I know very little about what Afghanistan looks like except for what I’ve seen on the news, and that is: dusty desert. It struck me as odd that there was green grass and deciduous trees (void of leaves, but there no less) in the background in TAB. Wonder why they didn’t film it somewhere less… green. Hm.
Afghanistan, while not exactly akin to the English countryside, is very luscious in places. For example:
I don’t know much about the Afghan wars of the 19th century. but it’s a big country and there’s a lot of variety.
Afghanistan is desert in the western/southwestern part. This is the bit Americans tend to see on the news because that’s the quadrant of the country our troops were based in. But from there, the country rises as you go east, quickly rising up into foothills and then the Himalaya mountains in the center and northeastern regions–specifically a sub-range of the Himalayas known as the Hindu Kush. The Khyber Pass, a vast ‘low’ plateau running through the mountains that split Asia Minor and the Indian subcontinent, is on the eastern border.
Most of Afghanistan is strikingly beautiful. I’ve talked to vets who say it’s the most beautiful place they’ve ever seen, with dizzying vistas and swathes of lush farmland that has been fertile since ancient times (which is a marvel of engineering in its own right, if you know much about farming), thanks in part to a vast, elaborate irrigation system that kept water flowing from the mountains to the fields from c. 300 BC until recent times. The invasions by Russia and NATO in the last few decades have done a lot of damage to that system, which in turn has done a lot of damage to the ability of Afghanistan’s people to support themselves.
During the 19th century British-Russian wars in Afghanistan, the Khyber Pass was one of the main avenues of access for the British army coming up out of India, and they spent a lot of time fighting in those green mountainous and plateau regions. Maiwand is southward of that, in the desert region, but the irrigation system was still in full swing during the Battle of Maiwand, and the place was surrounded by irrigated cropland. (And indeed, it still is.)
