Proceed to Peshawar

Book excerpt: Proceed to Peshawar is a story of adventure in the Hindu Kush Mountains and of a previously untold military and naval intelligence mission during World War II by two American officers along 800 miles of the Durand Line, the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They passed through the tribal areas and the princely states of the North-West Frontier Province, and into Baluchistan. This appears to be the first time that any American officials were permitted to travel for any distance along either side of the Durand Line. Many British political and military officers believed that India would soon be free, and that the Great Game between Russia and Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would then come to an end. Some of them thought that the United States should, and would, assume Britain’s role in Central Asia, and they wanted to introduce America to this ancient contest.