Avoiding Nation Building in Afghanistan: an Absent Insight from Alexander*

chapter 30 Avoiding Nation Building in Afghanistan: An Absent Insight from Alexander* Jason W. Warren Alexander’s fort teemed with activity. Its stone walls and elevated terrain pro- vided security from sudden raids. Soldiers repaired and readied weapons. Logisticians prepared supplies. Leaders considered on-going and near-term operations. Soon it would be time to conquer or be conquered in a land marked by extreme weather conditions, and while awe-inspiring, some of the most rugged topography in the world. The Afghan army of 2013—not Alexander’s Macedonian-Persian army—would soon leave the somewhat safe confines of an Alexander-era fort in southern Afghanistan, on yet another mission to find, fix, and destroy Taliban forces. Not far away in another province, the Afghan army would have been prevented from utilizing another Alexander-era struc- ture, with its location in Taliban-controlled territory. Afghanistan has always been a place of extremes, whether political, religious, weather, or landscape. These conditions have posed problems for invaders up to present times. The diverse nature of this unique territory is a fact as unchanging as the craggy cliffs of the Hindu Kush. The land encompassing modern Afghanistan in Alexander’s time paralleled the region’s current diverse peoples and places. From a military standpoint, controlling the area was vastly complicated as Alex- ander had to deal with different leaders and their idiosyncrasies and those of their peoples, instead of any centralized authority. nato faces a similar situation today and struggles with the same issues of imposing centralized control on this historically disparate land. Alexander’s Afghanistan consisted * I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Lawrence Tritle, Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles), and Dr. Sibylle Scheipers, St. Andrews University, for providing thorough critiques of this chapter. I would also like to thank my u.s. Army War College colleague, Dr. John Bonin, for assisting me in contextualizing Alexander’s world with the present day. I acknowledge Dr. Edward Gutierrez, Northeastern University, for discussing the general thrust of the chapter with me. Dr. Andrew DeLaGarza, University of Louisiana (Lafayette), described the empires that encompassed Afghanistan. The Alexander era forts described here are located in the vicinity of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. The author’s views do not necessarily reflect those of the Dept. of Defense, u.s. Army, or u.s. Army War College. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004359932_031 740 warren of ungoverned regions and parts of the Persian Empire that he had just dis- patched, as well as territory influenced by Indian principalities and Scythian raiders. The region furthest to the west in what is now Helmand province Afghani- stan, encompassing modern-day Herat and Farah, were the Persian satrapies known as Areia and Drangiana.The border between these areas and the current Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan is now termed the Helmand River. The area east of Areia and Drangiana to the border of India and north to the Hindu Kush Mountains beyond Kabul was known as Arachosia, embodying today the most populous and heavily Pashtun regions of Afghanistan. Southern Bactria too, where Alexander campaigned after subduing Areia, Drangiana, and Arachosia, is part of modern Afghanistan. Bactra (aka Zariaspa) was then capital of that region, now coined Balkh, and just north of the highlands separating the city from Kabul and Begram, where Alexander founded another city in his name.1 It is not my intent here to recount the varied and significant historiogra- phy of Alexander the Great, a project that is worthy of entire volumes. There are, however, some significant works that cover Alexander’s campaigns in the region now known as Afghanistan. A.B. Bosworth’s Conquest and Empire, still the salient modern account of Alexander, devotes a generous segment to Alex- ander in the East. Bosworth authored a more specific volume of Alexander in the region, Alexander in the East, where he accurately criticizes Alexander for a strategy of destruction. Bosworth aptly pointed out that Alexander destroyed entire villages to set an example for others. Where Bosworth was not a military historian however, Frank Holt provides a better military analysis of Alexander, in Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan, specifically in the region of Afghanistan. My intent here is neither to copycat Holt’s solid account nor Stephen Tanner’s more general Afghanistan: A Military History from Alex- ander the Great to the War Against the Taliban, but to tie my own experience in Afghanistan directly to a historical account of the region’s martial value, from Alexander to the present.2 Alexander succeeded where the West more gener- 1 For this geographical description, I utilized the excellent map, “Map 4 Bactria and India,” in the appendices of Arrian, Alexander the Great, The Anabasis and the Indica, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The Arrian citations below derive from this version. 2 A.B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1988); Bosworth, Alexander and the East: The Tragedy of Triumph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Frank L. Holt, Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Stephen Tan-.

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