The Honey Thief by Najaf Mazari, Robert Hillman Read Free Book Online Page A

Russians, yet the demand for money to support these wars always started with higher taxes for the Hazara. If you didn’t pay the taxes because you couldn’t, your house was burnt to the ground and you yourself might have the bad luck to be hanged from a tripod in front of your sorrowing family.
    Foreign soldiers found it impossible to subdue the soldiers of the Afghan armies. As it was in the past, so it is now. The Russians and the British, learning nothing from their past calamities, believed that a war lasting a year, at worst five years, would settle the issue of who would rule Afghanistan. When the foreigners won a battle and advanced fifty kilometres to set up their tents, they thought that one more such victory would give them Afghanistan. What they didn’t understand, then as now, is that Afghans, whatever their tribe, Pashtun, Uzbeki, Tajik, Hazara, consider a single defeat a matter of no significance. For Afghans, a war of a hundred years is an easy thing to imagine. If your enemy wins a battle today and advances fifty kilometres, then he is that much further from his home, whereas the Afghan’s homeland is all around him. Between the foreigners and their final victory lie thousands of mountains, and on each mountain thousands of rocks. Afghans know to whom the mountains and rocks are loyal; they know to whom the many caves will give shelter. It is to them. If the foreigners would only listen in the right way, their ears would hear the mountains and rocks whispering a warning: ‘The ground is parched. Where your blood is spilt flowers will bloom.’ The foreigners – their generals, at least – could not listen and would not be instructed. They persisted. They died.
    But Afghan emirs sometimes saw more profit in befriending the foreigners than in cutting their throats. Abdur Rahman believed in profit above all things on earth and embraced the Russians with a full heart. His message was simple and direct: ‘My uncle rules Afghanistan today. He is aged. I am young. In a few years’ time, I will rule.’ The Russians needed a friend on the throne of Afghanistan to frustrate the British and were prepared to provide Abdur Rahman with a villa in Tashkent, the great city of Russian Turkestan, together with servants and bodyguards and a bag of gold on the eve of Ramadan each year. The message of the Russians to Abdur Rahman was as simple and as direct as Abdur Rahman’s message to the Russians: ‘Wait’. Abdur Rahman was intelligent enough to see that it would require the death of his uncle Sher Ali before he would have the opportunity to cross the Oxus River on Afghanistan’s northern border and seize the country. If he attacked too soon, the people would rally to Sher Ali, who hadn’t the same reputation for violence as his nephew. So he waited there in Tashkent, learning patience by growing vines in his garden. For sport, he rode his horses at the gallop over fences. He occupied himself with games, too; he taught the Russians how to win at backgammon, while from the Russians he learnt more about the game of chess than he had known before. His other great project called for the cooperation of Tashkent’s tailors, who used their craft to provide him with new ceremonial uniforms of endless designs and colours, some modelled on those worn by European and Russian emirs. Abdur Rahman’s vanity became a treasure trove for tailors.
    Abdur Rahman waited eleven years for the death of his uncle – long enough for the vines he’d planted to bear harvests of fruit, long enough for his mares to have foaled many times, long enough for the Russians to start losing to him at chess. When the news of Sher Ali’s death came through, the Russians sent an invitation to Abdur Rahman’s villa in Tashkent. ‘You are to attend the mansion of His Imperial Majesty’s Governor-General for Turkestan together with such members of your household as it pleases you to present to His Excellency.’ Abdur Rahman visited the mansion in