kleph
20-02-2006, 02:13 AM
We look east today and and see the miasma of blood and smoke left in the wake of yet another a violent conflict on that vast and seemingly untamable piece of real estate we call the middle east. Given the huge human and financial cost we are only now begining to recognize, it is probably wise to look back a bit further and over a slightly wider geographical field to understand what the hell is happening and where it might all eventually end up.
To describe the possiblities as sobering would be a gross overuse of the British tendency of understatement. In 1994, a former reporter for The Times of London, Peter Hopkirk, gave us and excellent volume that undertook this heady task, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia.
"The Great Game" was a phrase coined by Captain Arthur Connolly of the East India Company to describe the covert political efforts and espionage that were undertaken in the 1800s by Tsarist Russia and Victorian England across the vast plain of Central Asia. The prize at hand was the crown jewel of England's empire - India, which the crown wanted to preserve and Russia's monarchy wanted to obtain.
As Hopkirk notes, at the start of the game in the early 1800's the two empires lay more than two thousand miles apart, across vast deserts and almost impassable mountain ranges. By the end, only 20 miles separated the two rivals. In between lay dozens of tribal groups that were hostile and suspicious of outsiders. Given the fact the two Empires saw them as little more than tools for their political ends, that turned out not to be a bit unjustified.
So dozens of British and Russian agents began crawling over this vast area trying to infiltrate the native groups, gain information and, eventually, set the stage for military actions to expand their frontiers. It certainly makes for an adventure yarn given the dangers and perils they faced. The aforementioned Connelly ended up losing his head in Bokhara in 1842 - the penalty for being a spy.
Although the stage of the conflict here is central asia and completely preceeds the current conflict in Iraq and the middle east, only the most obtuse reader would miss the continuation of the same mindset toward this region of the world. Time after time, these Western powers have moved into these regions and insisted on imposing their style of governance, typically at the end of a gun. The results are consistantly horrific.
Ask the Brits. In 1842 their military hold on Afghanistan fell with a revolt in Kabul. The entire garrison - more than 16,000 men, women and children - fled the city. One man survived. (The incident was covered up more than 12 years when an official inquiry finally exposed the sheer incompetence of the garrison's military leaders.)
Then they went back and, forty years later, the same thing happened again.
Hopkirk presents this two-century long tale of intrigue in a spectacularly well done fashion. It's a history book, yes, but you will find it a complete page turner despite that fact. Fact is these guys were extreme before the idea existed. They crawled across impassable deserts, climbed unsumountable mountains and discovered lands and peoples previously only known through legend.
But it is the lessons of these ventures that resound most strongly for the modern reader. Too often the conflicts in the middle east are painted in the broad strokes of the media as west vs east, muslim vs jew and in the shadow of that great modern shibboleth - oil.
(The main focus of this book is Central Asia primarily in Afghanistan - not what we typically consider the "middle east" today since it touches on events only as geographically as far east as modern day Iraq. My contention is the general trend of actions by western powers to the whole region is historically consistent.)
This book reminds us of older preconceptions with just as dangerous perils that are still being perpetrated today. Imposing a western-style government (or communist, for that matter) on these lands via military force has never worked out well. Underestimating the ability of these peoples is always at your peril, not only when acting out of the most altruistic of motives but most dangerously when using the most exploitive of reasons.
Add on this template the profound chimeras of the modern religious conflicts, the complexity of how the middle eastern states emerged in the early 1900s and the intercene political powers that constantly surge beneath the surface of these societies that we barely give notice to at all and you have a recipe for disaster on an... well, imperial scale.
A great book and an important one to have read given the stakes of what is happening in our world today.
Links:Amazon.com entry (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568360223/104-7314290-1862316?v=glance&n=283155)
Wikipedia entry on The Great Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game)
A version of this essay originally appeared on my website kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com/).
©2004 C.J. Schexnayder
To describe the possiblities as sobering would be a gross overuse of the British tendency of understatement. In 1994, a former reporter for The Times of London, Peter Hopkirk, gave us and excellent volume that undertook this heady task, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia.
"The Great Game" was a phrase coined by Captain Arthur Connolly of the East India Company to describe the covert political efforts and espionage that were undertaken in the 1800s by Tsarist Russia and Victorian England across the vast plain of Central Asia. The prize at hand was the crown jewel of England's empire - India, which the crown wanted to preserve and Russia's monarchy wanted to obtain.
As Hopkirk notes, at the start of the game in the early 1800's the two empires lay more than two thousand miles apart, across vast deserts and almost impassable mountain ranges. By the end, only 20 miles separated the two rivals. In between lay dozens of tribal groups that were hostile and suspicious of outsiders. Given the fact the two Empires saw them as little more than tools for their political ends, that turned out not to be a bit unjustified.
So dozens of British and Russian agents began crawling over this vast area trying to infiltrate the native groups, gain information and, eventually, set the stage for military actions to expand their frontiers. It certainly makes for an adventure yarn given the dangers and perils they faced. The aforementioned Connelly ended up losing his head in Bokhara in 1842 - the penalty for being a spy.
Although the stage of the conflict here is central asia and completely preceeds the current conflict in Iraq and the middle east, only the most obtuse reader would miss the continuation of the same mindset toward this region of the world. Time after time, these Western powers have moved into these regions and insisted on imposing their style of governance, typically at the end of a gun. The results are consistantly horrific.
Ask the Brits. In 1842 their military hold on Afghanistan fell with a revolt in Kabul. The entire garrison - more than 16,000 men, women and children - fled the city. One man survived. (The incident was covered up more than 12 years when an official inquiry finally exposed the sheer incompetence of the garrison's military leaders.)
Then they went back and, forty years later, the same thing happened again.
Hopkirk presents this two-century long tale of intrigue in a spectacularly well done fashion. It's a history book, yes, but you will find it a complete page turner despite that fact. Fact is these guys were extreme before the idea existed. They crawled across impassable deserts, climbed unsumountable mountains and discovered lands and peoples previously only known through legend.
But it is the lessons of these ventures that resound most strongly for the modern reader. Too often the conflicts in the middle east are painted in the broad strokes of the media as west vs east, muslim vs jew and in the shadow of that great modern shibboleth - oil.
(The main focus of this book is Central Asia primarily in Afghanistan - not what we typically consider the "middle east" today since it touches on events only as geographically as far east as modern day Iraq. My contention is the general trend of actions by western powers to the whole region is historically consistent.)
This book reminds us of older preconceptions with just as dangerous perils that are still being perpetrated today. Imposing a western-style government (or communist, for that matter) on these lands via military force has never worked out well. Underestimating the ability of these peoples is always at your peril, not only when acting out of the most altruistic of motives but most dangerously when using the most exploitive of reasons.
Add on this template the profound chimeras of the modern religious conflicts, the complexity of how the middle eastern states emerged in the early 1900s and the intercene political powers that constantly surge beneath the surface of these societies that we barely give notice to at all and you have a recipe for disaster on an... well, imperial scale.
A great book and an important one to have read given the stakes of what is happening in our world today.
Links:Amazon.com entry (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568360223/104-7314290-1862316?v=glance&n=283155)
Wikipedia entry on The Great Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game)
A version of this essay originally appeared on my website kleph.com (http://www.kleph.com/).
©2004 C.J. Schexnayder