To make sure his vanquished subjects never rebuilt their power, he launched a policy that the Assyrians had pursued three millennia earlier and that Stalin would try a few decades later. He moved whole populations around the country to separate them from natural allies and plop them down among people whom they didn’t trust and who didn’t trust them. Entire tribes of Pushtoons were sent from south to north; thousands of families were forced to move from the northern steppes to areas south of Kabul. This autocratic program did have a salutary side effect: it shuffled the separate peoples of
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