Into the Land of Bones. Frank L. Holt
unqualified and absolute success.”27 Fresh battle lines are already being entrenched in books even as the real combat continues. What happens next none can say, although the past warns us that early triumphs in Afghanistan might yet end tragically. The fighting and humanitarian crises continue; many of the enemy’s leaders and warlords remain at large or lurk in the shadows as momentary allies.28 Assassinations still occur with unsettling frequency in Kabul and other cities. Anarchy torments the countryside while NATO boasts but three working helicopters to perform its mission.29 Calls for more troops go unanswered. As early as the summer of 2003, Americans began openly to question whether U.S. forces were spread too thin, giving al-Qaeda and the Taliban too much hope that yet again the West might fail in the long run to make any lasting difference in Afghanistan.30 Nearly every day, the news from central Asia stirs up painful reminders. The hoofbeats of our anachronistic cavalry have awakened the spirits of another time and kicked the dust from their tombs. Here and there, at Kandahar and Kabul, Herat and Begram, the desolate posts of the British and Soviet dead have become datelines again in tragic stories of war and occupation.
Few people today realize just how long this has been going on. The invasions led by Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States stretch across centuries and carry us from an age of mules and muskets to one of helicopters and cruise missiles. Yet these modern struggles in Afghanistan are merely the latest phase of something far more ancient, a calamity thicker in ghosts than almost any other in history. Genghis Khan, “the atom bomb of his day,” devastated the region when his Mongol hordes rode through in the thirteenth century C.E.31 Tamerlane followed in the fourteenth century, and Babur (founder of the Moghul dynasty) in the sixteenth. In what has been called “the great hiving-ground of world-disturbers,” these medieval wars presaged the modern misfortunes of Afghanistan.32 One recent study, however, traces the problem back even further, to the fifth century C.E.: “The breakdown of law and order following the invasion of the White Huns perhaps initiated that self-reliant parochialism which is at the root of the fierce tribal and microgeographical independence and mutual hostility which characterizes the structure of Afghan society in recent centuries. Even the unifying influence of Islam [since the seventh century] has been unable to break down this attitude.”33 This broad frame of reference across fifteen centuries says a lot about the continuity of certain conditions in Afghanistan, but it still falls short of the truth by at least eight hundred years. The long rhythms of Afghan history do show some periods of relative calm during which cities grew, trade routes pulsed, irrigated agriculture expanded, and the arts flourished, but between each renaissance we find an era of ruin brought on or exacerbated by the parochialism, tribalism, fierce independence, and mutual hostility mentioned above. These social conditions, not to mention the physical challenges of a harsh terrain and environment, stretch back as far as our earliest written sources will carry us. In these respects, the twenty-first century C.E. differs very little from the fifteenth or fifth C.E. or even the fourth B.C.E.
A DEEPER PERSPECTIVE
What George W. Bush has called “the first war of the twenty-first century” actually began on a different autumn day more than twenty-three hundred years ago, when Alexander the Great launched the initial invasion by a Western superpower to subdue Afghanistan and its warlords.34 Accounts of that campaign read eerily like news from our own day. Alexander, too, acted in the context of a larger Middle East crisis inherited from his father. King Philip II of Macedonia (reigned 359–336 B.C.E.) left his son an unresolved conflict against a major powerhouse based in what is now Iraq.35 For many years, the Greeks had felt threatened by a regime whose palaces, power, and propaganda seemed to embody everything that divided the peoples of Europe from Asia. Philip’s nemesis was the Persian Empire of the Achaemenid kings. Often despised and demonized by the Greeks, Persia had gobbled up the great powers of the past (the Egyptians, Lydians, Chaldaeans) as well as many lesser principalities (those of the Hebrews, Arabs, Phoenicians). The rulers of Persia took the title “King of Kings” to announce their authority over a wide range of local princes, chiefs, and potentates. Back in the fifth century B.C.E., 120 years before the reign of Philip, Persian forces had even invaded Greece by marching through the domain of Macedonia to attack Athens and other city-states. Celebrated battles punctuated that epic struggle at Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Herodotus became the Father of History by recounting this epic showdown.36
Macedonia and its related Greek neighbors often did not get along, but the specter of the Persian Empire overshadowed their differences and, in the fourth century, drove them together in a makeshift alliance led first by Alexander’s father. Philip was a seasoned war veteran who took equal pride in his diplomatic expertise. He surrounded himself with an aggressive staff of generals and advisors who shared his vision of the world. Together they mapped out a bold plan to invade Persia using Macedonian troops backed by a coalition of Greek states (the so-called League of Corinth).37 In 336 B.C.E., Philip sent an expeditionary army into the western fringes of the Persian Empire; he intended to follow at the head of a much larger force. The objective seems to have been relatively straightforward: push back the frontiers of the Achaemenid Empire and cripple the Persian king’s military power without necessarily crushing him.
Philip’s son took a much harder line and put no limits whatever on his own mission in the Middle East. When Philip fell to an assassin’s dagger in 336 B.C.E., before reaching Persia himself, Alexander held the Persians partly to blame. Rightly or wrongly, he later accused the Achaemenid king of sponsoring turmoil in Greece and of financing the plot against his father’s life.38 Young Alexander therefore made it clear that regime change was to be the new goal of his war against Persia. Before that could transpire, however, Alexander needed to rally his nation and rebuild his father’s old alliance through incentives and intimidation (on the ancient sources, see the appendix).
Philip’s assassination had pitched the world onto a wobbly new axis, but Alexander somehow kept it spinning. He began his reign under a vexing cloud as some opponents openly questioned his right to take office. It was a dangerous time for a disputed succession. Alexander naturally relied upon many of the senior advisors and officers of his father’s administration to help him through this crisis. Barely twenty years old, Alexander had next to restore allegiance to the Panhellenic (all-Greek) league, because a few wavering states publicly doubted the untested new king’s experience and abilities. Between 336 and 334 B.C.E., reluctant allies were chastised and, when necessary, punished.39 The war against Persia, Alexander announced, would be renewed. In fact, an aggressive preemptive policy would be put into play throughout the Middle East. Alexander made it clear that Persia’s King Darius III must disarm and surrender or risk a fight to the finish. Under no circumstances could the alleged tyrant keep his throne.
True to the demands of his time, Alexander personally led his troops through the harrowing battles and sieges that toppled the regime of Darius. Macedonian kings led by example at the forefront of their armies, enduring all the risks of every ill-advised assault while earning all the renown for every brilliant success. More than any other battlefield commander in history, Alexander stayed ahead in this unforgiving ledger of leadership. At the Battle of the Granicus River in 334 B.C.E., he survived a brisk bout of hand-to-hand combat that smashed his helmet and killed his horse (see Map 2). His followers surged into the enemy ranks and routed the Persian forces. A year later at the Battle of Issus, Alexander suffered a thigh wound while leading the victorious charge that broke the ranks of Darius’s huge army and forced the enemy to flee. During the capture of Gaza in 332 B.C.E., a catapult missile hit Alexander in the shoulder.40
2. The world of Alexander
Through all such duress, Alexander fought the Persians at close range in a conspicuous display of Homeric-style machismo. Darius, too, fought boldly at the head of an army that vastly outnumbered the Macedonians and Greeks, but Alexander proved the better tactician on every occasion.41 This was never truer than at Gaugamela (near modern Irbil in Iraq) in 331 B.C.E., where Alexander routed his royal opponent for the final time. Darius fled into hiding, but his palaces fell one by one to the Greek and Macedonian invaders, who marveled at their opulence. How, they wondered, could a leader so wealthy and