Afghanistan Redux

'The Man Who Would Be King' - Revisited

One of the more haunting films I saw on TV growing up was 'The Man Who Would Be King' starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine. What I didn't know was that Christopher Plummer from 'Sound of Music' fame plays Rudyard Kipling, and completely over my head went all the references to the Freemasons. Also, it was directed by John Huston which is interesting because it does smack of 'Black Heart White Hunter'.

Why watch this now? Good question. Well, apart from the nice price tag I saw for it, I think it was the British Army uniforms from the 19th Century worn by Michael Caine that got me in. He did look rather dashing in 'Zulu', and Sean Connery is well, Sean Connery. Indeed a movie that features two Brit stars of the 60s can't be that bad to watch again. Perhaps a more adult insight might be found.

There are indeed fascinating ideas lurking in this story, not to mention the fateful geography of Kafiristan. You'd think it was a fake place name, but it is not!

Kafiristan takes its name from the inhabitants, the Kafirs, a fiercely independent people with distinctive culture, language and religion. They were called Kafir ("infidel") because they were not Muslim. In 1896 Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, who conquered the region for Islam by sword^[1], renamed the people as Nuristani ("Enlightened Ones" in Persian) and the land as Nuristan ("Land of the Enlightened"). Only three valleys, Birir, Bumburet and Rumbur, escaped because they were located east of the Durand line, under the administrative control of the British Raj and later Pakistan.

So yeah. It's a film set in Afghanistan, with Englishmen trying to get a kingdom going.

What's Good About It

Considering how simple the story is, the script manages to convey a number of complex ideas that are germane to the 'why' part of the story, and it boils down to this: two army officers decide to go into deep central Eurasia, equipped with the modern military know-how and try to carve a kingdom for themselves, because... they can. The essence of the story is in the 'can'; the willingness to undertake an audacious move with just a bunch of guns and military know how is beautifully and indelibly expressed.

The boundless, jaunty energy of both characters played by Connery and Caine is infectious and totally skips over any post-colonial trauma for India and Pakistan. Perhaps the overt Imperialism in Kipling and hence the film is a bit too much for us to take these days, there's something profoundly charming about both Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan. they do make a dashing duo, sort of 'Bond and Palmer'.

What's Bad About It

Time has not been kind to this film. The acting seems very old-style and a little stilted. Connery over-acts for the shot-size in parts and Caine is a little cheesy as he reprises his Zulu schtick in other parts. It's not bad as such, just a little on the nose by our contemporary standards. The lighting in the studio scenes are nice, but most of the location exteriors just look flat and unimaginative. I'm not exactly sure where they shot it (wikipedia says Morocco), but it all looks like America to me.

Other Thoughts

I kept thinking "damn, we're still there fighting in Afghanistan." What's worse is that we're in Afghanistan for as equally intangible reasons as Danny and Peachy. After all, there's actually something of the current military campaign that echoes what amounts to 'Danny and Peachy's excellent Afghan adventure'.

Danny and Peachy set about going in to Afghanistan with the hope of using 20 rifles to secure one of the tribes to be their army. From there, they are going to use their military acumen to conquer the rest of Afghanistan. It's a wildly fanciful story except that is exactly how the CIA fought the Taliban in 2002. They went in there and gave superior weapons to the North Eastern tribesmen - some even presumably from Kafiristan/Nuristan - and sent them in to take down the Taliban Government with US Air Cover. In fact, the entire Afghan campaign since 9/11 could be characterised as 'Danny and Peachy's Extraordinary Afghan Adventure Part 2' - although serious minded people would be in denial.

They'd be kind of wrong to be in denial.
Let's face it: how different is the goal to become a King and to establish a stable government in Afghanistan? If Rambo III was a little silly, then surely the real life wars in Afghanistan are worthy of comedy. Kipling would've seen the tropes and laughed. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe we're there because Kipling wrote this magnificent short story that got made into this wonderful film and people are still programmed by it to go to Afghanistan? Who knows?

When Peachy implores Danny to come home with him, he looks out at the Afghans and says, "they're savages!" It's a bit cruel and unkind, indeed it's downright imperialist and priggish. It's more like they are barbaric than savage, I thought. How little things change. Yet the fact of the matter is, we're all Danny and Peachy in Afghanistan. What was a bittersweet parable by Kipling is still the defining text of how the West with all its technological edge fails in the Central Steppes of Eurasia.

Alexander, The West and Parthia
Parthia, the Empire to the East has been the counter part to the Western Civilization for along time. Alexander marches deep into terrain on his way to making his great Empire, but this is more of a punctuation in a long line of history written by people of the Persian area. Xerxes hailed from there, as did Darius. The Roman Empire stopped on the doorstep of the Parthians and today, Iran has inherited the political legacy of the Parthians and the Sassanid Persians.

It's no coincidence then that the story turns on the recognition of supposedly Alexander's symbol which has been co-opted by the Freemasons. I'm sure there is a mountain of literature on the significance of these things, which I'll politely sidestep because I want to get to one point: We in the west are largely ignorant of what the world might look like from the Parthian/Persian perspectivie. As such, we are driven by our own needs and seem to stumble into Afghanistan over and over again when in reality it might be somebody else's problem.

Like Alexander himself, Danny and Peachy fail because they have no conception of the depth of the Kafiristani culture. They all ride in proudly as conquerors but do not realise that they have been co-opted into the local war. This too has a historic echo in what is happening today as our troops fight in Afghanistan siding with Karzai's government, shooting at the Taliban.

It's also a little like the observation that the Connecticut Yankee ultimately fails in King Arthur' court because of his own cultural prejudices and his failure to take in to account the local culture. It's a story that seems to keep repeating in history, which is probably why this yarn by Kipling keeps its relevance.