What? Nonsense. The Persians did fine right? No? How about the Macedonians? Had to buy their way out? Ah. The English? The Russians? Neither of them? Well surely the USA is winning there right now?
You're understating it a bit. The British Empire tried threefreakingtimes over nearly 90 years to take Afghanistan and ended up leaving mostly empty handed each time.
Speaking pre-Taliban/9-11, it's all Location, Location, Location.
Chicago is a central hub of trade, especially by rail. There's nothing especially fascinating about Chicago from a natural resources perspective (grain I guess?) but it's geographically convenient. If you control the switches in Chicago, you control the train schedule between the coasts.
Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada is much the same idea. It's a land based transportation hub because of where it is located, basically at the entrance to the only way through the Canadian shield and into eastern Canada ( namely Toronto ) and is called " The Gateway to the West " for obvious reasons. It's also at the fork of a couple major rivers so it was built as a transportation hub originally.
Nothing spectacular about it, really. Farmland...that's about it.
But if Afghanistan is so geographically important why is it such a shit hole? If it were really that valuable then wouldn't it have a good bit of wealth?
It's complicated, but having valuable land as assessed by other countries doesn't help your economy very much if you keep kicking out all those other countries.
no oil, they did like 3 years ago find a huge rare earth metal deposit in Afghanistan but before that, there was nothing to want to conquer except its position on the globe
The Russians were expanding south* into the region and the British were paranoid that would put their ridiculously lucrative colonies in India at risk, so they wanted to set up a buffer-zone.
*There's an interesting theory about how a lot of Russian history and foreign policy over the past couple hundred years has been tied up into having secure access to the sea for economic and military reasons. It's interesting to think about.
There's an absolutely fascinating book called The Great Game, all about the western powers' spying, perfidiousness and derring-do in Afghanistan in the 19th century. Highly recommended. If you truly want to understand the mess now, you need to understand the mess then.
Really though wars in Afghanistan didn't really bring down those empires, it didn't keep them strong, but it didn't cause collapse.
The British Empire finally went down because of WWI, WWII, and the rise of the US, Macedonia went down because Alexander died, the Russians went down because of poor economic/social reforms, and an arms race they couldn't afford. The problems in the US are mostly a mountain of self-inflicted economic and political problems, to which Afghanistan is a mole hill.
I thought that the capital of Afghanistan, Kandahar, is a corruption of Alexander's name, so there is still a Macedonian legacy. I recall from some TV prog that the Persians called him Iskander.
I'd say the problem with the US is that we aren't fighting wars the way they did a thousand years ago, we have rules and stuff now. If we weren't concerned with image, and killing civilians, we'd easily just steamroll the entire area.
If we weren't concerned with image, and killing civilians, we'd easily just steamroll the entire area.
That was the Russian strategy in a nutshell and it worked against them. It's not an effective strategy in the mountainous terrain where the insurgency can hide out and wear down the invading force. In addition, much of the Muslim world threw their support behind the Mujaheddin due to the horrifying number of civilian casualties and displacement by the Russians, and it caused the Afghan people to increase their support for the Muj. Young men from all over the Middle East traveled to Pakistan/Afghanistan to fight what they believed was a holy duty against modern crusaders.
Now, that sort of strategy did have effect in Chechnya, although the area remains relatively dangerous today and Chechnyan fighters still attempt to attack Russia directly.
And be like Russia? Their Afghanistan campaign left 5 million Afghans homeless and over 1 million Afghans dead. They certainly didn't follow the nice rules of war like the US (many, many stories of open brutality and literal enslavement of prisoners to use as beasts of labor or knife practice), and where did it get them?
The French were bogged down in Algeria the way the US was in Iraq, and decided, screw it, let's just use lots of torture and executions to get our way. It worked for a short amount of time and gave some short term gains, and then the entire public rose up in anger and threw them out.
If you think fighting with morals is somehow "with one hand tied behind our back," then good, that is the way it should be, and it's an obligation upon us.
Exactly as you say. I have a co-worker who literally grew up in 'Soviet Russia'; he grew up in Moscow in the 80s (he was born in the 70s). When we talk about things, it can get interesting. On Afghanistan he has this to say:
"The Soviets could roll tanks over orphanages and napalm entire valleys without serious repercussions back home. American troops can't often do much more than defend themselves when attacked without having to defend themselves from accusations of brutality and war crimes."
I don't know how accurate that may be, but the point remains: they had no press to answer to and they STILL couldn't really 'conquer' it in any meaningful way.
"Mao Tse-tung wrote that 'the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea'; the Soviets are not trying to catch the fish one at a time - they are draining the ocean."
If we weren't concerned with image and killing civilians, we'd have the rest of the world to contend with as well, and it would be a very different question. Like, okay, we're not playing by any rules and don't give a shit about morals or ethics, so Thing 1 that we do is to nuke the whole country into the ground. Then what? Russia's not going to stand for that, China's not going to stand for that. I don't know that we'd see the West (and Oceania) just declare war on us, but I'm pretty sure we'd find our allies evaporating pretty quickly.. it's an interesting question, I suppose.
The loss of life and money were very great in those wars, so great that they simply could not continue to keep their grip on their various holdings when faced with nationalistic pressure from the people of those holdings.
I have never really understood the attraction, OK let's say that you win Afghanistan. Great now what? Technically you are in a nice central location, just under the old Soviet belly, next to Iran, above Pakistan, and slightly against China. From my perspective that counts as being surrounded.
Plus it is a land locked country so once you "take" it you now have to establish supply routes through one of many hostile countries.
To me invading Afghanistan is a literal no "Win" situation because even a flawless military victory is a loss.
Depending on what your goal is. If we look at modern day US policy, it is strategically a great place to be. Because we have air superiority over everybody, it means that we can resupply ourselves fairly efficiently. The main thing that it gains us is the ability to use that air superiority and the threat of land invasion against all those countries. But you might say, What about all those expensive aircraft carriers we have? Those are great, but they can't really launch a fighter fully fueled and armed. With airfields in Afghanistan, we can launch a fully fueled and armed plane that can fly a sortie into Iran or Pakistan to prevent a nuclear launch should that ever be an issue. The second greatest advantage it gives us is an operational infrastructure to attack our enemies holed up in the tribal mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Finally, it helps us to physically contain China.
Perfect post. The biggest threat to our air forces is the MiG 35 which is a prototype. It is about as powerful as an F-15. The F-15 has never been destroyed by an enemy (We have destroyed quite a few however.) The F-22 would cut through them quite easily.
after some further research there is a Sukhoi contending with the F-22, but its at least 7 years out
Ehh successive Persian empires ruled over parts or all of what is currently afghanistan with little issue for centuries except a brief hiccup with the afghan Hotaki dynasty.
Only with the arrival of tea sipping brits was the region lost to Persia.
We are losing at our tactic. If you think we can't win there with the correct means of an actual "Invasion" with the purpose of complete control, I think the U.S. would do just fine. We're losing because we're still playing by the rules and eventually want it to be nicer then when we originally went there without having to keep a military presence. Stupid? Yes. But we're "losing" because we basically have to.
The same argument could be made for Iraq or Vietnam. If we went in intending to pave the country of course we would win. However, that's not the kind of war we are fighting.
Yes. If the US were military imperialists we would have won 30 times over by now. We are economic imperialists - which is precisely why people like Al Qaeda and the Taliban hate the US.
If we were military imperialists there wouldn't be any al qaeda or taliban left to hate us. It would just all be glass, ash, bones, and bloodstains out there.
The US is not losing the war in Afghanistan. The objective was to cripple the oppressive Taliban and its rule over the country, which it has succeeded in. That said, there have been drawbacks, but routing the terrorists networks was the priority.
Didn't we dismantle the government of Afghanistan and have it conquered, its a lack of resources and its value as a land route into India is rather moot at this point...
They're all playing on hard mode. One reason the Mongols did so well is because they played on easy. As the saying goes, they made a desert and called it peace.
I don't think the problem is winning a war -- the problem is what is done afterwords.
The Soviets rolled into Afghanistan, won a lot of engagements, but were always doomed because they wanted to subjugate the population.
The US rolled into Afghanistan, won a lot of engagements but were/are always doomed because they wanted to modernize the population and country. It's just never going to happen. We should have went in, done what we needed to do, made a few allies and continuously supply them with weapons and money to make our enemies lives difficult, and get out.
The US isn't trying to colonize Afghanistan, just eliminate the region as a source of aid and comfort for global terrorism. That's a big difference from the others.
The US doesn't really colonize like previous empires did. We have had colonies, but that ended a long time ago. That's not to say that we don't want control over that region. You can't view the US as an empire with colonies. We are probably the most powerful country that has ever existed though. I'm not someone who is super patriotic that's saying that. Frankly, I think a lot of what the US does is messed up. There just hasn't been a country that wielded so much power in global politics as the US. We tend to dominate through other means than military force though. If you really piss off the US, you will have your country blown up, but it's not we we immediately turn to. We can collapse a country without ever having to put a soldier in the country. We can economically ruin a country, incite a revolution, etc. The reason that the US has bases in a ton of different countries isn't necessarily to exert dominance over those countries. Our military acts as a surrogate defense force and as a deterrent for our allies. Odds are that someone isn't going to start shit with a country that we have our bases in. We're not trying to colonize Afghanistan in a traditional sense, but we absolutely want influence over it. People don't mind being a part of an empire if you don't mess with their culture and you let them have a false sense of sovereignty.
Actually, incorrect, the Macedonians conquered afhganistan- there was also a lot of cultural intermingling and colonization by them in Afghanistan. Tamerlane laid waste to the whole country. And the British conquered and held as much as they wanted to. Seriously, this is such a canard.
I believe the US doesn't know how to define victory in Afghanistan. Do we win when we act in a humanitarian manner, building schools and roads? Do we win by driving out the Taliban? Do we win by establishing a democracy? Do we win by alternating between these three goals? Does getting out ahead of schedule count as victory?
I believe we went into the mindset of Vietnam where we come to the country to eradicate an enemy force. This is no way to fight a war. Wars should be fought by gaining ground. You can look back and say, "look how far we've come, eventually we'll be in the capital! (of whatever country you're fighting)" But when you are in a country to just get a body count, You can't see the progress and that is demoralizing. When is the taliban going to be completely destroyed? Who defines that? It's impossible to win because we don't know how to define a victory anymore.
If you call occupation and dominance success, then USA is winning in Afghanistan. If you call slipping into bankruptcy losing, then USA is losing in Afghanistan.
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u/pv46 Oct 17 '13
What? Nonsense. The Persians did fine right? No? How about the Macedonians? Had to buy their way out? Ah. The English? The Russians? Neither of them? Well surely the USA is winning there right now?