Taki Magazine

Alexander in Afghanistan

by Mark Hackard on September 04, 2009

An interesting work on Alexander the Great’s campaigns in Afghanistan recently came to my attention.  Frank L. Holt’s Into the Land of Bones gives a fast-paced account of the young Macedonian king’s counterinsurgency operations in the Hindu Kush and Central Asia.  The book was published in 2005, when Afghanistan was still upheld as the model of democracy-building in the Muslim world, and the US effort there was practically considered a victory. Into the Land of Bones, however, evinces no such enthusiasm, and rightly so. Holt, a scholar of Hellenistic Bactria, provides us with the context of history both ancient and more recent to show how foreign attempts to subdue the region are all but fated to come to grief.

“All these (British, Soviet and US) invasions of Afghanistan went well at first, but so far no superpower has found a workable alternative to what might be called the recipe for ruin in Afghanistan:

1. Estimate the time and resources necessary to conquer and control the region.
2. Double all estimates.
3. Repeat as needed.” (p. 18)

Geography and culture are the two permanent features that make Afghanistan ungovernable. When Alexander invaded Bactria in pursuit of Persian rebels in 330 B.C., he found the mountainous wasteland and isolated, feuding tribes that would accurately sum up the country today.  Warlords, then known as hyparchs, would seemingly submit and then take up their rebellion again at the first opportunity.  While Alexander did found new colonies (among them Kandahar and Bagram), the Macedonian army was engaged in a grinding, bloody and ruthless counterinsurgency. The effect of Alexander’s Bactrian campaign on his forces was demoralizing. The casualties produced in this alien land far exceeded those for all the battles that had brought down the Persian Empire. Alexander and his generals hunted down first one hyparch, then another, often wiping out entire villages in their path.

Nonetheless, the legendary Iskander’s military brilliance revealed itself yet again in the harsh conditions of Afghanistan. Alexander adapted his forces for unconventional warfare against an elusive opponent, devising means to neutralize the mobile raiding parties of Bactrian and Scythian horsemen. Among these innovations were rapid-reaction detachments composed of cavalry and light infantry, mountaineering, and the use of field artillery. Anyone who defied Alexander’s will to power would pay dearly, but the king also came to recognize Bactria’s inherent intractability. Four years of counterinsurgency in the wilds of Central Asia was leading nowhere. Considering his flank as secured as feasible with the military settlements in place, Alexander ranged southward to new conquests in India.

Hellenistic Bactria would survive for two centuries after its founding, though the kingdom was constantly rocked by intrigue, upheaval and internecine strife, as was characteristic of the region. When the descendants of Alexander’s Macedonian army eventually left around 125 B.C., they abandoned their walled cities, gymnasiums and amphitheaters. All soon fell into ruin and disrepair:

“Not in the palace, but in the theater, there appeared the most significant sign that the first European attempt to transform Afghanistan had failed. Where once Alexander’s and Seleucus’s settlers had assembled by the thousands to keep alive their ancestral arts, where practiced actors had donned their masks and recited the line of classical poets, a new kind of tragedy now unfolded on a stage littered with the human wreckage of an awakened population. The natives needed no Greek theater, so they piled upon its stage and front row seats the scattered remains of their unburied dead, whose bodies were otherwise in the way”. (p. 164)

Greek culture was able to maintain itself in the remoteness of the Hindu Kush for a significant period of time, but American technical civilization will disappear just as soon as US forces withdraw.  Infrastructure such as schools, water treatment plants, and roads that policymakers tout as metrics of success will quickly go the way of the Greek colonists’ amphitheaters. Washington’s expenditures on creating ex-nihilo “good governance” and “accountability” in Afghanistan are more ambitious and ridiculous than Alexander’s conquering vision.  The luminaries of the counterinsurgency crowd are kidding themselves if they think they can meaningfully alter the region’s systemic instability and violence.

Alexander, a warrior whose genius is still unparalleled, a figure who was both successful and crazy enough to think himself a god, had seen enough of Afghanistan after a few years of hard, bitter fighting. US strategists today speak of a sustained, decades-long presence there, not to mention the possibility of escalating intervention in Pakistan, as part of an open-ended “War on Terror”-cum-social engineering experiment. So who’s crazier?

• Print Article
• Email Article
• Email the Editor