American Hubris: The Real Reason For The Afghan Debacle - Power not only corrupts, but stupefies the proud

 American Hubris: The Real Reason For The Afghan Debacle

Power not only corrupts, but stupefies the proud

Glenn Rocess

August 16, 2021

Taliban soldiers after taking an Afghan base in Kandahar (longwarjournal.com)

Afghanistan is the Graveyard of Empires. Afghanistan is a swamp, the more you move, the more you bog down. — Suhail Shaheen

Over the past twenty years, most of us have heard of Kandahar, the second-largest city in Afghanistan. It is a truly ancient city, having been founded by its namesake Iskandar in 330 BCE. “Iskandar” was the local version of the name “Alexander”, as in Alexander the Great. Archaeologists have documented a wealth of evidence of Greek influence in the Afghan hinterlands. After Alexander’s death, his empire was divided into the Successor States, and the region we now call Afghanistan was taken his general Seleucus, who founded the Seleucid Empire which lasted for over three centuries.

Twelve centuries later, the Mongol Horde descended upon Afghanistan, and from that period until the mid-19th century, the region was ruled (if with occasional interruptions) by Genghis Khan and those who claimed to be his descendants, including Timur the Lame (“Tamerlane”) and Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire (which name is a corruption of ‘Mongol’). One of the major ethnic groups of central Afghanistan today are the Hazaras who appear to be of Mongol descent, and who face bitter retribution from the Taliban as they reestablish their rule following America’s withdrawal.

Thus, despite what is so often claimed, Afghanistan is not a graveyard of empires. Instead, if one would rule in that ancient land, one must learn how the region was dominated in the past: through cruelty, torture, and mass murder. The aforementioned Hazaras only became established after the depopulation (read: genocide) of much of the region by the Mongols.

In other words, an invading nation may win the war on the battlefield, but unless they are willing to rule Afghanistan with an iron hand, that nation will lose the peace and be forced to withdraw as have the British, the Soviets, and now the Americans.

American soldiers boarding a transport aircraft to depart from Afghanistan (keshwarnews.com)

America’s loss of our longest war is just one more in the long, long list of examples of nations whose prior successes had convinced them that they would not, could not lose against lesser foes. Cyrus the Great was unbeatable until he met the Scythian Queen Tomyris, and it cost him his head. The Roman Legions were unstoppable until Arminius slaughtered three legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Napoleon won the Battle of Borodino in Russia and took Moscow, but was soon forced into a disastrous retreat, leaving much of his Grand Armée frozen in the snows behind. 130 years later history famously rhymed with Hitler’s loss on the outskirts of Moscow, heralding a similar and far more terrible retreat from the Russian steppe. “Pride goeth before a fall,” goes the abridged version of Solomon’s admonition, the examples of which are legion indeed.

In 2001, America was the world’s sole superpower, with the mightiest military the world had ever seen. More importantly, following the successes of ‘winning the peace’ in western Europe, Japan, and South Korea through iterations of the Marshall Plan, we had proven to ourselves that we would win not only the war, but also the peace. “But what about Vietnam?” one might ask, but surely that was merely an aberration.

In mid-October of that year, President George W. Bush faced a difficult choice. Osama bin Laden had been identified as the mastermind behind the attacks on 9/11, and the Taliban admitted that bin Laden was in Afghanistan. They stated that they would not hand him over to America or to an American ally, but would only hand him over to a third nation — one that “would not be intimidated by America.” Bush’s only options were to agree with the Taliban — and surely face universal condemnation at home for allowing bin Laden to escape American justice — or to invade Afghanistan and take bin Laden by force. He chose the latter. After all, what could the Afghans do against the enormity of American military might?

Perhaps if bin Laden had been found right away, America wouldn’t have locked itself in a two-decade-long struggle to “Americanize” Afghanistan. But he wasn’t found until nearly ten years later — not in Afghanistan at all, but in neighboring Pakistan. By that time America had invested so much blood and treasure in modernizing Afghan infrastructure and governance that we felt we couldn’t simply walk away. Besides, we were America — the rhymes of history don’t apply to us, right?

Perhaps the most tragic result of America’s failure: an entire generation of girls who have tasted education and self-determination for the first time in living memory, only to lose it all to hardline Taliban rule (npr.org)

But we Americans are unwilling to be as ruthless as Alexander was, or as genocidally cruel as the Mongols were. Moreover, Afghanistan has never been one people, but a hodgepodge of tribes and ethnicities with a millennia-long tradition of feuds, vendettas, and distrust. Add to that the eager support of Taliban insurgents by Pakistan, the general anger of the Middle East (and Islamic peoples in general) against America for our unwarranted invasion of Iraq, and covert support by Russia (who understandably wanted some payback for our support of the Afghan mujahedeen when the Soviets invaded in 1979), and one is left with a witch’s brew of bad juju for the occupying American military. It turns out that one can’t win the peace if there is no peace in the first place.

Future generations will view this time with the requisite 20/20 hindsight and say, “Just what the hell were you people thinking?” The answer is simple: America was ruled by overly proud men in control of the most powerful military in history, and when that particular chord is strummed by the fingers of Fate, history must rhyme once more.