The Punishment of Virtue (33 page)

No one involved even bothers to hide these things. That same spring, when I went to visit Mahmad Anwar in Chaman, he wanted me to stay the night so he could show me the distributions of automatic weapons, motorcycles, and cash at a
madrassa,
or religious school, around the corner from his house. At the camp near the border, due north of Chaman, where Akrem landed an informant, the trainers were a Pakistani army colonel and two majors. Akrem gave me their names. The curriculum included such subjects as constructing explosives from improvised materials and how to plan and carry out the assassination of public figures.

The Pakistani ploy of buying Washington off with well-timed deliveries of Al-Qaeda operatives while continuing to support the Taliban worked quite effectively. I remember at the U.S. embassy once, I was providing details on a training camp on the road from Quetta to Karachi, and on a top Taliban official who was swaggering around Quetta. I had his license plate number—an ISI plate—and the addresses of his two government-provided safe houses.

The U.S. official groaned. “I know, I know, Sarah. But there's not a thing we can do about it. Pakistan just gave us Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.”

And so U.S. troops fighting resurgent Taliban found themselves in the ironic position of battling foes sent against them by a country that was supposed to be their ally. Indeed, when Washington awarded $3.5 billion to Pakistan in the summer of 2003, American troops following the news on TVs in their plywood hooches had every reason to assume that a good chunk of that U.S. taxpayer money would be spent on the very Taliban who were attacking them. In other words, Washington was actually supporting the terrorists it claimed to be waging war upon. The war on terror was a charade.

When I brought these issues up with U.S. soldiers, they tended to react strongly: “If it was to invade Pakistan, I'd sign up for another rotation,” one of them told me. “We all feel that way,” shrugged a military police officer, who had kindly let me sit in the sandbagged bunker behind Gate 2 one sizzling afternoon. “The Pakistani border is just an imaginary line keeping us from doing our job.”

330S B.C., 1220–1450

T
HOSE LINES WERE
written in the thirteenth century, but when I read them, I couldn't help thinking that the action they depict sounded a lot like what U.S. soldiers were doing in Afghanistan: chasing an elusive foe to the border with “the land of the Hindus”—read, nowadays, Pakistan—and losing him. The operative difference being that U.S. soldiers were not allowed to “search into the heart of the land of the Hindus.” They had to stop at the border.

It turns out that the American soldiers who spent years hunting Al-Qaeda and Taliban holdouts in Afghanistan were respecting an old tradition. The theme of conquering army hunting vanquished foe through desert, dale, and mountain vale is a recurring one in Central Asian history. An examination of some of these quests debunks a famous myth: that Afghanistan has never been conquered. The fact is that the lands of Afghanistan have been repeatedly invaded, and conquered, during their long history. The fact is, indeed, that conquest—devastating, waste-laying conquest—has come to define the character of these lands perhaps as much as stubborn independence has. And the
yaghestan
principle, while often successful in stymieing would-be invaders, has just as often constituted the fatal chink in Afghanistan's bulwark: allowing those invaders in.

The most famous chase of a defeated local leader across Central Asia is one I have reveled in since adolescence, when I discovered a riveting historical novel by Mary Renault called
The Persian Boy.
It tells the story of Alexander the Great, who, in the early 330s
B
.
C
., pursued the shah of Persia and then his would-be successor well beyond the confines of the Greeks' known world, into the heart of Central Asia.

Back then the Persian Empire covered all of today's Iraq and stretched beyond it to the shores of the Mediterranean. Alexander's original goal was to retrieve some Greek city-states in modern Turkey, Syria, and Israel/ Palestine, which had been conquered by the Persians.

The ambitious young Macedonian first did battle with Persia's king of kings, Darius III, at the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, where the coast of modern Turkey meets the top of Syria. The shah deployed his forces in a narrow defile, where his serried contingents were unable to maneuver to advantage.

Alexander, mounted on his beloved and now rather elderly steed Bucephalas, threw himself at the Persian royal bodyguard and the tall, gemstudded monarch in its midst. Darius, to his eternal shame, turned and fled. Like a drowning man shedding sodden clothes and shoes, he cast off accoutrements, cumbersome chariot, royal weapons, and robe of state as he leaped to the back of an unharnessed horse and galloped for his life.

Alexander turned back from the chase with the trophies but not the king, and discovered at the Persian camp what kind of style Darius traveled in. The shah had abandoned sumptuous tents and furnishings, harem, even his mother to the Greeks. A filial friendship was born between Alexander the Great and the Persian queen mother.
²

After a detour to Egypt, Alexander headed back north and east across modern Syria and Iraq. The Greeks fought Darius and beat him again, not far from Mosul. Deployed in the left wing of the Persian army, behind the elephants and to their left, was a small cavalry contingent from Kandahar.
³

According to one account, Alexander sacrificed to Fear ahead of the fight that morning.
⁴
Apparently, Fear heard him: again Darius turned and ran. The Greeks caught up with him just south of the Caspian Sea. They found his body, that is. Some nobles had tied him up and thrown him in a cart, then stabbed him and fled.

One of those nobles tried to set himself up as king of kings in his murdered kinsman's place. He headed for the wild east, rallied the tribes, took a shah's name, and began wearing the Persian cap of royal office.

It was to pursue and punish this regicide that Alexander persuaded his army, already so far from home, not to turn back toward Macedon, but to push yet farther eastward into lands that were well off the map. The Macedonian army was a democratic affair, with major decisions decided by general assembly. So it was indeed a matter of persuasion on Alexander's part, not force. It is hard to imagine what kind of charisma he must have had to move his men to follow him to the back of beyond.

They chased the regicide across Persia, detoured southward to Herat on modern Afghanistan's border with Iran. By autumn of 330
B
.
C
., Alexander's army was encamped in today's Farah, roughly halfway between Herat and Kandahar. Then, passing by Zaranj and the home counties of those Persian folk heroes Zal and Garshasp and Rustam, the Greeks turned eastward along the mighty Helmand River. The winter, passed in those warm regions where the zunbils of Zabulistan spent their winters almost a thousand years later, was a delight. A “peaceful tribe”
⁵
provisioned the army and received reward. And, with no battle noted, Alexander founded another one of his Alexandrias there, Alexandria in Arachosia, on the approximate site of modern Kandahar. It was one of many Greek colonies he was to leave behind to administer the vast new empire he was building.

It took a lot more chasing before Alexander finally caught up with Darius's assassin. By sheer force of will he hauled his army over the towering and snow-drifted Hindu Kush Mountains north of Kabul, later in the year than he should have dreamed of trying it. He spent five days crossing the Oxus River, now Afghanistan's northern boundary with Uzbekistan, much the way Afghans do today: on rafts made of inflated animal hides. His soldiers finally put a collar around the neck of the regicide not far from modern Samarqand.

That was a city with an illustrious future ahead of it.
⁶

Just short of fifteen hundred years later, in the early
A.D
. 1200s, Samarqand was a flourishing commercial town, polyglot, its people sporting the fabulous dress of a dozen countries, eating foods that revolted each other. Samarqand was a key halt along the silk route, plied by caravans with their multicolored bales of goods headed from China westward to the Mediterranean. The capital of a small steppe principality, the town enjoyed great prestige. “It was by common consent the most delectable of the paradises of this world among the Four Edens,” wrote the historian Ata Malik Juvayni in the 1250s, “a country whose stones are jewels, whose soil is musk and whose rainwater is strong wine.”
⁷

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, has a publications division. It has seen fit to put out a translation of the above-quoted, absolutely crucial source for the Mongol conquests, one of the most traumatizing events ever to occur on earth. The book is available in paperback; it can be ordered on the Internet.

Here is what propelled me to do that. The Mongols swept across Central Asia in the 1220s like a tidal wave. Nothing stood in their way. They killed people in the hundreds of thousands, pushed down trees and uprooted fields, sacked magnificent cities. And on the wreckage they founded the largest contiguous empire in human history, spreading from China all the way across Asia to the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. The Mongol conquests had an unimaginable impact on the collective psychology of an entire continent, one that has lasted until today. And Afghanistan—Kandahar—was in the Mongols' way. I just had to know how Kandahar had fared. How had the conquest that defines the very idea of conquest in the human imagination treated Kandahar?

I did my now-familiar trawl in the library. I took out five books on the Mongols, photocopied them, and returned them the next day. The later arrival of that UNESCO primary source added priceless details to what I first read.

When the Mongols under Genghis Khan—the greatest military genius since Alexander—erupted onto the plain before Samarqand in 1220, they enjoyed a military superiority every bit as dramatic as that of the Soviets over the Afghans in the 1980s or the United States over the Taliban in 2001.

Their first advantage was speed. The Mongols on their shaggy ponies could race across territory with unimaginable swiftness because, unlike any army of the day, they traveled unencumbered. They would not even carry food, hunting along the way instead and crossing deserts in winter so they could graze their ponies on shoots of dew-fed grass. The Mongols carried no siege engines, preferring to load much lighter engineers, who could build what they needed on the battlefield. They wore tough but flexible rawhide armor, the contemporary equivalent of a bulletproof vest.
⁸
Practically born on horseback, the Mongols could shoot their arrows while hanging sideways or backward off their mounts. They perfected the old steppe ruse of the feigned retreat, drawing an overconfident foe into a cul-de-sac and then falling on him from all sides.

Apart from these advantages, which grew almost naturally out of the Mongols' native environment, Genghis Khan's genius added others. Like the leaders of the early Muslim Arabs six hundred years before, he had learned that tribalism hampered conquest. Genghis Khan abolished tribes and reorganized his army on a decimal principle. The Mongol army was the most disciplined fighting force the world had ever seen.
⁹

Like Alexander, Genghis Khan loved surprise. When, to avenge a grievous insult, he made up his mind at the age of sixty to go out west to Persia and conquer the shah, Genghis Khan did not take the straight road traveled by the silk merchants. He opened up a longer route on a northern arc—fully two thousand miles of rugged mountain and Kyzyl Qum Desert that
no one
crossed. Appearing impossibly at the gates of Samarqand's neighboring city Bukhara in March of 1220, Genghis Khan strewed panic.

The pages of Juvayni and other Persian-speaking chroniclers of these events indicate what a tremendous clash of cultures then transpired. Islam in those days, though politically chaotic, was a deeply learned, cultivated society—much more so than contemporary Europe. Of Bukhara, Juvayni writes, “Its environs were adorned with the bright light of doctors and jurists and its surroundings embellished with the rarest of high attainments. Since ancient times it has in every age been the place of assembly of the great scholars.”
¹⁰
Among the horrors that followed in the Mongol sack, the destruction of Bukhara's library was the most painful to these authors: “And they brought the cases in which the Korans were kept out into the courtyard of the mosque, where they cast the Korans right and left and turned the cases into mangers for their horses.”
¹¹

The Mongols at that stage had no use for book learning. They had little use for cities. Bukhara, like the others, they methodically destroyed. What they did have use for was fodder, which is why they cut up a lot of cultivation and let grassland reconquer the Persians' tilled fields. There was a certain logic to their treatment of Bukhara's books, though as systematic destruction of cultural objects with no military value, punishable in international tribunals today, it was shocking even then. The Muslims did not understand that by allowing the learned jurists to feed their horses, the Mongols were ritually accepting their submission, sparing them death, and promising them future protection.
¹²

Like Alexander, Genghis Khan invoked the animus of fear to aid his conquests. Indeed, he consciously cultivated fear. The Mongols' tactics were designed to terrorize the population into submission.

When he did not massacre the entire population of a conquered place, Genghis Khan would execute the fighting men, after emptying the city so his people could loot it more efficiently. He would allot a portion of the vanquished men to each of his commanders of a thousand for killing. The bones of the dead would be heaped up to frighten travelers, as attested to in another contemporary chronicle by a witness who rode past such a macabre hill: “We supposed that that white eminence was perhaps a hill of snow, but the people of that part replied, ‘The whole of it is the bones of men slain.' [Further on,] the ground became so greasy and dark from human fat that it was necessary for us to advance another three stages on that same road until we came to dry ground again.”
¹³
Three full days wading through human blood.

Craftsmen, who might be valuable in equipping the Mongol army, were shared out among its divisions. The Mongols organized most of the other civilian males into “levies,” whose duty was to take the lead in assaulting the next city.
¹⁴

It was this kind of army, ghoulishly swelled with conscripted local folk, that took the glorious city of Samarqand. “So many men, both Mongols and levies, were assembled together that their numbers exceeded those of the sand of the desert or drops of rain.”
¹⁵
Petrified Samarqand swung open its gates, and “the Mongols then entered and that day busied themselves with the destruction of the town and its outworks.” Barely glancing up as night fell, the Mongols “lit torches and continued their work until the walls were level with the streets and there was everywhere free passage for horse and foot.”
¹⁶