And getting back home was deadly. Others learned the same lesson, the hard way.
Britain called this contest the “Great Game” and Russia referred to it as bol’shaia igra (tournament of shadows). Some in Britain thought it would lose this game if it did not control Afghanistan as a forward base to keep Russia at bay, and Russia thought it must control Afghanistan to launch its drive to the Indian Ocean. Britain also fought the expansion of the Russian Empire to the west, as well as to the south. The spoils of the greater contest once included the decaying empire of Turkey, and the Crimean War was also part of this struggle.
The notion of the Great Game draws on our recollections of other games. It is exemplified by Montaigne’s reference to le jeu, the game, in an expression paraphrased by Moorcroft, an early British explorer in Central Asia. The idea of “the game” includes both chance and skill; you have to take what you are dealt, and then play it to win. It is universally understood, because that is the game of life itself. The expression “great game” has become common. Perhaps this derives from Kipling’s popular novel, Kim, which referred to “the Great Game,” although more likely it is because the game of chance is so deeply imbedded in human activities. Kipling’s words resonate with our beliefs and aspirations. The term “great game” as used by Kipling has been traced back to the origin of the game of rugby, which in 1823 arose as a great game at Rugby College. After Kipling introduced the term “Great Game,” it became a metaphor for spying, or for any great contest. Winston Churchill supposedly “acquired in his adventures on the outposts of the British empire a fascination for the ‘Great Game’ of secret intelligence.”1
I will use the term “Great Game” as Kipling referred to it, a game that was centered on Afghanistan’s border with India that Britain attempted to keep secure. Britain originally attempted to protect India by controlling Afghanistan—Britain’s so-called forward policy. But after losing two brutal wars with the Afghans (in 1839–42 and 1878–79), the British decided a better course would be to withdraw to the south and allow Afghanistan to be the buffer against Russia’s advance. The new British policy was to allow the ferocious border tribes—particularly the Pashtuns, who were then called Pathans—to defend their own territory. The tribes would thereby provide insurance against a Russian advance into India. In 1893 an agreement was reached between Mortimer Durand of Britain and the emir (king) of Afghanistan to fix the border between Afghanistan and India. Passing through the Pashtun territory, the intent of the Durand Line was to divide the tribes and prevent them from rising in unison.
Geography
The area that is now called Afghanistan is a landlocked nation in Central Asia surrounded by six other countries. Its borders were vague in ancient times but gradually became defined, and then shifted to their present lines. As it is with most countries, borders are based on geography and politics. The northern border largely follows the course of the Amu Darya River, which was formerly called the Oxus. In its eastern reaches, the boundary is the tributary known as the Panj River. These rivers separate Afghanistan from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, which were formerly Soviet socialist republics. Russia and Britain created the eastern border in 1873 to separate the Russian Empire from British India. It extends along a narrow corridor, called the Wakhan, to the province of Xinjiang in western China. It is some 150 miles long, narrowing to only seven miles at one point. In the east, the Pamir Mountains provide a natural barrier between Afghanistan and China. Iran is on Afghanistan’s western border, a boundary that has been contested in the past by both Iran and Russia. And the southern border, on which this book is focused, is with the provinces of Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province [NWFP]) of Pakistan. This border formerly extended farther to the south, but in 1893 it was fixed in its present location after an agreement was made between Russia and Britain; Afghanistan was simply told that this would be the border. The Durand Line, surveyed between 1893 and 1896, pushed the border about forty miles to the north, to the Khyber Pass. It placed Peshawar in India, and it affirmed the independence of Chitral from Afghanistan. Some in Afghanistan, especially the Pashtuns, who live on both sides of the Durand Line, have never fully accepted the southern border: they dream of uniting “Pashtunistan” and extending the border to the south again.
Afghanistan is a country of contrasts. With some 251,772 square miles, it is slightly smaller than Texas, with an average elevation of three thousand feet. The population of Afghanistan is about 28 million, slightly more than the 26 million in Texas. It is transected by the Hindu Kush Mountains, which are roughly in the center of the country, tapering down in the west. The highest mountain is Nowshak, at 24,557 feet, nearly 10,000 feet higher than the peaks of the Rockies in Colorado. Some of the area is good cropland and very lush, and other parts are arid. Sheep and goats graze the mountains up to ten or twelve thousand feet. One of the main crops is the opium poppy, from which Afghanistan produces much of the world’s heroin; some estimate it as greater than 90 percent of the world’s supply. It is also the world’s largest producer of hashish, the resin produced from the cannabis plants, from which marijuana is prepared. The country is divided by ethnicity—many groups have settled here and they have their own territories. Local government is largely based on tribal customs, which are male dominated and hierarchical. The country is Islamic, principally Sunni, except for the Shiites in western Afghanistan. The principal cities are the capital Kabul, Herat in the west, Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, and Kandahar and Jelalabad, which are principally Pashtun cities, near the southeastern border.
Two provinces of Pakistan adjoin the south side of the poorly marked, roughly 1,500-mile long Durand Line. They are now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan Provinces; each province occupies about half of the length of the border. Formed in 1901 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province was originally called the North-West Frontier Province of India, and it retained that name after Pakistan was formed in 1947. Its present name was given in 2010, but it will usually be referred to in this book, as it was throughout World War II, as the NWFP. Immediately adjacent to Afghanistan within this province are the frontier regions and federally administered tribal areas. The trip described in this book in November–December 1943 was largely within the NWFP, but it ended in Baluchistan.
The capital of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province is Peshawar, a town that dates back to time immemorial. The province now consists of twenty-five districts. It includes what were formerly three semi-independent states to the north of Peshawar, that are now considered as provincially administered tribal areas: Chitral, the northernmost of the three, that was ruled by a hereditary mehtar (the ruler of Chitral); Upper Dir and Lower Dir, that were ruled by the nawab (the ruler of Dir) of Dir; Malakand (which in British India was an administrative district that included Dir and Chitral); and Swat, whose ruler was known as the wali (the ruler of Swat) of Swat. There are seven federally administered tribal areas: Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan, and South Waziristan. All the provincially administered tribal areas and federally administered tribal areas were traversed by the three Anglo-American officers in the fall of 1943, and all were identified by name as the travelers passed through them, except for Bajaur and Orakzai. The principal cities of the province, in addition to Peshawar, are Dera Ismail Khan and Abbotabad (where bin Laden was killed in 2011).
Baluchistan (meaning the land of the Balochis) is the province to the south of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. From its capital, Quetta, in the north, it extends from Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. It is the largest of Pakistan’s four provinces, with some 43 percent of its area, but because of its arid and mountainous nature, it is by far the least populous, containing only 7 percent of Pakistan’s population. About 70 percent of the Balochi people live in Baluchistan Province, and the rest live in Iran, to the west. The East India Company had informally occupied western Baluchistan in 1843; its territories came under the direct rule or Raj of the British in 1858 when the East India Company was dissolved. In 1872, having little choice in the matter, the Persians agreed to the present border—the so-called Goldsmid Line. Northern Baluchistan was added in 1879 from Afghanistan, including the formidable Golan Pass and Quetta in the north, and then the border was pushed a bit farther north by the Durand Line in 1893. Britain was not interested in direct rule of most of the area,
