Ancient & modern
The British are about to replace the Americans in Afghanistan. Let us hope they take a good life of Alexander with them — Arrian or Quintus Curtius Rufus will do — because conditions for military campaigns have not changed much since then.
When Alexander finally defeated Darius III and his Persian army in 329 BC — the purpose of his expedition — he pushed into Bactria/Sogdia, as it was then, to pursue the leader of the Persian resistance, Bessus. Bessus was duly turned in by his treacherous Bactrian lieutenant Spitamenes. But Alexander needed to feed his army and secure his rear, and did so by plundering widely and garrisoning the main villages. Further, he refused to allow the locals to do what they had always done in relation to their war dead, i.e., leave their bodies in the field for vultures to consume. All this raised the locals to revolt, and when Alexander decided to turn to Spitamenes for suggestions about how to deal with it, he found that Spitamenes was the ringleader. The furious Alexander immediately sent 2,000 troops to Samarkand to sort him out. Knowing the terrain, Spitamenes laid an ambush. It was a massacre. Alexander at once mustered 7,000 elite troops and raced 180 miles across the desert in three days (!) to take revenge. He searched up and down for him but found, precisely, nothing.
The guerrilla attacks continued for nearly three years. Spitamenes kept on the move, making alliances where he could in an area which Alexander increasingly dominated, and attacking at speed and without warning: surprise raids on garrisons, ambushes and instant retreats into the desert where he could not be followed. The result was that Alexander effectively gave up, simply ordering the troops in Spitamenes’ territory to keep a look-out ‘on the chance of laying a trap for him, in case he should be riding round in the neighbourhood’. It was not often that he was reduced to such a counsel of despair. Spitamenes was finally nailed only when his troops felt his luck had run out, beheaded him and sent his head to Alexander as a gesture of friendship.
A fiercely independent tribal world with its own way of doing things, where guerrilla warfare is incessant and executed at speed in very difficult terrain, fought by a people whose capacity for endurance is matched only by their hatred of foreigners and where no alliance can be guaranteed there are situations in which the ‘lessons of history’ are more than wishful thinking.
Peter Jones
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