Steven Pressfield: The Afgan Campaign

Mountain fortresses are assaulted by stages. A base camp is first established on the plain. Now come the provisions. Rations and fodder in hundreds of tons are rafted in by river or trucked overland via caravan or mule train. Now the first forward camp is raised in the foothills. Up come the convoys of supplies and materiel. The foe in this case has retired to four monumental strongholds. Imagine Mount Olympus. That’s what they’re like, mountain systems covering scores of square miles, with hundreds of approaches.

First to be invested, before winter has ended, is that fastness called by the troops the Sogdian Rock. The warlord Oxyartes is up there with eleven thousand troops and all their goods. The defenders are sitting on year-round springs, with enough provisions to hold out for years. When Alexander’s emissaries call for the Afghan’s surrender, Oxyartes taunts them, asking if our men have wings, for by no other means will we scale this stronghold.

Up trails and switchbacks come our supplies, on trains fifteen miles long, to the higher camps. For us scuffs, all hopes hang on negotiations. Oxyartes’ envoys shuttle in supposed secrecy in and out of camp. We know them all. We pave a highway for them. “What is wanting,” says Stephanos, “is for Alexander to pick one horse.”

One warlord to hand Afghanistan over to.

One chieftain to rule all others.

Supplies are in place by late winter. The summit is the size of a small county. Bare piney slopes approach, of loose scree and shingle, too steep even for mules. An assault is possible from the west, where the incline is least severe, but here Oxyartes has fortified the approaches with stone ramparts and great deadfalls of timber. South and north the faces loom impregnable. East is worse-raw stone for the approach march and sheer cliffs for the final four hundred feet.

Alexander calls the youth of the army together. He pledges twelve talents of gold to the first man to mount by this route to the summit and extravagant premiums to every trooper who joins him. Six hundred men set out by night, clawing their way up the face by means of iron tent pegs, which they wedge into fissures in the rock, and from which they belay one another by rope. Thirty-seven valiant souls plummet to their deaths. But three hundred reach the summit. When they show themselves in armor next dawn, the foe, believing Alexander must indeed possess winged warriors-or be, himself, a god-sues for peace.

Oxyartes and a handful of chiefs get away down a back track. But our rangers capture his suite in its entirety-horses, wagons, wife, and three daughters. The youngest, Roxane, is a proud beauty, said to be the darling of her father’s eye.

Will Alexander crucify her? Hold her as hostage? Will he ransom her? Exploit her father’s fears for her safety, to bring him to heel?

Not for nothing is our king acclaimed a genius of politics and war.

He appears before the army with the princess at his side.

He will marry her.

Alexander has picked his horse.

By taking to wife the daughter of the warlord Oxyartes, our king transforms his most formidable foe into his father-in-law. War is all in the family now. Envoys shuttle between the Afghan camps and our own, my brother Philip among them. The army buzzes with details of the prospective peace.

If Oxyartes will come in amity to Bactra City and there give his daughter in marriage, Alexander will honor him with such treasures and esteem as to effectively render him lord of all Afghanistan and peer to Amyntas Nicolaus, who will govern Bactria and Sogdiana in Alexander’s name. This can be sold to the tribes as a mighty coup for the sons of Afghana, since, under Darius’ rule, none but Persian nationals had stood so tall. Now, by the blood of her patriots and the grace of heaven, the land has been restored to its rightful rulers.

At least that’s the story.

Who’s quibbling?

Then he, Alexander, will take his army and depart Afghanistan.

In return for these pledges of peace, Oxyartes will use his influence to bring his confederates to the table of peace. Affairs will be so arranged, Alexander warrants, that no chieftain’s portion will suffer, and each, secure in his lands and station, will discover no cause for complaint.

“What we must accept about this theater of war,” Philip explains one night to me, Flag, Stephanos, and our fellows, “is that military victory is impossible. So long as even one man or woman of these Afghans draws breath, they will resist us. But what we have achieved, by the ungodly suffering we have inflicted upon them, is to drive them to the point where they’ll accept an accommodation, an alliance if you will, that they can call victory, or at least not defeat, and that we can live with.

“Then, between paying them off, severing them from their northern allies and sanctuaries, and keeping enough forces in garrison here, we may be able to stabilize the situation sufficiently so that we can move on to India without leaving our lines of supply and communication vulnerable to assault. That’s the best we can do. That’s enough. It will suffice.

“In the end,” Philip says, “the issue comes down to this: What is the minimum acceptable dispensation? Short of victory, what can we live with? We cannot slaughter every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan, however gratifying such an enterprise might be.”

Peace at last. The corps of Macedon exhales with relief. For me, only one impediment remains:

Shinar will not marry me. She refuses.

To celebrate his wedding to Roxane and the end of the war, Alexander has pledged rich dowries to every Mack who joins him in taking to wife his own Asiatic consort. The couples will take their vows at the same hour as Alexander and his princess and on the same site, the palace of Chorienes in Bactra City.

But Shinar won’t do it.

It is the old story of A’shaara.

“Don’t ask me! If you care for me, you will never mention this again.”

Will I ever understand this woman? My child grows in her belly. I can’t let her refusal stand. “What will you do then? Go away?”

I see she will. Her expression is despair. “Will you make me speak of this?”

“Yes! You must explain it to me now, once and for all, and make me understand.”

She has to sit. Her back groans under the weight she carries. “Can I have some water please?”

I get it for her. Cool, with a sliver of apricot, the way she likes it.

“ A’shaara means shame, this much you know, Matthias. But it means soul as well, and family or tribe. I have forfeited mine by permitting you, an alien and an invader, to rescue me. For this, I stand ad benghis, ‘outside,’ and can never be brought back in.”

I reject this. “You’re not ‘outside,’ with me. Your god cannot touch me, and when you join with me in marriage, he can’t touch you either.”

She smiles darkly. “God cannot, perhaps. But others.” She means her kin. Her brother.

My Afghan bride. She and this country are one and the same. I love and fear her and can grasp her secrets no more than I can these ocher mountains or this storm-riven sky.

In the end it is my brother who wins her over. The peace deal done, Philip’s unit is among the first to pack out for Bactra City, to make political preparations for Alexander’s wedding. He visits Shinar and me on his last evening, bringing baghee, a dish of lamb and lentils roasted in the beast’s own intestines, and a jar of plum wine.

Shinar’s belly has become taut as a drum. You can thump it with a finger; it rings like a melon. Philip dotes upon her like a bachelor uncle. She makes him set his ear and listen for the child’s kick. When it comes, they both giggle like innocents.

Later, Philip addresses Shinar in earnest. She will listen to him when she won’t to me. For the sake of the child, he says, she must make me her husband. For love of this infant, she must become my wife.