of Quetta. Most of the country was nominally independent, under the Khanates of Kalat and Las Bela. Baluchistan has continued to be restive, and the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda have been able to find a safe haven in Quetta.2
Historical Background
A vivid description of the ancient history of Afghanistan and the NWFP was given by Lowell Thomas:
Through Waziristan on the Way to High Asia . . . the land of another mighty range, the Hindu Kush, south of the Oxus River and beyond the northwest frontier of India—Afghanistan. The door is the Khyber Pass, a door that has refused to swing back to all save a few. . . . Throughout history, Afghan trails have echoed to the march of northern hosts that looked with lustful eyes on India’s riches. Scythian, Persian, Greek, Seljuk, Tartar, Mongol, Durani—these and others have plundered India through the Afghan door.3
The Mongol leader Teumjin, later known as Genghis Khan, set out at the head of the Golden Horde in 1206 to conquer the world. His empire eventually stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the border of modern Poland. In 1219–40 the principalities of Russia fell to the Mongols, and for the next two centuries they ruled Russia. Marco Polo passed through this region on his journeys in 1269–95, along what has long been known as the Silk Road.
In 1480 Russia broke free from the Mongols, as Ivan III (Ivan the Great), grand prince of Moscow, put several envoys of the Mongol leader to death. The Russians then began advancing to the south in the adventure that eventually became known as the Great Game. Meanwhile, the British role in India began with the East India Company, a joint-stock company that was granted a Royal Charter in 1600 to trade with the East Indies, but that mainly traded with the Indian subcontinent and China. The Afghans also had their eyes on India. Nadir Shah invaded India in 1738–39. His dynasty was known as Durrani—the “Durani” mentioned above by Lowell Thomas.4
In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, explorers from Russia and Britain made wary contact with each other. Captain Arthur Conolly reached Bokhara, insulted the emir, and was beheaded there in 1842. Before he died, Conolly wrote to another officer, “You’ve a great game, a noble one, before you.” Rudyard Kipling seized the phrase, some fifty years later, and immortalized it in Kim. Kipling was born in 1865, and he made this the birth year of the fictional boy-spy, Kim, the hero of his novel. In January 1873 Russia acknowledged that the Wakhan, on the upper Oxus, “lay within the domains of the Emir of Afghanistan” and that “Afghanistan itself lay within Britain’s sphere of influence.”5 Nevertheless, Russia quietly continued to advance, and by 1875 it appeared that Russia would soon control the passes leading to Ladakh and Kashmir. In 1888 George Nathaniel Curzon, MP, visited the Oxus, Bokhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent. As Lord Curzon, he later became viceroy of India and was perhaps the most aggressive proponent of Britain’s forward policy.6
In 1892 a serious crisis had arisen in Chitral. The aging ruler had died and “family rivals fought for the throne,” producing “five successive rulers in three years.” The Durand Line was demarcated in 1893, dividing Afghanistan from India. When the British subsidy to the emir of Afghanistan was raised to 1.8 million rupees, Britain hoped it had control of the northwest frontier.7
However, in 1895, believing (probably correctly) that the Russians (or some others, such as the ruler of Swat or the ruler of Afghanistan) would move into Chitral if it could not be brought under stable rule, the senior British officer in Gilgit, Major George Robertson, set out for Chitral with four hundred troops. Robertson captured the citadel at Chitral, but was himself besieged. After enduring for six weeks, Robertson’s small force was relieved. Two weeks later, a much larger force under Major General Sir Richard Low reached Chitral from Peshawar, having fought its way through the Malakand Pass at 3,500 feet and then the snow-covered Lowari Pass. The campaign “included one future field-marshal, at least nine future generals and a number of knights. From a career point of view, Chitral was clearly a good place to have on one’s CV.”8 Winston Churchill saw action at Malakand as a young lieutenant, and wrote about it in his first book. As prime minister, he would later play the Great Game in earnest.9
In 1898 Curzon was appointed viceroy of India. Three years later, he created the NWFP from territory that was taken from Afghanistan when the Durand Line was drawn, and from the Punjab. In Afghanistan, Habibullah became emir; he would rule until 1919. The conflict between Russia and Britain got its name, the Great Game, in 1901 with the appearance of Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim. While it is true that a Russian foreign minister called the conflict the “tournament of shadows,” and Conolly had called it “a Great Game” in a letter from Bokhara in about 1842, the world would never have known the conflict as “the Great Game” except for Kipling and Kim. Some say the Great Game ended with a secret agreement that was signed by Russia and Britain in 1907, and what has happened since then is a “new Great Game.” Others say that Russia was duplicitous: it did not really plan to leave the Great Game in 1907, and it continued even after the Revolution in 1917, as Lenin threatened to “set the East ablaze.” By this calculation, the Great Game did not end until Britain withdrew from India in 1947. A “new Great Game,” if one exists, would therefore date from 1947.10
Because so many people involved in this book were readers and admirers of Kipling and Kim, it could be said that he was the godfather of the trip itself. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was one of the most famous writers of his time. He had a gift for capturing the dialects of ordinary people—those from the British Isles (as they were called in those days) and those from the Indian subcontinent. Nearly every book about the Great Game or India or Afghanistan in the nineteenth century (and many since then) includes a quotation or two from Kipling. The two Americans in this trip mentioned Kipling more than once, and all three had doubtless read Kim. Lord Wavell’s anthology, Other Men’s Flower’s, contains more poems by Kipling than by any other poet, and Wavell was president of the Kipling Society in his later years. Gordon Enders admired Kipling’s famous boy hero so much that he called himself “an American Kim.” Albert Zimmermann owned a complete collection of Kipling’s works. He referred to one of Kipling’s heroes, the brave, fictional Gunga Din, in describing the Swat Valley in a letter to his wife. And Zimmermann’s British friend in India, April Swayne-Thomas, referred in her letters to places that appear in poems written by Kipling.11
The boy hero of Kim was Kimball O’Hara, orphaned son of an Irish man who was a sergeant in the Indian army, and his Irish wife. The boy grew up as a preternaturally wise street urchin in Lahore, although he was, in fact, a “sahib, and the son of a sahib,” which gave him a special place in society. The Second Afghan War took place at about the time the events in the book took place, although it is not mentioned. At age thirteen Kim is recruited to be a successful spy in the Great Game. And the name of the young man, Kim, has become a metaphor for spies. That was true not only for Gordon Enders, whose travels are described in this book, but also for Harold A. R. Philby, known by his boyhood nickname as “Kim” Philby—the most successful spy of his generation, who played the game for the Soviet Union. It was also true for Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., grandson of the president, who played the game for America, against the Soviets. A copy of Kim is said to have been on the bedside of the chief American spy of his time, Allen Dulles, when he died.12
The viceroy, Curzon, feared that a secret treaty had been signed between Tibet and Russia. In 1904 he sent two expeditions into Tibet, and the British entered Lhasa on 3 August 1904. In 1919, desiring a greater degree of independence, Afghanistan declared war on the British in what is known as the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Zimmermann and Enders observed scenes of that war in November 1943. British military aircraft dropped bombs on Kabul and Jelalabad, and both sides then sued for peace. The war lasted only a month. The Treaty of Rawalpindi in August 1919 allowed Afghanistan to conduct its own foreign affairs.13
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin issued a call to set the East ablaze, hoping that the Communist Party of India would create a Socialist
