A CENTRAL ASIAN LEAGUE.
(To roe EDITOR or TIM ‘' Elrecnroa."3 Sm,—When we turn our thoughts to the numerous and com- plicated problems which confront the intellectual powers and patience of the Peace Conference, the Rhine, Poland, Czeolao- Slovakia, Transylvania, the Yugo-Slav and Italy, Graecia Irredsnta, the great Arab area, Asia Minor and the Caucasus, Persia and Armenia, the bent of the mind may take one of two channels; to wit, either—One more or less, what doe. it matter? or, Be thankful that the " mandate " for Afghanistan is already in the hands of the Indian Government, and that, if there ie an agency that by precedent, by position. and by long experience, is competent to weld the tribes and Khanates of Central Asia, cast adrift by the Russian revolution, into a self-governing confederacy, that agency again is theIndian Government One of the most remarkable reversals of decades, we might almost say *eateries, of persistent policy brought about by this war is the part that Indian troop. have played in maintaining order in that very region which, till recently, the Eitobelete. Grodekeihe Alikhanefle, %emanate. and Hone patkins regarded as the "jumping-ofi spot" for the Russian invasion of India. When we look back a century or more and follow the advance of Russia over the Caucasus into Azerbai- jan, and from Orenburg and the Caspian to the Oxus and Thian-Shan. we stand and ponder over the dispensations of a Providence—always assuming that such dispensations exist— which in a year undoes the achievement of years, just as we thoughtfully compare Prussia in her pride of 1914 with Ger- many In her downfall of to-day-. The obligation of inducing condition of peace from the east shores of the Black See to the vicinity of that spot which Mr. E. F. %night a quarter of a century ago immortalized as "Where Three Empires Meet" is only aecond in importance to that which enjoins upon the Peace Conference the duty of reconciling Pole with German and Russian. and Yugo-Slav with Italian, and of rnakiug Greece underetand that " self-determination " is not the only law that prescribes the rule under which a race may have to live.
Very shortly before the assassination of the Amir Habibullah Khan, at the very moment when he seemed within reach of ambitions which he must have nurtured ae the just recompense of his staunch neutrality throughout the war, intelligence, struggling into the wider world out of the Bolshevism of Tash. tent and across the rugged' passes of the Hindu %vela, reached us that the emancipated Khanates of Russian Turkestan medi- tated the formation of a League, the hegerrten of which was to be the Amir of Kabul. We may fairly for the moment assume that the Amir Amanullah Mien will prove a ruler not unworthy of his father or his even greater grandfather, the Amir Abdnrrahman Khan, a great man and a great ruler, Angus Hamilton'. description (Afghanistan. p. 882) of Amanullah %Marie masterful mother, written fourteen or fifteen years ago, engages our attention now. Masterful mothers can make Kings as well as "King-makers." It was always thought that BIM Halima might bring Seeder Muhammad Umar Jan to the throne of Kabul instead of his elder brother Babibullah; and now Amanullah has sup- planted his seemingly feebler brother Inayatallah, and his fanatic and uncongenial uncle Nasnallah, whose behaviour, when he visited Britain twenty-four years ago. stamped him for ever. I always recall, in this connexion, a talk I had in those days with a Bailie of Glasgow, who had received both Li-Hung-Chang and Nasrullah Khan at Glasgow in 1895. The great "Li " had a relieving touch of humour about his cool, almost insolent, air of Celestial superiority, but for Nasrullah my friend had but one epithet—" impossible" Now Afghan- istan under Habibollah has done well by the Attie., and above all by Great Britain, In this war, and his son AmaimIlah deserves the reward of which the assassin's bullet bee robbed his father. Russia has encroached upon the small Khanatcs of the upper water. of the Oans, on Shignan, Roehan, Derives, and Wakhan, just as she lowered menacingly across the broad channel opposite Mazar-i-sharif, and pressed the Afghan back in the valleys of the Murghab and the Knehk and on the steppes of Badghis. Afghanistan le already politically under the wing of India, and I feel convinced that India must, for the next decade or two at least, exercise a very appreciable influence on the fortunes of Pereia; and, under the aegis of the some influence, the Khanates may well rally to the hegemony of Kabul, and the Tureennens be brought into closer touch with the provincial governments of Maimenet and Herat, of Mash- had. Kuchan, and Astrabad.
The Caucasus at this moment is crying out for Allied inter- vention to restrain Armenian, Georgian, and Tartar from internecine warfare. Let us extend our compassionate sympathy to the State which receives that Wilsonme "man- date," and than realise what a title our military enterprise gives us to control the fortunes of Tranesaspla and the valley of the Zarafahan in the future. The story of the gallant " Duneter fore*" is well known. It is British troops that occupied and hold Kramovodsk, the Camden terminus of the Merv-Bokbara-Samareand-Andijan Railway, and Britisly troops that for a year past, in co-operation with Mensheviets and Turcomans, have been guarding the Transeaspian Rail- way from Kramovodsk to Bairam All and Anankovo, and preserving the neutrality of both Mashhad and Herat. The Nuehki-Mirjawa Railway is already trending northward, and any gaps between railway systems are nowadays easily bridged over by an air or a motor-transport service. For a century or so Persia and Afghanistan have stood as buffers between Europe and India. Bet now the opportune moment seems to have come to draw the country of the Tranecasplan Railway and the Central Asian Khanetes into that Perso- Afghan buffer system; and to legalize that and to give it due stability under the aegis of the League of Nations, a " man,. data" is needed, and the present is the moment to seek it—I
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