Britain Begins to Break

[Sheilbh]

Hey Squeelus, who in Afghanistan speaks Farsi?  I got the impression from The Kite Runner that it was/is the first language of the educated urban elite.

The language in Afghanistan is called Dari and I believe it's a slightly archaic version of Farsi and is largely spoken by people in the North and West (the areas you'd expect there to be Persian influence).  I don't know if it's ethnic or a class thing.  For example the elites of India and Pakistan still use English a lot, in their private schools modeled on the English public school or in the legal system.  I wonder if something similar's happened here, just with a different Empire?

[Admiral Yi]

The language in Afghanistan is called Dari and I believe it's a slightly archaic version of Farsi and is largely spoken by people in the North and West (the areas you'd expect there to be Persian influence).  I don't know if it's ethnic or a class thing.  For example the elites of India and Pakistan still use English a lot, in their private schools modeled on the English public school or in the legal system.  I wonder if something similar's happened here, just with a different Empire?

I'm confused by what you mean when you say "the language of Afghanistan."  Aren't there a number of languages spoken there?

[Sheilbh]

I'm confused by what you mean when you say "the language of Afghanistan."  Aren't there a number of languages spoken there?

I said 'the language in Afghanistan' by which I meant the Farsi, or form or it spoken in Afghanistan.  I believe that Afghanistan's got a ridiculous number of languages.

[Admiral Yi]

I said 'the language in Afghanistan' by which I meant the Farsi, or form or it spoken in Afghanistan.  I believe that Afghanistan's got a ridiculous number of languages.

Ah.

But if it's the language of the north and west why are the Kabulis in the book speaking it?  They're ethnic Pashtuns, living in the east.

[Sheilbh]

But if it's the language of the north and west why are the Kabulis in the book speaking it?  They're ethnic Pashtuns, living in the east.

Well as I say I'm not sure if it's an ethnic thing, or a class thing.  If it's class then the Kabulis would also speak it.  Just looking at Wiki it seems that way.  About 41% of the population are Pashtun but only 35% mainly speak Pashto.  This map also indicates that Dari's far more widespread than I thought:

[Queequeg]

But if it's the language of the north and west why are the Kabulis in the book speaking it?  They're ethnic Pashtuns, living in the east.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Map_of_Ethnic_Groups_in_Afghanistan,_by_district.svg
Ethnic map of Afghanistan, Green being Tajik (Persian-speaking Iranians, though largely Sunni), Yellow being Hazara (racial admixture of Mongoloid type, monolingual in Persian), Brown being Pashtun, Grey being Baluch and Red and Orange being Turkic minorities, presumably raised speaking Uzbek or Turkmen.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Map_of_Languages_in_Afghanistan,_by_district.svg

This, on the other hand, is a linguistic map of Afghanistan, with Green now representing Persian and then everything else breaking down on Ethnic lines.  As you can tell, in the vicinity of the big cities, and generally close to the Tajik-Pashtun border, Pashtuns speak Persian.  It is also, as you guessed, the language of the educated classes.

This is very, very complicated, but I'll try to break it down.

First, there is what may be called the Persian language, which is largely intellidgeable from Kermanshah the West in Iran to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the East.  This language comes by three names and two orthographies.  In Persia, it is "Farsi", the name for the central-southern province in Iran from which the Sassanids and Achaemenid sprang, as does our word "Persian" (Arabic has no P phoneme, so P=F)  .  In Afghanistan it is Dari, or Court, which is actually fair as the post-Islamic Persian language really developed in Khorasan, modern day Afghanistan, Tajikstan, southern Uzbekistan and eastern Iran.  In Tajikistan it is called Tajik, and it is written in the Cyrilic alphabet. 

Secondly, this is further complicated by the fact that Pashtun, Kurdish and Persian (as well as some random languages like Ossete, in Russia and Georgia) are all related Aryan languages with quite a bit of shared vocabulary. 

[Queequeg]

The language in Afghanistan is called Dari and I believe it's a slightly archaic version of Farsi and is largely spoken by people in the North and West (the areas you'd expect there to be Persian influence).  I don't know if it's ethnic or a class thing.  For example the elites of India and Pakistan still use English a lot, in their private schools modeled on the English public school or in the legal system.  I wonder if something similar's happened here, just with a different Empire?

Pretty much.  The language of the educated in the Muslim world outside of the Peninsula and Africa has been Persian almost consistently since the end of the Abbasids, and even then a lot of the intellectuals were Persian.  So the Turkic-run Ottoman and Mughal Empires both tended to speak Dari or a kind of well educated patois at court, though ironically the early Safavids used Turkish at court.  In the Mughal period, Persian had the same role as the language of the educated and inter-regional communication that English now has.  Classic Persian stories like the Shahnameh played a role fairly analogous to the Classics in the Muslim (and Muslim-dominated) world, especially east and north of the Peninsula.  Huge chunks of the Urdu and all Muslim Turkic vocabularies are Persian based, and even Malay, Albanian (curiously more than Turkish, iirc) and Swahili have some words from it. 

[grumbler]

Accidental shots going off in barracks is different from American planes dropping bombs on our troops which was the point Viper was making.

No, he was being a smartass and so was I.  I don't think anyone is more dead if mortally shot by accident than mortally bombed by accident. Blue-on-blue fatalities are tragedies no matter how they occur. It is just easier to blame someone when you know their name.

[KRonn]

Interesting article Armyknife. Appropriate in several ways I'd say. One, for showing the differences in the intervention of today vs those of many years ago. And on that note, points out how if similar mind sets and tactics are used again then similar failure would likely be the result. Not that there's any guarantee of success, or failure for that matter, but maybe we don' t have to feel it can't be successful just because of past history.

[Admiral Yi]

Seems like a BBC PC version of history.

The British didn't shoot their way into Afghanistan in 39.  Their "instinctive response to rebellion" was not to "meet violence with violence."  If anything the opposite was true--they did nothing in response to the murder of their top civilians and this in turn emboldened the Afghanis.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Hmmm....surely the 2nd Afghan war was a success, since it led to "quasi-British rule" for 40 years?

[grumbler]

Seems like a BBC PC version of history.

The British didn't shoot their way into Afghanistan in 39.  Their "instinctive response to rebellion" was not to "meet violence with violence."  If anything the opposite was true--they did nothing in response to the murder of their top civilians and this in turn emboldened the Afghanis.

Exactly.  They did precisely what the article suggested, and that led to their failure.

They also were not "routed" and thus "forced to flee Kabul in the winter of 1841" with a "16,000 strong army."  They negotiated a withdrawal for their 4,000 strong army and its 12,000 dependents, and this withdrawal then collapsed as the Afghans violated the ceasefire and failed to deliver the promised supplies.

The article also fails completely to note (presumably because it would counter the "routed and fled" paradigm) that the British returned to Afghanistan after several signal military successes and left again in 1842 because their candidate for the throne had been assassinated.

The campaign overall was a failure, no question - but not for the reasons postulated in the article.

[grumbler]

Hmmm....surely the 2nd Afghan war was a success, since it led to "quasi-British rule" for 40 years?

Nope.  Never happened. It was a failure, because the BBC has so ordained it.

[Siege]

Are you serious? 
The Battle of Maiwand was 25 000 afghanis vs less than 2500 brit-indians.
The indians broke after their artillery ran out of rounds.
The few englishmen had no chance after that.

[Tonitrus]

Perhaps the problem with Afghanistan is, that it's full of Afghans.