“AF-PAK” AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN GLOBAL GREAT GAME: A COMPLETE OVERVIEW FROM START TO FINISH
THE RISE AND ORIGINS OF PASHTUN-AFGHAN POLITICAL INFLUENCE
The Saka Indo-Scythians who invaded the eastern parts of the Parthian Persian Empire about 2000 years ago settled in two main communities — in Sistan (which took its name originally from “Sakastan” or Land of the Sakas) — and the adjacent upper portion of the Sulaiman Mountain Range, known as the Greater Paktia Region. Although they did not figure much in the history of the area at that time, several centuries of complex of ethno-cultural interactions with other local residents such as Pactyan and other later forms of Dards, Iranian Parthians and other Indic natives of the Indus Valley — in addition to layers of several later invaders comprising of successive waves of Huns, Proto-Turks, and Early Turks…would give rise not only to what we now know as the Pashto language, but the two core Ethno-categories who speak the various dialects of Pashto: the Pashtuns and Afghans.
The overall process of transformation of what we now know as the four major tribal confederacies constituting the Pashtuns-Afghans — into their present shapes, thus began somewhere in about 100 BCE with the Pashtun Karlanis, and was completed in about 1350 CE with the consolidation of the Afghan Ghalji Confederacy in the murky post-Ghurid era of Khorasan. In between, the major Afghan Sarabani section and their ancillary group the Ghurghusht are thought to have assumed their current shapes starting with the accession to power of Sultan Mahmud in Ghazni in around 1000 CE.
The Ghalji sept’s formation stemmed largely from the activities of the Ghurid established Delhi Sultanate and its history — and its reflexive effects back home in Khorasan upon the original Ghurid capital region of Ghor, Ghazni and Zabulistan. But the Sarabanis stayed behind in the Sistan (now known as the Kandahar-Zamindawar-Arghistan area) in relative dormancy. However the Timurid invasions after 1398 were to have a prolonged and stirring effect upon the Sarabanis which saw them become politically active and rise territorially out of obscurity from the old Zabulistan region to expand northwards over the Hindukush into old Kabulistan. Like the later Ghaljis, the Sarabanis also had a strong dominant Turkish racial component — the only difference between the two was that the former were constituted from Pashtunised Khalaj Turks (hence their name Khilji = “Ghalji”), while the Sarabanis exhibit a clear Khazar Turkic influence and also have hereditary “Khans”. This aspect likely enabled a strong nexus between them and the Timurids who themselves were of Turco-Mongolic stock.
The first Sarabani political victory was the arrival in Peshawar Valley of their main tribe called the Yusufzais, as refugees with their men having being massacred in Kabul and the rest expelled therefrom (in about 1481) by the Timurid prince Ulugh Beg II, who was ruler of Kabul. Peshawar Valley (Gandhara) was then under the rule of the Jahangiri Dynasty of the Swati-Gabari Tajiks. After spending about 30 years as refugees in the Swati kingdom, the Yusufzais staged a rebellion and overthrew the last Swati King, Sultan Owais II in 1520, with the help of the Timurid prince Zahiruddin Babar of Ferghana who later invaded India where he overthrew the Delhi Sultanate and its Ghalji Lodi Dynasty and established his own “Mughal” Empire in its place. It should be noted that the Swati Tajik kings and their cousins, the Shahmiri Sultans of Kashmir were the old vassals and allies of the Delhi Sultanate. However it should be noted that the Sarabani Afghan capture of Peshawar Valley did not see them establishing any kind of statehood here. In fact they just seized and occupied its lands, and political authority in the area remained with the Mughal Emperor of India , and the Sarabani Afghans were his subjects.
The above action 500 years ago initiated the wholesale spread of the Pashtun-Afghan ethnicity and the prominence of its identity and culture in the lower and eastern portions of the Khorasan region. Ironically this event also saw the decline of the Ghalji Afghan identity for the next 200 years — till the invasion of Safavid Iran and capture of Isfahan by Mirwais Hotaki, a Ghalji warlord in 1720. The Afsharid successor of the Safavids in Persia (Nader Shah) and his assassination enabled the rise of the second Sarabani Afghan faction to power in the whole of Khorasan — the Abdalis (Durranis) under Ahmad Shah in 1747.
THE NATURE OF AFGHAN STATEHOOD
The spillover of the transformed and charged Saka remnants of old Sistan onto lower Eastern Iran and their increasing political influence had a strongly degenerative effect on what were the once potent and legendary political structures of the powerful Persian civilisation. The underlying reason for this is the well-apparent and unremitting fractious tribal propensity of the Pashtun-Afghan culture and character. It is the cause of their inability to form cohesive and stable political structures, which are the basic prerequisite of not only modern national-statehood, but that of any civilised society.
Ahmad Shah Abdali (later Durrani) inherited a stable power structure from his Persian Safavid-Afsharid overlord, the Emperor Nader Shah — whose unexpected assassination led to Abdali’s rise to power in his native Kandahar in 1747 at the age of 24. But owing to the inherently unstable nature of his Afghan Saddozai Dynasty, circumstances degenerated within this dynasty due to the ceaseless squabbling and ruthless intriguing for power among his grandsons. Pashtun-Afghan society possessed no inherent “institutional” characteristics which could have arrested or impeded this situation. After 70 years power passed to the rival Barakzai Durrani clan, which fared better on that score. In 1818 the first and greatest Barakzai ruler Dost Muhammad Khan took power as king and assumed the Islamic title of “Emir” instead of the Persian “Shah”. However by 1823 the Barakzai Emirate was deprived of its major eastern possession of Peshawar City and its surrounding valley area, as well as territories in Kashmir, and further south in Multan and in Sindh. Peshawar was considered to be a key loss owing to its Afghan population and was considered to be the best cultivable area hosting Afghans and Pashtuns. All these losses were due to the expanding Punjabi Sikh Empire under Ranjeet Singh. The Sikhs in turn had actually been empowered and motivated by the exponentially increasing British imperial influence embodied in the East India Company during the 18th Century. The British were interested in expanding their territorial acquisitions to the north and west of their core Indian territories — but they were also motivated by a morbid fear of the threat to their authority over India by the eastward territorial expansion of the other great European power, the Russian Empire, begun under the Empress Catherine the Great in the 1760s…this happened more or less at the same time as the establishment of the Durrani Afghan State in Khorasan and an active and comprehensive strategy of outward British political activity and engagement was soon begun as a result, which would come to be called the “Great Game” of Central Asia of Britain against Russia. It turns out that most of the British fears in this regard were baseless, but charged as they were with the greed of their rich pickings in India and the unprecedented heights to which those had taken Britain, their mood was very anxious indeed.
The Sikh Empire failed and was eventually defeated and absorbed by the expanding British in 1849 — and 55 years after the first losses experienced by the Barakzai Emirate, all eastern Afghan territories from Quetta in the south to Bajaur in the north would be in British possession. The British had determined that any conquest or direct subjugation of the Barakzai Emirate by them would cause them unremitting and unnecessary trouble instead of benefit, and it would be far better to have it as a puppet buffer state between their empire and that of the Russians. But the Barakzai Emirate as it existed, was far from being what they desired: its northern non-Pashtun territories such as the small emirates of Khulm, Qataghan, Badakhshan and Ishkashim, etc, were autonomous and under nominal allegiance to the Barakzai Emir at Kabul. Kandahar was till 1855 a powerful fiefdom ruled by autonomous Barakzai barons…and Herat still remained under the rule of the remaining Saddozai prince, Shah Kamran till 1842. So the Barakzai Emirate was not all-encompassing or stable, the way a modern nation-state should be even in the manner of Qajar Persia or Ottoman Turkey. However the Barakzai Emirs were generally friendly to the British and after the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1879–80 which had been conducted to take care of the uncooperative Emir Sher Ali Khan and his successor Sardar Muhammad Ayub Khan, the British took several steps to consolidate the Barakzai Afghan state once and for all, turning it into a durable buffer puppet state for their use against Tsarist Russian moves in the region. For this reason, they enthroned another Barakzai Abdul Rahman Khan as their puppet Emir at Kabul in 1881. The Afghan Emirate had finally become a British geopolitical tool. In 1885 the British in a treaty with Russia, guaranteed the northern border of the Barakzai Emirate along the Amu Darya Treaty of Panjdeh); in 1893, the British fixed the eastern border of this country under the Treaty of Durand, with the Emir himself. The British also stationed their permanent “Resident” in Kabul whose job it was to supervise and guide the Emir. They left internal day-to-day decision making to the Emir’s prerogative, but dictated all external involvements. They also officially enforced the use of the term “Afghanistan” by the Barakzai Emirate from this time onwards.
THE “NEW GAME”: THE NECESSITY FOR PAKISTAN
The Russian threat to British interests in the region was greatly reduced by the Anglo-Russian Treaty of Paris conducted in 1907. But the First World War brought major unforeseen changes, and among these was the Great October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. Shortly afterwards an unpredictable young Barakzai Emir came to the throne of Kabul, after the mysterious murder of his complacent and pro-British father. This was Amanullah Khan, the grandson of Emir Abdul Rahman who had died in 1901. This young Emir was interested in renewing his society along almost revolutionary lines, and was greatly encouraged in this by the Russian Revolution. The British were now at the peak of their power in India, but had been weakened by the war. There was also growing Indian political resistance to their colonial rule. Now the British were faced with a renewed “Russian threat” — which this time involved revolutionary Marxist ideology. Also there was a revolutionary young ruler in Afghanistan who fought a third war with the British in 1919 and ended their dictatorial monopoly in determining its foreign policy after 40 years. In effect, he was seeking self-determination and development for Afghanistan, as well as friendship with Soviet Russia.
To deal with this unexpected headache and turn of events, the British resorted to treacherous measures and manoeuvres, which took advantage of Amanullah Khan’s immature methods and inspired a successful uprising against him. He was made to flee into exile in Rome for the rest of his life and replaced as king by one of his cousins General Nader Khan in 1929. Nader was assassinated in 1933 by a vengeful student whose father he had killed…and was replaced by his 13-year old son Prince Zahir as king. Zahir’s long period of rule was placid, and saw some nominal foreign assisted modernisation projects of some basic facilities in Afghanistan, which imparted the basic trappings of a modern nation state. These were carried out by his ambitious cousin Prince Daud who acted as his Prime Minister and involved Western countries as well as the USSR. Prince Daud overthrew his cousin Zahir Shah in 1973 and declared a republic. His influence had seen the rise of a class of nationalistic bourgeois and educated citizens in Kabul who adopted Marxism as their ideology and formed a revolutionary party in 1965. This party conducted activity on political fronts as well as clandestinely in the national army and by 1978 it determined that it was strong enough to precipitate a coup to bring about revolutionary changes in Afghanistan.
It is not my intention to describe here the events and after effects of the “Saur Revolution” as it was called…except that it brought on the direct involvement of the Soviet Union. The Americans and their allies and lackeys responded to the situation, by rushing in with a massive retaliatory effort involving the use of the ideology of Islamic Fundamentalism to try and subvert not only the Saur Revolution but also the USSR — and in both efforts they succeeded, creating a situation which continues to generate direct and profound consequences to this very day 45 years later.
ENTER PAKISTAN
Not long after their unsettling experience with the birth of the USSR and with Amanullah Khan, came World War 2 which was even more destructive. It weakened Britain to the extent that it had to relinquish direct imperial control in most territories favour of subtler methods; it brought to the fore the USA as the “Second British Empire”. And most of all, it left the USSR as the second global superpower — the worst possible nightmare for all of Western Europe which has been confident that is was supremely on top of the rest of the world.
With all of the above in view….and with changed regional interests, the Anglo-American axis determined that Afghanistan was now no longer in the forefront of serving as their buffer. Besides the Afghans were not dependable or efficient. There was no British Indian Empire now to defend in a modern, non-aligned India….but the oilfields of the Gulf and the Persian Gulf itself, which led to the Suez Canal. Iran was pro-Western, but was developed and independent. They needed a political entity whose sole purpose of existence would be to serve their interests in carrying out the regional dirty work to subvert Soviet and other competing interests in this very crucial region. And they were right: Afghanistan was useless, but it was changing….and it would soon become the battlefield and proving ground for some of the most intense mischief history has ever seen.
In the radically changed post-war circumstances, and for the stable continuation of their vile interests, the perpetrators would need a new instrument with which to carry out such operations so the plan to divide India along “Muslim-Hindu” lines was hatched, basing its justification on a warped interpretation of some Indian social and historical realities and characteristics. Mr. Jinnah, a frail but stiff old lawyer and Anglophile who represented certain such lobbies and interests in Indian society was hired and co-opted to put the scheme into effect. A massacre was incited the scale of which has few known precedents in history, if ever. Pakistan came into being complete with flag, ideology and its funny sounding (and patently false) name. More Muslims still live in India than are to be found here. Its ”eastern wing”, now called Bangladesh broke away in a bloody war of liberation only 25 years after it became Pakistan in 1971 when it realised the deception — a war in which involved the perpetration of a cold-blooded and carefully planned genocide of 3 million civilian citizens. Pakistan is a country that has to be ruled by the military in order to implement its true purpose and utility. It has seen 34 years of direct military rule out of its 75 year history — and even in “civilian” times its army still dominates and calls the shots.
But now things have changed. They changed in 2021, when America finally gave in to what it deemed as its hopeless struggle in Afghanistan, after having occupied that shambles of country militarily for two decades and having fought there its longest and costliest war. A year before that, the outbreak of Covid-19 saw to it that America would be unable to sustain what was already a prolonged situation over there. Three months after the hurried and shameful American exit from Kabul, Russia announced its intention to prepare for a military operation to contain Western sponsored mischief in the Ukraine, which threatened to violate the integrity of Russia’s security and legitimate interests. In this environment, the 200-year long focus on the Great Game by the Anglo-American powers…that had merited the existence and need for Pakistan….suddenly ceased to exist; the theatre of operations and confrontation had attained an acute character and had shifted directly to Europe itself. There was no need now to continue feeding the coteries of corrupt dogs which took care of the mess called Pakistan, previously a happily acknowledged “necessary evil”.
In the aftermath of the American Cold War victory over the USSR in 1991 — the Pakistani state made Jihad as part of its doctrine of overall nation security in both its internal as well as external aspects. To use an American term, it resorted to a “piggyback” imperialism of its own, in its regional neighbourhood — which was directed at (i) annexing Afghanistan as a “fifth province” to provide “strategic depth”; (ii) its eternal enemy India — especially in Kashmir; and (iii) the newly independent republics of former Soviet Central Asia. Pakistani planners imagined that their grateful American overlords would allow it these privileges, in return for its continued services in promoting and realising continued American political and energy objectives as regards the Central Asian and Trans Caspian regions, oil pipelines, etc.
After the Cold War victory of 1991, Pakistan slid into a period of runaway corruption the intensity and shamelessness of which have few known comparisons. Freewheeling attitudes and Dollars inherited from the CIA Jihad of the 1980s and its policies provided the gusto. In 1994 the Pakistani state security establishment created the Afghan Taliban to replace the old Afghan Mujahideen in the new situation. This signalled the formal grafting by the state of Jihad onto the already spurious body politic of Pakistan. In two years the Taliban were ruling Kabul, and the spectre of “Talibanism” was already making its appearance on the horizons of the Pashtun Tribal Areas (FATA). Ten years later in 2001 came “9/11” — the first crisis in the unscrupulous American-Pakistani “partnership”. By the middle of this 30-year period in 2006, the first infestation of the Pakistani Taliban (later known as TTP) had begun to manifest which led to a 9 year low intensity conflict. By 2012 with the American mischief directed at Syria, Russia had begun to reassert itself anew on the world stage, thus marking the end of American “unipolarity”. In 2014 Russia took the historic decision to return the Crimea to its original fold….and in 2015 China offered the CPEC geostrategic scheme to Pakistan, which the latter has now all but spurned in the comic hope of winning the approval of its old master which has abandoned it. And in 2021 came the final debacle for America in Afghanistan when it fled and the Taliban returned to Kabul. This time however, Pakistan was redundant for the Americans and the Taliban were no longer obedient “servants of slaves”.
EPILOGUE
In the autumn of 2009 the officials of the US State Department coined the term “Af-Pak” to describe the whole nexus detailed above….this bespeaks of their knowledge and cunning in this regard.
When looked at, the former US President Obama must be commended for coining this most appropriate term “Af-Pak”. For it is all a huge and irretrievable mess now, in a state of rot and breakdown rarely to be seen. Afghanistan was never a modern state to begin with. It was dominated by a people who seem to have no purpose in life except to partake of the mischief in the affairs of others and to profit from that, and to offer their services in this regard. Pakistan is as artificial a contrivance as the word can get — it has no purpose for existence, save for that which its creators intended. It was justified by a “philosophy” that even a child would declare as ridiculous. It is a country run entirely on foreign cash though the resources found on its territory are interminable and rich. It is run by an elite of thugs which firmly believes in the righteousness of its thuggery. It is a country that has done nothing for the weal of its common citizen, as is the generally acceptable way of the world in these times. Af-Pak now exists in a state of calamitous ruin…the principal cause of which is the diminution of American influence in the region from 2021 — due to diminished interest. And that diminished interest is because America is now forced acutely to defend its very survival in another more emergent theatre, that of Europe itself. The focus and priorities have shifted… It is as if the air has been sucked out of the Af-Pak balloon. No other air can replace it, at least in the present shape of the balloon — neither that of Russia nor China which have tried doing so in the past decade but they have been unable to revive these old Anglo political structures to their own geopolitical advantage. Perhaps just as well. The Eurasian Bloc need not contaminate itself with this deleterious mix of inferior, slavish and wild peoples. They were of use to the Devil himself.
Pakistani planners and influentials still insist with characteristic cheeriness (as is their usual tactic) that there is nothing unusual afoot….they still talk about America and its influence in current terms…as if nothing had happened. Denial and deception are the standard tactics of such people, but it seems that those who propagate them have also been affected adversely: many of them are unaware of the actual implications, depth and inevitability of the ruin now awaiting them and their setups. They have always been pampered and taken care of in the past 200 years and their memories seem woefully short and trivially oriented. Added to this is the fact that their awareness of history is next to nil.
The past 200 years saw this area function as a major bastion of Anglo-American global policy, at the height of their power. This was due to the inherent traits of Pashtun-Afghan political behaviour which presented themselves not only as a challenge, but one that could effectively be used against Russia in a contention for global superiority. According the British strategist Hal Mackinder, he who possessed the heart of Eurasia (Af-Pak) also had the key to its destiny.
To sum up — it is a rarely acknowledged fact, but both the faulty nation-states of Afghanistan and Pakistan (known in the end to Americans as the “Af-Pak”) were in effect the products of Anglo-American imperial strategy against Russia in all its forms.
POSTSCRIPT
It will be worth adding at this point that in the last few days Iran has taken the most unusual yet very pragmatic step, the first of a kind in several decades of theocratic Shia rule — of handing the Afghan Embassy in Tehran over to the Taliban. Previously, it was occupied by the staff of the overthrown US puppet Ghani regime. Iran is obviously aware that the Taliban represent the peak extent and achievement of the Pashtun-Afghan political genius and its expression, if ever there even was such a thing…and that further hopes and expectations in this regard would be foolish. Reality may be unpleasant but that is often the case, and conditions are presently such that it cannot be addressed in any other way and therefore has to be tolerated momentarily. This is in contrast to the pathetic and comical naïveté and lack of presence of the “National Resistance Movement” opposed to the Taliban — composed mostly of youthful and alienated Western immigrants having a good time on social media and feeling good about such “accomplishments”. The question Iran will ask is that in a situation such as this, beset with impossible problems — what is one to do??
