Myth of "Martial Races"

http://www.firstpost.com/blogs/perception-vs-reality-is-the-punjabi-muslim-really-martial-473743.html
"Punjabi Muslims neither rebelled against Mughal Delhi nor fought any invader whether Afghan or Persian. Was this because the Punjabi did not want to fight other Muslims? Not really, because he did not even resist being conquered easily by Sikhs, who were only 12 percent of Punjab.
It is the Englishman who 150 years ago gave the Punjabi Muslim a rifle and taught him how to use it. But this did not require any martial background. The British Bengal army was full of UP Brahmins (like Mangal Pandey). It is only after this formation of the modern regiments, that Punjabi Muslims are called martial by writers like GF MacMunn."

http://odysseuslahori.blogspot.com/2013/08/pakistanhistory.html
"It is commonly believed that the Ghaznavides, Ghorids, and the Sultanate kings were all Pakhtuns. This is the greatest falsehood ever fed to us. They were not Pakhtuns; they were, one and all, Turks. The originator of this idiotic fallacy is one Abul Qasim Farishta who wrote his Tarikh e Farishta in the middle years of the 17th century during the Mughal reign. He repeatedly referred to, and erroneously of course, the Turks as Afghans. Once that happened, every ignorant body began to believe that all those so-called conquerors were indeed Afghans.

This is another discussion on the myth of the invincible Afghan. There was no such animal in history. Beginning with Cyrus the Great and right through that great parade of invaders running down to the Mughals, the Afghans/Pakhtuns/Pashtuns either meekly submitted or were beaten into the dirt by every outsider. The Afghans/Pakhtuns/Pashtuns took every invader lying down. There was never any resistance for none is read of in history. The only tales of Pakhtun/Pashtun courage in combat are what they call seena gazette – tales passed down by word of mouth. We know well enough what merit they have as history.

The only time the Afghans ever stood up to an invader was against the British forces in the First Afghan War. To hide their discomfiture upon their ignominious defeat, the Brits invented the myth of the invincible Afghan, reinforcing the belief first created by Farishta.

Ever since that time, every idiot writer pretending to be an historian has referred to Afghanistan as the Graveyard of Empires. If that were true, if the Afghans really had ever been capable of defeating an outsider, the Achaemenians, Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Kushans, Sassanians, Turks, Mongols, Mughals et al, having been trounced in that mythical Graveyard of Empires would never have made it to India. Not only did all those outsiders make it to India, they also held Afghanistan under their yoke."


http://www.geocurrents.info/geopolitics/the-afghan-%e2%80%9cgraveyard-of-empires%e2%80%9d-myth-and-the-wakhan-corridor#ixzz3y9RUhhLo
"Serious authors such as Christian Caryl and Thomas Barfield have turned the graveyard cliché on its head, arguing that Afghanistan is better interpreted historically as both a “highway of conquest” and a “cradle of empires.” Even the British failure to subdue the region has been much exaggerated. As Caryl cogently notes:

[In the] Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880), [Britain] succeeded in occupying much of the country and forcing its rulers to accept a treaty giving the British a veto over future Afghan foreign policy. … London, it should be noted, never intended to make Afghanistan part of its empire. Britain’s foreign-policy aim, which it ultimately achieved, was to ensure that  Afghanistan remained a buffer state outside the influence of imperial competitors, such as the Russians.

            The fact that an independent Afghanistan served British interests as a buffer state is evident in the very outline of the country. Northeastern Afghanistan features a curious panhandle, the Wakhan Corridor, that extends all the way to the border of China. Negotiations during the late 1800s, first between Britain and Russia and then between British India and Afghanistan, ensured that the territories of the British and Russian empires would never directly touch each other. As a result, Wakhan was appended to Afghanistan. Today it is a sparsely populated and generally peaceful region eager to welcome tourists, at least according to a recent BBC report."

http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/07/26/bury-the-graveyard/
"One of those myths, for example, is that Afghanistan is inherently unconquerable thanks to the fierceness of its inhabitants and the formidable nature of its terrain. But this isn’t at all borne out by history. "Until 1840 Afghanistan was better known as a ‘highway of conquest’ rather than the ‘graveyard of empires,’" Barfield points out. "For 2,500 years it was always part of somebody’s empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C." After the Persians it was Alexander the Great’s turn. Some contend that Alexander met his match in the Afghans, since it was an Afghan archer who wounded him in the heel, ushering in a series of misfortunes that would end with the great conqueror’s death. Ask anyone who believes this is why Greek coins keep cropping up in Afghan soil today — in fact, Alexander’s successors managed to keep the place under their control for another 200 years. Not too shabby, really. And there were plenty of empires that came after, thanks to Afghanistan’s centrality to world trade in the era before European ocean fleets put an end to the Silk Road’s transportation monopoly.
What about the popular accounts that insist, awe-struck, that even Genghis Khan was humbled by the Afghans? Poppycock, says Barfield. Genghis had "no trouble at all overrunning the place," and his descendants would build wide-ranging kingdoms using Afghanistan as a base. Timur (know to most of us as Tamerlane) ultimately shifted the capital of his empire from provincial Samarkand to cosmopolitan Herat, evidence of the role command over Afghanistan played in his calculations. Babur, who is buried in Kabul, used Afghanistan to launch his conquest of a sizable chunk of India and establish centuries of Muslim rule. Afghans seemed pretty happy to go along.
In fact, Afghan self-rule is a relatively recent invention in the full sweep of the country’s history, dating to the middle of the 18th century — and it took another century for Afghanistan to earn its reputation as an empire-beater. That’s when the Afghans trounced a British invasion force, destroying all but one of 16,000 troops sent to Kabul to teach the Afghan rulers a lesson.
But context is everything. Everyone tends to forget what happened after the rout of the British: In 1842 they invaded again, defeating every Afghan army sent out against them. True, they didn’t necessarily achieve their aim of preventing Tzarist Russia from encroaching on Central Asia; that had to wait for the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880), when they succeeded in occupying much of the country and forcing its rulers to accept a treaty giving the British a veto over future Afghan foreign policy. Then there’s the fact that the First Anglo-Afghan War preceded the end of the British Empire by more than a century. London, it should be noted, never intended to make Afghanistan part of its empire. Britain’s foreign-policy aim, which it ultimately achieved, was to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer state outside the influence of imperial competitors, such as the Russians."