Tournament of Shadows

AUTHORS’ NOTE

THERE ARE NINE-AND-SIXTY WAYS OF CONSTRUCTING TRIBAL LAYS, instructs the poet, and every one is right.We have applied the same agnostic principle to the insoluble matter of spelling proper and place names. At sacrifice of consistency, we have adopted the most familiar and accessible usages, save in quotations, where the author’s text is respected.Thus it is Bokhara, not Bocara, Boghar or Bukhara, and we refer to Genghis Khan, not to the scholarly Chingiz, the widely used Jenghiz, or Voltaire’s Gengis or Gibbon’s Zingis, not to mention a dozen other variants. Romanizing Chinese has been especially troublesome. Pinyin is the system officially approved by the People’s Republic of China, and most of us realize that Peking is now Beijing. But how many of us recognize that Chiang Kaishek, as he is rendered in the old Wade-Giles method, has become Jiang Jieshi? So we have mostly stuck to Wade-Giles in the pre-1950 period (Ch’ing Dynasty and not Qing), while preserving Chiang in his longfamiliar form throughout. Place names change for political reasons, too. The careful reader will notice that Chinese Turkestan becomes Sinkiang Province (or Xinjiang in the pinyin system); the sharp-eyed will also note that the endpaper overview of Asia uses current Chinese spellings (Xining, not Sining), and pinpoints elusive ancient sites (Khara Khoto).

Wherever possible we turn to Henry Yule’s indispensable Hobson Jobson, as an authoritative glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases. For a non-British view of things past, we have relied on Parshotam Mehra’s A Dictionary of Indian History, 1707–1947, as well as a large and growing body of Indian and Pakistani scholarship.

Our goal has been to describe familiar events in a fresh way, drawing on recent scholarship and newly opened archives, and to throw a sharp beam on neglected or unknown figures and incidents. Our approach is broadly chronological and thematic, which necessarily requires repetition of information in earlier chapters, in the belief that readers may skip around, or ahead.Thus the ox-bows in our narrative are not the result of carelessness or amnesia, but are intentional.

At every point we have benefited from the help of librarians and archivists in four capitals and at a dozen universities. Scholars, journalists, soldiers, and survivors of every nationality have given generously of their time; their names are listed in the Acknowledgments. We have tried, within the text, to identify sources of important quoted matter, with fuller references in the chapter-by-chapter bibliography, annotated candidly, the better to encourage every reader to excavate further in this rich seam of pertinent history.

Two matters resisted ready resolution, the first atelevision sets or automobiles, the current dollar equivalent is a matter of spirited conjecture. An additional problem regards the use in Russia of the Julian or oldstyle calendar before l918.This has been especially puzzling when drawing on Russian sources for the years 1860–1900, when the Julian dates were twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar in use in Europe, and the years 1900–1918, when they were thirteen days behind. It is not always possible to determine which calendar an author is using, or whether the dates have been corrected, so some inconsistencies are unavoidable.

INTRODUCTION

The Great Game, Redux

IT IS AN AGREEABLE PRIVILEGE TO INTRODUCE THIS NEW EDITION OF Tournament, with remaining typos fixed and with the reading list updated. The occasion is also, in a modest way, instructive.When our book initially appeared in 1999, its themes and locations seemed peripheral to American life, so much so that commiserating friends worried that too few would trouble to read about Afghanistan or Central Asia, or about mad emirs and forgotten spies. That concern evaporated after the trauma of 9/11 and its sequel, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Nowadays the entire geography of Afghanistan and Pakistan is the stuff of headlines. Osama Bin Laden has been reputedly hiding in the tribal areas of the North-West Frontier, eluding U.S. Special Forces while Pakistan implausibly claims its military intelligence agency is doing all it can to track him down. Nobody literate in this history can be dumb with surprise that along that frontier dissimulation is an art form. Indeed, long ago the British encountered the secretive Muslim extremists in India, as we are reminded by Charles Allen, author of Plain Tales of the Raj, whose great-grandfather was standing beside the only British Viceroy to be assassinated. In 1871, the popular and outgoing Lord Mayo was visiting the Andaman Islands when he was fatally stabbed by an alleged Wahhabi assassin of Pathan (or Pushtun) origins.

Contrary to common impression,Wahhabism, a fundamentalist creed originating in Saudi Arabia, acquired deep roots in British India in the early nineteenth century. In 1825, Islamic militants, inspired by pilgrims who returned from Arabia as Wahhabis, rose up in a jihad against “accursed Nazarenes and mischievous polytheists.” The Raj’s forces drove them northwards to the Vale of Peshawar near the Khyber Pass, where they settled in what the British called “the Fanatic Camp.” Their descendants, known as Deoband, have multiplied, and their seminaries have flourished. A fundamentalist party now governs the frontier province, and Pakistan’s military ruler, himself twice the target of assassins, acknowledges that Osama is a national hero. These are difficult truths for Americans to grasp, much less live with, and we hope that this book will shed some light on the fierce contentiousness of the tribal peoples inhabiting the Hindu Kush.

Indeed, viewed more widely, the present disorders in Islamic Asia and the Middle East on all sides follow the pattern of the earlier Great Game.The stakes are bigger, the script is writ larger, but the plot is familiar. For rival big powers, one expansionist step seems ineluctably to lead to the next.Thus the British initially feared that a Russian advance through Central Asia would challenge their rule in India (see below, passim). Then, in 1875, in a political coup to protect Britain’s route to India, Prime Minister Disraeli snapped up the insolvent Egyptian khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal Company, making the British equal partners with the French. Disraeli’s coup was assailed by his Liberal opponent, William Ewart Gladstone, who warned that Britain’s first move into Egypt, whether by purchase or larceny, “will be the almost certain egg of a North African empire that will grow and grow until another Victoria and another Albert, titles of the lake-sources of the White Nile, come within our borders, and till we finally join hands across the equator with Natal and Cape-Town, to say nothing of Transvaal and the Orange River in the south, or of Abyssinia or Zanzibar.”

Which is almost exactly what transpired. Within a few decades, the Union Jack was flying over every name on Gladstone’s roster, Abyssinia excepted.This expansion grew by a quantum leap in 1882 when, to protect the Suez Canal and European bondholders, the British intervened in Egypt to crush a nationalist army revolt, the Prime Minister ironically being Gladstone. So began a “temporary” British occupation that persisted until 1956 as place by place in the Islamic East and Africa became a fresh locus for British strategic anxiety.

In this new introduction we have both broadened our horizon and turned our telescope around to examine the present through the prism of the classic Great Game.The moral is that (as the Psalmist cautioned) little is ever new under the imperial sun.The bard of empire, Rudyard Kipling, offers a basic text.

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Were he alive today, Kipling would probably shrug.The least politically correct yet the most quotable of major poets was also among the more prophetic. He would not be surprised by superpower America’s foreign frustrations. In the noontime of Pax Britannica, he foresaw (and wrote) that the mightiest of empires could crumble in a lifetime; that expansionary prowess rested on the will and muscle of ordinary people; and that the contest for mastery was a tournament without end.Thus on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, when her realm was the largest known to history comprising a fourth of the world’s population and its habitable real estate, when hosannas of self-congratulation resounded through the British Isles, Kipling did not join in. On July 17, 1897, in a poem titled “Recessional” published in The Times (the journalistic high church of Empire), he looked beyond the day’s boasts to warn of things to come: