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Visitors to the Khyber Pass are often stunned to find that the pass itself lies over five highway miles inside Pakistan and stands more than a thousand feet above Torkham, the point at which the main road connecting Pakistan and Afghanistan intersects the Afghan border. Historians also note that Afghanistan’s leaf-shape outline was crafted not with the will or welfare of its people in mind, but with the buffering of the surrounding countries from one another as the primary criterion.
    Possibly the most important and historically far-reaching consequence of the Great Game era, particularly for the Marines of ⅔, was the British installation of Abdur Rahman Khan as emir, or king, of Afghanistan in 1880. Rahman Khan, the “Iron Emir,” took a fierce nationalistic stance, and sought the complete religious unification of the country. A Pashtun, he focused his ardor for Sunni Islamic conversion on the pagan “infidels” of the secretive ridges and valleys of Kafiristan. While the years since their arrival in the Hindu Kush had seen the Pashtuns chipping away at the lands and customs of the Kafir, intermingling blood and customs in many cases, Rahman Khan took a “convert or die” stance to the people who had yet to switch their religious allegiance to Sunni Islam.
    And while some chose death through resistance, most acquiesced to conversion—but to varying degrees. In the past, many Afghans whom outsiders had converted quickly disavowed Islam as soon as those having effected their new religious adherence departed their villages. However, in the Pech River region, particularly in those villages of the upper reaches of the Korangal and the Chowkay valleys, some not only embraced Sunni Islam under Rahman Khan’s press, but adopted its most extreme form. Calling themselves the Safis, meaning “the Pure Ones,” the people of the Korangal, upper Chowkay, and segments of the surrounding valleys, while continuing to speak in dialects of the millenniaold Pashai language, would become the most conservative Muslims in all of Afghanistan, if not the world. Kafiristan had become Nuristan, literally “Land of Light”—meaning “Land of the Enlightened Ones.”
    Afghanistan, however, wasn’t the only part of the globe where European colonial powers sought to influence lands dominated by Muslims. In North Africa, while the Great Game raged far to the east, a group of ultraconservative Muslims, inspired by burgeoning anticolonialist sentiments, conceived the Salafiyya movement. Members of this group, who saw themselves as strict adherents to the Salafi, which means “following the forefathers of Islam,” would many decades later radically alter the course of human history, igniting the Global War on Terror through their extremist acts. Often incorrectly referred to as Wahhabism (in reality a small offshoot of the Salafiyya movement, Wahhabism emerged through the interpretations of the Salafi by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century on the Arabian peninsula), Salafis would become increasingly powerful, widespread, and ever more extreme throughout the twentieth century, establishing madrassas throughout the Middle East as well as in Pakistan for the teaching of ultraconservative, ferociously anti-Western interpretations of Islam.
    In addition to learning about the Pashtuns and their culture, practicing conversational Afghan phrases (in both Pashto and Dari, both official languages of Afghanistan, although Pashto predominates the area where the Marines would deploy), and studying the nuances of Sunni Islam, the Marines of ⅔ focused much of their predeployment studies on a period of the country’s history particularly relevant to their forthcoming tour, the Soviet-Afghan War. While the latter was triggered by and fought for starkly different reasons than that of the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Marines would glean both tactical and cultural insight by researching individual battles of the period.