Outside the Window: May 29, 2009. New York, New York. Cloudy and cool. Maybe some storms tonight.

Inside the Book: 2003. Ghazni and Shkin, Afghanistan. Hot. Tense.

            In a 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs, Milton Bearden (CIA station chief in Pakistan between 1986 and 1989) dubbed Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.” The Soviets had tried and failed to pacify it. A century earlier, the British fought three costly wars on the same terrain before retreating. Two millennia before that, Alexander the Great barely escaped with his life. Only Genghis Kahn had any luck incorporating the tribes into his empire, and according to Bearden, even he had to make “painful accommodations with the Afghans.” The initial invasions sometimes went pretty well, with foreign armies marching into cities and setting up puppet governments. But then, little by little, ambush by ambush…

        This history is much on Mullaney’s mind. A well-trained historian, he sees evidence of it everywhere: from Ghazni’s 12th century “Towers of Victory” to a half-buried Soviet tank. The latter is another example of Mullaney’s keen eye for metaphor: the land can swallow an invader whole. Mullaney implies here and elsewhere that—despite a history of invasions and occupations—no outsider has been able to impose its will on this country, at least not for long. As he points out, “Afghans say Americans have all the watches, but they have all the time.”
        Not that Mullaney thinks the American mission is doomed. Unlike Alexander, Pollock, Genghis, and Gromov, Mullaney insists he isn’t “interested in acquiring Afghanistan as an imperial territory.” There may be a valid distinction here, and many of Mullaney’s missions do have humanitarian goals, such as providing medical care for the local population and, almost as importantly, its cattle. Not everyone agrees with him, though, and another important American project, the road between Kabul and Kandahar, is under frequent attack:

We soon turned onto the best road in Afghanistan, the centerpiece of the international reconstruction effort. Its renovation had cut the driving time in half between Kabul and Kandahar, spurring the recovering Afghan economy and providing thousands of jobs to construction workers along the route. It was a hard-won accomplishment, costing the lives of many brave Afghans and foreign construction managers who had been terrorized by insurgents eager to detour the ambitious project.

They still are. Whether this road will last like Ghazni’s towers or sink into the earth like a Soviet tank remains to be seen. Mullaney is acutely aware that it could go either way.