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cincinnatusvirtue · 4 years ago

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The First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-1842): Britain’s Great Game ends up meeting a dead end...

The region of Afghanistan has a long and varied history, one that is rugged like its topography of many mountain ranges, valleys and deserts. Its mix of barren wastes, snowy caps and forested patches of oasis. Its history has placed it at the crossroads of the geopolitical focus over the centuries. The focus of empires and of trade, often trying to assert its own path in history but so often a focal point of foreign ambition. As always to appreciate the modern we need to go back to earlier times.

Early History:

-Afghanistan is a patchwork of peoples, a testament to its status as a crossroads of empires over the ages. Primarily it sits in the eastern end of the ethnolinguistic region of Iranian peoples, a mix of ethno linguistically related but diverse groups of peoples from Persians (Farsi), Kurds, Ossetians, Baloch to Pashtun and Tajik among others. The latter two being the primary groups found in Afghanistan today, along with smaller Iranian groups like the Hazara & Baloch. Others include the Turkic Uzbek and Turkmens and a small number of Arabs.

-In ancient times Afghanistan was home to Iranian groups known as Bactrians & Sogdians who inhabited portions of the country. These peoples were incorporated into their fellow Iranians sphere of influence, the first Persian or Achaemenid Empire. This empire stretched from the Indus Valley in the East (modern Pakistan/India) to Greece and the Balkans in the West. Members of these groups served in the Persian Empire’s army but maintained their own traditions too. It is widely believed that the religion of the Persian Empire and of most Iranians in this time was Zoroastrianism, founded by Zoroaster in the region of Balkh in North Central Afghanistan. This religion would serve in some ways as an influence on the monotheistic Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity & Islam later on history.

-During Alexander the Great’s march to conquer the Persian Empire, having defeated the Persians in three major battles and taken the western half of their empire, he sought to conquer the eastern half too which took him into the modern region of Afghanistan. The Macedonian armies under Alexander founded new cities here and brought forth Greek culture which began to merge with the local religion and culture. This Hellenistic culture spread as far as India as with Greek paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism all mixing in the same cities as times. In the wake of Alexander’s death, his empire which essentially replaced the Persian Empire had no set structure of succession and quickly dissolved into portions going to his various generals. The largest expanse of which was the Seleucid Empire which spanned the whole of the Iranian plateau to India and to the Levant, this included Afghanistan. The region underwent many changes with portions being given to the Indian superpower of the day, the Mauryan Empire and later a successful uprising against the Seleucids, forming the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom which found itself at war with the Parthian Empire, a resurgent Iranian Empire which swept away the remnants of Seleucid Greek rule. These wars left Afghanistan open to nomadic invasions, namely from the nomadic branch of Iranians from the Eurasian steppe, coming in different waves. The Yuezhi and Scythians, the Scythians would later establish a kingdom that controlled portions of the region, the Indo-Scythian Kingdom as did the Yuezhi which became the Kushan Empire. Eventually this gave way to the second Persian Empire or Sassanid Empire which took over the region.

-All the while this region sat along the Silk Road spanning from the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire in the West to the Han Chinese in the East. Goods and peoples of different backgrounds travelled through the region, most just passing through but they all shared their influence, establishing Afghanistan as an important crossroads of commerce and not just conquest. Additionally, ancient sources attest to portions of Afghanistan, namely the region around the city of Herat being a major source of grain due to fertile farmlands in Central Asia as well as supplying vineyards of grapes for winemaking in the Persian world.

-In terms of religion, Afghanistan reflected the many changes of its many ruling peoples religions remaining a hub of Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism along with lingering elements of Greek culture. This would change with the eventual downfall of the Sassanids in the 7th Century AD to the Islamic Caliphates and their gradual expansion over the Iranian plateau. Overtime Islam began to gradually take hold as the religion over the area but it was still set side by side with numerous other faiths and lived in relative tolerance to the other faiths. Eventually the Ghaznavid and Ghurid & Khwarazmian dynasties ruled over the area, a mix of Iranian and Turkic peoples who gradually made Islam the unifying religion of the region by the Middle Ages.

-The Mongols would invade and devastate the region in the 13th century. The devastation was so complete that the many settled cities were ruined, forcing the peoples of Afghanistan back into rural agrarian societies, something which has not been fully removed from the majority of Afghan society today. Overtime the peoples of Afghanistan, a region long noted for its literary, especially Islamic poetic contributions and had been a hotbed crossroads of cultural interfacing, was now reverted to an mostly tribal agrarian society once more. With some centers of learning gone forever Its peoples divided along ethnolinguistic grounds and into clans from there.

-There was somewhat a renaissance in the ages with the Turco-Mongol ruler, Timur and his empire ruled with new additions to architecture and culture contributed to the region but this was short lived. Meanwhile, a descendant of Timur named Babur would base himself in Afghanistan before launching an invasion of India and upon overtaking the Sultanate of Delhi, became the founder and ruler of the new Mughal Empire, the Islamic superpower that was to overrun much of India and dominate the subcontinent and beyond in the coming two centuries.

-Meanwhile, Afghanistan once more found itself on the fringe of an Iranian power, half the country at max was under the control of the Safavid Empire, a Kurdish dynasty that took power in Persia and expanded to reclaim historical “Persian” lands. Indeed the Persian (Farsi) language was regarded as the lingua franca of the region for centuries and was the language of the learned and most educated in the Islamic world as a whole, whereas Arabic was for mostly religious celebration. Persian was the language of government and the arts.

-Safavid rule was tenuous at best and their primary focus was facing the Turkish Ottomans to the west, leaving much of Afghanistan to de-facto local rule. Here the tribal societies that have dominated Afghanistan to the modern era, in part a result of the resumption of rural life after the Mongol destruction of the major cities held sway, with tribal leaders functioning as more or less warlords among the Pashtun and Tajik peoples and their various clans among others ruled over certain sections of the country. Only Islam united them in their differences. Much time was spent raiding and fighting each other, along with the few travelers who ventured into this increasingly isolated and remote portion of the world.

-The Hotak dynasty of Pashtuns had a hand in the downfall of the Safavids which was increasingly corrupted and weakened by intrigue at the royal court. In the wake of this, a Turco-Persianate ruler named Nader Shah took the reins in Persia and put down the Hotaks before setting up his own short lived Persian Empire, known as the Afsharid dynasty which pillaged the Mughals in India and defeated the Ottomans several times before Nader Shah was killed and his successors failed to maintain control. In Afghanistan, another Pashtun dynasty, the Durrani took power in the middle 18th century.

-The Durrani would for the first time in the modern age have a local Afghan power base that expanded beyond the borders of Afghanistan with any longer lasting impact. These mostly Pashtun peoples supported by some Persians invaded and controlled portions of India, defeating the Hindu superpower, the Maratha Empire at the peak of their powers at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761. However the Durrani dynasty and its Emirate of Afghanistan, was weakened through ongoing external and internal pressures, military defeats from the Qajar dynasty in Persia and the new Sikh Empire in the Indian Punjab put closed in their borders. Eventually, internal conflict led to the fall of the Durrani dynasty with one its Emirs (leader), Shuja Shah going into exile in India hoping to return to rule. By 1823 the country had fractured into many smaller entities with civil war taking place until by 1837 Dost Mohammed Khan, founder of the Barakzai dynasty took power as Emir and reunited the country...

The Great Game:

-The exile of Shuja Shah and rise of the Barakzai dynasty in Afghanistan after much civil war by the end of the 1830′s was the state into which Afghanistan again entered wider geopolitics. Namely amidst the geopolitical struggle between the British and Russian Empires. Called the Great Game by the British as Tournament of Shadows by the Russians, this rivalry for geopolitical and economic influence was a likened to a game of chess whereby each power vied for influence, mostly through proxies, a precursor to the Cold War of the 20th Century between the US and USSR. Afghanistan it was hoped by both Empires would be one of those proxies.

-The British since the 16th and 17th centuries had pushed to become a naval power as well and felt that international commerce was the way to expand their economic and political power. Along with the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch they all took an interest in naval power and setting up colonies in other parts of the world. In Asia, the Indian subcontinent became their primary focus. It was rich in resources such as tradable goods like cotton, silks, spices, jewels, salt, opium, various minerals and other commodities. It was also a vital link in the idea of a global empire in protecting commerce links on the way to Indonesia and China. Denying their main rival, France, influence in India was of high importance and by the mid 18th century, they became the unrivalled European power defeating the French at the Battle of Plassey during the Seven Years War. India was not united in any meaningful fashion at the time locally with various empires, kingdoms and principalities fighting locally over this vast area. They were divided by various ethnicities, religions and the usual drives of personal power and wealth. Due to this division, the Europeans who first established small trading factories gradually could expand their power to the interior of India and through mutual alliances of convenience between them and their local Indian trading partners they could compete with other Europeans. For some Indians, the European powers were initially more to their benefit, their presence was small but their weapons and military advantages were far superior giving them a strategic advantage over their opponents. In time, this power dynamic changed as the Indians had to continually grant the Europeans more power, namely the British who routinely defeated the Indians and began ceding more territory to them. Also the British’s vast wealth could now employ Indians against other Indian powers. Especially after France’s defeat at Plassey, no other Europeans seriously threatened the British interests. Britain’s East India Company, a joint-stock venture given great autonomy in the name of the British Crown had its own military, its own military officers school and total monopolies over half the world’s trade at one point.

-The British East India Company’ army had British officers, mostly Indian rank and file soldiers called sepoys and occasional regular British army regiments to complement it in its venture to conquer the whole of India by any means necessary. The East India Company also known as the Company had since the 17th century established a number of trading posts, most importantly Calcutta which was the capital of Bengal in the eastern portion of the country. This was decisively established after defeating the French and remnants of the crumbling Mughal Empire which they supported and which had declined since the 18th century due to the rising power of the Maratha Empire, India’s last great Hindu superpower before the British era.

-Britain focused their efforts of conquest on south India, first defeating after much initial difficulty the Kingdom of Mysore, run by Tipu Sultan. Later, battling the Maratha Empire which had piqued by the mid 18th century. Following their defeat by the Afghan Durrani Empire at the Third Battle of Panipat, the Maratha started a gradual decentralization that led to civil war, the Company got involved trying to place their preferred candidates in power in the Maratha hierarchy. The first war saw a British defeat but by the early 19th century, the British with Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, fought a second war, defeating the Marathas at Assaye from which they gained territory. They finished off the Marathas in 1818 and had by then essentially absorbed the whole of India with exception of the Punjab where the Sikh Empire had arisen under Maharaja Ranjit Singh at the end of the 18th century and grew in power in the first decades of the 19th century. The Sikhs had thrown off the last remnants of the Mughals in their realm and then pushed out the Afghans on their borders too.

-The Sikh Empire like many Indian powers used foreign mercenaries and officers from Europe & America to join their ranks, supply them with European and American style military training doctrine and supply them with the latest in military technology which far surpassed anything made in India at the time. The Sikh army was quite strong and had French officers providing most of the training, the Company’s default position was to make an alliance with them. The Sikh’s had troubles with Afghanistan, namely over the city of Peshawar and the Khyber Pass.

-The Russians for their part had expanded from Russia over the whole of Siberia towards the Pacific, this process had begun in the late 1500’s and was completed by the end of the 17th century. Leading to Russian exploration and colonization in Alaska and elsewhere in the Pacific during the 18th century.

-Russian expansion into Central Asia was in part a result of their off and on conflicts with the Ottomans and Persians in the past. By the second decade of the 19th century with the threat of Napoleonic France gone, their attention turned to maintaining a balance of power in Europe and a free rein in Central Asia. The threat to their influence as they saw it was Britain, which Russian tsars, namely Nicholas I, viewed with suspicion as far too “liberal” for their belief in absolute monarchy and conservative values. The British in turn were suspicious of Russian threats to their geopolitical spheres, namely gaining too much power at the expense of the Ottoman Empire or more directly to British India which was after the American Revolution to become the crown jewel in their global empire.

-The Russians gradually defeated the various Islamic emirates in Central Asia, taking over modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The process was drawn out over several decades but through military conquest by the late 19th century would be achieved. It was as this Russian encroachment neared Afghanistan, that alarm amongst the British in India began to be raised…

The British Misinterpret Everything:

-Britain’s government and the East India Company misinterpreted the Russian view of events. It is true Russia sought to expand its influence but the British interpreted the expansion into Central Asia as meaning only one thing, eventual invasion and conquest of British India. Only Tsar Paul I in 1800 seriously pressed for an invasion of British India but he was assassinated and the plans for invasion never thought of as a practical reality by most in Russia’s military were cancelled. The Russians did want increased political influence in the area but even the most conservative of Russian tsars always believed a reproach with Britain could be obtained.

-The British also saw civil war in Afghanistan as well as the strength of the Sikh Empire as threats to their border and greater sphere of influence in India. The conflict between the Sikhs and Afghans meant they had to choose sides, they couldn’t be an alliance with both. Precisely, because of this conflict and the greater specter of Russian influence did Britain find itself on a course for war.

-In Afghanistan, the British and Russians had spies and intelligence agents acting as emissaries. The British had Scotsman Alexander Burnes, who joined the British East India Company. Burnes was stationed in Kabul and in turn his presence spurred the Russians to counter with their own envoy, the Polish-Lithuanian born Jan Prosper Witkiewicz. Both British and Russian envoys hoped to make an alliance with Afghanistan’s emir, Dost Mohammad Khan against the other. The emir for his part sought to regain Peshawar, recently lost to the Sikhs. This, however put the British in an awkward position, Company controlled India bordered the Sikh Empire and both sides had a mutual if tense respect for one another. The Sikh Empire was the last major independent kingdom of India outside of British rule and while Britain sought to eventually neutralize it, now was not the time. Furthermore, the Sikhs had a large standing army, with European doctrine, modern weapons and European officers who could pose a threat to British India, a threat they saw as greater than Afghanistan. Afghanistan had no formal army, only tribal men with tribal loyalties but nominally served their overlord the emir in times of national defense.

-Dost Mohammed Khan wasn’t enthused about the Russians to begin with but he believed the entertaining of an alliance might force the British to offer their alliance. Instead, given the British calculations of realizing they couldn’t support the Afghans over the more powerful Sikhs but also couldn’t abide the possibility of s Russian allied Afghanistan, moved closer to a casus belli for war.

-Burnes was apparently distraught at the arrival of the Russian envoy in 1836-1837, he wrote panicked reports. The Russians in turn reported on British maneuvers in Kabul. The British governor-general of India, Lord Auckland sent what amounted to a cease and desist letter to Dost Mohammed Khan. The letter was very demanding of Khan, ordering him to not negotiate with the Russians or even receive them as envoys. Khan was angered by this but wanted to avoid war. He had his own advisor, an American named Josiah Harlan talk to Burnes. Burnes argued he could only report on matters not make policy directly himself, Harlan saw this as merely stalling on his part and on his advice Khan expelled the British mission.

-Lord Auckland was now determined to force Afghanistan to submit to British demands. Furthemore, Russia and Afghanistan couldn’t come to a deal and their mission too broke down. Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s major western city, Herat was besieged by Qajar Persia with Russian material support. Fearful the Russians might use this as a pretext to invade Afghanistan proper, Auckland would in turn use it as a pretext to restore “order” in Afghanistan.

-Auckland reached a reproach with Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Maharaja. His goal was to fend off the Persians and their Russian support. He would also depose Dost Mohammed Khan as emir, seeing him as too unfriendly to British interests by his earlier negotiations with the Russians, as well his conflict with the Sikhs, who the British treated as a nominal ally at the time. His plan included placing the former Durrani emir, Shuja Shah on the throne once more. Shah had lived in exile in British india since 1818 and had been deposed in 1809. In the three decades since he last reigned, he was hardly remembered by anyone, aside from those who remembered his cruelty that had led to his deposition in the first place. Shah had been given a Company pension and comfortable living in exile, considered a useful pawn in British geopolitics, he in turn was willing to ally with anyone who would support his restoration to the throne. Auckland was led to believe that Shah was actually popular and that the instability in Afghanistan meant Khan was unpopular himself, the inverse turned out to be the case...

The First-Anglo-Afghan War:

-By October 1838, Auckland sent the so called Simla Declaration which resolved the British and the Sikhs to march in Afghanistan and restore Shuja Shah to the throne on the grounds that Dost Mohammed Khan was unpopular, had lead to instability within the country, was a threat to the Sikhs and British by extension and given rise to the prospect of foreign (Russian) interference.

-In Punjab, Lord Auckland and Ranjit Singh held a grand parade of the so-called Grand Army of the Indus which would march in Afghanistan jointly to bring “order”. Two things happened in the interim. The Persian siege of Herat was called off and the Russian tsar had recalled his envoy altogether. The British pretexts for war ended before war began. Auckland and others heading the Company’s policy in India however were deadset to commit to a military operation, believing Afghanistan essentially needed to be put in its place, meaning it needed a British backed ruler who would amount to a puppet and could put British interests in the region first.

-December 1838 saw the British East India Company’s 21,000 strong army set out for Afghanistan. Composed of British and Indian troops (mostly rank and file Indians and British officers) along with nearly 40,000 Indian camp followers, Indian servants, families and even prostitutes following too. Ranjit Singh in the end backed out of the plan, not sending any troops to aid in Afghanistan.

-The British trek took months to cross the snowy Hindu Kush mountains. Finally they reached the area near Kandahar in April 1839. From there they waited two months until better conditions in the summer to march to Kabul. The British found themselves having to besiege the fortress-city of Ghazni in July. Eventually upon destroying a weakened gate, they breached the city and after much fighting captured the city.

-Khan upon hearing of Ghazni’s fall, offered a surrender to the British, he was replied with removal of his position on the throne to a life of exile in India, this was unacceptable, so the march to Kabul continued, though Ghazni remained occupied.

-A battle took place outside of Kabul which forced Dost Mohammed Khan to flee the city, the British entered and Shuja Shah was placed on the throne. The war was seemingly at end, the main objective achieved, Khan’s removal and Shah placed on the throne. Most of the British Indian force returned to India, leaving some 8,000 to occupy Afghanistan in various places from Kandahar to Kabul.

-The initial invasion was successful but the occupation and continued support of Shuja Shah was costly in terms of public relations for the British. Shah resumed his cruelty, he punished and executed those who he considered traitors from decades before. By his own admission, his people were dogs in need of “obedience” and corrective punishment. He raised taxes which hurt the already impoverished economy. This hurt his limited popularity along with his essentially martial rule, upheld by the British. Now, a guerilla war phase was being instituted by various Afghan groups, some loyal to Khan and some just offended by the presence of foreign invaders.

-The British for their part did not help matters. Many officers imported their families from India into Kabul, where they took residence in a cooler mountain valley climate, they created gardens and set up English country gentrified life in the Afghan capital. Some English customs weren’t especially troublesome to the Afghans, tea drinking socials, cricket and polo, even ice skating on frozen ponds in the winter which actually amazed the Afghans having never before seen such a thing.

-However, the more the British lingered, the sense they'd never leave crept in, their presence in the daily markets brought raised prices which coupled with higher taxes meant they were linked with such economic hardship. The British also drank alcohol and had wine cellars fully stocked, in a devout Muslim country this was offensive given Islamic prohibitions on alcohol. However, most trying for the Afghan populace was the sexual relations between the occupiers and Afghan women. British men soon found themselves acquiring the services of willing Afghan women for prostitution. Afghanistan was quite poor to begin with and coupled with hardships brought on by the invasion a number of Afghan women, married or unmarried found themselves becoming prostitutes to the British. Afghan women realized even the lowest paid British soldier was more wealthy than Afghan men, so their turns to prostitution were not unsurprising. Others willingly entered into romantic relationships with the British and indeed some British officers did marry Afghan women, including daughters of tribal leaders. This development offended the Afghan men, particularly the Pashtun who had a sense of society that revolved around honor to manhood, any slight real or imagined could be responded to with justified violence in their code of honor. The Pashtun men could enact honor killings on women who fraternized with the British, on the grounds that these women brought shame to the men in their family for engaging in immoral behavior and for sleeping with infidel Christians.

-The guerilla war that developed in reaction to the British also spurred their sense of prolonging their stay. Shuja Shah knew more British was the only way to ensure his continued reign. Isolated British outposts or patrols could be attacked in ambush due to fighters whose entire fighting style relied less on technical skill or discipline beyond waging ambushes and raids. Most Afghan warriors would have been armed with little more than an old matchlock musket or possibly a dagger or sword.

-The British nevertheless were negotiating with Shuja Shah to develop a standing army and do away with the tribal levy system. He argued there was not enough infrastructure or more succinctly, funding to maintain a standing army. So the British occupation dragged on.

-Dost Mohammed Khan was eventually taken prisoner and exiled to India. However, his sons continued to wage the war on their dynasty’s behalf.

- By 1841, George Elphinstone was in charge of the British forces in Kabul, most of his time was spent bed ridden with gout and other ailments.

-Early November, saw in motion a planned uprising. For months through Shuja, tribal chieftains had their loyalty earned by bribes of money. The British used this as a way to pacify the resistance with some success but it was a tenuous development. The spark for the uprising in Kabul came from British agent, Alexander Burnes. Burnes had been particularly well known for his sexual relations and womanizing of Afghan women and was viewed as largely a focal point of the resentment Afghans had towards the British. The final straw came when a slave girl from Kashmir who belonged to a Pashtun chieftain escaped to Burnes home. At first the chieftain sent retainers to retrieve the girl, only to find Burnes in the act of sleeping with her himself, Burnes own guards then beat the retainers and sent them on their way. The chieftain, having his code of honor offended along with other chieftains, proclaimed jihad. The next morning a large riot broke out at Burnes residence in Old Kabul, away from the British camp which had moved to the outside of town. Burnes, his brother and others were hacked to death by the angry mob, their beheaded skulls placed on pikes for display. Shuja Shah sent a single British regiment to put down the events, it suffered casualties and was forced to return. Shuja realized the people were rebelling against him and the British and he was effectively overthrown.

-Elphinstone was gripped with indecision on how to deal with the matter, he wrote to the Company Civil Administrator, William Macnaughten. Macnaughten tried to negotiate with Akbar Khan, son of Dost Mohammed, with an eye towards making him vizier, in exchange for extending the British stay. Macnaughten also negotiated with other tribal leaders to assassinate Akbar Khan. The news of these two faced dealings led to Macnaughten being captured and killed by Khan’s men, his body dragged through the streets of Kabul.

-Elphinstone realized it was time to withdraw, the British presence no longer tenable. The Afghans had not attacked the encampment directly due to the concentrated British strength but these appeared to be only a matter of time. He made the decision to withdraw the garrison, 4,500 strong with 12,000 camp followers including family and mostly Indian servants and some Afghan women who preferred life with their British lovers as opposed to facing the wrath of their angered families who would kill them for shaming them.

-January 1842 saw Elphinstone’s withdrawal in a massive column through snowy passes. The retreat dragged out for weeks with little food, bad weather and repeated attacks from Pashtun guerillas who attacked and killed as many as they could. Repeatedly, Elphinstone met with Akbar Khan to call off the attacks, Khan allowed the English women and children to return to Kabul to be ransomed later, but the Indian camp followers were not spared, they were forced to freeze to death in the snowy passes. Meanwhile as Elphinstone and the army marched on, the attacks continued with Khan playing Elphinstone for a fool. Eventually, he treated Elphinstone to a good meal before taking him prisoner, Elphinstone would die as a hostage some months later. The 44th Foot, the only all British regiment made a famous last stand fending off many Afghan charges before being overrun. The British column was mostly starved, frozen or hacked to death in the passes, most of the victims being Indian sepoys or their families and camp followers (servants) of the British officers. Some British women and children remained in Afghan captivity for a time, with some being ransomed and released, most being well treated. Some women were forced to marry their captors and others as children were adopted into Afghan families, some living into the early 20th century in Afghanistan. Only one British doctor and some scattered sepoys survived the ordeal at all. Much of this episode was detailed by Lady Florentia Sale in a diary, later published to great acclaim. She would spend nine months in captivity before her and her daughter were rescued by the British.

-The Afghans stormed the other British garrisons but all these attacks were repelled, in turn British reinforcements were arriving from India. These reinforcements subsequently beat Akbar Khan in a pitched battle. Plans were underway for a retaking of Kabul with a new larger force but Lord Auckland suffered a stroke and was replaced by Lord Ellenborough as Governor-General of India. Plus, elections in Britain’s parliament brought a new government with orders to change policy, withdraw from Afghanistan, which found itself in a military stalemate. A last battle took place in which Akbar Khan who was routinely defeated in pitched battles was beaten again with huge casualties at Kabul. However, the measure was merely punitive for the deaths of Elphinstone’s column. The Company at government orders withdrew all British troops from Afghanistan, having inflicted numerous deaths on the Afghan side and destroyed more forts of theirs but politically been unable to change the situation.

-Dost Mohammaed Khan was allowed to return where he co-ruled with his son Akbar who eventually died in 1845, possibly poisoned on orders from his father, who is rumored to have misgivings about his ambition. Dost Mohhamed Khan’s primary goal was to restore Peshawar from the Sikhs all along, during the Anglo-Sikh Wars that followed in the decade ((1845-1846 & 1848-1849), he was nominally neutral albeit he somewhat supported his old rivals the Sikhs with an Afghan mercenary force, still hoping to negotiate Peshawar. These wars resulted in British victory over the Sikhs, the last of Indian independent kingdoms fell and India was more or less completely in Company hands, the Afghan border nor directly bordered British India in the Punjab. The British never returned Peshawar despite their own promises to do so, but Dost having faced his own temporary overthrow and captivity realized, the British were far too powerful to resist in the long run and so he maintained quiet on his part, staying neutral during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, ruling until his death in 1863.

-The British for their part were defeated in the first Anglo-Afghan War, though their military generally held the upper hand in pitched battles and their initial invasion for all its hubris and motivations was successful. It was the occupation that proved too much of an expense than originally endeavored. British arrogance and ignorance of local custom also worsened reception of their plans. In the end, it was British paranoia, belief in imperial prestige and jingoism that had led to a war that while a limited military success was a political failure, having achieved none of their goals, which seemed to shift as the situation shifted. It was a confused war, brought on by people on all sides misreading the events surrounding them and made worse by their stubborn commitment to short-sighted policy goals and ego. Britain would avoid venturing into Afghanistan for nearly forty years when similar disputes over diplomacy led to a second war...

#19th century #military history #afghanistan #the great game #british imperialism #british east india company #india #islam #pashtun #tajik #persian #russian empire #guerilla warfare #kabul

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aftaabmagazine · 6 years ago

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Conversation with Jamil Jan Kochai, author of "99 Nights in Logar"

By Farhad Azad

[caption: The cover of Jamil Jan Kochai debut novel]

Jamil Jan Kochai's multi-layered debut novel 99 Nights in Logar opens inside Afghanistan at a time when Khaled Hosseini first book The Kite Runner was making waves in the US. While Hosseini's story depicts the urban Kabuli perspective, Kochai's narrates the rural Logari experience. The distance between Logar and Kabul maybe a short 45-minute drive, however in many ways, the two places are worlds apart.

In this rural environment, we are guided by the main character, Marwand, a 12-year-old Afghan-American from the capital of California. He is spending his summer vacation in his parent's modest village located near the Logar - Kabul roadway.

Being so young, he is collectively accepted as a local by his large extended family and the people he meets. Marwand, along with his younger male family members, leads several hairy adventures. They organize a disastrous search party to find the fierce family dog, avoid local gunmen, including a couple of young Taliban, and don burqas attempting to join a women's wedding party.

Humorous, tragic, and honest, the novel requires careful reading because the multi-layered stories are intricate and dense. The primary reader is the Afghan-American who will connect more with the native terms and phrases skillfully crafted by the author, along with particular cultural nuances. Through the stories of the different characters— young and old, male and female —Kochai writes an authentic narrative about the people of his native Logar, one of Afghanistan's most picturesque regions— romantically beautiful on the surface and dark and complex on the inside.

I chatted with Jamil Jan Kochai about his novel, here is our conversation.

Farhad Azad: What did your parents think about your desire to be a writer vs. the usual lawyer, doctor, or engineer?

Jamil Jan Kochai: At first, they were definitely resistant to the idea of writing as a career. Up until my third year of undergrad, my father was still trying to convince me to switch to engineering or computer science. For a time, I was able to quell their worries because I'd actually planned to go to law school. But, gradually, as I won a few writing awards at Sac State and eventually became the commencement speaker for my graduating class, both they and I realized that I was much more gifted as a writer than I ever would be as a lawyer. So, after I graduated from Sac State and entered the Masters in Creative Writing Program at UC Davis, my parents began to fully support my creative writing endeavors. They let me interview them for stories, they respected the time I needed to read and write, and they never doubted or scolded me for pursuing such a risky career path. Their faith in my abilities made me work even harder. I read and wrote like a mad man. Alhamdullilah, their support was honestly astonishing. I couldn't have written this novel without them.

Farhad Azad: Were you familiar with Afghan writers and literature growing up?

Jamil Jan Kochai: I was very familiar with Pashtun poetry. My father was an admirer of Rahman Baba, Khushal Khattak, and Ghani Khan. He would often recite their poetry from memory. I was also familiar with some of our local folktales and our more culturally expansive epics. Laila and Majnun, Farhad and Shirin, and those sorts of tales. From an early age, I was taught to appreciate the poetic arts and Afghanistan's literary lineage.

Farhad Azad: Post 9/11, how did you deal with the backlash growing up?

Jamil Jan Kochai: In many ways, I think the backlash, the alienation, and the condemnation I felt in the years after 9/11 only made me prouder to be a Muslim and an Afghan. Even as a young kid, I was very defensive of my cultural heritage and my religious beliefs. I became rebellious. I would argue with my teachers about Afghan and American history. I questioned what I was taught in high school, and by the time I got to college, I had this immense curiosity about all these differing but interconnecting lineages of imperialism and warfare. By studying the American War in Afghanistan, I learned about the civil wars, the Soviet Invasion, and the Anglo-Afghan Wars, which led me to study the broader histories of colonization and imperialism throughout the world. This all had a profound impact on my writing.

Farhad Azad: There are many stories told by the various characters in 99 Nights in Logar, how did you decide to include them in the work?

Jamil Jan Kochai: I realized that my stories themselves can encapsulate all these other stories. There was this moment when I was writing the novel itself when I hit this barrier in the road, and I didn't know what would happen next. Once I realized that we had this rich tradition of oral storytelling and all these stories within my own family, I sort of allowed the characters in the novel to tell their own stories. That's when the project really hit its stride.

Farhad Azad: Afghans have a habit of not finishing their stories which you included in your work.

Jamil Jan Kochai: It is sort of magical in that way. When I first started this project, I would interview my father. It was really important to me that I recorded some of his stories from his life, but I would try to do this chronologically, starting with his childhood. But it was difficult trying to get stories out of him. He would say, "Oh, I had a regular childhood."

I couldn't get the details I wanted. Later on, we'd be sitting somewhere. We would be drinking tea, and he would see something on TV. It would remind him of this beautiful, incredible story from his life that he didn't mention to me in my interview. And he would tell the story and stop at some place, often times a place where it would be emotionally difficult for him to continue the story. It would be about a significant loss, and he would have to stop. It took me a while to be patient with his stories, to learn that certain stories didn’t always have pleasant resolutions, that some stories you had to piece together, a memory at a time, like a puzzle.

Farhad Azad: Telling stories is a quality that Afghans possess, including the ability to describe anything in very fine detail.

Jamil Jan Kochai: It's incredible. I remember on a trip with my aunt to Yosemite, and out of nowhere, just because of the mountains and the forest, she started to tell us the story of when she escaped out of Logar during the war, going through the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan to escape to Peshawar. She told this incredibly detailed story of carrying her little sister through the mountains and then getting lost. Then my father is eventually finding them on horseback. Then she remembers calling my father's name and the echoes coming back to her through the mountain. It was so visual, and it was so essential at the same time. It really made me appreciate it. At a storytelling level, how talented my family members are at telling stories.

Farhad Azad: For the past two decades you have traveled to Logar, but your trips to the region have shortened in length.

Jamil Jan Kochai: When I first went to Logar, I was 6 years old, I had all these really precious magical, memories of swimming in these streams, with my cousin, these were some of my greatest memories. When I came back from Logar, I was telling everyone how really beautiful Afghanistan was. And everyone was so surprised that my reaction to the time because the Taliban were in control. So everyone had this very grim vision of Afghanistan. I was telling everyone how much I loved it and how beautiful and incredible experience. And then I went back when I was 12, and it was again an incredible experience with some of the most precious memories that I still have is from that summer that I spent in Afghanistan those three months especially in Logar.

Then I had the opportunity to go back in 2012, but it just seemed like progressively Logar was becoming more and more dangerous. And so when I went back in 2012, the security situation hadn't completely deteriorated, but it was a very murky situation. During the day, government forces were in control and then at night, the Taliban had control over the village. And I had to be very careful about speaking because of my accent, I had to be careful about telling people who I was and where I was from. Nonetheless, I still got to spend a decent amount of time. I was 19. I spent a great deal of time in my grandfather's orchard. I spend a great deal of time with my cousins. It was another beautiful experience.

But when I went back in 2017, by then the security situation in my village had gotten so bad that even villagers who had lived their whole lives there were afraid to go back because of the gunfights and the executions and the bombings and these things had become almost a daily occurrence.

My uncles and cousins, who had seen war and gone through warfare, they were completely afraid to enter Logar. They wouldn't allow me to spend a night in Logar. My father, brother, and cousins, and I ended up taking a very short trip through my home village. The whole village had been emptied out because one of the militias had shot a rabid dog with a machine gun. Everyone thought it was a gunfight. We entered my father's village, and it was a ghost town. We drove in, and there was this incredibly heart-wrenching experience. My father's cousin, who had grown up in Logar and my father looked afraid. But we were determined to visit the grave of my father's brother, and other family members' graves. We said our prayers, and we came out as quickly as we came.

I just remembered being incredibly saddened by the way that the security situation in Logar had developed. My father's village has been so precious to me. The security situation has deteriorated to the point where I'm not able to visit anymore and spend time anymore. Logar has fallen into tragic circumstances. It has made me want to tell the stories of Logar even more. It has made my storytelling even more urgent.

Farhad Azad: Today on social media, we see thousands of beautiful photos from all over Afghanistan, but these places, more or less, are intangible to experience.

Jamil Jan Kochai: Thinking back on these memories, these precious times I had in Logar, it really feels like that beauty I had experienced had been lost to war in this very concrete way. Looking back at these memories, I have access to this time in this land that is almost lost to me now.

Farhad Azad: Your novel you have incorporated the stories of almost every character.

Jamil Jan Kochai: That was really important to me when starting the project was that I tried to get as many differing and diverse voices as possible into the novel and into my stories because I didn't want it to just be this kid from America coming into Afghanistan and just telling everything from his point of view. I was trying to find a way how I could resist that and how I could tell as many different stories, I can capture as many different voices as possible. Once I realized that the main tool I had was of the storytelling and allowing the other characters to tell their stories. And Marwand [the main character] listens to and absorbs the world and not always talking. And so I did I went into the novel with this with a very specific goal.

Particularly Afghan women voices, which can often time in our culture can be overwhelmed by men's voices and particularly telling these voices of the story of people but particularly women living in these rural spaces. I'm trying to try to understand these stores and trying to understand their lives and try and understand the particular ways that they live, grow, and suffer.

The novel was expansive in its abilities to tell different stories and perceptions and point of views. I was really concerned that I was able to capture these different perceptions and point of views. And one thing that I did when I finished writing, I showed it to different Afghan women, who identified as Pashtun or Tajik or whatever else, because I didn't want it to be to just be a book about an Afghan American boy seeing the world. I wanted it to be about different versions of Afghanistan culminated to this one narrative, which I think is one of the biggest problems of how Afghanistan is always understood-- about one narrative about terrorism, about one narrative about oppression or one narrative about violence. It seems to me there is beauty, and beauty of the complexity of just a small village. Often times it isn't crafted.

Farhad Azad: You clearly describe the nuances of the people, down to the standards of beauty.

Jamil Jan Kochai: With so many aspects of Afghan culture, so many aspects of our society and country, we are constantly being put into these boxes.

"This is the conservative mullah who beats his wife." "This is the wine drinking musician and who is doing drugs." "This is the oppressed women who never spoke up for herself."

It was very important to me to unpackage those boxes that our people are being put into and understand the complexity of it at the same time, maintaining a sense of realism.

Women in villages and in Logar are often times oppressed by men. And they go through severe abuse. They go through these incredibly traumatic events in their lives. It was important for me to demonstrate that. But I also wanted to show the ways that these men at the same time because of poverty, because of war, because of whatever else are living painful, traumatic lives themselves. Often times the trauma you see in villages, there are larger, more complex reasons for these things that are occurring. And it was very important for me to demonstrate and show that these are very real in Afghanistan.

Insurgents can oftentimes also be incredibly young men. Just boys on the brink of becoming men.

I was heartbroken by that, and I feel that is a side of Afghanistan, that isn't often demonstrated. There is an incredible amount of nuance to all these figures, stereotypes, and cliches that we have put on Afghanistan. That there are reasons-- historically, politically, socially -- people end up becoming the way they are. I don't know how successful I was in the novel, but that is something I was trying to do.

Farhad Azad: Please talk about the shape shifter character Jawad who seems to match many of the political and militant personalities in Afghan history.

Jamil Jan Kochai: That character specifically came out of a story that I heard one day when I was at my uncle's house. This is in 2012. I visited my uncle in Logar, and over dinner, one of my uncle's brother-in-law's brought up this guy named Jawid who was on the run from the Taliban because he was impersonating a Taliban and had been working for the government forces. He was a spy. He was also running away from the government forces because he was spying on them too. He was putting these two groups against each other. He became kind of a folk legend in the villages because no one could capture him. I found this character so incredibly fascinating. He became this figure of fluidity, like you said, a shape shifter, one day he is Talib and the next day he is a government soldier, the next day he is a civilian and the next day he is donning a burqa pretending to be a woman. He was a figure who disrupted the usual categorizations placed on Afghans, this "black and white" of government vs. rebels, revolution vs. order, however, you want to categorize it. By showing figures that are constantly moving back and forth, I wanted to demonstrate how it is not always so simple to be able to relegate people into one group or another. There is an incredible amount of fluidity and shapeshifting, these gray areas in war. I was trying to get Jawid to sort of embody that.

Farhad Azad: The maze is a central piece to the novel. For me, it symbolized the complex history of Afghanistan.

Jamil Jan Kochai: Definitely, the history of Afghanistan was an important part of it. When I was thinking about the maze, I was specifically thinking about the geography of my village, which has these mazes, alleyways and compounds build close to each other. I was also thinking about the stories my father told about these tunnels built underneath the compounds during bombings. The Russians had figured out what the Afghans were doing to avoid their bombs and so they began to use gas. There were tunnels in Logar filled with dead bodies. During the Soviet war, Logar was sort of turned into a ghost town. And now new buildings are being built upon these sites of these massacres.

So when I was thinking of the land itself, it seemed to me that there were so many layers of trauma, massacres, and history. And these stories that were buried right underneath the earth, locked inside of the ground. So much of these stories have been lost. The maze sort of embodies the bits and pieces of the history of Logar, but also of Afghanistan at large, that have been sort of lost to time but are still buried in the earth. Somewhere ready to be found.

Farhad Azad: In modern Afghan history, there have been two versions of Afghanistan: Kabul and everywhere else. Your novel touches on the dichotomy between rural vs. urban.

Jamil Jan Kochai: I wish I had given more time to Kabul. In my last two visits, I've spent most of my time in Kabul and I have come to appreciate Kabul as a city. But coming from the rural area of Logar, my family came to despise Kabul in a way. We felt that the urban people of Kabul were living in their own world, their own universe. Although our village in Logar was maybe a 40-minute drive from Kabul, it was still its own world. The people in rural Afghanistan lives are just built around the compound, the crops and local forms of government, that all the goings-on and incredible events happening in Kabul wasn't touching them in a very real way. My father told me that it wasn’t until the Communists took over and repressive measures were being laid out in the countryside, in Logar, that people felt the shift in the country.

It was fascinating to me that the perception and the stories and viewpoints that were coming out of Kabul were the ones that ended up getting the most light shown on them. We talked earlier about "The Kite Runner." I remember reading it, and it was an important novel to me, I'm not sure if I would have pursued writing without having read The Kite Runner first. But it didn't feel like my own vision of Afghanistan, my experience of Afghanistan wasn't really captured in that novel because it was centered upon Kabul and not the countryside.

And that kind of became inspiring to me in an odd way, my experience of Afghanistan, my family's experience in Afghanistan, and rural Afghanistan it hasn't had its own light and its own time to share its stories. That was one of my goals in the novel was to demonstrate life in Afghanistan and to show this very complex relationship between the urban and the rural and the how the political and economic roles of Logar and Kabul were deeply intertwined and yet encapsulated in their own worlds.

Farhad Azad: You also show the various levels of how Islam is embraced within a family.

Jamil Jan Kochai: Practicing Islam, praying, and reading and studying the Quran was such an important part of who I am, and it was such an important part of how I understood the world. I wanted to show how people practice and struggled with faith. And ultimately my goal was to show the struggle, even the struggling with Islam is in its own way very beautiful.

Farhad Azad: One chapter is written entirely in Pashto.

Jamil Jan Kochai: That was a story my father told verbatim to a scribe in Pashto. My father gave it to me. I gave it to my editor and told them that I want it to be part of the novel. I wanted to stay in Pashto, true to my father's voice.

Farhad Azad: Thank you for the time in speaking with me.

Jamil Jan Kochai: It was an absolute pleasure.

More From Jamil Jan Kochai

Author’s Website

Purchase Book on Amazon

NPR Interview

Time Review

New Yorker Review

The Guardian Review

Kirkus Review

Washington Post Review

#literature

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historybehindassassinscreed · 6 years ago

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In Game:

Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield was a British politician and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice.

During his first term as Prime Minister in 1868, Benjamin introduced the Corrupt Practices Act which was meant to end electoral bribery. Wishing to maintain its grasp on London, the British Rite of the Templar Order plotted to kill Benjamin to stall the implementation of the act indefinitely and allow its favored candidate, Gladstone, to become Prime Minister. While Gladstone gave precedent to domestic issues, Disraeli was a staunch and self-styled imperialist.

The Templar James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan hired men to kill Benjamin, although the plot was foiled by the Assassin Jacob Frye. He infiltrated Benjamin's carriage after learning from the Templar-affiliated gang Blighters member of the plot, pretending to be his bodyguard. Though Benjamin was suspicious, his wife Mary Anne allowed Jacob to speak. A gunshot interrupted their conversation and Jacob defended the Disraelis from their Blighter attackers. While Jacob was busy with the attackers, more Blighters arrived and hijacked Benjamin's carriage. After Jacob managed to rescue them, Benjamin voiced his opinion that Gladstone was the one responsible for the attacks and stormed into Downing Street, vowing to get even with his hated rival.

Benjamin and his wife were later invited by Jacob and his twin sister Evie to their train hideout to request invitations for the ball at Buckingham Palace, to which Mary Anne sadly admitted that none were available. Benjamin said that if Gladstone were in attendance, he'd give Jacob his invitation card. However, Evie suggested that instead Jacob steal the Gladstones' invitations. Benjamin and his wife, delighted at the prospect of humiliating Gladstone, then gladly provided them with the couple's address.

Benjamin later became embroiled in a Templar plot to bomb Parliament. He was held hostage by the Templar leader, but was thankfully saved by the Frye twins, who proceeded to defuse all the bombs around Parliament. Benjamin then brought the Frye twins to meet with the Queen, who properly thanked them for foiling the Templars.

In Real Life:

Benjamin Disraeli, in full Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield, Viscount Hughenden of Hughenden was born on December 21st, 1804. Disraeli was of Italian-Jewish descent, the eldest son and second child of Isaac D’Israeli and Maria Basevi.

The most important event in Disraeli’s boyhood was his father’s quarrel in 1813 with the synagogue of Bevis Marks, which led to the decision in 1817 to have his children baptized as Christians. Until 1858, Jews by religion were excluded from Parliament; except for the father’s decision, Disraeli’s political career could never have taken the form it did.Disraeli was educated at small private schools. At the age of 17 he was articled to a firm of solicitors, but he longed to become notable in a more sensational manner. His first efforts were disastrous. In 1824 he speculated recklessly in South American mining shares, and, when he lost all a year later, he was left so badly in debt that he did not recover until well past middle age.

(Image source)

By 1831 Disraeli had decided to enter politics and sought a seat in Buckinghamshire, near Wycombe, where his family had settled. As an independent radical, he stood for and lost High Wycombe twice in 1832 and once in 1835. Realizing that he must attach himself to one of the political parties, he made a somewhat eccentric interpretation of Toryism, which some features of his radicalism fitted. In 1835 he unsuccessfully stood for Taunton as the official Conservative candidate. His extravagant behavior, great debts, and open liaison with Henrietta, wife of Sir Francis Sykes (the prototype of the heroine in his novel Henrietta Temple [1837]), all gave him a dubious reputation. In 1837, however, he successfully stood for Maidstone in Kent as the Conservative candidate. His maiden speech in the House of Commons was a failure. Elaborate metaphors, affected mannerisms, and foppish dress led to his being shouted down. But he was not silenced. He concluded, defiantly and prophetically, “I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.”

After several unsuccessful attempts, Disraeli entered the House of Commons in 1837. In 1846, Prime Minister Robert Peel split the Conservatives over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, which involved ending the tariff on imported grain. As a result of his clashes with Peel in the House of Commons, Disraeli became a major Tory figure. When Lord Derby, the party leader, thrice formed governments in the 1850s and 1860s, Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons.

Upon Derby's retirement in 1868, Disraeli became prime minister briefly before losing that year's general election. He returned to opposition until the general election of 1874, when he led the Tories as they won an outright majority.

Disraeli's second term was dominated by the Eastern Question—the slow decay of the Ottoman Empire and the desire of other European powers, such as Russia, to gain at its expense. Disraeli arranged for the British to purchase a major interest in the Suez Canal Company (in Ottoman-controlled Egypt). In 1878, faced with Russian victories against the Ottomans, he worked at the Congress of Berlin to obtain peace in the Balkans at terms favorable to Britain and unfavorable to Russia, its longstanding enemy. This diplomatic victory established Disraeli as one of Europe's leading statesmen.

(Image source)

World events thereafter moved against the Conservatives. The Second Anglo-Afghan War and the Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa undermined his public support. He angered British farmers by refusing to reinstitute the Corn Laws in response to poor harvests and cheap imported grain. With Gladstone conducting a massive speaking campaign, his Liberals bested the Conservatives at the 1880 general election.

Disraeli died on April 19th, 1881 at the age of 76. In his final months, he led the Conservatives in opposition. He had always maintained a close friendship with Queen Victoria, who in 1876 appointed him Earl of Beaconsfield. His last completed novel, Endymion, was published in 1881 shortly before his death, more than 50 years after his first.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/disraeli_benjamin.shtml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benjamin-Disraeli

#Assassin's Creed #AC S #People

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brookstonalmanac · 1 year ago

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Events 8.2 (after 1900)

338 BC – A Macedonian army led by Philip II defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony in Greece and the Aegean. 216 BC – The Carthaginian army led by Hannibal defeats a numerically superior Roman army at the Battle of Cannae. 49 BC – Caesar, who marched to Spain earlier in the year leaving Marcus Antonius in charge of Italy, defeats Pompey's general Afranius and Petreius in Ilerda (Lerida) north of the Ebro river. 461 – Majorian is arrested near Tortona (northern Italy) and deposed by the Suebian general Ricimer as puppet emperor. 932 – After a two-year siege, the city of Toledo, in Spain, surrenders to the forces of the Caliph of Córdoba Abd al-Rahman III, assuming an important victory in his campaign to subjugate the Central March. 1274 – Edward I of England returns from the Ninth Crusade and is crowned King seventeen days later. 1343 – After the execution of her husband, Jeanne de Clisson sells her estates and raises a force of men with which to attack French shipping and ports. 1377 – Russian troops are defeated by forces of the Blue Horde Khan Arapsha in the Battle on Pyana River. 1415 – Thomas Grey is executed for participating in the Southampton Plot. 1610 – During Henry Hudson's search for the Northwest Passage, he sails into what is now known as Hudson Bay. 1776 – The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence took place. 1790 – The first United States Census is conducted. 1798 – French Revolutionary Wars: The Battle of the Nile concludes in a British victory. 1830 – Charles X of France abdicates the throne in favor of his grandson Henri. 1858 – The Government of India Act 1858 replaces Company rule in India with that of the British Raj. 1869 – Japan's Edo society class system is abolished as part of the Meiji Restoration reforms. 1870 – Tower Subway, the world's first underground tube railway, opens in London, England, United Kingdom. 1873 – The Clay Street Hill Railroad begins operating the first cable car in San Francisco's famous cable car system. 1897 – Anglo-Afghan War: The Siege of Malakand ends when a relief column is able to reach the British garrison in the Malakand states.

#Events

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omkar-n · 3 years ago

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Why the Vernacular Press Act Banned Seditious Writings In British India?

The British sought to control the Indian press by making various accusations against the freedom of the press. Let’s find out more.

Vernacular Press Act was a law legislated in 1878 in British India to limit publishing freedom in the Indian language press (i.e., non-English). Suggested by Lord Lytton, then viceroy of India, the move got planned to control the indigenous language media from revealing criticism of English policies.

In particular, the growing opposition at the beginning of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80). The Act did not include publishing in English, and it has provoked dominant and persistent protests from the wider Indian society.

The Act was repealed in 1881 after Lytton as deputy, Lord Ripon (ruled 1880–84). However, indignation caused by the Indians was one of the factors that led to India's growing independence movement.

Among the most vocal critics of this practice was the Indian Party (founded in 1876), generally regarded as one of the forerunners of the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885).

The purpose of the vernacular press law in indigenous languages

The first and foremost question is when was the vernacular press act passed. So the answer is 1978 in the British raj. This act gave the government the power to constantly monitor indigenous language newspapers and control sections that wrote mainly against the British so that the British could control the opposition to their policies in India.

When a report published in the newspaper was considered seditious, the newspaper was warned and later had to take drastic action against it. When the ban got approved, there were printing presses in more than 35 languages in Bengal alone, showing a large market for newspapers and reports.

The largest printing press at this time included the Amrita Bazar Patrika, a Naval Kishore press that got considered the popular revolution. The vernacular press act 1878 has stated that any magistrate or Commissioner of Police has the right to arrest any newspaper publisher for filing a bond, undertake not to print any material, and may confiscate any printed material he deems appropriate.

The issue of sedition had to get decided by the police, not by the authorities and was a major factor in the action. As a result of this act, many newspapers were shut down, and many editors were imprisoned for criticising British rule in India.

It was also the year when an Arms law was passed banning Indians from carrying weapons without prior permission from the British. These two actions got strongly criticised by Indian nationalists.

Vernacular press act 1978 and Indian freedom fighters

In 1883, Surendranath Banerjea became the first Indian journalist to be arrested. In an angry episode of The Bengalee Banerjea, he criticised a Calcutta Supreme Court judge for ignoring Bengali religious sentiments in one of his decisions.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak is often associated with the national liberation war of the media. Tilak has been building anti-imperialist sentiments in the community through the Ganapati festivals (which began in 1893), the Shivaji festivals (which began in 1896) and his newspapers Caesar and Mahratta.

He was one of the first to promote introducing the middle class, farmers, artisans and workers in the ANC. In 1896, he organised the entire Maharashtra campaign to strike a foreign cloth importing cotton goods. In 1896-97 he started a tax-free campaign in Maharashtra, urging farmers to refrain from paying income if their crops failed. In 1897 an epidemic broke out in Poona.

Although Tilak supported the government's measures to diagnose the disease, there was widespread outrage against irrational and aggressive methods such as segregation and housing searches.

The famous riots resulted in the assassination of the chairman of the Poona Plagues Committee by the Chapekar brothers. Government policies on taxes, money, and poverty were also the cause of this widespread outrage.

The government has been looking for an opportunity to address this trend of rebellion and hostility in the newspapers. They decided to make Tilak a victim to set an example for the community.

Tilak got arrested after the assassination of Rand based on the publication of the poem, Shivaji’s Words, at Caesar, and the speech Tilak delivered at the Shivaji ceremony, pardoning the assassination of Afzal Khan by Shivaji.

Tilak's defence in Shivaji Afzal Khan's assassination has got cited by the prosecutor as a justification for the killings of British officials. Tilak was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.

At the same time, a few other editors in the Bombay presidency were tried and given similar harsh sentences. There have been widespread protests against these measures. Tilak soon became a national hero and was nicknamed Lokmanya (respected and respected by the people)—a new leader who preached his deeds.

Conclusion

Lord Lytton passed the Vernacular Press Act 1878, authorising the government to seize newspapers that published seditious writing. He also passed the Weapons Act of 1878, which prohibited Indians from carrying weapons other than licensed, and the English got not included in this action.

This act did not involve publishing in English as it intended to control the Indian subversive writing contrary to India's British policies. This act has brought a great deal of criticism from Indian intellectuals.

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davidjjohnston3 · 3 years ago

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Wish I could deliver top-shelf right now... I feel almost as if I will be left with naught but the notebooks, like Flaubert's "Sentimental Education" working notes.

1."You're too philosophical" - it turned/s out he is trying to become conscious of something.

2.The damn thing is, 2010 Korea is not a warped society. People are ignorant or naive about some things; and they have a w/Way that worked/s for them.They are trying to help; they want to be mothers and fathers and daughters and students and sons faithful.Great nation.

3.He is unaware of women. The beauty of the office-buildings at night, when everyone is still at work, captivates his doesn't educate entirely as he's unaware of women and girls and boys at home; he thinks, "family unit." It's Americanism / mental Americanness. He has no sense / conception of man, woman, child, m/Mom, p/pop.

4.Abortion-culture, abortion, abortion, abortion."Our point is that we have no point; post hoc ergo propter hoc, you have no point because God isn't real and we are God.

"5."In the Valley of the Butterflies" - a meditation or reflection on how to some people fantasy and unreality are closer to [Adonai] than are their own parents, "parents," friends, "friends," teachers, "teachers.

"6."Minima Moralia Covidiana: Reflections on a Mentally Ill Era from North Korea Policy and NK Studies to Obama to Metascience, Metatheology."

"It's not Houellebecq that's depressed; it's the world that's depressing." - Marie-Pierre Houellebecqa)

Everyone suddenly became their "brother's keeper, neighbor-lover" but it's more like judge thy neighbor and teach thy neighbor according to crypto-communist evaluations of wokeness. Also, no qualifications to teach + primitive tools + no mechanism for assessing performance or firing incompetents or the morally depraved.

b) Biden obviously, POTUS, one of the most powerful men in history, says so many right things or right-sounding but at bottom I feel he neck-kneels me in the name of his political macro-economy and is more than willing not just to despise Afghans and throw them away but to silence anyone who registers an eloquent-enough complaint about American throwaway culture, anti-religion, anti-belief, anti-truth, anti-child-ism, anti-Otherism.God love him and give rest to his soul!

c) I am in trouble for being Christian and Christianist but not Frank McCourt or the guy from "Calvary" who gets kilt on the beach. Jesus / Yesunim was not thrown out or casually murdered by disturbed victim of someone else's crime. He was arrested by the greatest empire in human history - the last empire - interrogated by a magistrate, sentenced by the religious right and institutional ecclesial / synagogic supreme prestige of his time, and subject to formal capital punishment with full ceremony. He was also buried with honor and gifts by women and men who loved Him. He was and is King with all authority on Heaven and Earth and many grown men - in some places - have authority.These people saw too many movies.

d) Taeyeon Kim's "Circus."We are supposed to take up our Crosses and follow Jesu but Milwaukee's a waterpark / flush-toilet . "Circulation."

e) David J. Johnston's recurrent wish to write that get-out-of-Babylon bestseller but it'd take 2 years to process through the publishing industry "irregardless."

f) David Cameron's "Life Chances" speech influenced by "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," a book which kept me awake for some 36 hours the first time I read it despite already knowing what Chinese mu'ai (mom-love) was like in its outlines.

"I'm not against the welfare-state." - Si. It's far different to show material as well as spiritual charity to the poor than to to tell them they're all victims who deserve Santa Mao's grab-bag and a guillotine or torture or Xinjiang vivisection and serial gang-rape forced abortion bonanza to boot.

"Family is the basic welfare-state." - Sadly assuming sincerity, faith, veracity on the part of Anglo-American relationality and family-roles.

g) Saint John Paul II, "Papa Karol." Humana Vitae / Human Life. Again and again again and again and again, from the city to the world, generation after generation. Abortion, euthanasia, rampant Medicalism and Scientism. If I were to extend JP2's observations through "Theology of the Body" as well I would say that Man's contemporary despising of the soul and Spirit have also infected American literature with the twin outcomes of a) censoring the Spirit and b) despiritualizing and ultimately robbing of all sacredness the material and physical. In my view this might lead to what I called "liquefaction" or "deliquescence.' I feel as if communitarian Catholic theologian Charles Taylor might find this idea relatable to "ontology of flesh not bodies" from "A Secular Age," suggesting that Covid-19 and the policies and souls and wills responding thereto led out to a "state of things" (R. Dienst Rutgers) at which people began to actualize a madcap hostility to the physical integrity or integrality or wholeness of the Other. Part and parcel of this disintegrationism or disintegrationisticity (sorry) other than structural inefficiencies and wasted lives characteristic of socialism / communism, moral confusion, is the outsourcing and supply-chain-disruption and -invasion (is that a Huawei chip in your X-1 or are you just cannibalistic to see me?) or distally "sparagmos" (Gr. "tearing apart; rending limb from limb") of human bodies, but particularly culturally Other men, women, and girls. Americans not even aware of their own psychopathically malevolent spirits.

g-i) Korean American Literature, though / / Yoon Choi.I don't know if I should be this "medical" but I rem. something about those "This is what a feminist looks like" shirts which were sort of like rainbow-colored Soviet cluster-bombs in the Soviet-Afghan War that attracted women near to toxic (and/or unprepared) men then harmed them... I kept thinking, "Yeah well this is what a semenist looks like" just b/c I was in a bad mood dealing with ideology while trying to "become the man" but it turns out Man would have been better-served to reflect on the characteristics of seed than to devise mechanistic and deterministic monster-murder-Moloch-machines and that's not even "Dreiserian or neo-Dreiserian Naturalism," it's literally part of the intelligence design of the body. g-ii) If anyone knows of a hole in the ground in Los Angeles preferably with a mirror so I can shave...

7.I keep remembering the lines from "Lincoln" - the only good lines that that bourgeois bench-warmer Kushner perhaps wrote - "millions now unborn... now, now, now." Human trafficking, abortion, beyond-awful schools and teachers...

8. DJ is always trying to improve his platform without realizing that he has a voice. He takes the bait again and again and again, both in terms of finding a wife / girlfriend / "coming to an arrangement with _" in the Victorian sense and being baited into a defensive crouch for what he stands to lose.

9. Ownership, "so yu kweon."

10. Everyone taking advice from SF / special forces soldiers on YouTube and a psychologist who deliberately dealt with extremes, Jordan B. Peterson, such as Marxism, Nietzsche, &c.

11.

"Everlasting Consolation."

"Stepfather."

They are watching TV, reading memoirs, being "Episcopalian" in the old-fashioned regard of having the Bible and the newspaper both, the "Cross of Lorraine" maybe kind of. But his parents are Democrats and democrats to the core and want to character-assassinate any leader they don't like; they will do anything to reduce a king to a doctor even if this ruler wanted to serve God. They love nothing more than to find out the ways in which someone is hypocritical or labors under astheneia (weakness), whether monetary of social (no friends, antagonistic sideways deflectionistic teach-you-everything-(to-become-me) / push-me-pull-you neighbors)

12.

I want to exchange poems on Twitter with Pastors Timothy Keller NYC and John Piper BCSMN Bethlehem Baptist Church Twin Cities.

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web4study-net-blog · 5 years ago

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THE NEW GREAT GAME | Essay for CSS and PMS

The term 'Great Game' was first coined by Arthur Conolly in 1829. He was a British intelligence officer, explorer and writer. He was a captain of the Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, who worked for the British East India Company. Arthur Conolly used this term to describe the struggle between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for domination over Central Asia. The Great Game refers to the strategic rivalry between the British and the Russian empires in a bid to maintain their supremacy over Central Asia that is rich in natural resources, main oil and natural gas. The Great Game period continued from 1813 to 1907. It started with the British-Russian rivalry in Afghanistan. The British feared that the Russian Empire's expansion in Central Asia would threaten their domination of the resource-rich India. The British believed that Afghanistan would become a staging post for a Russian invasion of India the fear led the British to launch the first Anglo-Afghan war in 1838. The attempt to impose a puppet regime under Shuja Shah in Afghanistan ultimately failed in 1842 due to the attack of the Afghan mobs on the British. A second Anglo-Afghan War erupted when British diplomatic mission sent to Kabul in 1878 was turned back by Sher Ali, the then ruler of Afghanistan. The Britishers were infuriated because an uninvited diplomatic mission of Russia was welcomed by Afghanistan but the Britishers were declined similar treatment. The war's conclusion left Abdur Rahman Khan on the throne, who agreed to let the British maintain Afghanistan's foreign policy. 1n the run-up to World War I, Germany's increased activity in Central Asia brought Russia and Britain closer and brought an end to the classic Great Game. Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 closed the Great Game. The Russians accepted that the politics of Afghanistan were solely under British control as long as the British guaranteed not to change the regime. Russia agreed to conduct all political relations with Afghanistan through the British. The British agreed that they would maintain the current borders and actively discourage any attempt by Afghanistan to encroach on Russian territory. Persia was divided into three zones: a British zone in the south, a Russian zone in the north, and a narrow neutral zone serving as a buffer in between. However, in 1917 another phase of the great game began which led to the third AngloAfghan war in 1919. This was a result of the assassination of the then ruler Habibullah Khan. His son and successor Amanullah declared full independence and attacked British India's northern frontier. The issue was resolved with the Rawalpindi Agreement of 1919. In May 1921, Afghanistan and the Russian Soviet Republic signed a Treaty of Friendship. The United Kingdom imposed minor sanctions and diplomatic slights as a response to the treaty. 1n 1928, Amanullah abdicated under pressure. With the advent of World War II came the temporary alignment of British and Soviet interests. With this period of cooperation between the USSR and the UK, the Great Game between the two powers came to an end. The New Great Game is a term that refers to modem geopolitics in Central Asia as a competition between the United States, the United Kingdom and other NATO countries against Russia, the People's Republic of China and other Shanghai Cooperation Organisation countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) for influence, power, hegemony and profits in Central Asia. The competition for actual control over a geographic area has been taken over by pipelines, tanker routes, petroleum consortiums, and contracts. Read the full article

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khalilhumam · 4 years ago

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How to Build Peace in Afghanistan?

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/how-to-build-peace-in-afghanistan/

How to Build Peace in Afghanistan?

Table of Contents Peacebuilding: What is it? A Brief review of concepts Mini case studies: Peace treaties External Conflicts 2nd Anglo-Afghan War, 1878-80 3rd Anglo-Afghan War, 1919 Russo Afghan War: 1987-89 Internal Conflicts The war against the Afghan Government The War among Internal Factions The war with Taliban The war against terror Causes of Failure. External Conflicts Internal Conflicts Index Works Cited

Peacebuilding: What is it?

A brief review of concepts

Peacemaking: Refers to diplomatic efforts to end violence between conflict parties and to achieve a peace agreement. It is also envisioned in Chapter VI of the UN Charter of the pacific settlement of disputes – Article 33: “The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice”. In order to make peace, sometimes the UN Security Council uses economic sanctions or even military interventions. (Berghof Foundation Operations GmbH, 2012) Peacekeeping: Refers to the interposition/deployment of (international) armed forces; to separate the conflicting armed forces as a buffer zone, to monitor and police ceasefire agreement and peace processes (peacemaking). A common example is the UN peacekeeping operations. It is guided by three basic principles; consent of the parties, impartiality, non-use of force except in self-defence and defence of the mandate. It currently has 16 peacekeeping operations on four continents. Though it is not specifically mentioned in the UN Charter, a peacekeeping mission can be deployed based on the security council resolution in order to fulfill the UN responsibilities mentioned in Chapters VI~VIII. (Ibid) Peacebuilding: “Peacebuilding involves a range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the foundations for sustainable peace and development…”[1]. The concept is first used in 2000 in the Brahimi report, however, the definition has evolved ever since. According to the UN, the peacebuilding process is primarily a nationally-owned process; the national capacity development must be central to Peacebuilding efforts; and inclusive of the UN and the international community so they can allocate resources appropriately. In the following chart, the UN Peace Building Fund (UNPF) priority areas clearly show the multi-functionality of the peacebuilding efforts. (Source: UN Peacebuilding: an Orientation)

Mini case studies: Peace treaties

Afghanistan as we know it has always been at war, both with internal and external forces, however, here I would like to briefly review those wars, which has written a record of peace treaties. These Afghan wars can be divided into two categories; first, wars fought with foreign invaders such as the three Anglo-Afghan wars, and the Russo-Afghan war of 1978~1989; second, wars fought internally among various Afghan factions such as the ones occurred after 1989.

External Conflicts

The British government has invaded Afghanistan three times. The purpose of all these three wars was that Great Britain wanted to extend its control over neighbouring Afghanistan from its base in India and to oppose Russian influence in Afghanistan. However, the following cases belong to two[2] of them (2nd and 3rd), which have resulted in peace treaties. Moreover, the Russo Afghan wars are also mentioned during and after the Anglo-Afghan wars in this section.

2nd Anglo-Afghan War, 1878-80

Peace treaties:

The Gadamak Treaty

Panjdeh Treaty

The Durand Line Agreement

Category: Peacemaking When Shir Ali Khan the 3rd son of Dost Mohammad became Emir, the governor-general of India Lord Lytton sent him a mission (in 1875) to counter the influence of Russia in Afghanistan. However, Shir Ali Khan did not accept the mission, which created anger in British India. Though British India was ready to attack the Afghan government it did not take any aggressive actions until 1878 when a Russian business mission was admitted to Kabul under the leadership of Stolytov. Consequently, Viceroy Lytton launched the second Afghan war on November 21, 1878, and invaded Afghanistan. As usual, the British army occupied Kabul, and consequently forcefully signed the Gandamak (Gandomak) treaty with his son Yaqub Khan on May 26, 1879. In this treaty the British recognized Yaqub Khan as Emir, in return, he accepted a permanent British embassy at Kabul, and that the foreign relations of Afghanistan shall be conducted in accordance to the wishes and advice of the British government (this transformed the country into a British Protectorate). The Gandamak Treaty[3] included agreement in perpetual peace and friendship between the British government and the Afghan government, amnesty to war criminals (or warriors), and the Afghan nullification of war with any other state. Besides, two territorial exchanges were made, first, Kandahar and Jalalabad were returned to the Afghan government that was controlled by the British Government, and second, in return took over Khuram, Pishin and Sibi as protectorates and administratively controlled areas. Moreover, the British agreed that it would support Afghanistan in any foreign aggression with money, arms or troops. It also accepted 6 lacks Rupees in annual subsidy. However, the ordinary Afghan people were not pleased with the British presence in Afghanistan and revolted against them, which resulted in the murder of British envoy Sir Louis Cavagnari, and his entire escort on September 3, 1879. British forces were provoked and attacked Afghanistan again and by October of the same year they had already occupied Kabul, however, rebellions continued across the country. Yaqub Khan resigned from the throne, which remained vacant for almost 8 months until July 22, 1880, when Abdul Rahman Khan (his nephew) became Emir. After a while, in 1884, the Russian advanced towards Afghanistan and occupied Merve, and then occupied Panjdeh on March 30, 1885, which was previously part of the Afghanistan government. Abdul Rahman Khan proposed a peaceful settlement between Afghanistan and Russian by signing a protocol on 10 September 1885 where the Afghan government recognized Punjdeh as part of Russia, and in return, Russia accepted that Zulfiqar pass will not be occupied and will remain under the Afghan government. That agreement created a boundary between Russia and Afghanistan formally, however, the boundary between Afghanistan and British India was still not known (Treaty of Gandamak, 2012). British forces signed another agreement with Abdul Rahman Khan in 1893, known as the Duran Line Agreement, which drew the sphere of influence between the British government and Afghanistan and to avoid future wars. This agreement included demarcation of land from Wakhan to the Persian border and the agreement on no interference across the line for both governments. (Dr. Sultani Rome, n.d)

3rd Anglo-Afghan War, 1919

Peace Treaty: Rawalpindi Agreement Category: Peacemaking Amanullah Succeeded to throne on February 20, 1919, when his father (Habibullah) was assassinated who was a neutral person and was pursuing the policy of non-involvement in international politics (WWI). During this time, the Ottoman Empire was in conflict with the British and the ordinary Afghans were supporting the Ottoman Empire, however, Habibullah was not interested in taking sides. Contrary to his father, Amanullah was associated with anti-British movements, and hence in his coronation address, he declared total independence from Great Britain. The G.B. did not recognize his unilateral independence and waged the 3rd Anglo-Afghan war in May 1919. Since the British forces were worn-out and the resources were exhausted in WW1, therefore, the British stopped the war after a while and accepted the independence of Afghanistan on August 8, 1919, and signed a peace treaty in Rawalpindi. Meanwhile, before signing this treaty, the Afghan government had already signed a special friendship treaty with the new Bolshevik regime in the soviet government that lasted until 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. In the Rawalpindi treaty, both sides agreed to restore peace between the British government and the Afghan government, moreover, the British officially recognized Afghanistan as free and independent in its internal and external affairs, recognized the former boundaries, and demarcated new boundaries in the Khyber area (Aithison, n.d). Additionally, it was inserted in the agreement that the British stopped its subsidy formerly given to other Emirs as removal of favour from the Afghan king.

Russo Afghan War: 1987-89

Peace Treaty: The Geneva Accords Category: Peacemaking Conflict: Mohammad Zahir Shah reigned the country for approximately 40 years, however, in the latter part of his tenure in 1973, two draughts starved approximately 100,000 people to death, and also his monarchy was too weak to cope with social and economic challenges. As a result, former Prime Minister (1953-63) and the king cousin Mohammad Daoud led a non-violent coup supported by communist parties and consequently converted the Kingdom to a republic; meanwhile, he announced popular socialist policies (Vigier, 2009). This coup had two dimensions. Firstly, explicit dimensions such as parliamentary deadlock, the polarization of politics between Islamists and socialists, and the disengagements of prime ministers in political affairs were some of the well-known reasons that led to this coup. Secondly, there were some implicit dimensions as well, such as; M. Daoud was forced to resign in 1963 from his position as prime minister because of the deteriorating economic conditions over his rivalry with Pakistan over the Pashtunistan issue (which caused Pakistan to stop aid and exports to Afghanistan). Moreover, the new constitution that was promulgated immediately after the resignation of M. Daoud has barred the royal family other than the king from participating in politics and in government. This provision was perceived as an intention by the king to keep Daoud out of politics (thus based on the constitution he had no chance to become prime minister or minister in the future) (R.Blood, 1997). Mohammad Daoud Khan’s coup exacerbated the political fragmentation even further and eventually resulted in another coup in the country this time by the communist party. On April 27, 1978 (Saur 07, 1353), Nur Mohammad Tarakai who was under house arrest led the coup from Kabul International Airport and killed Mohammad Daoud Khan and most of his family in the palace. This regime issued numerous decrees majority of which were viewed as against Islamic principles, including that of equality of sexes, land reforms, and prohibition of usury to name few. The communist regime was unpopular, thus internal rebellions grew in the summer and fall of 1978, and also the conflict inside the communist party engulfed intense rivalry among the top leaders. Eventually, Taraki was killed in September 1979 and Hafizullah Amin assumed the power. During this period, many Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran and began organizing resistance movements across the country. Soviets first supported Amin, however, it was understood that Amin was too much of a communist to be accepted by the Afghans, and therefore, invaded Afghanistan with 100000 troops on December 25, 1979; killed Amin in the palace and installed Babrak Karmal as the new head of the government. The Soviets invasion created total chaos in national and international politics; the scorched earth policy of the USSR forced 3 million people to migrate to Pakistan and a million more to Iran. The majority of the migrants reorganized under the leadership of various commoners in exile and started attacking soviets and afghan government posts inside the country. In May 1986, Karmal was forced to resign by Russians and was replaced by Dr. Najibullah. Peace Treaty: Immediately after the soviets invasion, the UN Security Council debated to issue a resolution in January 1980, but it was vetoed by the USSR, and the consequence talks were unproductive either. In June 1982, and during the upcoming 6 years, Mr. Cordovez the undersecretary for Special Political Affairs acted as an intermediary in series of indirect negotiations between the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to find a solution for the invasion. The Afghan rebellions continued which forced the USSR to accept the withdrawal of its troops before any formal peace negotiation begins. In February 1988, the Soviets announced it would start withdrawing the troops in May. Meanwhile, the UN concluded its last round of talks on April 8, 1988, with the USSR, and announced that the settlement has been ready and open for signature. This settlement agreement famously known as the Geneva Accord, comprised of four instruments (Azam, 1993):

A bilateral agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan on the principles of mutual relations, in particular on non-interference and non-intervention,

A declaration of international guarantees, signed by the Soviets Union and the USA,

A bilateral agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan on the voluntary return of refugees (absolute majority of which were the so-called freedom fighters),

Agreement on the interrelationships for the settlement of the situation relating to Afghanistan signed by Afghanistan and Pakistan and witnessed by the Soviets Union and the United States. This included the provisions for the timetable and modalities of the withdrawals of soviet troops from Afghanistan.

These accords were assisted by several offices of the united nations that were together called the United Nations Good Offices Mission in Afghanistan and Pakistan (UNGOMAP), which investigated and reported the violations and implementations of these instruments. The UNGOMAP was having two main headquarters; one in Kabul and the next in Islamabad, and had the provision of 40 additional military officers if necessary to assess on the ground settlements agreed by the parties. This accord was signed by the 4 parties in Geneva, on 14 April 1988. The logic of the Geneva accord was that the Soviets forces had entered Afghanistan for protecting it from the intervention of foreign forces supporting the rebels who were attempting to overthrow the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The USSR initiated this accord in 1981 and claimed that once the foreign threat to Afghanistan was removed, the forces of the Afghan friend (USSR) would happily leave. Therefore, the USSR proposed several bilateral agreements in the Geneva Accords including the one between Pakistan who was actively supporting the resistance, and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan to stop intervention and interference between them. This accord thus justified the withdrawal of a superpower, in a manner, which justified an invasion, however, actually, it was a political bailout for a government struggling with the consequences of a costly error. Why it didn’t bring peace? The Geneva accord did not acknowledge the rebels and the absolute majority of the Afghan population as an involved party in the conflict. Additionally, the Mujahideen parties were not interested in the peace negotiations as well; even after the passage of 5 years when they were first approached in February 1988. Theirs re non-interest in peace agreement was mainly because by mid-1978, the resistance forces sensed a military victory, in addition, they were also receiving Stinger missiles and every other thing they needed from the outside in foreign assistance. Therefore, the defeat and overthrow of the Kabul government was their solution to peace. Moreover, their non-confidence and their distrust of the UN system virtually guaranteed their refusal of a political compromise. This belief was also due to popular perception that the USSR puppet government is not going to survive, which was right, the government eventually collapsed in 3 years after the withdrawal of the USSR forces.

Internal Conflicts

The war against the Afghan Government

Peace Treaty: The Peshawar Accord, April 24, 1992 Category: Peacemaking Conflict: For the reasons previously mentioned; the war continued beside the Geneva Accords were signed between the four countries, until the abandoned government collapsed in 1992, on the same day on which it was installed 14 years ago. However, the nature of the conflict changed as this time the war was not fought with Russian forces but with its successor government. Causes of the conflict: The Afghan fighters/Mujahedeen were not involved in Geneva Accords, and thus did not need to comply with any treaty signed or agreed upon by others. Settlement/peace mechanism: As the communist regime was in the last stages of its life, the Peshawar settled Mujahedin parties signed an accord on April 24, 1992, to replace the Kabul based regime. The mujahidin leaders were enjoying the support from the USA, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and many pro mujahedin countries. The Peshawar peace treaty was called the Peshawar accord, which envisaged three phases:

Transfer of power from the former regime to Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, he had to rule for two months (From April 28 to June 28, 1992).

Transfer of power from Mujaddedi to Rabani after two months,

Establishment of a government for two years after convening as an assembly by Rabbani for four months.

Moreover, the Rabbani administration was also responsible to create a new provisional constitution for the new republic, which had to be ratified by the national council (shura) in the same year. Moreover, after the constitution; a new government would establish the cabinet as per the strengths of the involved parties (Hekmatyar as prime minister). Why did it fail to bring peace? As per the Peshawar accord, Rabbani (Chief of Jamiate) was elected for four months in June 1992, and he had the responsibility to invite an Afghan assembly for choosing the president of Afghanistan. However, he failed to do so during the required time, and therefore, his period was extended for an extra 45 days. Ultimately, Rabbani was able to invite 1335 representatives from across the country to convene the proposed assembly (Shura-e-Hal-o-Aqdh). The assembly toke its first session on December 15, 1992. As a result; out of 1335 persons, 916 voted for him, 59 voted against him, and the remaining 360 people walked out the session as a protest. However, out of the 9 mujahedin parties, only 4 which were Jamiat, Harakat of Muhammadi, Harakat of Muhsini, and Ittehade Islami of Sayyaf participated in the Shura while the remaining 5 major parties which were Mahaz, Shiite Hezbe Wahdat, Hezbe Islami Khalis, Hezbe Islamic Hekmatyar, and Jabha boycotted the session. Consequently, when the Rabbani government announced that Rabbani has been elected for 2 years, a rocket hit Kabul city and killed dozens of innocent people. The main reason was that moderates and fundamentalists interpreted the “assembly” term differently, which was the foundation of the election mentioned in the Accord. The moderates considered assembly as Loya Jirga (grand assembly), while the fundamentalists considered it as Ahlo Aqd Shura (Council of Wise Men). Since the fundamentalists like Jamiat held power over the government they won the battle. Though all parties had agreed upon the Shura, most of the political organizations such as Mahaz, Hezbe Islami Hekmatyar, Hezbe Islami Khalis, Heze Wahdat, Jabha and National Islamic Movement of General Dostum boycotted the Shura over the mechanism of the Shura. The principles of the shura existed in Islamic history to elect a head of state, but there had been no example that a Shura has elected the president of an Islamic country. The experience of the past years proved that the leaders of the Afghan mujahideen did not agree on a unique political method and did not adopt a common stand. Some Jihadi groups considered Jihad and the understanding of Islamic principles as the criteria for the election of a person. Yes, it is a jihadi victory, but the situation reveals the fact that strength and force are a question of discussion too. For example, the militia units of Gen. Dostum have proved their strength in the struggle of political power.

The War among Internal Factions

The Islamabad Accord, March 7, 1993 Category: Peacemaking Conflict: The disagreement and conflict continued, while the US had lost interest after the defeat/withdrawal of the USSR, and the UN had already closed its mission on Afghanistan. Then, Pakistan was the only state hosting these parties and had to take action. Therefore, Pakistan invited Iran, Saudi Arabia and all-important factions for another peacemaking attempt in Islamabad. After many days of intense discussion, Pakistan prime minister and the envoys of the above-mentioned countries were able to sign a peace treaty among the war factions. This peace treaty is known as the Islamabad accord. Settlement/peace mechanism: After the failure of the Peshawar accord that did not include Iran supported Shiite parties; this time Pakistan did more homework. Pakistan included all parties, defined the powers of the president and prime minister in the accord, defined basic terms; devised time frame for the formation of the cabinet, execution of the electoral process, and the formation of the constitution, which had resulted in the failure of the Peshawar accord. The Islamabad accord contained the following features:

The formation of a new government in 18 months. Cabinet formation in 2 weeks by the prime minister in consultation with the president and other Afghan leaders. The current president (Mr. Rabbani) shall remain in office and Hekmatyar or his nominee should assume the position of Prime Minister. Moreover, the accord had also outlined the terms and powers of the prime minister, president and cabinet.

The start of an electoral process within 18 months, effective from December 29, 1992. This would include the creation of an independent “Election Commission” which shall hold elections for the formation of the Grand Constituent Assembly within 8 months, and then the assembly would formulate a constitution.

Formation of “Defense Council” that comprised two members from each party, which would retain the operations control of the armed forces, and looked into the collection of all heavy weaponry from the contracting parties.

Why did it fail to bring peace? After the accord was signed in Islamabad, the participants went to Saudi Arabia to perform Umrah (small Hajj), and upon return, they stopped in Tehran. All of the participants signed the same accord first in Islamabad, and then in Saudi Arabia and then in Tehran, however, the accord failed to be implemented by the rival factions. The main reason was the distribution of the defence minister position; one of the two executives (Mr. Rabbani) wanted to keep Masud as Defense Minister, while another executive (Mr. Hekmatyar) wanted to replace him. As a result, both of these two executives accused each other of the violation and non-execution of the accord. Meanwhile, Pakistan was engulfed in internal political crises and thus the Islamabad accord lost its supporter (Nawaz Sharif was removed from the PM post), and the mujahedeen could not reach an agreement by themselves regarding the power-sharing deal. One of the main clauses of the accord, which was that the cabinet should be formed with the consultation of the president, was a major hurdle in the cabinet making process and was broke down on the defence minister position over the Masud’s appointment. As mentioned earlier, Hekmatyar proposed the Deputy Prime Minister post for Masud, but Rabbani did not endorse it. Though Masud announced his cooperation with the new government of Hekmatyar, he actually did not give them control of Kabul to the defence counsel as per the agreement of the Islamabad accord. Consequently, the fight broke down between Hikmatyar and Masud, and as a result, Kabul city was severely damaged. Consequently, merely after two months of the Islamabad accord, a new wave of fighting erupted in Afghanistan and the war continued until the uprising of the Taliban.

The war with the Taliban

Faction groups attempted peace with the Taliban, but no peace deal was reached. Conflict: After the collapse of the communist regime and the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1988, the conflict between various parties continued which devastated the country, ruined the cities and killed approximately 30,000 innocent people. The continuation of this war had already caused 2 million casualties and 5.5 million refugees. During this turmoil, the Taliban movement started in Kandahar who wanted to put an end to all these atrocities. Their first offensive started in October-November of 1994 to capture Kandahar and the surrounding provinces. In just under 3 months, the Taliban captured 12 provinces out of the total 34 and demanded president Rabbani to step down. Understanding the threat, president Rabbani wanted to hold peace talks with the Taliban, and therefore, he formed a special representative team in December 1995 to negotiate a deal with the Taliban. However, despite the UN support for peace talks, the Taliban invited 1500 Ulemas to Kandahar from across the country, who all declared that Rabbani’s government was illegal and thus should be overturned. Thus the peace efforts started by Rabbani got weakened. In January of 1996, Pakistan initiated a peace talk between Hizbe Islami and the Taliban, however, the peace talks failed because both parties wanted a bigger slice of the pie. The Supreme Coordination Council of the Islamic Revolution of Afghanistan (SCCIRA) made another attempt of peace and held a meeting in Feberuary 1996 with various factions. The meeting was intended to form an inclusive interim administration to replace the Rabbani government. This meeting was attended by all major parties in Islamabad, and consequently, it announced 5 points agenda (Matinuddin, 1999) as follows:

Immediate resignation of the president,

Transfer of power and election of a new inclusive government,

Demilitarization of the Kabul province,

Formation of a new system to solve problems,

Since the Taliban did not participate in the gathering, therefore, the basic purpose of peacemaking was not realized. In response, the Taliban again invited 300 Mullah’s from all around the country (including the areas which were not under their control), to find a political settlement for the conflict in Afghanistan. After a week-long meeting, they all agreed that the Rabbani regime is illegitimate and thus should be toppled so the Taliban shall install an Islamic government in Kabul. Thus the war against the Rabbani government continued, ultimately, the Taliban fighters captured Kabul by 1996, and by 2000, it gained control of approximately 95% of the country, but it failed to unite Afghanistan under the leadership of Mullah Omar. The war against terror Peace treaty: Bonn Agreement Category: Peacemaking After the incident of 9/11 in New York and Washington, the US accused the Taliban of hiding Osama Bin Laden and providing a safe haven for his party the Al-Qaida, who was considered the mastermind of the attacks on America. Consequently, Mr. Bush the President of the US asked the Taliban regime to expel Osama who was also wanted since 1999, and destroy the Al-Qaida camps. However, the Taliban rejected all these demands, and thus the US invaded Afghanistan on October 07, 2001, and toppled the Taliban regime. The ground militia of the exiled Rabbani government and the northern warlords such as Dostum and Masud supported the US invasion. In December of 2001, the UN invited 4 groups of delegations to meet in Bonn and create an interim government to replace the Taliban regime. The invited people comprised of the anti-Taliban ethnic factions whose total number did not exceed 30 people. (UN, 2001) The Bonn agreement was a peacebuilding attempt having two components, first, Peacebuilding among rivals, however, the main faction – Taliban were not invited, second, state-building, where the state building institutions and power was distributed among US allies, not through political inclusion of all Afghans. That created a flawed foundation, which is still suffering and has not been balanced yet. The composition of the Bonn delegates was as following; the northern alliance and Iran supported a group who lived in exile sent 11 delegates, the Rome group affiliated with former king Mohammad Zahir Shah sent 11 delegates, and the Cypress group and the Peshawar group Pashtun dominated factions together sent 5 delegates. Though Pakistan insisted that moderate Taliban should also be included with the Peshawar delegates the offer was not accepted, this way, the influence of Pakistan was turned down. On December 25, 2001, the Bonn Delegates selected Hamid Karzai as Chairman of the Interim administration and also responsible for the establishment of a 29 members interim cabinet. Half of the cabinet seats were received by the northern alliance, the Rome group got a total of 8 positions, and the remaining few to Peshawar delegates. In the process of this meeting, the UN also created International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) led by NATO in order to bring full security in the country. The ISAF was created with 3000-5000 troops and only had the following specific tasks based on the Military Technical Agreement made in Bonn (the University of Denver, n.d):

Assist the new government to develop future security structure.

Assist in reconstruction.

Training arrangement for future Afghan security.

At the same time, the Bonn conference decided to bring all Mujahidin, Afghan armed forces and armed groups under the single command and control of Interim Authority by December 22, 2001. All the previously fighting faction warriors were also “re-organized” based on the requirements of new Afghan security forces (Tyler D, 2012). Though that nobody was interested in talking with the Taliban, by the years 2005-6, after the Taliban movement became quite strong as the number of casualties and fatalities of the US forces sharply increased, the voice of ordinary people and the president of Afghanistan rose (approximately from 2008 onwards) to talk to Taliban for peace and stability in the country. In 2003 the DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration) program launched which was focusing on individual Taliban and was ignoring to talk to convince the Taliban movement as a whole. Meanwhile, the American embassy was also talking about the moderate Taliban, but they were not talking to the Taliban movement as a whole. When the US engaged in Iraq; the USA withdrew 3000 troops out of the total 20000 from Afghanistan in later 2005. By early 2006, the USA senior officials such as Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Commander General Abizaid said they will withdraw 4000 more soldiers as well. Keeping the security vacuum in consideration, president Karzai established the Independent Peace and Reconciliation Commission (Programme Tahkim Sulh – PTS) under the leadership of Sibghatullah Mujaddedi in order to persuade Taliban militants to leave insurgency and they will be given amnesty, however, the program failed. Consequently, Germans met the Taliban delegates at the Swiss city of Zurich and offered recognition of the Taliban as a political party in exchange for renouncing al-Qaida, while CIA and MI6 (British Secret Intelligence Service) also contacted the Taliban, however, the gap was very vast. Many other efforts were made to hold peace talks with the Taliban as in October 2008, a Pashtun Tribal Jirga was summoned in Islamabad by Karzai, but failed, because the Taliban did not participate, and in November 2008, Karzai offered Mullah Omer safe passage for negotiations and assurance that government would not hand over him to American authorities. But in all cases, the Taliban Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid declared that the Taliban would not take part in any peace talks with Karzai until the foreign forces leave Afghanistan. It was only in late 2010, that president Karzai publicly called upon the Taliban in London Conference to engage in talks and invited them to participate in a peace conference. In June 2010, president Karzai launched the Afghan National Peace Conference (or Peace Jirga), and called the Taliban “dear brothers” and pleaded for peace. Taliban rejected any offer and attacked the Jirga on its first day. Karzai decided to make more organized efforts, and thus created a seventy-person (70) high peace council in September 2010, under the chairmanship of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the foe of the Taliban and the head of Jamiat Islami. That had some progress as the Taliban asked for the removal of their senior official names from the Afghan and International target lists, which was accepted by the US and separated the Taliban from Al-Qaeda from the International Sanctions list. Meanwhile, the Hezbe Islamic Gulbuddin (HIG) was in contact with senior US officials, such as US ambassadors, US generals, and French officials at the end of 2011. However, it also demanded the complete withdrawal of foreign troops, power-sharing deals, new government and a new constitution at the initial stages. In early December 2011, the Second Bonn Conference declared a “peace and reconciliation process” with the Taliban as an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned process. Meanwhile, in the same month, US Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview with Newsweek, that the “ Taliban per se is not our enemy”, and spoke of the desire to develop a process to include them. When the USA announced it is going to withdraw its forces by the end of 2014, the Taliban position got even stronger and waited for the withdrawal of the US forces and the collapse of the government so they can rule the country once again. In September 2010, the Taliban claimed the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Leader of Jamiate Islami and the head of the High Peace Council, which temporarily stopped speaking with the Taliban (Goldstein, 1992). After the 2014 elections, the National Unity Government diverted its focus to high-level reconciliation and negotiations. Generally, UNDP is supporting the peacebuilding efforts through Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP), which was first presented as a policy document – the Afghan Peace and Reintegration Policy, at the London conference in January 2010. In this conference, the International Community agreed to establish a Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund to finance the subsequent Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP). Through this program UNDP Finances peace conferences (such as the one in June 2010, 1600 delegates), High Peace Council (HPC), the Joint Secretariat to the HPC, the Provincial Peace Councils and Provincial Joint Secretariats in 33 provinces. Currently, the APRP is focusing on two levels; first, political level dialogue to reach a peace settlement with insurgents, second, facilitation and reintegration of armed groups. (Japan contribution 52055941 out of total 131769010, the largest among 9 donors). The program is valid until 2018 (extended from December 2015, though it is currently under assessment). The Bonn Agreement lacked two parties of the long-term conflict, the Taliban, and HIG. One again it followed the path of past peacemaking efforts, however, it established a way for Peacebuilding. The Bonn Agreement was a peace agreement in the sense that it was meant to establish a way for long-term peace in Afghanistan. However, it was certainly a partial agreement in the sense that it lacked major conflict parties that could or should have taken part in the process (Ed.Uesugi, n.d).

Causes of Failure

As seen in the previous section, all of these formal 8+ peacemaking treaties have been failed or otherwise have never been successful in the first place, this is why Afghanistan is still the 2nd least peaceful (160/162) [4] country in the world. The question is why the violent conflicts have continued in Afghanistan? In quest of reasons, we see two kinds of causes that have failed Peacebuilding efforts in the country. Escalating Causes: These are the ones that increase or intensify the war in extent, intensity or magnitude, [5]. Such causes are; first, on a social level such as; high level of illiteracy, lack of job opportunities, explosive population growth but very low economic growth, strong community and group structure, and cultural aspects such as blood feuds, honour, informal justice system, religious extremism, etc. second, on the political level such as predatory approaches to governance, spoils system in bureaucracy, broken/corrupt justice system, impunity of warlords, etc. Third, on an economic level such as scarcity of natural resources such as water, arable land, agricultural irrigation, energy and power, etc. Since all of these problems persist; therefore, peace in Afghanistan is not succeeding. Many have talked about the escalating causes and there are many solutions for overcoming these difficulties. The majority of these challenges are also considered in the new Peacebuilding project called APRP (Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Project), therefore, we skip these causes in favour of the next cause which is more important but less talked about. Root Causes are the ones that are beneath the surface. It is a “cause-Harmful factor” that is “root” (deep, fundamental). [6] Root cause is not the main cause as some may confuse. The conflicts perpetuate in Afghanistan because of the following two root causes[7].

External conflicts are caused by the fear of the “Afghan tribal breakup”,

Internal Conflicts are caused because of the “Incoherent models of the Afghan political leadership”,

External Conflicts

Besides the constitution, Afghanistan is still (mostly) governed by tribal laws and numerous ethnic codes, however, the “tribalism” aspect had been very strong in the past. The British and Russian invasion were due to their fear of “The Afghan Tribal Breakup” although they were exaggerated at that time, nonetheless, the invader's fear was not baseless. We had the “tribal breakup” examples in the past ever since the creation of modern Afghanistan. Afghanistan has always been a poor country without an internal revenue generation mechanism, therefore, since its creation, the kings were using expansionism by including more fertile lands, agricultural produce, and professional labour, or a foreign subsidy as economic models; so they can have enough money at the center. This is also true with the recent US evasion, as the US attacked Afghanistan due to the Taliban Tribal and religious setup; non-conforming to established modern principles, and were providing sanctuaries to other like-minded people and organizations such as as Osama and Al-Qaida. The US and the ISAF alliance were scared that Afghans and its allies have attacked our civilizations and if they are not tackled they will continue disrupting world peace. This is why they created a world alliance of (41+) countries and attacked Afghanistan in order to topple the regime and install another one which can guarantee that the “other world” is not attacked from Afghanistan, and Afghanistan never becomes a safe haven for terrorists again. In this case, as seen, the external invaders only want an agreement with the Afghanistan ruling government; not to threaten their national interests and not to create a headache to them. In short, the external invaders don’t bother with internal political dynamism as seen in the cases of British, Russian and US peace agreements. They sign an agreement and then walk away.

Internal Conflicts

The internal conflicts were caused due to “Moral Contradictions in the Afghan polity, or in other words due to moral fault lines in the Afghan political community”. The political community of Afghanistan has struggled to choose the right type of “authority” through which they can keep the power coherently. Nonetheless, Afghans have never succeeded to bring a coherent political model that can be agreed upon by the entire or the majority of the population. Afghan leaders have tried, “tribe”, “royalism” and “Islam” and most recently (after 2001) the “modern state” and “unity government outside of the constitution”, one after another, but the main problem is that the political community could not agree to prioritize one model. Trial of each model and failing in it, and then moving to another model and failing in it has created a vicious circle of state failure in the country which is the root cause for all the internal conflicts in Afghanistan. Karzai could not establish peace with the Taliban because of the “incoherence” of his political authority with the political reality. Karzai was following the contradictory models of “Tribalism and modernism”, while the Taliban was following the “Islamic model – emirate” as a political system which is a totally different sphere; not open for negotiation. Finally, Afghans have failed so far to create a coherent model of political leadership, as each leader/government contradicts the previous political model. …, it is still continuing, we had republic based on the constitution and now the constitution is set aside and (being adjusted) to suite what is right morally, and acceptable to two executives, rather than what is constitutionally right. The Afghan political community still have not agreed on a coherence model for political leadership since the beginning of the Afghanistan modern state until now (2016). We have experienced every kind of known political systems (For details see Index):

Empire (Tribalism, Tribal Confederacy)

Kingdom, (Royalism)

Emirate, (Islam)

Chairman and president of revolution council, (communist and socialist regimes)

Republic, (Modern statehood, but the constitution is not followed right now under the unity government)

When any of the leaders were not able to exert his established authority (belonging to any of the above systems), they would be assassinated, deposed or forced to resign. Therefore, we still see an unstable Afghan state. What should be done? The main solution to correct the “moral fault lines in Afghan political community” is to convert the current sequence of establishing a moral state based on teleological authority (theocratic legitimacy) (which requires moral authority rather than legal authority – modern state theories), into a modern Weberian state based on modern principles of authority. Or, otherwise, when all members of the Afghan political community agree on something else. What should be changed? Though it was expected that the international community would create a modern Weberian state after 2001 as part of “modern Peacebuilding[8]” efforts, however, the constitution again left loopholes for continuing the momentum of old-style politics. Besides, the modern state dream was faded when the international community again ignored the Afghanistan constitution and proposed yet another unique type of government (by John Kerry, in 2014) to settle out of the constitution through a national unity government agreement. How it should be changed? Since there are many diverse communities, ethnicities, cultures, sects, … habitation in Afghanistan, they all have different narratives or “constructs” of authority, or normative order. The only way for them to come and create a unified set of principles to run the country or to accept the Weberian state is to understand this problem and resolve it. The Weberian state is not yet acknowledged by the political Afghan community, which is a basic model for a modern state. Though it can be updated or modified to suit the realities of the country (if necessary), however, at first, its basic model is necessary for a stable country. And it is possible through modern human resource development. This HRD education should be prioritized as follows:

Politics; governance, international relations, international development, and international cooperation…

Development; social development and culture, economic development, development theories and philosophies….

Index

Table: The Afghanistan Political Systems

S.No Royal heads of state Hotak Empire (1709–1738) Dynasty 1 Mirwais Hotak Emir Hotak 2 Abdul Aziz Hotak Emir; Brother of Mirwais Hotak Hotak 3 Mahmud Hotak Emir; Son of Mirwais Hotak Hotak 4 Ashraf Hotak Emir; Nephew of Mirwais Hotak Hotak 5 Hussain Hotak Emir; Nephew of Mirwais Hotak Hotak Durrani Empire (1747–1823) Durrani 6 Ahmad Shah Durrani Emir Durrani 7 Timur Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Ahmad Shah Durrani Durrani 8 Zaman Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Timur Shah Durrani; Deposed Durrani 9 Mahmud Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Timur Shah Durrani; Deposed Durrani 10 Shuja Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Timur Shah Durrani; First Reign; Deposed Durrani 11 Mahmud Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Timur Shah Durrani; Deposed Durrani 12 Ali Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Timur Shah Durrani; Deposed Durrani 13 Ayub Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Timur Shah Durrani; Deposed Durrani Emirate of Afghanistan (1823–1926) 14 Dost Mohammad Khan Emir; Son of Sardar Payendah Khan; First Reign; Exiled Barakzai 15 Shuja Shah Durrani Emir; Son of Timur Shah Durrani; Second Reign; Assassinated Durrani 16 Wazir Akbar Khan Emir; Son of Dost Mohammad Khan Barakzai 17 Dost Mohammad Khan Emir; Son of Sardar Payendah Khan; Second Reign Barakzai 18 Sher Ali Khan Emir; Son of Dost Mohammad Khan; First Reign; Deposed Barakzai 19 Mohammad Afzal Khan Emir; Son of Dost Mohammad Khan Barakzai 20 Mohammad Azam Khan Emir; Son of Dost Mohammad Khan Barakzai 21 Sher Ali Khan Emir; Son of Dost Mohammad Khan; Second Reign Barakzai 22 Ayub Khan Emir; Son of Sher Ali Khan; Deposed Barakzai 23 Abdur Rahman Khan Emir; Son of Mohammad Afzal Khan Barakzai 25 Habibullah Khan Emir; Son of Abdur Rahman Khan; Assassinated Barakzai 26 Nasrullah Khan Emir; Son of Abdur Rahman Khan; Deposed Barakzai 27 Amanullah Khan Emir; Son of Habibullah Khan Barakzai Kingdom of Afghanistan (1926–1973) 28 Amanullah Khan King; Son of Habibullah Khan; Deposed Barakzai 29 Inayatullah Khan King; Son of Habibullah Khan; Deposed Barakzai 30 Habibullāh Kalakāni King; Deposed Non-Dynastic 31 Mohammed Nadir Shah King; Grandnephew of Dost Mohammed Khan; Assassinated Barakzai 32 Mohammed Zahir Shah King; Son of Mohammed Nadir Shah; Deposed Barakzai Non-Royal heads of state 33 Mohammed Daoud Khan President; Member of the Barakzai dynasty (first cousin of Mohammed Zahir Shah); Assassinated 34 Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978–1987) 35 Abdul Qadir Chairman of the Presidium of the Military Revolutionary Council, Resigned 36 Nur Muhammad Taraki Chairman of the Presidium of the Revolutionary Council, Assassinated 37 Hafizullah Amin Chairman of the Presidium of the Revolutionary Council, Assassinated 38 Babrak Karmal Chairman of the Presidium of the Revolutionary Council, Resigned 39 Haji Mohammad Chamkani Chairman of the Presidium of the Revolutionary Council, Resigned 40 Mohammad Najibullah Chairman of the Presidium of the Revolutionary Council, Republic of Afghanistan (1987–1992) 41 Mohammad Najibullah President; Resigned 42 Abdul Rahim Hatif Acting President; Deposed Islamic State of Afghanistan (1992–1996) 45 Sibghatullah Mojaddedi President; Resigned 46 Burhanuddin Rabbani President; Deposed Northern Alliance of Afghanistan (1996–2001) 48 Burhanuddin Rabbani President; The Northern Alliance remained the internationally recognized government, despite only controlling about 10% of Afghan territory 49 Mohammed Omar Emir, Head of the Supreme Council and Commander of the Faithful; The Islamic Emirate never attained widespread international recognition, despite controlling about 90% of Afghan territory; Deposed Interim/Transitional Administration (2001–2004) 50 Burhanuddin Rabbani Acting President 51 Hamid Karzai President of the Interim Administration until 29 June 2002; President of the Transitional Administration from 29 June 2002 Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (2004–present) 52 Hamid Karzai President; First democratically elected head of state 53 Ashraf Ghani President; First peaceful transfer of power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_heads_of_state_of_Afghanistan

Works Cited

Aithison, C. (Ed.). (n.d). Treaty of Peace between Governments of India and Afghansitan, 8 August 1919. Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads: Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries., XIII(1933), pp. 286-288. Azam, D. F. (1993). The Geneva Accords on Afghanistan, Introduction by Dr. Farouq Azam. Berghof Foundation Operations GmbH. (2012). Chapter 10, Peace, Peacebuilding, Peacemaking. In B. Austin, G. H. J., & U. Jager (Eds.), Berghof Glossary on Conflict Transformation, 20 notions for theory and practice. Berghof Foundation Operations GmbH. Dr. Sultani Rome. (n.d). The Durand Line Agreement (1893): Its Pros and Cons. J.R.S.P Vol. XXXXI, No.1, 2004. Ed.Uesugi, Y. (n.d). Towards Bringing Stability in Afghanistan: A Review of the Peacebuilding Strategy. IPSHU Engish Research Report. Goldstein, E. (1992). Wars and Peace Treaties: 1816 to 1991. Taylor & Francis. Matinuddin, K. (1999). The Taliban Phenomenon: Afghanistan 1994-1997. Diane Pub Co. R.Blood, P. (1997). Afghanistan, a country study. Federal Researh Division. Library of Congress. Treaty of Gandamak. (2012, April 14). Retrieved May 20, 2016, from Wikisource.org: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Gandamak Tyler D, W. (2012). Security System Reform in Afghanistan. The Canadian Army Journal, 41(1), 32.

(2001, December 25). Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-establishment of Permanent Government Institutions. Retrieved May 2016, from Un.org: http://www.un.org/news/dh/latest/afghan/afghan-agree.htm

University of Denver. (n.d). Military Technical Agreement. Retrieved May 2016, from Private Security Monitor: http://psm.du.edu/media/documents/us_regulations/sofas/us_isaf_military_technical_agreement.pdf Vigier, C. (2009). Conflict Assessment Afghanistan. American Friends Service Committee. [1]UN Peace Building: an Orientation, Page 5. [2] Britinica.com/topic/anglo-afghan-wars [3] Treaty of Gandamak, Wikisource [4] http://www.visionofhumanity.org/#page/indexes/global-peace-index/2015/AFG/OVER [5] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/escalate [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cause [7] These reasons are influenced by the “Making of Modern Afghanistan” B.D. Hopkins, Palgrave Macmillan, Ontology of the Afghan Political Community, pp.82-107. [8] Modern peacebuilding=peacebuilding+statebuiding.

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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On a frosty February morning in Kabul, Lima Aafshid’s face glows in the pale blue light of her smartphone. She is reciting the words of 13th century Afghan poet Jalaluddin Rumi. Speaking in Dari, her voice is soft, yet clear.

‘Let’s get away from all the clever humans who put words in our mouth.

Let’s only say what our hearts desire.’

For the past six years, Aafshid has been a member of Sher-e-daneshgah, the Kabul University Poetry Association. The group is mostly made up of students in their twenties, members of the city’s rapidly growing middle class. Their meeting place is a hip, bustling cafe in Pole-e-surkh, Kabul’s vibrant 3rd district. Cigarette smoke swirls around the dimly-lit room as young men and women huddle together and discuss their poetry around a small wood-burning stove.

“You must have poetry inside of you,” Aafshid says. “It’s not something that you can just learn with experience. I have been writing since I was a child, and when I started studying journalism at Kabul University I joined Shar-e-Daneshgah to receive critiques of my poetry from others.” Aafshid says that the meetings have introduced her to a tight-knit cadre of like-minded young people. And during the global COVID-19 pandemic, technology has helped them continue to meet.

Afghanistan has 33,908 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and 957 fatalities as of July 10, yet the true number of cases is likely much higher due to a shortage of testing kits. Since March 28, when the Afghan government brought in lockdown measures in the capital in an attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, Sher-e-daneshgah has started hosting virtual poetry sessions, enabling its members to maintain a sense of community despite the health crisis. Aafshid says that the virtual groups have proven extremely popular. “We started a group on Telegram which now has more than 200 members. In this group, we share our poems one day a week, just like we did in our face-to-face meetings.”

Another informal poetry group called Saped-dar also holds a Virtual Poetry Night on Telegram, where members join via video to discuss poetry with different themes each week, from love and war to everyday life. “The group was created because of it as a place for young people to socialize together and learn about poetry,” says Aafshid.

Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, mobile technology and Internet access in Afghanistan has grown at a breakneck pace. A 2018 report found that more than 10% of the population are using social media apps, up from 0.1% in 2004. A 2019 study found that over 90% of Afghans have at least one member in their household who owns a mobile phone and 46.3% have an Internet connection.

Even before the pandemic, that was useful for young women like Aafshid, who want to share their perspectives without fearing their safety. Aafshid shares her poetry on social media under a pseudonym, having faced online threats in the past on Facebook. “When people started to harass me, I made a Telegram channel, and now I publish my poems there. I can choose who can follow me and can view my poems and on Telegram people can’t leave comments,” Aafshid says. “Now I am in control.”

Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women and ranks 168 out of 189 countries in the U.N.’s Gender Development Index. According to the Women and Children Legal Research Foundation, a Kabul-based research advocacy group, nine out of 10 women in urban communities face at least some form of physical or verbal harassment. Despite a peace deal signed in February between the U.S. and the Taliban, violence against women persists. On May 12, militants attacked a Kabul maternity ward, leaving 24 dead, including 16 young mothers and 2 newborns.

Amid the violence and the isolation of lockdown, Aafshid says that online poetry groups offer a vital means of maintaining mental health. “All generations have been witness to war in Afghanistan,” she says. “Poetry offers a means for us to release our stress.”

Lynzy BillingThe first edition of ‘Shariat’, a monthly magazine published on March 22, 1998 by the Afghan Taliban. Inside, an article by a female writer praising the talent of Persian and Pashtun women poets.

Long before the pandemic, poetry societies led by women had sprung up in underground spaces. Mirman Baheer, a nationwide women’s literary society, was formed in 2010 by Sahira Sharif, an Afghan politician, author, and women’s rights advocate.

Sharif recognized that anonymous communities were one of the few safe avenues for Afghan women to share firsthand accounts of their lives. Mirman Baheer meets in a different secret location each week, allowing women to share experiences that would otherwise remain hidden.

In rural areas many women still write in secret, using pen names. Mirman Baheer offers a space for rural women to share their deepest thoughts through a type of coded oral poetry called a landay. Originating thousands of years ago, landays are usually anonymous, and composed of two lines of 22 syllables. One notable example is by warrior war poet Malalai:

‘Young love if you do not fall in the battle of Maiwand;

By God someone is saving you as a token of shame.’

Malalai, an Afghan heroine who famously fought during the second Anglo-Afghan war, called out this landay during the 1880 battle of Maiwand. Locals believe Malalai’s landay motivated the fighters to ultimately defeat the British invaders.

These days, Mirman Baheer hosts a few hundred members aged 13 to 55 in clubs across a handful of Afghan cities and provinces including Kandahar, Khost and Jalalabad. Younger poets are mentored by professors and poets. During the pandemic, physical gathering has become difficult, but the founding members have come up with a solution: live streaming on Facebook. Members can join from the safety of their homes, participating in conversation and literary criticism.

Pakiza Arezo, a former literature student who now works with the Ministry of Information and Culture in Kabul has been a member of Mirman Baheer since the group’s founding. “Our members are mostly Pashtun girls from the provinces whose families disapprove of them writing and reading poetry in front of men. Their society is more conservative,” she says. “So we formed a women’s only group.”

For these women from rural areas, who overwhelmingly lack access to the Internet or smartphones, participation is still possible. “For women who aren’t able to join in the group discussions in person, because of the distance, issues around security or family permission, we will listen to and discuss their poetry by telephone,” Arezo says.

Azero says that growing access to the Internet is helping to transform the prospects of female poets in rural areas and to offer opportunities for their work to be shared widely and, importantly, anonymously if the poet chooses. “Social media has encouraged women to share their ideas, and opinions, and offered a space for women to be more open minded,” she says.

Technology has enabled Afghan women to share their experiences in ways that were not available to them before, agrees Farzaneh Milani, an Iranian-American author and professor of Persian literature and Women’s Studies at the University of Virginia. She says technology has played a key role in the movement for women’s equality in the country. “Although the ties between women and poetry have been deep and strong in Afghanistan, digital online poetry sharing is an ultimate act of unveiling for women in the borderless cyberspace,” Milani says. “Giving presence to the unseen and the voice to the unheard.”

In Kabul, Aafshid is optimistic about the opportunity that poetry brings for Afghan women’s rights. But she also recognizes that fundamental societal attitudes must shift to meet this change. “Women have a right to shape the policies that determine the political and cultural landscape in their own country,” says Afshid.

To get there, she says, Afghan women’s perspectives needed to be recognized. “Women need to feel safe to share their voices publicly. Until then, they will only find safety in anonymity online and among one another.”

#IFTTT #Blogger

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thecoroutfitters · 6 years ago

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Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

Beyond individual and small-group home, property, and self-defense, we increasingly hear a call for citizens to stand up as modern minutemen. The term is relatively new, but the idea isn’t.

Many preppers have always expected that at some point, they’ll either be joining a group or family, friends, and neighbors with the need to engage an enemy force of some kind. While some of those expectations come from fictional sources, there are some fairly recent precedents that make a compelling argument for the ability to band together.

Images: Koreatown business owners on guard during the LA riots (L.A. Times); business owners during Ferguson’s riots 20 years later (Riverfront Times).

There are also realistic “what-if” situations where a functional independent force not unlike a ramped-up community watch has reasonable applications, long before we start entertaining way-out scenarios involving EROL troops and foreign NWO invaders.

Before we start really looking at individual skills and basic gear, there’s a few key areas that can make or break the success of a Modern Minuteman. They’re things to account for before we gather our gear to march to our woods and fences, and things to ensure any group we join has considered before we sign on, whether we’re signing up now or later.

First, Understand the Minuteman

No, I’m not going to dissect the myths and truths of yesteryear’s minutemen (although… http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/minuteman-myth/). I’m not even going to split hairs between minutemen and the militia of the era.

I just want to point out that a minuteman was – just like today’s reservists and guardsmen and many fighting forces large and small for centuries and millennia before and after them – a yeoman, tapped to fight when needed.

They were first and foremost workers. Not soldiers.

For the greatest breadth of that history – all the way up to the modern eras – most of those yeomen were involved in production and trades/crafts, and much of that production involved foods.

While a pyramid helps start to make that point, they still don’t accurately represent the consumerism and contributions of each group. The stepped versions of trophic/energy graphs start getting closer, but it’s still really difficult to appreciate the magnitudes and exponential’s of input required at each level to sustain a single member of the tier above.

Why am I harping on this opening and seemingly tangential point so much?

Because it’s expensive to maintain all the specialists within a society – any type of specialist, to include part-time and full-time soldiers.

When the American minuteman was born, he was led and organized by landowners and businessmen who were mostly still tied enough to the earth to understand production and man-hours – even the city boys.

Many of our founding fathers and the local militia and minuteman organizers were deeply involved in breeding better crop and livestock varieties for the regions, developing management techniques for timber, and fine-tuning stoves, housing, transportation, and tools to better work the land and make efficient and maximum use of resources.

While they understood the need to fight once letter-writing and overseas discussion trips failed, they already inherently understood the need for a populace to feed itself – especially with supply lines about to be disrupted.

(Fun quickie reads: http://www.edisonmuckers.org/founding-father-inventors/, https://www.varsitytutors.com/earlyamerica/jefferson-primer/agronomist)

Their citizen soldiers were also deeply tied to production. Even the urbanite craftsmen and tradesmen, the accountants and scholars, were much more aware of their larder needs, and of the seasons – harvests and planting, hunting and livestock, foraging and wood cutting.

They understood time with a powder horn instead of a plow and hammer would impact life.

While it doesn’t get the attention other aspects of the Revolutionary citizen soldiers do, the quote traced back to Napoleon was in full effect:

“Amateurs discuss tactics; professionals discuss logistics.”

He’s not the first, last, or only to emphasize it. Alexander the Great is credited with saying that his logicians were humorless, because they knew if his campaign failed, the supply chain was going to be investigated first.

Antoine-Henri Jomni described logistics as the means through which tactics and strategy could be implemented, and the main factor in creating those strategies and tactics.

Those logistics range throughout training and deployment, from mobility of troops and supplies, to types of supplies and sourcing them. Everyone involved in every step of that process has to be fed and kept shoe’d, rested, and housed.

As Sun Tzu said, “the line between disorder and order lies in logistics”.

(Fun fact: Today’s home canning methods came about due to Napoleon’s logistical challenges.)

The minutemen largely fought close to home, not called away as often or as far as the standing army and militia. The same is likely to be true of the Modern Minuteman. Even so, and even though we’ll presumably be better trained than the Revolutionary minuteman, we’re at a disadvantage.

See, we’re now largely what would have been the exception among those citizen soldiers and their organizers.

We very rarely have ingrained understanding of our larders or household supplies like water and fuel, of reasonable production/foraging yield expectations, or of the logistics involved with outfitting even short-term, short-distance yeoman fighters.

That Needs to be the First Focus.

Whether we expect to stand up in mostly “normal” conditions or during a Big-time Event, get the larder and daily-use supplies sorted. Get self- and home-defense taken care of if you’re vulnerable.

Get basic repairs for water, windows, vehicles, and roofs prepped. Know how to handle common injuries like sprains, burns, and foreign objects in eyes.

*It also wouldn’t hurt to remember how often in history yeomen – right up to today’s irregular/guerrilla/insurgent forces – spend some portion of their time producing food, and start practicing that.

Then spend time and money on the sexy run-n-gun goodies.

Next Step: Intel & Comms – No intel, no comms, no mission.

From the most elite modern warriors to cavemen with bone clubs, we rely on information. Even on a personal level – say, a home intruder – if we don’t know there’s a problem, and what it is, we don’t know that we need to react, let alone how to best respond.

Sun Tzu also weighed in on that front. Importantly, he emphasized honest self-assessment and understanding of the community at large along with accurate assessments of the opposing force.

That self-assessment is enormous.

It factors hugely in choosing when and how to engage. And disengage. And when and how to not engage at all.

Being good at making that call is one of the things that made successful resistance fighters difficult to counter even before the Swamp Fox dove around fences and trees instead of lining up to engage Brits with big “X marks the spot” on their chests. It has continued to run empire-ruling armies ragged in the centuries since.

Images: Brits in the First Anglo-Afghan war, and Russian troops fighting the same never-quite-conquered enemy 120 years and several wars later.

Whichever extreme we choose for our scenarios – commonplace likely events that occur even today or restoring order or freedom during or after something huge – the Modern Minuteman can expect to be facing larger numbers and-or better-equipped professional militaries, just like the guerrilla and insurgent forces before them.

They, too, are going to rely on accurate self-assessment combined with accurate calculation of both the local community and the enemy to successfully engage.

Images: Italian, South Vietnamese, and Greek civilian home-guard militia and resistance fighters of WWII and Vietnam.

Denying enemy intel on us is also a biggie. After all, they’re using information the exact same way we hopefully are.

Communication Is Key.

Again, it’s “no intel, no comms, no mission”. Without the ability to trickle information both ways, intel does no good. Willing, able parties with the best training and all the gear in the world can be rendered totally inoperable without communication systems.

Those minutemen had to be rallied, remember.

Somebody had to tell them where they were massing, and then somebody had to decide on a plan of action based on available information. Unit and individual assignments and instructions had to be passed.

The most likely scenarios leave phones and texting an option for Modern Minutemen. We also have regular ol’ Motorolas. I’m a fan of SSB-CB for middling distances due to cost, ease, lack of regulation, and the possible ranges without repeaters, but there’s also HAM radio – which will also send texts and email these days – and even field phones from various eras.

We can also make arrangements for a low-tech Twilight Bark https://www.theprepperjournal.com/2017/03/04/radio-silence-communication-without-electronics/, some of which offer pretty decent ranges if we have line of sight.

For near-area alerts that we should check something like a flag, hobo symbols, or message board system, or to tell neighbors on standby that it’s time to rally or to man their stations, we might also consider things like canned-air stadium squealers and boater’s fog horns.

(Having a variety of grid-down comms systems has all sorts of benefits even if A Big Thing never occurs. It also applies to things that have nothing to do with gun-toters: riding to the rescue for births, warning about fires and rising water or stock-killing loose dogs, saving steps and time to call people in for breakfast, telling neighbors we’re sick/injured, helping each other with planting and harvest…)

The Modern Minuteman

The idea of a fast-response or defensive force citizen soldier isn’t new. Nor is it fading away anytime soon. It’s not just tactics, though, or the gear each individual and team needs to employ them. It’s not even the basic skills and abilities required to engage in a fight.

Before we go whole-hog on the combat aspects of the Modern Minuteman, take some time to seriously game plan the basic tenets of logistics, comms, and intel.

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