The battle of Talas & Chinese expansionism

China is a great enemy and we necessarily need to seek means to
counter it and overcome it in battle. The Chinese have always been
inveterate and ruthless expansionists who, like the Moslems,
understand only learn through the language of blows and punches.
Hence, reviewing the battle of Talas one of the most defining moments
in Asiatic history is worthwhile. We have to learn many military
lessons from the battle of Talas for a scenario like that is still
likely to be useful to unravel Chinese war machine.

In the space of 740-750 AD a numbers of events of importance
transpired in Central Asia. The Moslems from Merv and Khorasan grouped
under Abu Muslim and marched on the Umayyad Kalif and having routed
him placed the Abbasid Kalif as the head of the Moslem world. Shortly
after that Abu Muslim was commissioned to conduct Jihad in Central
Asia to exterminate the Kaffirs once and for all. It was a great low
point for the Western Turks. Their great Khan Su’lu, who was a bulwark
against the Moslems and the Chinese, in the wars of 720 and 723, was
assassinated by the Arabs. The pagan Turkic rulers of Samarqand and
Bokhara came under a heavy assault from the ghazis after the fall of
Su’lu when the Arabs with 300 giant trebuchets stormed the cities and
forcibly imposed Islam with the destruction of the pagan places of
worship. Archaeological evidence shows that these Turkic cities were
cosmopolitan with Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and the Tengri
cults of the Altaics being practiced. The Chinese in the meantime
eliminated a major rival of the Moslems, the Tibetans in a combined
operation with the Indians by smashing them in a 749 and reducing them
to vassalage. The pagan Turkic ruler of Tashkent, known as the Tudun,
was repeatedly pressured by the Chinese to pay tributes to the T’ang
emperor of China. The Uighurs in the mean time became the most
powerful Turko-Mongol group in the east and pushed the Qarluq turks
westwards. The Qarluqs remained the masters of the territory just west
of the Balkash lake. The Chinese appointed the Korean general Kao
Sien-chih to enforce the Chinese rule in central Asia and if possible
seize Baltistan, Gilgit and Wakhan from the emperors of Kashmir. Kao
marched right across the Pamirs and then took the Baroghil pass to
assault Gilgit and take its chief hostage. Thus he reduced Gilgit to
Chinese vassalage. Shri Mangala, the king of Kunduz was battling a
Tibetan invading force, when Kao promised him aid but betrayed him
once the former had beaten the Tibetans. Kao arrested him after
pretending to come to sign a treaty with his large Chinese army. Kao
to show his might as the Chinese viceroy of Central Asia, marched
suddenly on Tashkent and seized the city in 750 AD. He beheaded the
Tudun and appropriated the treasury of Tashkent, marking the pinnacle
of Chinese imperialist hegemony. The Turkic Tudun’s son shaken by the
Chinese advance, fled to his cousins, the Qarluqs, and sought their
aid against the imperial T’ang army. The Qarluq Yagbhu having built
his cavalry over the end of 750 started moving his horde towards the
Talas river from the northern bank. The Arabs under Abu Muslim
savagely crushed, the last attempt made by the populations of
Samarqand and Bokhara to rid themselves of Islam. Abu Muslim sent his
victorious commander of these wars, Ziyad ibn Salih, with a band of
40000 ghazis, to wage a Jihad on the Chinese. The Arab army marched
from the south towards Talas. Kao, itching to prove his might took
the cue and marched towards Aulie-Ata on the Talas with 100000 Chinese
troops in cavalry and infantry divisions. He totally underestimated
the strength of the Qarluq horde closing in from the north. On July
10th 751 AD the Qarluq, Arab and Chinese armies took to the field in
Aulie-Ata. The Chinese cavalry seemed to initially overwhelm the Arab
cavalry, but the Qarluqs forded the river and encircled a part of the
Chinese infantry butchering it to man. The Qarluq archers then shot
down Kao, shaking the Chinese center, which was rapidly assaulted by
the Arab heavy cavalry and destroyed. The infallible Chinese war
machine gave way under combined assault and they faced a heavy rout.
The Qarluqs fell upon their animals, baggage trains and supplies
carrying away all they could and receded back into the steppe. The
Arabs rounded up tens of thousands of Chinese and took them to
Samarqand from where Abu Muslim sent them to Baghdad and Damascus to
be sold as slaves, each worth a dirham. One Chinese survivor mentions
being kept as cattle in the Arab prison camps. Abu Muslim and Ziyad
made a huge buck out of this slave trade to pay their armies. More
importantly the Arabs forced the Chinese prisoners to teach them paper
making this allowed them the spread the ghazi manual, the Q’uran, with
even greater effectiveness. The same year the Southern division of the
Chinese Army faced a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Thais,
opening the once mighty empire for invasion by the Uighur Kha’Khans of
Mongolia.

The lesson to be learnt is that probably like the Moslem-Qarluq
combined assault, India, should draw China into Central Asia and then
combine with Japan, Russia and USA inflict a crushing blow on it and
split it up. Once communism goes away the Chinese will return to
normalcy on their own.

Madrassa and terrorists in the expansion of Dar ul Islam

Many Westerners, and their red Indian (communist) followers have been commenting
that the perversion of the Madrassa to mass produce talibs and the use
of the so called asymmetric warfare in the form of terrorists is a
recent innovation of the otherwise “peace loving” Islamic world.
Nothing can be farther from the truth. I thought, I should bring to
the lists attention that these were integral aspects of the Mohammedan
war machine. If one were to carefully study Indian history they were
very much in place especially during the Sikh wars and the Maharashtra
campaigns of both the Mogols and the local sultans.

However, they are best illustrated in the campaigns of the expansion
of the greatest upholder of Dar ul Islam- the Osman sultans. In their
revived expansion following recovery from Timur’s invasion, the
sultans Mehmet the Conqueror, Selim the Grim and Suleiman the
Magnificent, caliphs of Islam, took defeat and destruction into heart
of Europe. While the remarkable organizational ablities and strategic
planning of these sultans cannot be ignored at the heart of their
machinery lay two fundamental instruments that have been largely
ignored in secular surveys of their rise to glory. The Osman sultans
repeatedly proclaimed that they were waging wars for no other purpose
other than the expansion of Dar-ul-Islam. The sultans literally waged
an annual jihad for this purpose. It is said that when Suleiman in his
old age failed to go on his annual jihad, his daughter chided him that
he had forgotten the duties of a Ghazi.

The two primary instruments of Osman success was the ghulam army of
the sultan called the Yenicheri and the vast army of the irregular
sipahis. The Yenicheri was recruited by the devshirme system- it
comprised entirely of young christian boys who had been captured from
Eastern Europe and forcibly converted to Islam (The women landed up
in the sultan’s Haram). Cut off from home and family, traumatized by
circumcision, they spent all their youth in madrassas, learning the
Koran, rigorous military skills and absolute devotion to the caliph.
They disallowed from marriage or property. With their pent up
frustrations directed in battle with nothing to live for but to die as
a shahid they formed the elite war machine of the Sultan that
delivered the coup de grace for the Dar ul harb from whom they had
sprung.

The other force of the Osmans was the irregular Sipahis who used to be
sent off to fan over the country side a few weeks before the main
march of the Sultan, his Begs and the elite Turkish cavalry via the
well maintained military roads. These irregulars indeed were homologs
of the very Islamic terrorists of today- terrorizing the countryside
through incessant raids and slaughter of the hapless immates. This
prevented any distraction for the march of the main elite force. Any
Armenian or Greek will tell you how effective these irregulars were as
late as the last century.

This model of action with the irregular terror specialist followed by
the elite division is essentially what Pakistan uses in both Kashmir
(Kargil) and Afghanistan. The analogy is complete when one sees the
production of the Talibs by the truck load, like the Yenicheri, to
become shahids to expand the Umma. If one looks harder, this analogy
is not a merely chance coincidence but a time tested model inherited
by the ISI quite directly from their Kilafat precursors.

Guenther Sontheimer

Many Germanic indologists have been rightly or wrongly criticized with regards
to their studies. The older ones like Max
Mueller, as I said before on this list are in the grey zone: they did some good
and some bad for India. A wide range of
Indians got acquainted with the contents of the vedic texts through their
translation. On the downside their erroneous
views sometimes stuck on much longer than they needed to and produced a great
deal of confusion in the minds of the
Indians. More recent ones like Witzel, while making some insightful observations
have suffered from a very narrow world
view and failed to really understand the depth of IE culture in India.The more
recent crop including Witzel also appear to
be too philo-Marxist to be objective in their studies. Whatever the case, in the
general (and in my opinion somewhat
flawed) Indian reaction against the external Aryan origins, many of these German
investigators have been getting the
stick. I believe we should be cautious in our reaction towards these foreign
scholars. One example that was quite different
from the main stream was Guenther Sontheimer. His studies are of immense value
whatever maybe ones view towards
AIT. He is one of the few who saw the entire spectral continuity in Indo-Aryan
tradition from the Brahminical core to the
tribal fringe: the whole range of local phenotypes mingling into each other.
Thus he saw India very differently from the
traditional western indologist, who pictured everything in terms of a conflict
between the intrusive Indo-European and the
native tribes. Whatever the merit of his own conclusions, his data reveal that
the Indo-European core of India was rather
diverse, including, but going beyond vedic mainstream and have a profound
conduit for assimilation at the fringe.
Sanskritization driven by the brAhmaNas did not destroy native tribal cultures
but merely formalized it and fortified through
elite imitation*.

For biography see:
http://www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/abt/IND/index/mitarbe/sta/inmem.htm

Now see how the desi hindu-hating media interprets his work:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?art_id=160982\
60

*This is how Hindu India preserved its diversity. Christianity and Islam have
been pernicious influences because they have
precisely aimed at erasing this diversity through their iconoclastic
monotheistic zeal

Political science

One amongst the many problems that beset the Indians was the analysis
of politics. The failure to be original in this direction was in part
responsible for the Indians to rejuvenate during their civilizational
clash with Islam and Christianity. A proper political science that
could provide a basis for action against these vicious monotheistic
ideologies is not in place even after we have won a temporary victory
against them. So it is very important that we load cannons suitably
before we resume our life and death struggle against the enemies of
our civilization. It is much harder now for us than any time in the
past as we have descended to a lower military status and to enact a
good politics military might is the first requirement.

We have had a variety of models from the past to study that may be
worth discussing: The vedic kingship with the yaga as a means of
conflict reduction. A brilliant solution in an Aryan+Aryanized
society. Still it was not a foolproof method as Magadhan imperialism
was challenge it failed to overcome. Perhaps the very development of
KR^ishna’s political carrier was an attempt to restore the old Vedic
system against the Magadhan imperialism which through a series of
events culminated in the bhArata war. However, its effects were only
to delay the ultimate rise of Magadha.

Magadha’s rise was probably back by its band of political theorists
with the kuTa nIti as its basis. But parallel to kuTa nIti was an
offshoot of the vedic system- the janapada system or Indian democracy.
This system while appealing to the modern tastes was not
really useful as a defense model for society at large plagued
by invaders from the West and Central Asia. Parallely in the South one
can see what may be termed the Tamil model or puranAnuru model. In
this model tried to reinstate the original vedic model with greater
emphasis on real life claiming conflicts as well as the more violent
equivalents of the gavishThi.

The imperialist and democratic models were combined excellently by
RajaRaja and Rajendra of the Chola expansion period.

But an important point to note is that Indian Imperialism and
Democracy is an indegenous product. It is not as the Western scholars
would like us to believe: A product of inspiration from Alexander or
Darius or some Magna Carta drawn by by some semi-civilized blokes.
This I would rate as one of the most important tactic of the Western
ideologists, more than the Aryan invasion debates, to keep the Indians
as a suppressed lot. Our Indian peaceniks who oppose our N-Bomb and
commit other traitorous acts bite this misrepresentation of the
origins of Indian imperialism/democracy hook-line and sinker. We must
destroy them first before taking on other external enemies. Real
political science must be taught to our people rather than that
worthless civics that we learnt in school. Currently Political science
is largely the forte of some paan chewing goondas rather than erudite
Aryas.