All eyes remain fixed on Afghanistan as the Biden administration continues its disastrous, haphazard withdrawal of American troops and personnel from the country and its capital, Kabul. As Bradley Bowman wrote in these pages last week, President Joe Biden and his flunkies have made clear the administration’s policy was built upon the absurd idea “that chaos was inevitable, and that inevitability argued against keeping troops there.”
It is true that Afghanistan has, throughout its long history, been home to near-constant chaos. Thanks to its particular geography, both in terms of its physical topography and its regional location, Afghanistan is in many ways predisposed to factional conflict. The country is dominated by the Hindu Kush mountain range, which runs through roughly its center, and the Pamir Mountains in the east. Its key cities developed necessarily in relation to these mountains, which serve to divide the country into three regions. Afghanistan also sits at the crossroads between Central, South, and East Asia, meaning it has been a strategically key region for historical great powers in India, China, and Iran and Persia. Because of these factors, Afghanistan has been home to a vast ethnic mix of tribes and peoples, frequently at war with one another and with the imperial powers constantly invading from outside.
The lands that would become modern-day Afghanistan arrived on the historical scene around 500 B.C. as satrapies of the Achaemenid Empire under its Persian king, Darius the Great. The most prominent of these satrapies were Bactria, located in northern Afghanistan above the Hindu Kush, and Sogdiana, in modern-day Uzbekistan. These lasted until the arrival of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., who completed his conquest of the Persian Empire by defeating King Darius III in the decisive Battle of Gaugamela in 331.
Yet Darius escaped the battlefield and fled with his few remaining satraps (Persian provincial governors) to Bactria. While fleeing, one of those commanders, a Bactrian by the name of Bessus, deposed Darius and killed him. Bessus then declared himself “King of Kings” and the new ruler of the Persian Empire despite the fact that virtually all of that “empire” was now in the hands of the Greeks. Perhaps Bessus considered the Persian rout just a flesh wound. Alexander didn’t take too kindly to someone else claiming his mantle as ruler of Persia and followed Bessus to Bactria in 329, where he captured the would-be emperor and had his nose and earlobes cut off before executing him.
When Alexander died, his cavalry commander Seleucus established the Seleucid Empire, which held tenuous, distant control over present-day Afghanistan until the middle of the third century when an independent Greek state was declared in Bactria. That kingdom was later washed out by the Parthians, nomadic invaders from Central Asia, who lasted for about a century until the Kushan Empire consolidated its rule over the region for the better part of four centuries.
The seventh century brought the Muslim conquests and the spread of Islam. The first great Islamic empire in Afghanistan was the Ghaznavid dynasty, which emerged in the mid-ninth century. Its capital was the city of Ghazni, which sits upon the road between Kabul and Kandahar, an important strategic position both in antiquity and in the present day. Using riches looted from Hindu temples in India, Ghaznavid rulers made Ghazni into a grand hub of art and learning, building universities and employing poets and Muslim historians.
The majesty of Ghazni didn’t last, however. In 1150, a Tajik conqueror from the mountainous kingdom of Ghur southeast of Herat came in vengeance against the faltering Ghaznavid dynasty and sacked the city. Ala al Din Husayn and his troops destroyed Ghazni, which is said “to have burned for seven days and seven nights.” For this, he earned himself the title Jahansuz, “the World Burner.” According to historian Tom Holland, Ala al Din then made the remaining Ghaznavid survivors take the burned earth of their sacked city to his capital, Firozkoh, in the mountains of Ghor. There they were slaughtered, and “the World Burner” had their blood mixed with the soil and used the resulting matter to make mortar to build towers to his victory.
Less than a century later saw the arrival of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes to Central Asia and Afghanistan, who committed similar atrocities. In 1381, Timur, or Tamerlane, was able to defeat the remaining Mongol rulers in the region and created the Timurid Empire from his capital of Samarkand, located in modern Uzbekistan. Timur was severely disabled on his right side from an early childhood injury and likely only stood about 5 feet, 7 inches. Nevertheless, he is considered the last great nomadic conqueror of the steppes, who heralded himself as “the Sword of Islam.” According to legend, Timur also had his soldiers ride down the side of a mountain on their shields, which isn’t entirely relevant but still awesome.
In 1504, 100 years after the death of Timur and the collapse of the Timurid Empire, Zahir al Din Muhammad Babur fled Samarkand to the then-impoverished outpost city of Kabul. For the next 20 years, Babur, himself a descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, used Afghanistan as a base from which to launch his irredentist conquest of India in order to take back his ancestral home. With weapons and aid from the Safavids in Iran and the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, Babur won an unlikely victory in 1526 against the sultan of Dehli and established the Mughal Empire.
Those who argue that “geography is destiny” have a strong case in Afghanistan. Yet to think, as Biden does, that chaos is inevitable, and thus we should wash our hands of it, is to ignore clear lessons from the history of Afghanistan. Rather than some Hegelian theory of tectonic, impersonal forces moving events outside of our control, from Alexander and Bessus to Babur and beyond, Afghanistan is rife with examples of individual action, whether good or bad, driving monumental events. According to the Persian historian Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani, Genghis Khan only invaded Afghanistan after the shah of the Khwarezmid Empire burned off the beards of his Mongol ambassadors. Less than two years later, he had wiped the Khwarezmid Empire off the map.
Twenty years of war in Afghanistan, wiped out in a week. It’s the “Graveyard of Empires,” perhaps, but don’t pretend it’s “inevitable.”
