Victory Point - Ed Darack [9]
Pashtun dominance took a quantum leap in 1747, when a man named Ahmad Shah Durrani, arguably the most renowned and celebrated in this people’s history (many Afghans would later adopt the name Ahmad Shah as a sign of solidarity in spirit with the leader), paved the way for Afghanistan to become a nation-state by moving the center of authority of the Pashtuns from the Kandahar region to Kabul, enabling Pashtun monopolization of the Trans-Hindu Kush caravan trade route between India and Central Asia. From Kabul, where the region’s center of governance remains to this day, Ahmad Shah began expanding his authority in all directions, slowly coalescing power. And yet the Pashai-speaking mountain people of Kafiristan still refused to accept not only the idea of centralized authority, but Islam as well. This struggle would continue for years, resulting in an unlikely outcome with far-reaching historical ramifications, especially for the Marines of ⅔.
During the 1800s through to the early 1900s, Afghanistan found itself once again squeezed between burgeoning foreign powers: England to its east in India, czarist Russia to its north in Turkistan, and the Persians to its west. Much has been made of the “Great Game,” a term taken by English historians from a line in a British intelligence officer’s letter to a colleague referring to British influence of Afghanistan, and it is true that the vast majority of aggressive “chess moves” of this period were British in origin. During the years of the Great Game, the Russians carried out some espionage missions and studied possible invasion routes into India (they ruled out passage through Afghanistan as they felt they could not maneuver artillery through the high, narrow passes of the Hindu Kush), but it was the British, initially for commercial reasons and then for geopolitical goals, who ventured repeatedly into Afghanistan. Three conflicts ensued between England and Afghanistan, culminating in the Treaty of Rawalpindi on August 19, 1919, granting independence to the hard-fighting and tenacious Afghans. While it was not until the early twentieth century that the British granted independence to the Afghans, they had all but given up on the region by the 1860s, as Russia’s construction of a Central Asian railroad bypassing Afghanistan dashed England’s hopes for monopolization of trade in the region, drastically reducing the strategic commercial importance of Afghanistan to Britain’s East India Company.
Although the Brits ultimately retreated from Afghanistan, they did so only after leaving a number of historically significant marks on the country. One of the most notable, the drawing of the country’s modern boundary, saw the English cunningly demarcate Afghanistan’s border exclusively on slopes so that the surrounding territories, especially those to the east along the portion of the border known as the Durand Line, would have military units approaching Afghanistan from a superior position, firing down upon the Afghans during potential conflict. Visitors to the Khyber Pass are often stunned to find that the pass itself lies over five highway miles inside Pakistan and stands more than a thousand feet above Torkham, the point at which the main road connecting Pakistan and Afghanistan intersects the Afghan border. Historians also note that Afghanistan’s leaf-shape outline was crafted not with the will or welfare of its people in mind, but with the buffering of the surrounding