 1858 with three armies converging on the murids’ fortresses. Shamil’s aeries fell one after another until finally he was left with just 400 followers in the aoul of Gunib facing an army of 40,000. Seeing the hopelessness of the situation, Shamil surrendered on August 25, 1859. He pledged allegiance to the tsar and urged his followers to lay down their arms. Thus ended three decades of murid wars.65

  THE CIVILIZATIONAL STRIFE pitting Muslim raiders against countries full of unbelievers may not be new, but it has changed shape over the centuries. Shamil’s willingness to give up was characteristic of other nineteenth-century Muslim resistance leaders such as Samory Touré in West Africa and Abd el-Kader in Algeria—and quite different from most of their twenty-first-century successors. Few nineteenth-century rebels was as fanatical as modern-day jihadists. Many showed greater regard for innocent life, even the life of Christians and Jews, than is the case with Hezbollah or Al Qaeda. Abd el-Kader won widespread approbation, including a letter of thanks from Shamil, for interceding during his exile in Damascus to protect Christians from Muslim rioters in 1860. It is hard to imagine a leader of Al Qaeda showing similar regard for “crusaders.” In turn, it is hard to imagine Al Qaeda captives being treated as well as Shamil or Abd el-Kader were. Far from being sent to a detention facility such as Guantánamo, the former was given a country house in Russia and an allowance by the tsar, while the latter, after leading resistance against French rule in Algeria for fifteen years (1832–47), was provided a generous French pension and a comfortable exile.66

  One thing that has not changed over the years is the steep cost of these wars. The British traveler and historian John Baddeley summed up the Caucasus after the end of their “pacification”: “whole families exterminated, whole villages destroyed, whole communities decimated.”67 Even among the victors, the toll was high. According to a modern history, “From the annexation of eastern Georgia in 1801 until the end of the Circassian campaign in 1864, as many as twenty-four thousand Russian soldiers and eight hundred officers were killed in the Caucasus, plus perhaps three times that number wounded and captured.”68

  In other words, the pacification of the Caucasus was twenty-one times more costly than the pacification of the trans-Mississippi West. No wonder that Russian authors such as Tolstoy and Lermontov, who served in the Caucasus, produced a rich literature chronicling the Russian achievement in epic if ambivalent tones that in sheer artistic achievement put to shame the numerous novels and movies of the American West.69

  Rudyard Kipling aside, the British did not produce a comparable literature of empire. But the raw materials were certainly there. It is hard, for example, to imagine a more moving or tragic event than the famous retreat from Kabul in 1842, which, like the wars in the Caucasus, occurred at a time—prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century—when Europeans did not yet have an insuperable technological advantage over the peoples of Asia. Westerners may have possessed superior warships and artillery, but they did not yet have machine guns and repeating rifles, let alone radios, armored cars, and aircraft. Their opponents were often armed with rifles and muskets just as good as, if not better than, their own—and they fought on their home ground, which was often inhospitable to European attempts to bring massed firepower to bear. Even more brutally than Custer’s Last Stand, the First Afghan War showed how under such conditions the arrogance and carelessness of Westerners could lead them to disaster.

  24.

  DARK DEFILES

  The First Anglo-Afghan War, 1838–1842

  THEY BEGAN MARCHING at 9 a.m. on January 6, 1842. The snow outside Kabul was already “ankle deep.” From the start the stench of defeat wafted like a foul aroma over the 4,500 Anglo-Indian troops and 12,000 camp followers, including many women and children. There was no order to the march, and camp followers, pack animals (including a large number of camels), and baggage were hopelessly mixed up together. “Dreary indeed was the scene over which, with drooping spirits and dismal forebodings, we had to bend our unwilling steps,” wrote Lieutenant Vincent Eyre.

  While still in Kabul the British had been penned into their cantonment, their provisions running out, because of incessant attack from angry hordes of Afghans. They decided they had no choice but to march back to India. The Afghan leaders promised to let them go. But it soon became clear they had no intention of honoring their commitments. As the rear guard left Kabul around dusk on January 6, Afghans set fire to the cantonment. “The conflagration illuminated the surrounding country for several miles, presenting a spectacle of fearful sublimity,” Eyre wrote. Meanwhile other Afghans were sniping at the column with their long-range jezail rifle, “under which many fell.” Because of these attacks and sheer disorganization, the column advanced at a crawl and lost most of its baggage. Having covered just six miles, the refugees halted at 4 p.m. to make camp. There were hardly any tents or provisions. Tired soldiers and civilians alike sank down into the snow, and many died on the spot. Others froze overnight; their frostbitten legs “looked like charred logs of wood.”

  The next day offered no relief. Lady Florentia Sale, a brigadier’s wife, noted in her diary, “The force was perfectly disorganized, nearly every man paralyzed with cold, so as to be scarcely able to hold his musket or move. Many frozen corpses lay on the ground. . . . The ground was strewn with boxes of ammunition, plate, and property of various kinds. . . . The enemy soon assembled in great numbers. Had they made a dash at us, we could have offered no resistance, and all would have been massacred.”

  Make a dash? That was not the tribal way. Why risk a frontal battle with a still-potent force when it was possible to let the elements do their work and pick off the stragglers one by one? The Afghans, like all raiders everywhere, could detect weakness from miles away. They knew they could take their time in picking apart the feringees (foreigners). The foreigners, for their part, must have occasionally wondered, as they desperately struggled for survival, how they had gotten into this mess in the first place.70

  BRITISH INTEREST IN Afghanistan was sparked by the worrisome proximity of Russia’s advance in the Caucasus and Central Asia. In 1838 Lord Auckland, the governor-general of India, feared that Dost Muhammad Khan, the king of Afghanistan, was getting too friendly with the Russians. So he dispatched an expeditionary force to depose the Dost and replace him with Shah Shuja ul-Mulkh, a British client who had been living in exile in India since losing the Afghan throne three decades earlier.

  Despite the manifest imperfections in their own society revealed in works such as Oliver Twist (published in 1838), British officials were confident that they were representatives of a superior race with a particular genius for government, and they viewed it as their right to chastise or even replace rulers in distant lands “who,” as Kipling was later to write, “lack the lig
hts that guide us.”71 At almost the same time that the British were invading Afghanistan, they were becoming ensnared in another war on the other side of Asia—the First Opium War (1839–42), fought to open up the Chinese market to British exports, including opium. That conflict was to have a happier ending from the British perspective than the war in Afghanistan. But that was hardly apparent at first, for the invasion of Afghanistan began smoothly—as smoothly as would the Russian invasion nearly a century and a half later and the American invasion two decades after that.

  The grandly named Army of the Indus included 15,100 British and Indian soldiers (known as sepoys) and 6,000 mercenaries in Shah Shuja’s employ. They were accompanied by a staggering 38,000 camp followers (servants, storekeepers, prostitutes, and the like) and 30,000 camels to haul a vast array of baggage, including linens, wines, cigars, and other “comforts which remote countries and uncivilized people cannot supply.” Setting off in late 1838, this unwieldy expedition had little trouble as it marched to “Candahar” and from there to “Cabool,” thus confirming British expectations that their armies would have little to fear from supposedly inferior adversaries in the “Orient.” Dost Muhammad abdicated on August 2, 1839, and the British entered the capital shortly thereafter. The Dost would harass the British for the next year before giving up and being sent to exile in India. The only ominous development was the lack of enthusiasm for the country’s new sovereign. A British officer noted that Afghans viewed Shah Shuja’s arrival with “the most mortifying indifference.”