Conflict and Heritage in Kabul
Last week I finally found time to open a book I bought a few weeks ago, William Dalrymple’s latest epic on the First Anglo-Afghan war, Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury 2013). Having read a number of highly complementary reviews, and indeed, having recently heard the author speak on the topic at an event organised by the wonderful independent bookshop Topping & Co., in my parents’ home town of Ely, my expectations of enjoyment are high.
Dalrymple outlines a number of parallels between the conflict of 1839-42, and the current International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) presence in Afghanistan. What strikes me in particular is the continuity of the roles played by certain places, often heritage sites, in the conflicts of the last two centuries and more. The site of the nineteenth-century British army cantonments in the north-east of Kabul is the location now occupied by the main ISAF base. To the south, the city’s historic fort, known as the Bala Hissar, is likewise still an active military base for the Afghan and US armies, and houses a surveillance station.
Armies are notoriously unwilling to allow scrutiny of their actions, and gaining access to the important archaeological site of the Bala Hissar remains difficult, although not impossible. I visited in 2007 with Afghan and international colleagues, at which time an expansion of military infrastructure on the site was in progress. A series of extensive and deep trenches had been bulldozed in the lower fort, causing an international outcry that did succeed in stopping the construction work. While on site, we recorded archaeological remains uncovered by the bulldozers, including evidence for activity stretching back into the pre-Islamic period; the site of the Bala Hissar clearly (and unsurprisingly) has a long history of use.
Construction clearly continued after our departure, however. Time-lapse satellite imagery available through Google Earth shows that in 2009 a large gravelled enclosure was created in the same area, housing what looks very much like a missile emplacement. Without going back to look, it’s hard to know whether this might have caused further damage to the underlying archaeology; both the trenches and the subsequent enclosure overlie the part of the site where the royal palace of the early nineteenth century (and perhaps earlier) was located, along with its mosque, audience halls and gardens.
With the announcement a few days ago that the US have agreed to withdraw their forces from Wardak province, immediately to the east of Kabul, it appears that we may at last be entering the final phase of the current conflict – at least the final phase in which international forces participate. How will the Afghan army’s custodianship of the Bala Hissar shape up over the coming years? It is a sad reality that in a country with as many development-associated calls on the national budget as has Afghanistan, the heritage voice usually takes a back seat. The symbolic importance of the Bala Hissar as a key locale in the war that Dalrymple calls the Afghans’ ‘Trafalgar, Waterloo and Battle of Britain rolled into one’ (p. 496) must surely give it value. It would be nice to think that any future construction inside the Bala Hissar might be undertaken in conjunction with Afghanistan’s archaeologists. For all these reasons, we wish our highly committed Afghan colleagues all the best in the months and years to come in their efforts to safeguard the wonderful Bala Hissar of Kabul.
