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He distinguished countries between blind alleys and highways, and among the latter he thought two held prominent place: Syria, which was the link between the civilizations of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and Afghanistan, which was the nodal point between the civilizations of India, East Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and thence Europe.” “The historian Arnold Toynbee once suggested that upon viewing the rise of civilization from its center in Mesopotamia, the map of the Old World becomes startlingly clear. Stephen Tanner makes much the same observation in ‘Afghanistan: A Military History’:
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During this period, Afghanistan was part of many different empires ruled by outsiders and the center of a couple of its own.” Geography may not be destiny but it has set the course of Afghan history for millennia as the gateway for invaders spilling out of Iran or central Asia and into India: Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Mahmud of Ghazni, Ghinggis Khan, Tamerlane, and Babur, to mention some of the most illustrious examples. “Landlocked Afghanistan lies in the heart of Asia, and links three major cultural and geographic regions: the Indian subcontinent to the southeast, central Asia to the north, and the Iranian plateau in the west. In ‘Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History’, Thomas Barfield says: Unfortunately, avoiding war in Afghanistan has also proved difficult for foreign powers over the centuries. In this, Luttrell echoes exactly what every observer of Afghan military history has always said about the country, albeit without necessarily comparing foreign troops to diamonds on a goat.īy all accounts, there are usually three principal antagonists in any Afghan war: foreign armies, the domestic force (or forces) resisting them, and the terrain. “…Barren, treeless mountainscapes are no place to conduct secretive landings and takeoffs, not with Taliban rocket men all around… And if those mountain cliffs that surrounded the village were as rough and stony as I suspected, we’d stick out on those heights like a diamond in a goat’s ass.” Even before going in, he says of his initial impressions in the briefing room: An intense gunfight with the Taliban followed, an encounter that only Luttrell made it through alive.ĭespite his palpable annoyance and anguish about the decision to let the goat herders go, it’s obvious that Afghanistan’s geography was just as much to blame for the botched mission. So says Marcus Luttrell in his book ‘Lone Survivor’.Īnyone familiar with it, or the film of the same name starring Mark Wahlberg, will know that Luttrell’s four-man Navy SEAL team was compromised by three goat herders whilst on a covert mission in Afghanistan. Stealth, we were told, must be our watchword on the high, quiet slopes.” Every footstep that dislodges anything, a small rock, a pile of shale, seems like it might cause an earth-shaking avalanche. “Up there, complex paths emerge then disappear behind huge boulders and rocks.