John Barber re Kipling

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'Wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains'

John Barber

Rudyard Kipling was the first to chronicle the treacherous and often clandestine exploits of the subcontinent's so-called Great Game. A century later, the West should heed his advice and exercise 'extreme caution before contemplating an extended plunge into the Afghan morass'

It was published exactly 100 years ago, in the fall of 1901, but it is hard to imagine any work of fiction as bitterly relevant today -- in the second half of September, 2001 -- as Kim, Rudyard Kipling's masterpiece. Too easily dismissed as an artifact of patronizing "Orientalism," Kim is not only "the finest novel in the English language with an Indian theme," according to Bengali scholar Nirad Chaudhuri, "but also one of the greatest of English novels in spite of the theme." But that theme could not be more contemporary: Kim tells of the Great Game, the secret war an otherwise peace-loving British raj conducted against sinister forces of disorder located across the northern passes -- in Afghanistan, to be precise. Equally contemporary -- almost heartbreaking in the aftermath of last week's terror -- is the Lahore-born author's brilliant portrayal of the precious Indian civilization that needs protection: a gloriously diverse, ecumenical society supported by deep traditions of religious and social tolerance, yet tragically vulnerable. Suddenly, Kipling's striking effort to imagine a humane imperialism -- to honour his beloved India in the name of the raj -- does not seem so quaint. Kim has always been more influential as a political, rather than a literary, work. Anti-imperialists will not be surprised to learn that Allen Dulles, director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency during the height of the Cold War, revered Kim and died with a well-thumbed copy at his bedside. The Great Game that Kipling immortalized, pitting Russia against Britain in an extraordinary clandestine struggle that swept across Central Asia throughout the 19th century, flowed seamlessly into the secret war that Dulles led, with all its geopolitical fallacies intact. The buoyant, archaically noble spirit of Kim transformed easily into the beau ideal of the early CIA. But some time during the tumultuous second half of the century, that spirit went missing; the ideal became a mere matter of trade, and the means of protecting it crude and desultory. It took the most devastating terrorist attack in world history to remind Americans of something that Kipling, for all his heartfelt humanity, never neglected: the unending, necessary war against subversion. In that light, it would be interesting to consider how Colonel Creighton, Kim's enigmatic spymaster, might have reacted last week to the extraordinary broadcast by Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as he pleaded for help from Arabic- or Farsi-speaking Americans. The multilingual, ethnologically enlightened magus of the Northwest Frontier would surely have been astonished to learn that one of the great champions of the modern game, a leading U.S. intelligence agency, had lost such basic skills. "I don't think this is a mistake the British would have made," said Karl Meyer, an Afghanistan expert and the author, with Shareen Blair Brysac, of Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, the latest and most thorough volume in the rich trove of scholarship that documents the struggle. As Tournament of Shadows demonstrates, the Great Game of Kipling's day was a more intimate struggle, involving dozens of minority peoples in key roles alongside and between the imperial combatants -- from the brilliant Indian pundits the British secret service recruited to be its eyes and ears in Central Asia to the mysterious Mongolian Buryats who served the czar in the name of Tibetan Buddhism. Kipling's winning orphan hero epitomizes this strangely hybridized species of idealistic spy. Kim is a guttersnipe from Lahore, born white but living entirely as an Indian, unaware of his origins. He embarks on a colourful, Huck Finnish career of remarkable adventure that ultimately leads him to a painfully irresolvable choice between two lives: one of religious quietude in the service of a Tibetan lama he adores; another as a secret agent for the raj, foiling Russian plots with the aid of grizzled Afghan horse dealer Mahbub Ali and the unforgettable Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, alias R17, "the Babu." Virtually all the main characters in Kim are based on real people; Kipling's Babu celebrates the life of Sarat Chandra Das, the most famous of the pundit agents. Often disguised as holy men and mendicants, trudging over the high passes with sophisticated survey equipment hidden within their prayer wheels, they were among the more daring explorers of their day. Das, an especially brazen and inventive spy, earned a medal from the Royal Geographic Society for his pioneering exploration of Tibet in the 1880s, although Lhasa authorities subsequently drowned or dismembered several Tibetans who had aided him. Modern readers may question the real nature of the solidarity underlying indigenous co-operation in the Great Game, and Kipling, to his credit, leaves the matter open: The novel ends with Kim at maturity facing an acute crisis of identity. Whichever fate he chooses, however, the author makes it clear that his hero will remain -- as Joseph Conrad wrote about Lord Jim, an outcast hero of the imperial era, navigating the same shifting moral frontiers -- "one of us." "The original players of the Great Game, both the Russians and the British, had a very acute sense of the promise of using native speakers and indigenous peoples as their espionage allies, and recruiting them onto their side," Meyer explained. "Unfortunately, for various reasons, the CIA has not been effective in doing that." The failure of a reluctant American imperium to engage the sympathies of both its allies and its enemies in Asia is notorious. Even today, with their lack of reliable human intelligence in Central Asia so glaringly exposed, U.S. leaders refer to the task with distaste. It's "dirty business," according to George Bush Sr., a CIA director before he was a president, full of "people that are willing to betray their friends, people that want money or other things." Unlike the great powers of an earlier era, the United States observes a very strict division between the sanctified "us" and demonized "them." Part of that distaste, Meyer said, grows out of bad experiences with various Kim-like escapades in the early days of the Cold War. One such operation involved training and arming the Khampa people of eastern Tibet to fight the Chinese. It was, according to an official history of the CIA, "one of the most romantic programs of covert action ever undertaken by the agency." It was also unmitigated disaster. The Chinese methodically tracked down and killed three in every four of the Colorado-trained Khampa guerrillas, Meyer said. In the end, the CIA succeeded only in creating false hope for a lost cause, and alienating its Tibetan allies in the process. "There was a lot of hesitancy after that. The people in the agency understandably had really conflicted consciences about the Tibetan operation. Also, by temper, Americans are not good at languages, not good at recruiting non-Western peoples to their side." History repeated itself barely two decades later, when the United States poured arms into Afghanistan to support the mujahadeen in their struggle against the Soviet invaders. "During the Cold War, we were perfectly willing to use Afghan lives as pawns against the Russians," said Meyer, who wrote editorials on Afghanistan for The New York Times throughout the war, "but the moment the Russians pulled out, we dropped the Afghans completely." Once again, the United States left behind a widespread sense of resentment among people who, having beaten the Soviets, remained to suffer years of desperate poverty and civil strife in the aftermath. "All the Americans who were loudest in clamouring for aid to the Afghan mujahadeen during the war fell remarkably silent in the hour of need," Meyer said. "This feeling of betrayal has given Taliban much of its appeal. I don't think the British, who had a greater insight into the importance of winning over the hearts and minds of people of other cultures, would have made that mistake." That mistake was compounded by an earlier decision to place the distribution of all U.S. materiel in the hands of the intelligence branch of the Pakistani army, which used the opportunity to bolster the hard-line Islamic factions within Afghanistan at the expense of moderate elements. As far as Meyer is concerned, Afghanistan's emergence as a training ground for international terror was caused in large part by U.S. detachment, inadvertence and carelessness about consequences. Somewhere in the transformation of the Great Game into the Cold War, the wisdom of Kim's Creighton seems to have been lost. The Colonel makes his own philosophy of engaged espionage clear when he introduces Kim to the prospect of life as a "chain-man" on the Indian Survey -- a spy, in other words. Never, he advises Kim in fluent Urdu, "condemn the black man. I have known boys newly entered into the service of the Government who feigned not to understand the talk or the customs of black men. Their pay was cut for ignorance. There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this." He repeated the lesson several times over the course of a long train ride. " 'We all be on one lead-rope, then,' said Kim at last, 'the Colonel, Mahbub Ali and I -- when I become a chain-man." Kipling's vision of an inclusive, ecumenical imperialism -- all on one lead-rope -- slowly died under the growing weight of British oppression, including such horrors as the Massacre of Amritsar in 1919. By the time Britain divided India and fled in 1947, it was desperate to escape the close ties that had developed over the previous centuries. Today, it remains the greatest, and resolutely least nostalgic, of the former imperial powers. But the Great Game the British and Russians once played with such conviction still offers lessons -- as much in the spectacular blunders both sides committed as any successes they had. The most spectacular -- and most pertinent today -- of those blunders were the first and second Afghan wars. The British launched the first war with a bull-headed invasion based on a jumped-up pretext, sending more than 10,000 troops to occupy Kabul and shipping the legitimate emir of Afghanistan into exile. But the Afghans quickly tired of their unwanted guests. Months later, the lone British survivor of the expedition, out of tens of thousands of troopers and camp followers, staggered out the Jadalak Pass to safety. After routing the British army in Kabul, Afghans armed with long-range jezail muskets had annihilated the remnant during its long retreat through the passes. "No failure so totally overwhelming as this is recorded in the pages of history," Sir William Kaye wrote in his History of the War in Afghanistan, published soon after the disastrous retreat. "No lesson so grand and impressive is to be found in all the annals of the world." Nonetheless, the British violated that very impressive lesson -- never invade Afghanistan -- less than 30 years later, once again marching to Kabul with little reason other than their disapproval of growing Russian influence in the latest emir's court. The result was less disastrous for the British, but no less bloody for all concerned. Kipling, its bard, glared unblinking at the war's horror in The Young British Soldier: When you're wounded and left On Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out To cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle And blow out your brains, An' go to your Gawd Like a soldier. The backlash in the home country was led by William Gladstone, who roared that "the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own." Repelled by the experience of the Afghan and Zulu wars, the British elected Gladstone's Liberal Party enthusiastically in 1880, replacing the adventuring government of Benjamin Disraeli. Entering its climax as a clandestine struggle, the Great Game of the British Raj became less casually brutal, seeking as much for a moral purpose as for new territory. It was left to the Soviets, a century after the British extracted themselves from their second incursion, once again to ignore the "grand and impressive lesson" -- with predictable results. "The experience of history," Meyer said, "is that one should proceed with extreme caution before contemplating an extended plunge into the Afghan morass." That experience shows itself clearly in Kim;the enemies of the raj remain subliminal throughout the narrative, appearing only as anonymous assassins until a restrained climax in which Kim and the Babu foil two comically maladroit European intruders -- one Russian, one French -- in the High Himalayas. This showed a mellowing of Kipling, who once celebrated the imperial swagger of Lord Roberts of Kandahar -- "Our Bobs," in his affectionate verse, and "the most bloodthirsty little beast I know," according to the general's own chief of staff. The Great Game went on, blundering to an inconclusive end. In 1906, the dashing Francis Younghusband rushed to Lhasa on another slim pretext. He used two Maxim machine guns nicknamed Bubble and Squeak to slaughter about 1,000 Tibetans, armed with matchlock muskets, who stood in his way. In the 1920s, the Red Army brought the Russian chapter to a close by chasing the last, decadent emir of Bokhara out of his desert citadel, the potentate dropping off his favourite slave boys at regular intervals throughout his flight in the confident expectation that his pursuers would be detained as they succumbed to the sexual pleasures thus offered. Little of this intrudes into the glorious, burnished world of Kim, which in the end is more striking for its appreciation of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy than its geopolitical attitudes. That is what makes this spy story that expands gloriously into a universal prayer for tolerance and peace so modern. For Westerners besieged in a world that seems implacably, dumbfoundingly hostile, for any reader searching for an affirming account of 21st-century values in the face of world crisis, Kim is it: My brother kneels (so saith Kabir) To stone and brass in heathen wise, But in my brother's voice I hear My own unanswered agonies. His God is as his Fates assign -- His prayer is all the world's -- and mine.

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