Wednesday
Washington Post columnist David von Drehle recently reminded me where I first encountered a mention of Afghanistan since it’s the same place where he learned of it: in “one of the most famous opening chapters in literary history”:
I was 11 years old, and my new book introduced a young English doctor. Sent to an outpost of the Empire, he was hurried ahead to the front lines of a persistent war. He united with his assigned unit in Kandahar, and nearly died in combat when his shoulder was shattered by a bullet.
The book was a Study in Scarlet, and the chapter is famous because it describes Dr. Watson’s meeting with Sherlock Holmes. As I look over the Arthur Conan Doyle novel, I see there are other Afghanistan references that will resonate with those war veterans who continue to suffer ill effects from the conflict. “The campaign brought honors and promotion to many,” Watson tells us, “but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster.” Because his health has been “irretrievably ruined” and he has little money, he jumps at the chance when a friend mentions a potential roommate:
“I should like to meet him,” I said. “If I am to lodge with anyone, I should prefer a man of studious and quiet habits. I am not strong enough yet to stand much noise or excitement. I had enough of both in Afghanistan to last me for the remainder of my natural existence. How could I meet this friend of yours?”
Afghanistan is mentioned upon Watson’s first encounter with this man:
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
Holmes later reveals how he knows this:
“You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.”
“You were told, no doubt.”
“Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”
The relevant point for us is that our own Afghanistan vets also return indelibly marked by the experience.
Other than Watson, my first real literary encounter with Afghanistan was M.M. Kaye’s bestseller Far Pavilions. Given how many people perceived the fragility of Afghan government and the chaos that would follow an American withdrawal, the book is only too relevant.
In the book, the disaster is far worse as a British blunder costs the lives of 969 British and Indian soldiers after they are ambushed by Afghan rebels. The character who foresees this happening is Ashton, who is born British but, because he loses his parents, is raised Indian. He therefore has a foot in each world.
Ashton goes on to join the Corps of Guides when he discovers his English parentage. Because he knows the language and the customs of the local populace, he can clearly see when his superiors are making stupid mistakes.
His special knowledge causes him great internal anguish. Should he blindly obey orders even when he knows they will lead to disaster? If he ignores his place and speaks up to his commanders, telling them the truth, will it even make any difference? As it turns out, he does warn the commanders about the trap, pays a price for doing so, and is ignored anyway. A massacre results.
Our own specialists either didn’t speak up or, like Ashton, were ignored. There’s a significant distance between the book and America’s involvement, however. If our withdrawal is chaotic, it’s a chaos engineered in part by the previous administration. If the book were to have followed what happened in 2021, previous British officers would have made a special deal with the Afghan rebels to strengthen their hand, making the subsequent ambush more likely to succeed.
Of course, there’s plenty of blame to go around, starting with George W. Bush and continuing on with Barack Obama. Also, give Donald Trump credit for his determination to withdraw and Joe Biden for continuing the process. When we investigate what happened, we must be clear-eyed, not narrowly partisan.
I conclude today’s post with a poem that my father, an ardent birdwatcher, wrote in the early days of the war about the birds of Afghanistan. Through contrasting the natural world with the disasters created by humans, he expresses his longing for an unspoiled world of great natural beauty.
Yet the two worlds are not entirely separate. The Steppe Eagle may be able to ignore the puffs of explosives below him (he’s much more interested in a herd of ibex), but sandgrouse glean in the minefields, russet sparrows move into the emptied houses, and crows and vultures feed on the human dead. The tragedy of the war is captured in images that are all the more powerful for being only indirectly referred to.
The poem brings to my mind a powerful scene in Three Kings, the 1999 David O. Russell/George Clooney movie about the first Persian Gulf War. A woman war reporter, tough as nails (she has to be), breaks down when she encounters a pelican trapped in the oil spills caused by Saddam Hussein blowing up the Kuwaiti oil stations. Seemingly inured to human suffering, she can’t take the sight of innocence desecrated. She is recalling her own childhood innocence and mourning its loss.
A couple of notes on the poem. The “great game” in the first line echoes the phrase, made famous by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, referring to the battle between east and west. (Here the great game seems also to be the conflict between humans and nature.) The gyrfalcon freed from the falconer, meanwhile, is an allusion to Yeats’s great poem “The Second Coming,” which predicts cataclysmic apocalypse “stalking towards Bethlehem to be born.” As Yeats writes, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” which has certainly proved to be the case in current day Afghanistan.
Finally, the “old man of the mountain” was a ruler of an Islamic sect in the 11th century who would get his followers high on hashish and send them out to assassinate his enemies (the word “assassin” comes from hashish). Today it’s not hashish but opium that helps finance the Taliban.
In my father’s elegiac vision, the riches of the orient seem to be a thing of the past.
The Birds of Afghanistan
By Scott Bates“Hardly anyone has been birding in war-torn Afghanistan for 20 years. . . . Around 460 species of birds have been recorded there, a good record for a land-locked and largely arid country.” Nigel Wheatley, Where to Watch Birds in Asia, 1996
The Great Game of Winter plays in the Hindu Kush
A black-eyed, swarthy-faced, hawk-billed Steppe
Eagle sits on a cliff at fourteen thousand feet
Like Hasan Ben Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain.
He ignores the puffs of smoke in the hills below
And watches a herd of Ibex forage
In the drifts of whirling snow.Bands of Snowfinches feed on juniper berries.
Siberian Cranes wing southwest over Mount Zebak.
Snowcocks call in the high meadows of Badakshan.
Millions of Teal and Pelicans swim and dive in Hamun-i-Puzak.
(Flowerpeckers, Sunbirds, and Spiderhunters
Have left on vacation for the Indonesian jungles.)
Flocks of Painted Sandgrouse glean with impunity
In the minefields. Russet Sparrows in the east
Move into empty villages. Ravens chat on broken towers.
Carrion Crows and Bearded Vultures enjoy a holiday feast.A Gyrfalcon soars
Freed from her hood and her falconer.The Steppe Eagle swings down the Khinjan pass,
Circling down where once Marco Polo went
Amidst the riches of the Orient.