Everything Afghanistan • Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires, Most Recently American.

Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires, Most Recently American.

Afghanistan has once more earned its well-deserved title, “Graveyard of Empires.”

Retreating from combat is one of the two most dangerous military operations (the other is river crossing or amphibious landing under fire). Hopefully, the US can disengage from Afghanistan with the same skill and dexterity it did from Iraq. A long-overdue peace deal with Taliban would pave the way for an American withdrawal.

The US will continue strikes by drones, warplanes, and attacks by special forces from a small number of fortress bases. Pakistan will be cajoled or bribed by Washington to keep its forces active against Pashtun tribal fighters. Washington and London will keep issuing cheery claims about the success of the Afghan War.

But the hard truth cannot be avoided. All the concentrated military-technological might of the United States and its allies has been defeated by fierce Pashtun tribesmen whose primary weapons are courage, patience and legendary determination to drive out foreign invaders.

The United States had hoped to pound or bribe the Pashtun fighters that comprise Taliban and its allies, the Haqqani Group and Gulbadin Hekmatyar’s Hisbi Islami, into submission, or split them by selective peace talks.

Such tactics, backed by massive air power and ethnic cleansing of some three million Sunnis, worked for a time in Iraq.

They have failed in Afghanistan. Every sort of modern weapon save nuclear devices was used against the Afghan resistance: carpet bombing, laser-guided bombs, fuel-air explosives, cluster munitions dispending blizzards of steel shards, mines, helicopter gunships, tanks and giant armored trucks, swarms of drones, satellites, aircraft that disable roadside bombs. Deadly AC-130 gunships bristling with guns and 20mm cannon. Death squads attacking at night to kill Taliban sympathizers. Heavy artillery and rocket batteries.

Soon after 9/11, I wrote in a US newspaper article that US intervention in Afghanistan would be a disaster for all concerned. I’d been with Pashtun mujahidin, fighting first against the Soviets, then with Taliban battling the Afghan Communists. These Pashtun mountain warriors were the bravest men I had seen in covering 14 wars. They enjoyed war, even reveled in it. There was no way western forces were going to defeat them.

All the western claims about fighting “terrorism” or abused women in hijabs could not fully conceal that Afghanistan was also a war being waged for strategic geography, minerals, pipeline routes, and the desire to bar China from the region.

Source: marketoracle.co.uk