The moniker “Graveyard of Empires” for Afghanistan was lazily coined by the Americans in the 1990s, in the context of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Neither did the Afghans hold such grandiose notions about themselves before the 1980s, nor did others believe that the modern Afganistan had never been conquered. The Mongol invaders in early 13th century not only wiped out native settlements in what is now northern, western, and central Afghanistan, but also permanently Mongolized central Afghanistan, ruling and dominating the region for the next five centuries. As late as 1970s, Mongol langauge was spoken in some villages of Herat province of Afghanistan.
The only people of present-day Afghanistan whom the Mongols could not destroy, and who were little affected by the Mongol onslaught, were the Pashtuns and the Siah-Posh "Kafirs" (present-day Nuristanis). The Pashtuns, in fact, emerged as regional rivals of the Turko-Mongols in this region and ultimately surpassed them, founding their own native empires in the early 18th century.
The notion that all ethnic groups of modern Afghanistan have always resisted foreign invaders and fought them together is a recent idea, seemingly inspired by the saga of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The two Anglo-Afghan wars in the 19th century, for instance, were never about the entirety of modern Afghanistan. They were limited to eastern and southern Afghanistan, which is largely populated by Pashtuns. In the First Anglo-Afghan War, the Hazaras, Qizilbash, Shia Tajiks of Qandahar, and the Siah-Posh Kafirs actually welcomed the British invaders, while the Pashtuns and the Kohistani Tajiks (north of Kabul) resisted them.
The only moniker that was in use in connection with the Afghan (Pashtun) people was Yaghistan. The hilly tracts of the Pashtun regions of present-day Pakistan were sometimes referred to as Yaghistan (“the land of rebels”) because their inhabitants did not like to be ruled by any king. For example, Amir Abdur Rahman of Afghanistan refers to it as Yaghistan in his autobiography. It is likely that this term was originally coined by the Mughals, as it would make little sense for the Pashtun hillmen to call themselves “rebels” when they never acknowledged themselves as subjects of the Mughal rulers to begin with. They paid no taxes—neither to the Mughals nor to their own Durrani Afghan kings—and instead received allowances (bribes) from those rulers to keep the mountain passes open. It was against the Mughals that these so-called “rebellions” took place, and it is in Mughal sources that the Pashtuns of these regions are described as “rebels,” even though they were never subjects of the Mughal Empire. This region—Yaghistan—was later heavily targeted by British “punitive expeditions,” which, by the 20th century, even involved the use of tanks and aircraft. During the 19th century, the British initially treated this Yaghistan as a collection of independent territories, but it was later incorporated into British Raj, either as tribal agencies administered through Political Agents or as princely states (in the case of Swat and Dir). In Pakistan, these areas became known as FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and PATA (Provincially Administered Tribal Areas) until recently.
Try searching the phrase “Graveyard of Empires” in Google Books, and you will notice that in the early 20th century and earlier, it was used in the context of archaeology—for regions and countries rich in archaeological sites.
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Manana, for such a piece which cleared my many of my confusions.
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