The South Pole

“(T)he kingdom of Kabul, without Kandahar, was like a head without a nose, or a fort without any gate.” –Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, 1900

They love it here. I went to the roof the other day to get some pictures, and I met one of the Afghans there. When I told him I just wanted a few shots of Kandahar, he said “Our city is very beautiful!” I told him I thought so too. Another Afghan I know, in an expression of patriotism as off-centered as it is heartfelt, has “Our city is our home” set as his greeting on Microsoft Messenger.

There is a mystique to Kandahar that I have yet to identify. Like Fallujah, Buenos Aires, and Zanzibar, There is a mysterious something to this place dancing just beyond the edge of awareness. it doesn’t seem to be in the architecture; what isn’t made of mud brick is made of concrete, and none of it beautifully. It might have something to do with these rocky hills, these small mountains that dot the place. I am sure it is not because of the Taliban.

It might be the geography. To the north of Kandahar are mountains, miles of them. Somewhere up there is Kabul, worldly capital of Afghanistan, and a city perfectly defended by a ring of high mountains. Kandahar is not in the mountains, it is in a flat plain, but the map on my wall tells me that Kandahar lies at the end of the long, thin southern approach to Kabul. It is not far from here that the mountains start, and Kandahar guards the entrance to the mountains from the south.

As the mountains are to the north, just to the south we have the Registan. On an exceptionally clear day, the red sands of this desert can be seen from Kandahar, rising up from the south bank of the Dari river.

The Registan, a right proper desert. Click for full view.

People describe Afghanistan as being a desert, and I can believe that Kandahar sees less than the requisite 10 inches of rainfall a year. But the runoff from snowmelt and rainfall up north, and the ground water, are substantial. The combination of ample sun and available water allows Kandahar to grow some incredibly good fruit. If it is a desert, it is only so on a technicality.

The Registan is different. Its northern boundary is the Dari river, and the difference in soil color on the two sides of this river are striking. the Registan sees no rain and supports virtually no wildlife. The soft sand dunes are 50 to 100 feet deep in places. This place is a proper desert. If Kandahar sees little rain, it is because it has the Registan for a neighbor.

So, Kandahar is situated between high mountains and hard desert– right at the boundary. The implications of that kind of thing are already discussed elsewhere; http://alamanach.com/2009/03/28/for-b/.

This city has produced some of Afghanistan’s most prominent leaders. Ahmad Shah Durrani, also known as Ahmad Shah Baba, threw off Persian rule and established modern Afghanistan with its capital in Kandahar in 1747. Amir Abdur Rahman, from Kandahar, outmanuevered the Russians and the English to re-establish Afghan control over Afghanistan at the close of the 19th century. Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, and Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s current president, came from Kandahar as well.

Despite Kandahar’s propensity for giving Afghanistan heads of state, it is not a worldly city, or a center of learning, or in any other way a place from which we would expect greatness. It is a rural town, with provincial sensibilities and an unlettered population. Al-Qaeda tended to regard their Taliban hosts as a bunch of hicks, and Kandahar does nothing to dispel that notion. Nine years into the 21st century, globalization still has yet to reach Kandahar. This is a mideval city, except with cars and guns.

There are two other things to know about Kandahar. One is that it is arguably the most dangerous part of Afghanistan right now. The Taliban like to hit the city with big, spectacular attacks from time to time. Last summer they struck Sarposa prison, resulting in the biggest prison break in history and flooding the streets with hundreds of escaped criminals. Last fall they exploded a tanker truck at a government compound that left a crater 15 feet deep and shattered windows a mile away. This spring they hit the government again, with a truck bomb and five suicide bombers all at once. There are numerous smaller incidents ocurring on a daily basis.

The second thing to know is that Kandahar is key to this particular counterinsurgency. A counterinsurgency is a complex, integrated set of activities that are more political than military. A counterinsurgency seeks to establish the legitimacy of the government while destroying the legitimacy of the insurgents, and this is done by identifying and addressing grievances.

A bona fide government holds a monopoly on the legitimate uses of violence in a society. We can see that the government of Afghanistan holds no such monopoly; when Sarposa Prison got hit and the city flooded with criminals, there was no increased police presence on the street the next day, no martial law, no enforced curfew until the situation was under control. The Taliban unleashed chaos, and nothing was done to stop it. Manifestly, the government does not hold Kandahar.

I mentioned Amir Abdur Rahman. He took Kabul before he took Kandahar, and he knew that taking Kandahar would be an expensive, risky venture. But he had to do it in order to consolidate his power. Once he held both Kabul and Kandahar, the rest of the country fell into line. As long as he held one and not the other, he was little more than a local warlord. His Afghanistan had two poles: Kabul and Kandahar. Everything else followed those two.

Amir Rahman ruled over a hundred years ago, are those conditions still applicable today? There is some reason to think that they are. We look south again, to the Registan desert. A hundred miles south of Kandahar, in the middle of that hostile desert, is a well that was dug by hand centuries ago. It is some 394 feet deep. Initial reports were that it was 700 years old, though a more careful search of history revealed that it was closer to 300 years.

Everything old around here seems to be colloquially identified as being “700 years old.” Ruins of an old army outpost southeast of Kandahar, where Afghan cavalry used to rest in mudbrick towers, has been described as 700 years old.

Rabat watchtower in Takhtapul District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Note Registan in the distance. Click for full view.

What happened 700 years ago that everyone dates Afghan antiquity from it? Little or nothing. But some 800 years ago, central Asia saw the most climactic event in its history; the rise of Ghengis Khan. Ghengis was given an exceptionally rude reception when he first entered Afghanistan, and decimation was the result. The Mongols swept across the region, destroying everything in their path. Civilization was wiped clean, and had to begin again. That is the kind of event from which people will date things.

Civilization struggled in Afghanistan during the intervening centuries, at times advancing, at times sliding back, but never advancing for long. The reign of Amir Abdur Rahman was one of Afghanistan’s cultural high-water marks, when civilization managed to lift its head high enough to afford a look back. In the days of Amir Rahman, the Mongol invasion was 700 years old. “Old,” in Rahman’s day, would have been defined by a yardstick of 700 years. The Afghans today still possess this exact mindset. They have not updated their yardstick in over a century. Despite all of Afghanistan’s upheavals, even in the last 30 years, the people are still living in the era of Amir Abdur Rahman.

If Kandahar was one of Afghanistan’s poles in 1900, and if the country has not undergone a fundamental identity change to this day, then Kandahar may be a pole still. We have Kabul. If we would just take Kandahar then the rest may fall into line for us, as it did for Abdur Rahman.

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All photos are in the public domain.