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By Stephen Tanner
Following the occasions of September eleven, 2001, the area used to be riveted as American army energy contested the mythical warrior tradition of Afghanistan. through spring 2002, the United States started to draw down its forces, its project entire: The Afghan Taliban regime has been overthrown and the terrorists it harbored have been at the run. was once America's effortless victory facts of its army superiority, or have been the Afghans in simple terms eyeing the beginners as they've got watched overseas armies in centuries earlier, figuring out time is on their side?For over 2,500 years, the forbidding territory of Afghanistan has served as a necessary crossroads--not only for armies yet for clashes among civilizations--the Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, and Tartars, and in additional fresh instances, Britain and Russia. Now the US needs to face a brand new enemy in this land--a land that for hundreds of years has turn into a graveyard of empires past.This first-ever entire army historical past of Afghanistan illuminates the vast ancient context into which American forces were drawn--a cautionary story, might be, concerning the hazards which could lie forward.
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Extra resources for Afghanistan: A Military History From Alexander The Great To The Fall Of The Taliban
Example text
C. The fact is that by the time they were able to leave, every man in the Macedonian army— Alexander foremost—simply hated the place. That winter, instead of enjoying the spoils of conquest, they'd been forced into a miserable, windswept existence among stone and marble ghosts. Under the Achaemenids, Persepolis had been supplied with a constant stream of varied provisions, but Alexander had wrecked that infrastructure and the Macedonians were left with only the thirty thousand sheep they had seized from the Uxians.
In ancient times, unlike today, the region stretching from Farah to Lake Sistan and along the Helmand River valley to Kandahar was fertile and well populated, despite the "wind of 120 days" that roared in from the northwest every summer. The army halted around Kandahar to await the end of winter and accumulate food before proceeding north. While it was in camp, news arrived that Satibarzanes, reinforced by Bactrian cavalry, had broken back into Areia to raise a new revolt. Bessus had also dispatched cavalry farther west against Alexander's supply line and had named a new rebel satrap of Parthia.
The identity of the primitive Parapamisidae is intriguing because Arrian describes them as Indians, probably thinking of them as the "mountain Indians" he described at Gaugamela. If Curtius is correct about their utter isolation, the possibility also exists that they were aborigines in the territory—today's Suleiman range, or White Mountains—not yet acculturized by either the Iranians or Indians. In the fruitful Kabul valley, the army found sustenance, and was rewarded not so much by Alexander's impetuous leadership as by the advent of warm weather and ripening crops.