Beyond the Dorah to the westward, following the Kafiristan divide of the Hindu Kush, we may well leave unassisted Nature to maintain her own work of perfect defence, for there is not a track that we can discover to exist, nor a by-way that we can hear of which passes through that inconceivably grand and savage wilderness of untamed mountains. Undoubtedly such tracks exist, but judging from the remarkable physical constitution of the Kafir, they are such as to demand an exceptional type of mountaineer to deal with them. It is only when we work our way farther westward to those passes which lead into the valleys of the upper Kabul River affluents, from the Khawak Pass at the head of the Panjshir valley to the Unai which points the way from Kabul to Bamian, that we find material for sober reflection derived from the records of the past.
The general characteristics of these passes have been described already—and something of their history. We have seen that they have been more or less open doors to India through the ages. Men literally "in nations" have passed through them; the dynasties of India have been changed and her destinies reshaped time after time by the facilities of approach which they have afforded; and if the modern conditions of things military were now what they were in the days of Alexander or of Baber, there would be no reason why her destinies should not once again be changed through use of them. We must remember that they are not what they have been. How far they have been opened up by artificial means, or which of them, besides the Nuksan and the Chahardar, have been so improved, we have no means of knowing, but we may take it for granted that the Public Works Department of Afghanistan has not been idle; for we know that that department was very closely directed by the late Amir, and that his staff of engineers is most eminent and most practical.[13]
The base of all this group of passes lies in Badakshan, so that the chief characteristics as gates of India are common to all. It has been too often pointed out to require repetition that the plains of Balkh—all Afghan Turkistan in short—lie at the mercy of any well-organized force which crosses the Oxus southwards; but once that force enters the gorges and surmounts the passes of the Badakshan ramparts a totally new set of military problems would be presented. The narrowness and the isolation of its cultivated valleys; the vast spaces of dreary, rugged desolation which part them; the roughness and the altitude of the intervening ranges—in short, the passive hostility of the uplands and their blank sterility would create the necessity for some artificial means of importing supplies from the plains before any formidable force could be kept alive at the front. Modern methods point to military railways, for the ancient methods which included the occupation of the country by well-planted military colonies are no longer available. All military engineers nowadays believe in a line, more or less perfect, of railway connection between the front of a field force and its base of supply. But it would be a long and weary, if not absolutely hopeless, task to bring a railway across the highlands of Badakshan to the foot of the Hindu Kush from the Oxus plains.
We have read what Wood has to say of the routes from Kunduz southward to Bamian and Kabul. This is the recognized trade route; the great highway to Afghan Turkistan. Seven passes to be negotiated over as many rough mountain divides, plunges innumerable into the deep-rifted valleys by ways that are short and sharp, a series of physical obstacles to be encountered, to surmount any one of which would be a triumph of engineering enterprise. Amongst the scientific devices which altitude renders absolutely necessary, would be a repeated process of tunnelling. No railway yet has been carried over a sharp divide of 10,000 or 11,000 feet altitude, subject to sudden and severe climatic conditions, without the protection of a tunnel. As a work of peaceful enterprise alone, this would be a line probably without a parallel for the proportion of difficulty compared to its length in the whole wide world. As a military enterprise, a rapid construction for the support of a field army, it is but a childish chimera. Yet we are writing of Badakshan's best road!
It is true that by the Haibak route to Ghori and that ancient military base of the Greeks, Andarab, the difficulty of the sheer physical altitude of great passes is not encountered, and there are spaces which might be pointed out where a light line could be engineered with comparative facility. Even to reach thus far from the Oxus plains would be a great advantage to a force that could spend a year or two, like a Chinese army, in devising its route, but this comparative facility terminates at the base of the Hindu Kush foot-hills; and it matters not beyond that point whether the way be rough or plain, for the wall of the mountains never drops to less than 12,500 feet, and no railway has ever been carried in the open over such altitudes. Tunnelling here would be found impossible, owing to the flat-backed nature of the wide divide. With what may happen in future military developments; whether a fleet of air-ships should in the farther future sail over the snow-crested mountain tops and settle, replete with all military devices in gunnery and stores, on the plains of the Kohistan of Kabul we need hardly concern ourselves. It is at least an eventuality of which the risk seems remote at present, and we may rest content with the Hindu Kush barrier as a defensive line which cannot be violated in the future as it has been in the past by any formidable force cutting through Badakshan, without years of preparation and forewarning.
For any serious menace to the line of India's north-western defence we must look farther west—much farther west—for enough has been said of the great swelling highlands of the Firozkohi plateau, and of the Hazara regions south of the Hari Rud sources, to indicate their impracticable nature as the scene of military movement. It is, after all, the highways of Herat and Seistan that form the only avenues for military approach to the Indian frontier that are not barred by difficulties of Nature's own providing, or commanded from the sea. Once on these western fields we are touching on matter which has been so worn threadbare by controversy that it might seem almost useless to add further opinions. Historically it seems strange at first sight that, compared with the northern approaches to which Kabul gives the command, so very little use has been made of this open way. It was not till the eighteenth century saw the foundation laid for the Afghan kingdom that the more direct routes between Eastern Persia and the Indus became alive with marching troops. The reason is, obviously, geographical. Neither trade, nor the flag which preceded it from the west, cared to face the dreary wastes of sand to the south of the Helmund, backed, as they are, by the terrible band of the Sind frontier hills full of untamed and untameable tribes, merely for the purpose of dropping into the narrow riverain of the lower Indus, beyond which, again, the deserts of Rajputana parted them from the rich plains of Central India. When the Indus delta and Sind were the objective of a military expedition, the conquerors came by way of the sea, or by approaches within command of the sea—never from Herat. Herat was but the gateway to Kandahar, and to Kabul in the days when Kabul was "India."
It was not, so far as we can tell, till Nadir Shah, after ravaging Seistan and the rich towns of the Helmund valley, found a narrow passage across the Sind frontier hills that any practical use was ever made of the gates of Baluchistan. Although there are ethnological evidences that a remnant of the Mongol hordes of Chenghis Khan settled in those same Sind hills, there is no evidence that they crossed them by any of the Baluch passes. It seems certain that in prehistoric times, when the geographical conditions of Western India were different from what they are now, Turanian peoples in tribal crowds must have made their way into India southwards from Western Asia, but they drifted by routes that hugged the coast-line. We have now, however, replaced the old natural geographical conditions by an artificial system which totally alters the strategic properties of this part of the frontier. We have revolutionised the savage wilderness of Baluchistan, and made highways not only from the Indus to the Helmund, but from Central India to the Indus. The old barriers have been broken down and new gateways thrown open. We could not help breaking them down, if we were to have peace on our borders; but the process has been attended with the disadvantage that it obliges us to take anxious note of the roads through Eastern Persia and Western Afghanistan which lead to them.
For just about one century since the first scare arose concerning an Indian invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte, have we been alternating between periods of intense apprehension and of equally foolish apathy concerning these Western Indian gateways. The rise and fall of public apprehension might be expressed by a series of curves of curious regularity. At present we are at the bottom of a curve, for reasons which it is hardly necessary to enter into; but it is not an inapt position for a calm review of the subject. There is, then, one great highway after passing through Herat (which city is about 60 miles from the nearest Russian military post), a highway which has been quite sufficiently well described already, of about 360 miles in length between Herat and Kandahar; Kandahar, again, being about 80 miles from our frontier—say 500 miles in all; and the distinguishing feature of this highway between Russia and India is the comparative ease with which that great Asiatic divide which extends all the way from the Hindu Kush to the Persian frontier (or beyond) can be crossed on the north of Herat. There, this great central water-parting, so formidable in its altitudes for many hundreds of miles, sinks to insignificant levels and the comparatively gentle gradients of a debased and disintegrated range. This divide is parted and split by the passage of the Hari Rud River; but the passage of the river is hill-enclosed and narrow, with many a rock-bound gorge which would not readily lend itself to railway-making (although by no means precluding it), so that the ridges of the divide could be better passed elsewhere.
We must concede that, taking it for all in all, that 500 miles of railway gap which still yawns between the Indian and Russian systems is an easy gap to fill up, and that it affords a road for advance which (apart from the question of supplies) can only be regarded as an open highway. Then there is also that other parallel road to Seistan from the Russian Transcaspian line across the Elburz mountains (which here represents the great divide) via Mashad—a route infinitely more difficult, but still practicable—which leads by a longer way to the Helmund and Kandahar. Were it not for the political considerations arising from the respective geographical positions of these two routes, one lying within Persian territory and the other being Afghan, they might be regarded as practically one and the same. Neither of them could be used (in the aggressive sense) without the occupation of Herat, and most assuredly should circumstances arise in which either of the two should be used (in the same aggressive sense) the other would be utilized at the same time.
This is, then, the chief problem of Indian defence so far as the shutting of the gate is concerned, and there are no two ways of dealing with it. We must have men and material sufficient in both quantity and quality to guard these gates when open, or to close them if we wish them shut. The question whether these western gates should remain as they are, easily traversable, or should yield (as they must do sooner or later) to commercial interests and admit of an iron way to link up the Russian and Indian railway systems is really immaterial. In the latter case they might be the more readily closed, for such a connection would serve the purposes of a defence better than those for offence; but in any case in order to be secure we must be strong.