Afghanistan a military history from alexander the great to the fall of the taliban

[marwat]

In the middle of the fourth century A.D., a new horde of mounted
warriors crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan. Again the Chinese had
been the first to observe these people and, according to Louis Dupree,
their name for the tribe—Ye-ti-i-li-do—taxed Byzantine translators
into coming up with Ephthalite or Hephthalite. The Persians called
them Haytals, or Aytals (a term that provides a presentiment of
Attila); but the name of the tribe that invaded Afghanistan has
endured through history more famously as the "White Huns."

[marwat]

The exact ethnicity of the Kushans is unknown except that they were
Caucasian and probably spoke an Iranian language. The Turkic influence
on Pashtu (the Iranian language of the Pashtuns) is ascribed to later
centuries. Thus, excepting the Greek incursion from Europe and the
short-lived Mauryan Empire of India, the major influx of peoples—Saka,
Parthian, Kushan—may all have fallen under the loose definition of
Scythian: Indo-Aryans from the steppe with distinct but related Iranian
tongues; visually and culturally similar. The sedentary population along
the fertile river valleys of Afghanistan would have tried to accommodate
each new horde while being anxious to get on with their lives. Among
the mountains, nomad herdsmen would have looked on, unconquered
but willing to join any profitable alliance. The Kushans didn't have a
written language or rigid cultural ideals to force upon the area, and like
their nomadic predecessors were tolerant of local customs and religion.

[marwat]

The agent of Kushan demise did not arrive from India, where their rule
was largely unchallenged, but from a revitalized Persia in the west. The
Parthians had had an impressive run, holding down the former center
of the Persian Empire for four hundred years. But they ceased being
energetic, and in 225 A.D. a Persian named Ardashir, the grandson of
Sassan, formulated a patriotic revolt. Ardashir claimed direct descent
from the ancient Achaemenids, clung to the Zoroastrian fire religion of
his forebears, and was able to topple the last, decrepit Parthian king.
After consolidating power his first goal was to reconquer the East.
Sassanid armies overran Afghanistan, going as far as the Indus
River, the previous border of the Persian Empire.

[marwat]

If the ethnicity of the Kushans is mysterious, that of the White
Huns is a complete puzzle. Modern scholars, relying on the Chinese,
suspect they were a client people of the Avars, a Mongolian tribe that
would eventually follow Attila's larger Hun confederation into
Europe. (In Byzantium, some thought the Avars were another wave of
Huns.) Attila's horde was Turkic-speaking, though it may have contained
other groups. The singularity of the Ephthalites derives primarily
from the account of the Roman historian Procopius, who wrote inthe mid-sixth century: "[They] are of the stock of the Huns in fact as
well as in name; however they do not mingle with any of the Huns
known to us. They are the only ones among the Huns who have white
bodies and countenances which are not ugly."
The possibility naturally exists that they were one last group of
Scythians—beginning to feel like fish out of water on the steppe—who
followed their Kushan cousins who had made good after crossing the
Oxus. But other contemporary observers described the Ephthalites as
"squat and ugly," echoing descriptions of Turkic-Mongol aggressors
commonly held by all civilized peoples when initially attacked by
them. Though the White Huns injected some new terms such as
"khan" and "ulu" into the language of Afghanistan, their conquest
did not result in any heavy Turkic overlay. It was common practice on
the steppe for larger tribes to absorb smaller ones in their path, a common
lifestyle overriding any ethnic or lingual differences. On balance
it would seem that the White Huns were a hybrid of central Asian peoples
with a large Indo-Aryan element, and at the same time were quite
different from, and more fearsome than, invaders from that direction
who had come before.
As for the "ugliness" ascribed to the main force of Huns, multiculturalists
should not take offense but rather recognize that exceptional
personal appearance was part of the Huns's design. They practiced
head-binding of children that resulted in the rather grotesquely shaped
skulls of adults. This effect is seen clearly on some Ephthalite coins.
Also, according to Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus: "From the
moment of birth they make deep gashes in their children's cheeks, so
that when in due course hair appears its growth is checked by the wrinkled
scars." This warrior culture aimed to be as frightening as possible.
When the Huns were first encountered in the West, in fact, it was
urgently debated whether they were human. From ancient times, the
Indo-Aryan world had gradually encountered Ethiopians and Chinese,
providing evidence that variations of the species existed. The discovery
of pygmies in Africa by an Achaemenid explorer must have caused
a sensation, if it was believed; and then there were the persistent stories
about Amazons. It would have come as little surprise in Europe or
Persia if these new invaders had tails or horns, or ate their young, or
walked on all fours when they weren't astride a horse. The fact that
the Huns seemed unstoppable in battle lent further credence to their
oddity.

[marwat]

The White Huns themselves took over ancient Bactria and then
flowed into Persia. In 427 A.D., a Sassanid king, Bahrum Gur, tricked
an invading nomad force into an ambush and destroyed it completely,
buying some time for the Sassanid Empire. But the White Huns grew
in numbers and soon surged in overwhelming force both south and
west. By 455 they had conquered the Kabul valley and Gandhara. In
484, having been unwisely invited by a Sassanian prince to lend force
to a succession squabble, they killed the Persian king, Peroz, and conquered
Herat and Merv. In the following decade they chopped away
at Khorasan and other Sassanian territories south of the Caspian Sea.
They might have completely extinguished the Sassanids except that
even greater rewards seemed to lie to the east; their main force veered
toward India.

[marwat]

At the end of the seventh century the Arabs pushed into
Afghanistan, one column emerging from Sistan to take Kandahar,
while another seized Herat and then Balkh, which the Arabs termed
"The Mother of Cities." The birthplace of Zoroaster, at the time of the
Arabs's arrival Balkh housed one hundred Buddhist monasteries. A
force from Kandahar marched on to Kabul, then held by an Indian
dynasty called the Hindushahis, but rather than occupying the city the
Arabs simply assigned a military governor and a tax collector.

[marwat]

Evidence of the Ghorids, who rose and disappeared again relatively
quickly, has always been scanty and it wasn't until the invention of
aviation that the most tantalizing reminder of their empire was found.
In 1943 a pilot overflying the Hindu Kush noticed an odd structure on
the ground. Standing intact in a deserted mountain valley near Jam
was an elaborate minar, over 180 feet high. Built in the middle of
nowhere it had remained intact, unnoticed, across hundreds of years
of ruinous warfare in Afghanistan. Archaeologists identified it as a
Ghorid Tower of Victory.

[marwat]

In 1221, the Mongol army descended on Afghanistan like a force
of nature, or in Dupree's words, "the atom bomb of its day." But
Dupree noted that while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were able to
rebuild, many communities in Afghanistan never regained their
stature. The fact that today Afghanistan is considered a rough rather
than a fragile country—inured to warfare rather than prone to passive
resistance—stems largely from the wholesale destruction of its sedentary
element at this time. Towns and farms based on centuries-old cultivation
techniques lay naked in the path of the Mongol hordes whereas
a large portion of the nomad population was able to avoid attack.
The greater weight of the country shifted to the hills. Specifically, as
Rhea Talley Stewart described, the Mongols destroyed, "along with
the people, the irrigation systems they had created. No one was left to
replace them. Afghanistan is a dry land; the heavy winter snows must
leave enough moisture to last all year. Irrigation means life

[marwat]

One other thing the Mongols borrowed, inadvertently, from a
neighboring tribe was the name Tartar (or Tatar). Prior to the rise of
Genghis Khan, the Tartars had been one of the largest, fiercest tribes
north of China. Genghis slaughtered much of the tribe as soon as he
was able because they had killed his father; nevertheless, in later years
much of the world called the Mongols "Tartars," just as in ancient
times many people persisted in calling the Persians "Medes."

[marwat]

A third factor that contributed to Mongol dominance was that
they seem to have benefited from a rare confluence of military talent.
Genghis alone didn't lead the far-ranging tumens who effected his will,
but instead directed a coterie of excellent generals who all happened
to be present on the same side at the same time. Elsewhere in history
this phenomenon has been observed: a sudden rise in military skill in
a nation, almost always when a new power structure displaces an
older one and meritocracy abruptly takes precedence over seniority or
social status. Examples range from Alexander's upstart Macedonian
army (Parmenio, Hephaestion, Craterus, Perdiccas) to Napoleon's
revolutionary marshals (Massena, Davout, Ney, Murat) to the
German army of 1940-41 (Manstein, Guderian, Rommel, Model). In
American history the phenomenon is best seen in Robert E. Lee's
Army of Northern Virginia (Jackson, Longstreet, Stuart, A.P. Hill),
which carried Southern fortunes in the Civil War. Lee provided personal
and strategic leadership, and was quick to recognize and promote
military skill; but he benefited, too, from an unusual coincidence
of talent that would never have seen a history page had not a new
regime supplanted an older one, opening up fast avenues for native
talent.

[marwat]

The Khan may have been fortunate in his sons, but
in the case of Jebe, Subadei and others he benefited from a rare confluence
of skill. The former general is a curious case because as a member
of another tribe he originally fought against the Mongols, shooting
Genghis Khan's favorite horse, a white-muzzled chestnut. After
being captured he was brought before the Khan and admitted shooting
the horse. Genghis took a liking to the young man and gave him
the name Jebe ("Arrow"); he went on to become perhaps the best cavalry
leader in history. As the Mongols took on empires and civilizations
far larger than themselves, their strategy resembled the attack of
an octopus more than a shark. They launched multipronged offensives
with talented generals at the head of each column.

[marwat]

wrote:

When they stand before a fortress, they speak mildly with the
people and promise them a great deal so they will surrender.
And if they surrender the Tartars say to them, "Come out so
that, according to our custom, we may count you." And when
the townspeople come out, the Tartars ask who the craftsmen
are among them and put these aside; the others, however,
except those whom they wish to have as slaves, they kill with
their battle axes.

[marwat]

Battle of parwan (only battle mongol lost throughout their history

With Iran being ravaged by Mongol columns as far as the Caucasus,
the only place of refuge for Turks and Persians willing to fight
on was south of the Hindu Kush, and Genghis Khan had stretched a
full tumen between the Amu Darya and Khorasan to prevent such a
flow. After escaping from Gurganj, Jalal al-Din had been chased by
Mongol scouting partiesa. At one point, he and three hundred accompanying
cavalry had burst through a Mongol cordon of seven hundred
men. During this stage his brothers, including the crown prince of
Khwarezm, had headed in a different direction and been caught and
killed.
The Mongols lost Jalal al-Din's trail near Farah in western
Afghanistan. The prince made his way to Ghazni, where he assembled
refugee and garrison Turkish forces, including a strong contingent
under Temir Malek, one of the few Khwarezm generals who had
fought well against the Mongols. In addition, the call went out to the
Afghan hill tribes, who descended from the mountains in strength.
These descendants of the Scythians, Kushans, White Huns, Khalaj
Turks, and perhaps even Greeks, gathered, ready for war, making Jalal
al-Din's army sixty thousand strong. At this point Genghis Khan summoned
Jagatai and Ogadei to join him, and the main army reassembled
near Kunduz. Genghis planned to march through the passes to
Bamian while he directed another general, Shigi Kutaku, with three
tumens, to advance due south. This general, a Tartar, had been adopted
by Genghis when young and had been married to one of his daughters.
In the spring of 1221, Jalal al-Din's advancing army encountered
a forward patrol of Kutaku's at a village called Valian along the Ghori
River. The Mongol patrol was destroyed with only a few survivors.
Jalal al-Din moved to Parwan, some fifty miles north of today's Kabul,
where he awaited the inevitable battle. Kutaku, possibly without
orders, followed up the destruction of his probe with his full thirtythousand-
man Mongol army.
At Parwan the two sides met in a rock-strewn, sharply cut valley.
It was poor ground for cavalry, so the mobility of both sides was
negated. Jalal al-Din took the tactical initiative by ordering his right
wing of Turks under Temir Malek to dismount. An archer on foot can
put more strength and accuracy behind his shots. At the same time, the
Mongols's usual tricks of feigned retreat and ambush, and their standard
practice of encirclement, could not be employed. But they were
good enough to hold their own through the first day, even as the
native Afghans must have sensed their enemy's vulnerability and clambered
among the heights in order to shoot down at the invader, gravity
assisting their shots with both velocity and range.
The next morning, Jalal al-Din's army looked across the valley at a
Mongol army that seemed greatly reinforced. But Kutaku had only tried
a ruse, creating dummies of straw packed in clothes atop extra horses.
Jalal al-Din calmed the unease of his commanders and remained eager
to resume the fight. This time he dismounted his entire front line.
A Mongol attack on the Afghan left wing wilted under a barrage of
arrows, the men retreating in disorder. The Mongol general then ordered
an attack along the entire front. The dismounted defenders were easy
prey if the Mongol horsemen could close; but the attackers were hardpressed
to penetrate the wall of arrows and were forced by the terrain to
wade into it head-on. Gradually the famous Mongol discipline began to
come apart. They began to fall back and Jalal al-Din saw his chance. He
quickly brought up his army's horses and his men remounted. Then he
ordered a counterattack. The Mongols were surprised and began to
retreat headlong from the valley. Jalal al-Din's men overtook the fleeing
horde and Kutaku lost over half his army. One can picture the most casualties
in defiles where the panicked Mongols became jammed, falling victim
en masse to the pursuing Turkic and Afghan tribesmen.

[marwat]

Parwan was not just the only Mongol defeat in the war against
Khwarezm, it was the only defeat the Mongols would suffer in any
battle outside East Asia for another eighty years. But it may have been
a Pyrrhic victory for Afghanistan, because it was unclear whether the
Mongols had had any designs south of the Hindu Kush prior to Jalal
al-Din's assembling his army of resistance at Ghazni. Now Genghis
Khan himself was on the way through the passes with an army of seventy
thousand.

"It must be noted jalaluddin army was sixty thousand strong at the battle, however after the victory he left parwan with 20 thousand soldiers, which means that his army at the battle of parwan was mostly composed of hilly afghan tribals."

[marwat]

The Khan arrived at Bamian, the former Buddhist community in
the center of the Hindu Kush. One can hardly imagine his thoughts as
he gazed upon the huge Buddhas carved in the cliffs, the largest statues
he had ever seen. The town of Bamian held out, however, and
while Genghis was reconnoitering the walls his favorite grandson,
Ogadei's son Mo'etuken, was killed by an arrow shot. After a week's
siege, Bamian was destroyed so completely that not only every person
was killed but all the dogs and cats, and it was forbidden that anyone
should ever live there again. Today Bamian, like many places in
Afghanistan after the Mongol visit, is of primary interest to archaeologists.