While our fortunes are shaped by many factors, our parents, our nations, our eras, it may well be that the most pivotal force, in the determining of our destinies, is geography. For not only have exploitable land and natural resources, separately and together, altered the futures of nations and empires, forbidding mountains and impassable oceans have protected and nourished cultures that, otherwise, would have been long-since absorbed by more powerful societies. However, as much as these natural barriers can shield populations from assimilation, they can also invite attention by those rapacious greats of history who see only challenge in the unconquerable. And wherever there is conquest, ruin is not far afield. No country has ever labored more beneath the curse of geography, than Afghanistan. Mr. Tanner explains in this, his military history of that battered country.
Sprawled at the intersection of empires and continents, tribes and civilizations, lies Afghanistan. For thousands of years, this country of mountains and deserts has been the fascination of warriors and scholars, the former having tried with some success to conquer it; the latter having tried in vain to understand it. For Afghanistan, which has crouched between east and west for centuries, is an inexplicable blend of past and future. It is a country of cities and tribes, of cultured merchants and horse-born nomads. In any other land, such divisions would have been forced to amalgamate, to be normalized by the inevitable blending of cultural elements that occurs any time people are forced to comingle. However, Afghanistan's geography shortcircuited this process, allowing the tribes to live and survive in the mountains while, below, the citydwellers moved on, their fortunes rising and falling with the succession of kings and warlords, emperors and high priests, who, over millennia, have laid claim to this most vital and rocky roadway between Europe and Asia.
From Alexander the Great to Chandragupta Maurya, from the British empire to the Soviet Union, Mr. Tanner recounts Afghanistan's long and bloody history with armies and imperiums. He describes how these experiences imprinted upon the people of Afghanistan both the Way of the Warrior and the will of the resister, values that, along with the country's challenging geography, has kept it from cohering into a stable, united society. The absence of this national identity has bestowed upon Afghanistan a terrible legacy of chaos, the misery of which has only been added to by arrogant empires who sought to subdue through force a world they barely bothered to understand.
Though Afghanistan is not without flaws, it is, in the main, an excellent primer on the history of this cursed country. From the Mauryans to the Mongols, Mr. Tanner, a military historian, bombards the reader with a dizzying array of empires that have trampled and besieged this diverse land. In the process, he introduces us to the great men of history, the savage and the enlightened, who've driven their standards down into Afghanistan's hard soil. But as illuminating as the author makes this long and winding journey, he sheds very little light at all on the Afghanis themselves, their customs, their treasures. This may not be the fault of the author. An absence of written records for much of the country's history surely does not aid in a fulsome portrait of Afghanistan. More over, the works' core revelation, that Afghanistan is little more than a collection of disparate fragments which have been so long left in pieces that they can no longer fit together, raises the question of which culture, the city or the tribal, should be expanded upon. Nonetheless, the absence of cultural information leaves the work, at times, to read like little more than a succession of battles, the details of which eventually blur into a haze of bloodshed and suffering.
For all its handicaps, Afghanistan is revelatory work that leaves little doubt that this fractured place will continue to be a troubled country. Published in 2002, the author concludes his history on the positive tone created by the NATO defeat of the Taliban. However, we know better. For we have had the benefit of watching those early gains recede in the face of Talibani truculence which, ironically, only underscores Mr. Tanner's overall portrait of an Afghanistan divided, an Afghanistan burdened by countless invasions, an Afghanistan without a national identity in an era of nation states. Much to the cost of the Afghani people, this portrait leaves little doubt that this country will continue to be what it has always been, the road over which great civilizations destructively churn. (3/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment