Afghan insights: "The Man Who Would Be King"
By STEVE SAILER
UPI National Correspondent

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LOS ANGELES, Sep. 26 (UPI) -- No great adventure movie, not even "Lawrence
of Arabia," offers more insights into the upcoming war in Afghanistan than
John Huston's 1975 film "The Man Who Would Be King." Starring Sean Connery
and Michael Caine, the film is based on an 1888 short story by Rudyard
Kipling that is set in Afghanistan.

In the last two weeks, a couple of contradictory assertions about
Afghanistan have become commonplace in the press.

The first is that outsiders inevitably face horrifying defeat in
Afghanistan.

The second is that the U.S. must not only kill Osama bin Laden and batter
the Taliban regime, but should then take up the Imperial Burden in
Afghanistan. The U.S., they say, should conquer and pacify the entire
Texas-sized country, build a unified nation out of its warring ethnic groups,
reconstruct its economy, liberate its women, calm its furious holy men, and
make it a middle class democracy.

"The Man Who Would Be King" reminds us that neither despair nor utopianism
is a realistic attitude for anyone contemplating a military incursion into
that harsh land.

It may seem strange to look to a Victorian costume drama for perspectives on
a 21st Century war, but few movies have benefited more from the energetic
inspiration of a young genius and the skeptical wisdom of an old artist who'd
been everywhere and done everything.

Rudyard Kipling, the youngest man to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (at
age 41 in 1907), was only 22 when he wrote "The Man Who Would Be King." Yet,
he'd already been shot at by a Pathan tribesman in the famous Khyber Pass
that links Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Although out of fashion for decades, the Bombay-born Kipling is now the
literary immortal of the hour as America contemplates the same question that
so long plagued the British Empire: What to do about Afghanistan?

Kipling was long despised for his imperialism. Yet, at a time when many,
including more than a few anti-Taliban Afghans, want the U.S. to occupy and
take responsibility for Afghanistan, Kipling's sharp eye for the rewards and
dangers of imperialism is suddenly relevant once again.

In the words of critic John Derbyshire, Kipling "was an imperialist utterly
without illusions about what being an imperialist actually means. Which, in
some ways, means that he was not really an imperialist at all."

Yet, it took 69-year-old John Huston to richly flesh out Kipling's tall
tale. Huston gave the story a classic arc. From a slow beginning, it ascends
to a peak of cynical yet rousing adventure comedy, then descends into
inexorable tragedy.

Further, Huston added an astute post-Vietnam moral. While Joseph Conrad's
"Heart of Darkness" (the inspiration for "Apocalypse Now") is the allegory of
a good man corrupted by absolute power over natives, Huston's movie is about
a rascal ennobled - yet ultimately doomed - by his growing sense of kingly
responsibility for the welfare of the natives that he had come to plunder

To film Kipling's story was the obsession of the erratic second half of
Huston's long Hollywood career. Having previously written and directed such
Humphrey Bogart classics as "The Maltese Falcon," "The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre," and "The African Queen," Huston cast Bogey and Clark Gable as
Kipling's anti-heroes, Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot.

These charismatic rogues - former British Army sergeants turned gunrunners
and conmen - intend to make themselves "Kings of Kafiristan." They plan to
become the first Europeans since Alexander the Great to penetrate this
isolated region in Northeastern Afghanistan that was the last refuge of
Afghanistan's primordial pagan culture. Then, they'll "loot it six ways from
Sunday."

But Bogart died in 1957 and Gable in 1960. Over the years, Huston had three
screenwriters pen adaptations. Finally, Huston and his long-time secretary
Gladys Hill collaborated on a brilliant fourth version. In Huston's proud but
accurate words, "We did a lot of invention, and it turned out to be good
invention, supportive of the tone, feeling and spirit underlying the original
short story… I like this script as well as any I ever wrote."

In the early 1970's, Paul Newman and Robert Redford were on-board. Then,
Newman, always one of Hollywood's least selfish stars, told Huston his script
deserved British actors. He exclaimed, "John, get Connery and Caine!"

Sean Connery and Michael Caine went on to make what might be a more
delightful buddy movie than even Newman and Redford's "Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid." Connery's performance as the Scotsman Daniel is widely
considered the greatest of his majestic career. And Caine's turn as the
clever Cockney Peachey might be better.

Early in the movie, Connery's Daniel tells an incredulous Rudyard Kipling
(played by Christopher Plummer), "We have been all over India …and we have
decided that India isn't big enough for such as us."

Caine's Peachey adds, "We are not little men, and there is nothing that we
are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore,
we are going away to be Kings."

The two reasons they expected success in their audacious project are
directly relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can win in Afghanistan.

It is widely remarked these days that no external power has ever permanently
dominated Afghanistan. True, but what's forgotten is that no internal power
has either, suggesting that the life expectancy of the five-year-old Taliban
regime might be limited.

Why?

The severity of the Afghan terrain works against both conquest and unified
resistance. As Kipling warns the buccaneers, "It's one mass of mountains and
peaks and glaciers."

Connery's Daniel responds, "The more tribes, the more they'll fight, and the
better for us." The more broken the ground, the more broken the society, and
thus the harder it is to form a cohesive army to resist an invader.

Kafiristan, located in the Hindu Kush mountains northeast of Afghanistan's
capital of Kabul, remains even today a scale model of Afghanistan's overall
fractiousness. In this region that only covers 2 percent of the entire
country, there are currently fifteen ethnic groups speaking five different
languages.

Following his 1896 jihad, Amir Abdur Rahman, Khan of Kabul, changed the name
Kafiristan ("land of infidels") to Nuristan ("land of light"). He offered the
conquered Kafir pagans the choice of being put to the sword or to the knife.
Most of the men chose the latter and were circumcised into Islam, although in
that era before anesthetics and antibiotics, the pain couldn't have been all
that much less.

Author Jonny Bealby spent four weeks retracing the fictional footprints of
Daniel and Peachey in 1997, walking 250 miles across Kafiristan-Nuristan.
(Even today, there are no roads.) "On the four week journey, I'd heard of
twelve murders and enough tales of thieving and brigandage to fill a small
book," Bealby recounted. "When I asked Ismael, our Nuristani translator, why
this should be, he simply shrugged, 'It is our culture,' he said." (Nuristan,
by the way, was the first place in Afghanistan to rebel against the Soviets.)

Bealby concluded, "If [Daniel and Peachey] were to tumble from the skies
once again, more than a hundred years later, the task confronting them would
be exactly the same. Kafiristan is now Nuristan; the infidels have been
enlightened. But beyond religion, little of their ways seem to have changed."

Today, Afghanistan as a whole remains subdivided into hostile ethnic groups.
The Taliban rulers, who control most but not all of the country, are drawn
overwhelmingly from the Pashtun (know as the "Pathan" in Kipling's day), but
they only make up three-eighth of the population and are concentrated south
of the Hindu Kush. They may be the most war-like of the Afghans, but the
reason they are experienced at fighting is because they so often try to kill
each other.

A 22-year-old Winston Churchill fought them in an 1897 "butcher and bolt"
punitive expedition (depicted in the 1972 film "Young Winston"). Churchill
observed, "The Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. …
The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest."

A second insight into the difficulties faced by the Taliban at waging modern
war - beyond their small and rusty arsenal - is implicit in Daniel's
explanation to Kipling of their strategy for becoming Kings of Kafiristan.
"In any place where they fight, a man who knows how to drill men can always
be a King," Connery's character expounds. "We shall go to those parts and say
to any King we find - 'D'you want to vanquish your foes?' and we will show
him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we
will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a Dynasty."

Daniel's confidence in the might of properly drilled men goes to the heart
of the difference between irregular and regular armies. For tens of thousands
of years, men have been waging irregular war - shoot-from-behind-a-rock style
raiding. If you assume, like many Afghans, that war sputters on forever, then
sniping is the natural fighting method for clans intent on self-preservation,
whose fighters can always slip away from a stronger foe into wild country.

But nation-states long ago developed a more formidable style intended to win
wars. The ancient Greeks discovered that trained, disciplined armies could
maneuver to win decisive battles. Alexander the Great used this Greek
breakthrough to conquer Afghanistan, among much else. (Kipling asserted that
Alexander then married a Kafir princess named Roxanne and had a son.)

The famed military historian John Keegan wrote in "A History of Warfare,"
"It is a general rule that primitives lose to regulars over the long run;
harassment is an effective means of waging a defensive war, but wars are
ultimately won by offensives…"

Indeed, when Daniel and Peachey arrive at Er-Heb, their first Kafir village,
headman Ootah, familiar only with irregular war, offers them two goats for
each of his Bashkai neighbors that they will kill for him. Peachey, the
embodiment of regular soldiering, replies suavely, "A handsome offer, but
rather than knocking them over one at a time, we'll do the whole thing in one
fell swoop: storm Bashkai and give you a proper victory."

The next morning drill instructor Daniel starts teaching the men of Er-Heb
to march in ordered ranks like British soldiers. "When we're done with you,"
he roars at the recruits, "You'll be able to stand up and slaughter your
enemies like civilized men!"

Daniel explains to his uncomprehending boot privates, "Good soldiers don't
think. They just obey. Do you think that if a man thought twice, he'd give
his life for Queen and country? Not bloody likely!" Noticing an Er-Heb man
with an extremely small head, Daniel remarks, "Him there with the five and a
half hat size has the makings of a bloody hero."

Indeed, their drilled army, stiffened by twenty smuggled rifles, quickly
goes from victory to victory. And their pinheaded rifleman distinguishes
himself for loyalty. By treating newly conquered villages well, Daniel and
Peachey recruit their men into the ever-growing army.

In general, regular armies have been able to take from irregular fighters
the kind of land that's most worth taking: flat, fertile farmland.

Yet, what's a regular army to do in a place like Afghanistan that's
eminently not worth conquering? In 1842, the British lost all but one of
16,000 trying to retreat from the Afghan capital of Kabul. This showed once
again that irregulars could destroy a regular army in severe enough terrain.

By 1878, however, the Afghan ruler was again flirting with the expanding
Russian Empire. Fearing the Czar's army would soon be pouring through the
Khyber Pass and into the lightly defended plains of colonial India, the
British set out to take control of Afghanistan's foreign policy.

In his conquest of Kabul and Kandahar, Sir Frederick Roberts solved the
problem of how to beat Afghans in their own mountains. "General Bobs" used
mountain men as his shock troops. Passes were taken by Scottish Highlanders
(in which Daniel and Peachey fictitiously served) and Nepalese Gurkhas (like
Daniel and Peachey's loyal translator Billy Fish, who is played by the
tremendous Indian actor Saeed Jaffrey).

Today, the U.S. has about 30,000 elite Special Forces troops trained in both
regular and irregular fighting. America's British allies have superb S.A.S.
commandos, as well as 3,400 Gurkha mercenaries.

Yet, was General Bobs' campaign simply another long-term failure? It depends
on whether you consider 40 years of success a failure.

The British eventually placed Abdur Rahman on the throne in Kabul. Within
Afghanistan's now carefully defined borders, they let him have his way - such
as waging jihad against the poor Kafirs - so long as he delegated the conduct
of Afghanistan's external relations to London. In the "Great Game" (the
subject of Kipling's masterpiece "Kim"), Britain's spies and diplomats used
bribes and threats to keep the Amir from being bought off by the Russians.

This policy worked well enough for four decades. Finally, exhausted by WWI,
Britain lost control in 1919, a date now treated by Afghanistan as the year
of its independence. Afghanistan began to slowly tip toward the Soviet Union,
which ultimately lead to the Soviet invasion of 1979, a full century after
General Bobs' invasion.

Yet, if a war in Afghanistan does prove winnable, which it should, ought the
U.S. to undertake a long-term benevolent occupation to attempt to turn that
desolate land into a peaceful "normal country?" Huston's movie offers a
skeptical perspective.

Initially, the two pirates' plan succeeds wildly. The pagans believe Daniel
is a god, the son of Alexander. The high priests place the great Greek's
crown upon his head and offer him a treasure room full of rubies and gold.
All Daniel and Peachey need to do to become the two richest men on Earth is
to fill their packs, wait four months for the snows in the Hindu Kush to
melt, and then walk out.

While awaiting Spring, Daniel amuses himself by playing at being king. To
the applause of his new subjects, he enforces peace, dispenses justice at
traditional durbars, sets up granaries to insure against famine, and builds
bridges to tie the country together.

When the passes finally open, Peachey learns to his horror that Daniel now
feels too responsible for his people to grab the loot and run. The grandiose
nation-building urge that in the 1990's helped inspire American interventions
in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia has infected him. "A nation I shall make of it,
with an anthem and a flag," King Daniel thunders.

Worse, Daniel has decided to take a Queen. He has picked out a local beauty
called Roxanne - the same name as Alexander's wife. The priests demur. Billy
Fish tries to explain to the king why his marriage would be an affront to
Kafir beliefs. Daniel, blinded by his victories - "Have I not put the shadow
of my hand over this country?" - fails to grasp that what seems a quibble to
him is of dread import to the Kafirs.

Catastrophe ensues.

Science fiction novelist Orson Scott Card ("Ender's Game") summed up "The
Man Who Would Be King:" "This is the classic tragedy that Aristotle spoke of
- so powerful that some of us can only stand to see the ending once."

Those who advocate that we stay in Afghanistan long Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban are dealt with should ponder Kipling and Huston's parable.

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Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
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