Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (38 page)

Alexander was not the only conqueror to be withstood by the inhabitants of the Hindu Kush. The Arab armies that brought Islam to Afghanistan and northern India from the seventh century onward seem to have satisfied themselves with governing the rich lowland cities, and left the mountain people well alone. In the fourteenth century the brutal central Asian conqueror Tamerlane came close to conquering them: he fought his way up to the mountains’ highest citadel. He could not maintain his control, however, and the local people never converted to Islam. Long after Tamerlane, the people of this place still offered sacrifices to their gods Imra and Gish, drank wine, and danced—women and men together—on wooden platforms they precariously rigged up in villages clinging limpet-like to the steep mountainsides. Their frightened Muslim neighbors called them
kafir
s (unbelievers), a label they appear to have accepted with relish at the time. The region where they lived was called Kafiristan.

Marco Polo did not care for them when he passed by in the thirteenth century. “They are idolaters and utter savages, living entirely by the chase and dressed in the skins of beasts,” he wrote. “They are out and out bad.” That was not wholly inaccurate—the Kafirs did indeed wear animal skins, and did not practice agriculture—but it is doubtful that Polo ever went near them. A long time passed after Alexander’s visit before any Westerner looked on the Hindu Kush again.

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TWO CATHOLIC MISSIONARIES
are believed to have entered Kafiristan at the end of the eighteenth century (based on stories told by its inhabitants to later visitors). One was killed by the Kafirs after being mistaken for an evil spirit; neither left any record of what they saw. In the 1820s, an Illinois-born, part-Hispanic, Irish-accented, Jesuit-educated Unitarian named Alexander Gardner traveled to central Asia in search of adventurous employment (he would become, for a time, a highwayman). In the words of his admiring biographer, his time in the region was marked by “ambuscades, fierce reprisals, hairbreadth escapes, episodes sometimes of brutality and cruelty wellnigh inconceivable, at other times of hearty charity and fidelity unto death.” He took the local name Gordana Khan.

Gardner claimed to have entered Kafiristan twice, but his original record of the visit was lost when Sir Alexander Burnes, the British envoy to Kabul, who had the only copy, was killed by a mob at the start of the Afghan war (some at the time said that the mob were urged on by Afghan men whom the flamboyant Burnes had cuckolded). Burnes, cousin to the Scottish poet Robbie Burns, was a fluent Persian-speaker and did leave a record of testimony that he had received from Kafirs in Kabul, testimony that reveals their practices of burying their dead in coffins in the open air, selling off their girl children at a price determined by their size, and men reconciling blood feuds by sucking each other’s nipples.

After Burnes’s death many years passed in which Kafiristan went unvisited. It came to be called the “dark spot on the map of Asia”—a place that even the British imperial government of India, which sent spies to map out the most inaccessible and forbidden places on its borders, could not penetrate. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British planned to produce a gazetteer about Kafiristan, as they had for every other area that bordered India, but in this case—uniquely—they gave up.

Yet the British authorities had a strong interest in learning more about places such as Kafiristan, which abutted the northern edge of their British possessions: the biggest outside threat to their empire in India in the late nineteenth century was Russia, which was swallowing up central Asia and progressing south at a rapid pace. Scouting out the areas like Kafiristan that lay between the British and the Russians, with the goal of either winning them as allies or taking them as possessions, became a decades-long endeavor known as the Great Game. This was how a certain Lieutenant McNair, veteran of the second Anglo-Afghan War, found himself at the border of Kafiristan in 1883 during his official leave, darkening his skin with walnut juice and packing measuring instruments into a disguised medicine bag. He was transforming himself into “Sahib Gul McNair Hussain Shah” and hoping to enter Kafiristan in the company of two friends from a local Pashtun tribe. It must have given McNair pause to climb down a path lined with cairns of rocks that imperfectly covered the corpses of previous travelers murdered by the Kafirs, who were brutal in protecting their separateness. “Of all notable deeds,” McNair recorded, “among Kafirs that of slaying a [Muslim] is reckoned first.” The head of the victim would be put in a tall tree. Luckily, the two men who were with McNair belonged to a tribe that was regarded by the Kafirs with superstitious dread and whose members were therefore generally allowed to pass without harm.

McNair’s visit to the Kafirs was very brief, and he discovered little. He estimated their number at two hundred thousand. He added that “their idols are legion, each valley, glen and dale has some that are unknown except in that particular locality: these are supposed to represent heroes who lived among them in days of old and who now as spirits intercede with Amra in their behalf.” Their wine was weak, he thought, and they were amazed by the whisky he had thoughtfully brought with him. Most significant, he noted that they were “exceedingly well disposed towards the British . . . they would not hesitate to place their services, should occasion require, at our disposal.” He recorded all of this in a pamphlet stamped “Secret” that he lodged with the intelligence division of the British War Office. As an appendix to it, he wrote a vocabulary list showing what he thought a future visitor might need to say, such as “It is steep and I may fall” and “I will offer a goat to Amra.”

McNair’s insights were shallow, and Kafiristan remained an enigma until the arrival of George Scott Robertson. Robertson, originally an army doctor, was from the wild and remote Orkney Islands. He perhaps found some echo of home in the “veritable faery country” that he spotted from a mountaintop during a posting as an administrator in the very northwestern tip of British India. “Stretching far into the nothingness beyond” was how he described this view of Kafiristan. From that moment, as he tells us in a book that he later wrote about his expedition, he was hooked. While resident as the British political officer in nearby Gilgit he kept an eye out for any Kafirs that he might find there, and eventually some visited the region and were introduced to him. At first he found their appearance off-putting, but then he saw that “the vile brown robe, trailing at the heels, conceals active and athletic forms: that the bland insinuating faces are keen and well-formed, and can give at times the bold fixed stare, or the wild, quick glance of the hawk; and that the men playing the part of cringing beggars . . . are capable at any moment of throwing off the mask of humility and assuming their proper characteristics.” He discovered just how true that was when he managed to get permission not just to visit the Kafirs but to live among them for what turned out to be an entire year.

He discovered that the people called the Kafirs were divided into many tribes, whose languages and practices differed. The Kafirs’ religion, moreover, had once been shared by other neighboring peoples who now lived under Muslim rule. One of these peoples was called the Kalasha. Unlike those Kafirs in the high mountains who had remained free, the Kalasha’s lower-lying territory had been conquered by the
mehtar
s (princes) of Chitral, and they had been compelled to pay tribute in the form of forced labor. The Kalasha were of no use to Robertson, who wanted to find fighting men: they were “a thoroughly servile and degraded race,” he sniffed. The tribe with which he chose to live, the Kam, were by contrast the most warlike of all the Kafirs. When trying one day to describe to the Kam what a fat man looked like, he had trouble getting them to understand. Few of them had ever seen such a thing. He met with success only when he talked to the local priest, who “for a long time was puzzled. My meaning dawned on him as he exclaimed, ‘I remember killing a man near Asmar who was just as you describe—the word is
skior
.’”

The priest was not alone in being a killer. Blood feuds were not just an occasional mishap among the Kam; they were a way of life. The nearest Muslim villages were targets for murderous raids, often conducted for spoils (in such a poor community, it might be worth killing a man just to have his clothes) or as revenge for the steady encroachment of Muslim tribes on Kam land. Robertson made a list of the qualities that the Kam admired, at the top of which was an ability to kill—the other being “a good hill-man, ever ready to quarrel, and of an amorous disposition.” The Kam often had vendettas against each other, but a neat custom enabled them to dodge these if they wished: a man needed only to pretend to hide from his would-be killer, who then pretended not to see him.

Members of a tribe who failed to kill the tribe’s sworn enemies might be pelted with ashes by their own people. They might become the target of practical jokes, and at public banquets their wives would turn their faces away when serving them with food.
Gal,
shame, was a powerful motivation among the Kam. So was caste. Those who slipped down the social ladder might end up among the low-caste
brojan
, who were liable to be bought and sold like medieval serfs. On the other hand, a young man who had killed five victims was allowed to wear a blue scarf made from their clothing; Robertson saw quite a few of these during his visit. He also met Torag Merak, a man who appears to have walked straight out of a Victorian adventure novel. Merak, “the richest man in Kafiristan,” came to see Robertson dressed in a bright red robe and carrying a bronze shield. “He had strong Semitic features, and his long locks, matted into rat’s-tails, fell upon his gaudy shoulders, while occasionally he turned a proud glance to see if the stranger appreciated his grandeur.”

Merak claimed to have killed more than a hundred people, many of them women and children, and to celebrate the fact, he had tied a small bell to the end of his staff. ”In his gloomy eyes,” Robertson wrote, “there is a world of pathos. They belie him utterly. He is at heart a howling savage, while in repose his features are those of a man saddened from gazing on the sufferings of a troubled world.” Luckily for Robertson, being a Christian meant that he was regarded as a fellow non-Muslim and a kind of honorary Kafir. The British already had a reputation among the Kam, though of a rather peculiar kind: they told Robertson that Gish, their god of war, had gone to live in London.

Death, in any case, was hard to ignore among the Kam. All Kafirs buried their dead in the open air, probably just because it was usually too hard to dig in the frozen ground. The stink of the rotting bodies, Robertson commented, would waft through the village when the wind blew in the wrong direction. And when there was a funeral, it was marked with a dance—with the corpse propped up on a chair in the midst of the dancers.

Robertson’s portrait was as unflattering in its way as Marco Polo’s had been centuries before. He wrote that the Kam never washed, that they stole from him incessantly, and that “lying comes as easily to them as breathing.” But to Robertson, steeped as he was in the British Empire’s martial tradition, these qualities were outweighed by “their splendid courage, their domestic affections, and their overpowering love of freedom.” In other ways, he says, they were made what they were by circumstance. “For them, the world has not grown softer as it has grown older . . . if they had been different, they would have been enslaved long ago.”

For all that he admired the Kam for their love of freedom, he was the inadvertent harbinger of their subjugation. His journey had a covert purpose: the British authorities were trying to decide whether the Kafir tribes were worth including in their Empire. Robertson’s mission, disclosed in the India Office’s secret papers, was “to examine their tribal organisation and discover their value as friendly disposed but neutral allies, or active partisans in war.” His verdict was that they should be left alone. The Kafirs had, he wrote to his superiors, “no strategic or political importance whatever . . . and ought not to be interfered with in any way.” It was perhaps wise policy, proposed for good motives, but it spelled the end of Kafiristan.

Afghanistan, whose territory the Kafirs abutted, was then ruled by Abdur Rahman Khan, called the “Iron Amir” by the British. In his memoirs, the old amir claimed that he wanted the Kafirs in his army because “they were such a brave race of people that I considered that they would in time make very useful soldiers under my rule.” (He was right: in due course they became the elite of the Afghan army.) He also wanted to outdo Tamerlane by conquering Kafiristan. And although he was not a religious zealot—he employed, for instance, a Hindu secretary—he wanted to claim the glory of a jihad against nonbelievers. In 1895 three military units loyal to Abdur Rahman advanced on Kafiristan in a pincer movement. They struck in the depths of winter, when the Kafirs would find it hard to escape. Given that his enemies, however brave and brutal, had not yet mastered the use of the rifle and were mostly fighting with bows and arrows, Abdur Rahman’s victory was guaranteed. The Kafirs were given the choice of Islam or death; in the 1950s, the British travel writer Eric Newby was shown a stone red with the blood of those who chose execution. Abdur Rahman won the title Zia ul-Millat wa ul-Din, “light of the nation and the faith.” The territory that Abdur Rahman conquered was eventually renamed Nuristan, the “land of light,” to celebrate its forced conversion.

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MUSLIM IT NOW MAY BE
, but Nuristan is as fierce and untamable as it was before Abdur Rahman. At dawn on July 13, 2008, forty-nine US soldiers in a makeshift camp in Wanat, Nuristan province, woke up to a sinister sight: figures in the half-light emerging over distant ridges. Closer observation revealed that the figures were Taliban with rocket launchers. More and more of the silhouettes appeared, until there were nearly two hundred of them. Suddenly they opened fire, taking out the US camp’s heavy weaponry in the first few minutes. The next few hours were a confusion of blood and noise. At one point the attackers broke through the camp’s defenses, and when they finally withdrew after a few hours of sustained assault, they left nine Americans dead and twenty-seven wounded. The battle of Wanat, as it came to be known, was the costliest American engagement in Afghanistan since 2001. Reports of the battle in the American press highlighted Nuristan’s reputation as the “deadliest place on earth” and “Al-Qaeda and Taliban central.” Three things made it especially attractive to Islamic militants: its stark topography (the mountains that make up the province are up to 19,500 feet high), the fact that it sits alongside the border with Pakistan, and the religious fervor and battle-hardiness of its people (it was the first province to declare jihad against the Soviets in 1979). Just as in Alexander’s time, they and their neighbors in Kunar province, a little to the south, proved to be the fiercest fighters in the region.