Afghanistan: The Road Not Taken

By Benjamin Welton

The War in Afghanistan will soon become the longest military engagement in US history (the US Marines occupied Haiti 1915–34), and even though the administration of President Donald Trump recently signed a peace deal with the Taliban, a small cadre of US servicemen will remain in Afghanistan past 2020. There are some other nasty parts of that agreement, as the Kabul government will release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners in exchange for only 1,000 captives from the Afghan national forces.[1] Furthermore, the peace deal leaves open the possibility that the Taliban could return to central power in Afghanistan within a year or two.

We have seen this movie before. The American experience in Afghanistan closely mirrors the prior experiences of the British and the Soviets. We failed to learn many important lessons. Most of these failures come not from incompetency (although that is a large problem), but from a flawed worldview. Until this worldview is corrected, there is nothing to stop the mistakes of Afghanistan from being repeated down the road.

The first section will look at Afghanistan's history with outside forces, specifically conquerors like Alexander the Great of Macedon and Tamerlane. The next three will discuss Great Britain's wars in the country, which began in 1839 and lasted until 1919. The fifth section will discuss the Soviet-Afghan War and why the USSR felt the need to back an unpopular and inefficient Communist government in Kabul. The final section will discuss how the United States botched its own war in Afghanistan and what might have been done differently under a more competent ruling elite.

Pre-Modern and Early Modern History

Afghanistan is a rugged land dominated by frigid mountains in the north and deserts in the south. The majority Pashtuns are a fierce and warlike people who are prone to blood feuds. From the perspective of the outside world, Afghanistan has no strategic value—it is a “poor and landlocked country with no resources except opium.”[2]

Despite this, Afghanistan has been invaded by outside powers numerous times. Alexander the Great and his fearsome Macedonian army conquered parts of Afghanistan and established the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom in the city of Bactria (today's Balkh). When ethnically Greek kings ruled Afghanistan, the country enjoyed a period of unprecedented civilization. Several cities were either built or expanded, such as Alexandria Ariana (Herat), Alexandria Arachosia (Kandahar), and Bactria itself. The kingdom became a crossroads of Hellenic and Eastern culture, with Buddhism, Greek religion, and Persian learning mixing and mingling.[3]

Macedonian Greek power in Central Asia came at a terrible cost. The later Greco-Roman historian Plutarch described Alexander's conquest of Afghanistan as a desperate fight against a “hydra-headed monster.” Even before the birth of Christ, the tribes of Afghanistan made for terrifying enemies that could mobilize into roving guerrilla bands with ease. After Greek power faded from Central Asia, it was replaced by the Turco-Mongol states of the Timurid and Mughal Empires. The Chagatai Turkic ruler Babur (1483–1530) made Kabul his capital. From there, this descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane conquered the Punjab and captured the city of Delhi, the cities of the Rajput Confederacy, and the remaining Afghan states that were not loyal to him. Babur's empire, the Mughal Empire, would rule India until the coming of the British.[4]

The modern state of Afghanistan began with Ahmad Shah Abdali (1722–72). Elected as king (“shah”) in 1747, Ahmad Shah Abdali was an ethnic Pashtun who ruled from the southern city of Kandahar. Ahmad Shah Abdali managed to carve out a royal state from a patchwork of tribal entities, and by the time of his death, “he had reconciled the turbulent Pushtun [sic] tribes, subdued most of present-day Afghanistan, extended his empire to Delhi and into Persia, and earned the name of Father of his People.”[5]

Subsequent rulers failed to maintain unity over the ethnically-mixed state. For much of Afghanistan's history, Pashtuns have been in control and this rarely has sat well with the country's ethnic minorities (Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras). Another problem that continues to bedevil Afghanistan is its geography. Given the horrific violence of Tamerlane and Babur, India has a vested interest in keeping Afghanistan as weak as possible. Pakistan, with its own terrorism problem, has an interest in keeping the violence contained in Afghanistan rather than in its own North-Western frontier.[6] Iran, like its predecessor Persia, remains interested in the city of Herat.

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References

1. Hirsh, Michael (2020, Mar. 13). “Did Trump Cave to the Taliban?”. Foreign Policy.
2. Black, Conrad (2020, Feb. 26). “Trump Ready to Keep Promise to Get Out of Afghanistan”. The Epoch Times.
3. Holt, Frank (2012). Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan. University of California Press. p. 100.
4. Singh, Sneh (2017, Aug. 14). “How the British East India Company managed to colonise India for nearly 200 years”. Your Story.
5. Braithwaite, Rodric (2013). Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-89. Oxford University Press. p. 14.
6. Farooq, Umar (2013, Feb. 11). “Civilians bear brunt of Pakistan's war in the northwest”. Foreign Policy.
7. Braithwaite, p. 19.
8. David, Saul (2006). Victoria's Wars: The Rise of Empire. Penguin Books. p. 17.
9. Ibid., p. 19.
10. Ibid., p. 34.
11. Ibid., p. 45.
12. Ibid., p. 48.
13. Ibid., p. 54.
14. Ibid., p. 67.
15. Ibid., p. 71.
16. Ibid., p. 72.
17. Braithwaite, p. 24.
18. McNamara, Robert (2019, May 15). “The Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880)”. Thought Co.
19. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (2003). A Study in Scarlet. The Modern Library. p. 124.
20. Rahimi, Mujib Rahman (2017). State Formation in Afghanistan: A Theoretical and Political History. Bloomsbury. p. 186.
21. Foschini, Fabrizio (2019, Sep. 21). “The 1919 War of Independence (or third Anglo-Afghan War): a conflict the Afghans started (and ended)”. Afghanistan Analysts Network.
22. Coll, Steve (2018). Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Penguin Books. p. 421.
23. Braithwaite, p. 29.
24. Tucker, Spencer C., Ed. (2017). Modern Conflict in the Greater Middle East: A Country-by-Country Guide. ABC-CLIO. p. 4.
25. Braithwaite., p. 30.
26. Ibid., p. 31.
27. Ibid., p. 32.
28. Ibid., p. 123.
29. Ibid., p. 64.
30. Ibid., p. 48–53.
31. Ibid., p. 103.
32. Ibid., p. 44.
33. Ibid., p. 114–5.
34. Ibid., p. 275–6.
35. Ibid., p. 305–6.
36. Burns, John F (1996, Oct. 6). “Afghanistan Reels Back Into View”. New York Times.
37. Gant, Jim (2009). One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan. Nine Sisters Imports. p. 31–42.
38. Tyson, Ann Scott (2014). American Spartan: The Promise, The Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant. William Morrow. p. 296–7.