-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- .............................................................. Forwarded from the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed]: From: Taylor, John (JH) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: The Playing Fields of Asia Date: Sunday, January 16, 2000 11:49 AM New York Times January 9, 2000 The Playing Fields of Asia ______________________________________________________________ The story of the century-long battle between Britain and Russia for 2,000 miles of uncharted territory. By JASON GOODWIN TOURNAMENT OF SHADOWS: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. By Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. Illustrated. 646 pp. Washington: Cornelia and Michael Bessie/Counterpoint. $35. In the summer of 1839 a British army of 15,500, most of them native recruits, along with about 38,000 camp followers and 30,000 camels, marched up the Khyber Pass from India into Afghanistan. Their aim was to replace Dost Mohammed, a khan who had never done the British any harm, with Shah Shuja, who had never done the British any good. The expedition was promoted by the hawks in government, who believed that breaching the classic frontiers of British India would send a signal to the Russian czar and subdue another native state. ''You will see,'' remarked a colonel who watched the army go, ''not a soul will reach here from Kabul except one man, who will come to tell us the rest are destroyed.'' Three years later he had the gloomy satisfaction of seeing Dr. William Brydon, sagging in the saddle, come down from the hills alone. ''Did I not say so? Here comes the messenger.'' So ended the First Afghan War, creepily. One of the greatest debacles in British military history, it signaled the start of a struggle for power that was to pit Russia against Britain for over a century in a remote and inhospitable corner of the world -- the 2,000 miles of unknown territory, unspeakably hostile, mountainous, frozen, that divided British India from the Russian Empire. In the daredevil spirit that animated many of its participants, this contest of superpowers was called the Great Game. At the end of the 18th century, just as the British were consolidating their control over India, Chinese pressure closed Tibet to visitors. Beyond the North-West Frontier, through the notorious Khyber Pass, lay the rugged hills of Afghanistan, adapted to ambush and inhabited by fierce Muslim sharpshooters. Still farther north, the steppe of Central Asia extended from the borders of Russia to China, through whose frightful deserts and salt lakes the old Silk Road had run, creating fabled cities like Bokhara and Khiva. From the early 1800's, a battle of wits and endurance was waged between explorers and diplomats, who plunged into these half-forgotten wastes to win allies for the Raj or the czar, to seek better blood stock, to botanize, to settle cartographical disputes, to measure skulls or to prove the genesis of Aryan civilization. As the authors of this brilliant history point out, the Great Game was a dry run for the cold war, avoiding outright conflict but marked by the same search for influence and the same displays of bravery and cussedness, though whether the story of the cold war will ever seem as exciting as this, I doubt. ''Tournament of Shadows'' is much more than a magisterial work of scholarship: it is an absorbing inquiry into men and motives that is one part le Carre, one part Indiana Jones. The risks of the Great Game were frightful. Native rulers were understandably upset to be caught in a struggle they never asked for, and kept pits full of man-eating insects. There were unspeakable physical challenges to overcome, from the highest mountains in the world, the severest winters and deserts, to a disease of the steppe that caused unappeasable itching of the testicles. Camels died, dogs died, people dropped like flies. Yet half the time the difficulty for the authorities was not in finding men, but in holding them back. A book with these raw ingredients is bound to be thrilling. It might, in fact, have become just slightly overwhelming, except that Karl E. Meyer, a former editorial writer for The New York Times, and Shareen Blair Brysac, a television documentary producer, never allow a sensational cast of characters to crowd out the narrative. Chapter by chapter, they plumb the circumstances that drove the Great Game in each of its phases. ''Tournament of Shadows'' is a mine of information -- about the Russian steppe, about cartography, about the functioning of the Raj, the development of spycraft and the influence of theosophy. It is written with elegant assurance. The authors keep their own sympathies in the background, but no one can doubt that Sir John Lawrence, the only civil servant to become viceroy of India (in 1863) and the exponent of what his critics called a policy of ''masterly inactivity,'' was a hero; or that the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin -- pictured here cordially shaking hands with Hitler -- was a rotter. Here are the legendary pundits, recruited by the British mostly in the Himalayas, who mapped a million square miles of Tibet disguised as Buddhist pilgrims, counting off their paces on specially adapted prayer beads, with compasses in their prayer wheels and thermometers in their staffs. Here is Mark Twain advising Kipling (''Write for and about boys''), Lord Curzon on frontiers (''the razor's edge on which hang suspended the issue of war or peace and the life of nations'') and the verdict of the first Englishman to enter Lhasa (''Dirt, dirt, grease, smoke. Misery, but good mutton''). And ah, the rewards! Some went for glory, some for duty, some for curiosity and quite a few for enlightenment of one sort or another. They stoked the fire of imagination, from Shangri-La to the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and gave imperialism a glamour it often lacked in practice, as Kipling knew. Sir Aurel Stein, who earlier this century dug up the vanished civilizations of the Silk Road, was much more frightened of the unexciting bourgeois life that beckoned him whenever one of his major expeditions looked as if it wouldn't come off than of the dangers he faced in the desert. Britain in full imperial rig could almost casually offer stupendous rewards -- an enthusiastic public to ensure cracking sales of the traveler's book, the applause of fellow specialists at the Royal Geographical Society, cases to be filled at the British Museum, the adulation of high society and the worship of schoolboys. Attuned to the quiet, self-deprecating style of most heroic travelers, England whisked away the heroes' treasures, patted them on the back and sent them out for more. Only ungentlemanly conduct could spoil the arrangement, as it did with Hedin, who completed his first major expedition in 1893. In London in 1909 he defended his claim to have explored the last ''white spaces'' on the map of Tibet by pouring scorn on the achievements of the native pundits, and earned a deserved rebuke. He turned against England with a ferocity that sent him spinning into the arms of the Kaiser and, eventually, Heinrich Himmler, who once observed, ''What the English call a gentleman, we call an SS man.'' Himmler, with Hedin's blessing, sent a wholly unexpected, inordinately successful and unquestionably horrible Nazi mission to Tibet in 1938, to investigate some of the wilder and more intriguing claims of Nazi prehistory. The expedition leader won over several high-ranking Tibetan officials with his talk of swastikas, and the brief Nazi rapprochement has been embarrassing the Dalai Lama ever since. Russia, of course, put up the other half of the Great Game, and in fact pressed farther into the steppe and ice than anyone, claiming whole new empires for the czar. The Russians never quite enjoyed the same panoply of rewards imperial and domestic that British adventurers might receive, for in a bureaucratic autocracy the path to glory was very narrow. In the end, Meyer and Brysac conclude, it was a game indeed. Nothing much came of it, and forward policy had an invariably perverse outcome. Afghanistan never submitted to the British, and actually helped destroy the Soviet Union in the 1980's. The British invasion of Tibet in 1905 was a breathtaking sacrilege, yet stopped infuriatingly short of imposing a treaty on Tibet that might have served as a recognition of Tibetan independence in later years. One of the illustrations in the book is Lady Elizabeth Butler's ''Remnants of an Army,'' which shows Brydon, the sole survivor of the First Afghan War, coming up to the Jalalabad fort. Brydon later suffered in the 1857 Indian Mutiny. It is good to know that he died in his bed. ''Tournament of Shadows'' deals with a region where nature, not mankind, sets terms. Afghanistan is almost as closed and unfathomable now as it was a century ago; Tibet may surprise us yet; and from the former Soviet Central Asian republics we hear little and read less. This is a region that has swallowed civilizations, and sent the sands to seal them up. It has been dug, charted, swindled and coerced, but what can change the fact that its deserts are as dry as ever, its mountains vast, and it is still a long, long way from the sea? Readers who suspect that many of the world's tragedies are subplots to a vaster comedy will treasure ''Tournament of Shadows.'' The rest will find all the heroism and misery they might desire. ______________________________________________________________ Jason Goodwin is the author of ''Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire.'' Shop for Cars On-Line: http://a-albionic.com/ads/srch.html Forwarded for info and discussion from the New Paradigms Discussion List, not necessarily endorsed by: *********************************** Lloyd Miller, Research Director for A-albionic Research (POB 20273, Ferndale, MI 48220), a ruling class/conspiracy research resource for the entire political-ideological spectrum. Quarterly journal, book sales, rare/out-of-print searches, New Paradigms Discussion List, Weekly Up-date Lists & E-text Archive of research, intelligence, catalogs, & resources. 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