Proceed to Peshawar. George J. Hill
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, and the chief commissioner for Baluchistan oversaw only the lands on the border with Afghanistan and the environs 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)