Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires?

If you have been paying any attention to current events in the last two decades, Afghanistan has been a topic of almost daily conversation in the 24/7 news cycle. With the United States withdrawal in 2021, the topic turned once again to Afghanistan’s uncanny ability to shrug off and resist invasions by larger and immensely more powerful nations from around the world. The reputation stems from powers and individuals like Alexander the Great, the Persians, the Parthians, the British, the Soviets, and now the United States of America, suffering episodes of misadventure of empire involving the Afghans. Or have they? This article will explore the narrative, accurate or not, that Afghanistan is the “Graveyard of Empires” and is either too costly to conquer, or the subduing of the territory results in weakening and a devastating resource drain of the invading state. To be clear, this will not be an extensive exploration of Afghan history, as we are covering thousands of years, but will be a summation of the different periods and invading state’s relation to Afghanistan.

You may wonder, why are these empires invading an area such as Afghanistan? Through most of Afghanistan’s history the answer is the Khyber Pass. The Khyber Pass allowed travel along the famous silk road and connects the Middle East to India through what is now modern day Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was established as the safest and easiest way to travel over land and has been used for thousands of years. Anyone who controls this pass also controls the movement and trade through it, making it an immensely valuable piece of territory. This all began to change during the 15th and 16th centuries when sea lanes between Europe and India started to dominate the primary method of trade and travel.

First, we must start with the chronologically oldest conqueror to head into Afghanistan, Alexander the Great. Alexander is often included on the list, just like we did, when Afghanistan is called the “Graveyard of Empires,” but Alexander actually had remarkable success in subduing the area, mostly as it was just not that populated. Controlled by the Achaemenid Persians and called Bactria at the time, Alexander swept into the region and was able to subdue it, albeit with some of the hardest fighting of his reign, by c. 327 BCE. Alexander even married a Bactrian princess named Roxana and had a legitimate child (Alexander IV) with her, establishing a Hellenistic tie to the region that lasted beyond Alexander and into one of his successor kingdoms, the Seleucid Empire.

From here we have a series of Empires controlling the region successfully, the Seleucids control it until they lose it to the Maurya Empire (bringing Buddhism and Hinduism to the area), then the Parthians take it in the second century BCE, the Sassanids from the Parthians, and the Sassanids losing it in the 4th century but then reconquering it in the 6th. All this to show that the while these empires are controlling the territory, its gaining a reputation as a battleground, shown to be a valued piece of territory worth fighting over and coveted by rival states.

The 7th century Islamic conquest of Afghanistan proved to be a bit trickier than Alexander’s adventure, the Arab Islamic forces kept to the urban areas and didn’t fully venture to conquer the whole of the country, due to troublesome mountain tribes, leaving the eastern half independent for 200 years. Cities previously conquered and converted would rise in revolt and return to the old faith, only to be subdued again. One example is the attempted conquest of Kandahar, sending in a force of 20,000 men, returning in defeat with 5,000. This would last until the Ghaznavid dynasty, with their capital being in Ghazni, united the area with parts of Iran, Pakistan, India, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

Now we come to the Mongols, in 1221 CE the Mongols invade Afghanistan, facing steep resistance, especially in the Bamiyan valley, even suffering the ignominy of the grandson of Genghis Khan being killed in the campaign. The Mongols in response, unleashed total war upon the inhabitants, killing large percentages of the population and devastating the infrastructure. We will also include Tamerlane here too - Timur or Tamerlane, considered himself a successor the Mongols and caused equal devastation in Afghanistan from 1383 to 1385, with the Timur empire falling by the 16th century. The next power to control Afghanistan, the Mughal Empire, actually was founded in Kabul and went on to conquer from Afghanistan to Southern India until the 19th century, being replaced by the Sikh Empire, under a very well-known figure to history, Dost Muhammed, in 1837.

Dost Muhammed, unfortunately for him, was caught between the superpowers of the time, the Russian and British Empires. In the 19th century, Afghanistan became the playground (along with other Asian territories and states) for the “Great Game.” The Great Game is a euphemism for what only can be described as a cold war between Russia and Britain. Britain feared that a Russian invasion of British India could come through the famous Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. While at one point planning an invasion of India, the Russians never really gave it serious consideration, but that did not stop the British from invading Afghanistan three separate times through the 19th and early 20th century. The first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842) was specifically aimed at removing Dost Muhammed and curbing Russian influence in Afghanistan, while reducing border raids into India from the territory. The British lost the First Anglo-Afghan war and were subsequently expelled after numerous military disasters and suffering around 40,000 KIA. The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) was launched for similar reasons but the British, instead of aiming to conquer like their first foray, mainly aimed at forcing a friendly buffer state between the Russian Empire and British India. The British in this Anglo-Afghan War: Part Deux were successful and resulted in a British victory. Finally, a third invasion was launched in 1919, to prevent the Afghans, while nominally independent, from asserting true foreign and domestic policy independence from British influence, resulting in a British tactical defeat.

Afghanistan transformed into a fully-fledged kingdom in 1926 and existed in this state until a 1973 coup d’état established a republic, which then was replaced in 1978 by a communist state, known as the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). Facing a fierce insurgency known as the Mujahedeen, the DRA requested Soviet forces to support them, leading to a 10-year war. The Soviets infamously got bogged down in the area fighting an insurgency that was near impossible to fully stamp out due to the mountainous terrain and military support to the Mujahedeen from the American CIA and Pakistan. As one of the many proxy wars during the 20th century cold war between the Soviets and the USA, Afghanistan suffered greatly, experiencing up to 2 million of its civilian population killed, with the Soviets suffering around 26,000 killed. The Soviets were eventually forced to withdraw fully in 1989, with the DRA falling in 1992.

The Taliban, a hardline fundamentalist Islamic group, took power in 1994, using the chaos of the power vacuum created by the collapse of the DRA. In 2001, following the September 11th attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. in the USA, the United States (along with NATO allies) invaded Afghanistan, accusing the Taliban of giving resources and safety to Al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks. The Taliban were quickly defeated by US forces and shifted to an insurgency for the next twenty years, eventually regaining power in 2021 following the US withdrawal. With new information still coming to light on the history and conduct of the US War in Afghanistan, we will avoid a full summation but the US suffered a total of 2,459 military members killed in action and the Taliban are estimated to have lost nearly 53,000.

Ok, all of this was to give you the ability to understand the highlights of Afghan history and to make your own assessment on Afghanistan’s place in numerous Imperial stories. The criticism of the nickname “Graveyard of Empires” can be summed up as this: While Afghanistan has a history of seeing numerous imperial invasions throughout the millennia and centuries, it has never been fully responsible for the downfall of an empire and mostly has been successfully conquered throughout its history. While it is too soon to understand its place in the future of US foreign policy, we can point out that the British Empire did not “fall” until post World War II, the Soviet Union was in the midst of a slow collapse, even with victory or defeat in Afghanistan, and empires prior to the 20th century, mostly were able to subjugate and control, albeit sometimes with extreme difficulty and resource drain, Afghanistan for the majority of the region’s history. We will let you decide if it is truly the Graveyard of Empires, but I think we can all agree that any nation invading Afghanistan will have the odds stacked against them and should be prepared for a long and costly war, regardless of defeat or victory.