Holding Afghanistan is a nightmare for its takers

There must be a reason Afghanistan becomes the centre of a great game, involving superpowers and empires, every other century. How arrogantly one after the other the superpower of the day has waltzed into Kabul only to come out the other end with their hardware sometimes intact, but never their pride. That may be just half the tale, but it’s the most important and instructive part. Everybody, it seems, repeats each other’s mistakes.

And the problem has never been taking Afghanistan. It’s holding it that’s a nightmare. It gave the British the worst drubbing of the colonial period, bled the Soviets ‘by a thousand cuts’, and has reduced the American occupation to a tragicomedy. Strangely, all three came conquering under completely irrational expectations and quickly found themselves having to dump entire treasuries on the wretched country. A face-saving exit, then, was only a matter of time.

The first British ingress of the 19th century was driven by a completely unrealistic fear of Russian expansion into Afghanistan. Of course, it was not the British government that ruled India and decided to descend, rather ascend, across the western frontier. It was the East India Company, a private joint stock corporation with a larger standing army than any sovereign in Europe and shareholders whose fortunes put most continental royals to shame.

Based on completely wrong, rather twisted, intel (WMDs or yellow cake of the day?) the British effectively undertook a preemptive occupation of Afghanistan, rubbishing reports that the Afghan king, Dost Muhammad Khan, was far more interested in an alliance with the British than the Russians. Instead, Calcutta Residency lords with zero experience or information about Afghanistan decided to replace Dost Muhammad (a forebear of Mullah Omar) with Shah Shuja, among whose direct descendants counts one Hamid Karzai. Straight forward old school regime change.

Sure enough, it wasn’t quite like taking over the Indian plains where you could choke the farmers or loot the aristocracy. And with no funds coming in they had to cut down on protection money and road tax, something even the ruthless Persian warlord Nadir Shah was mindful of paying. Not much later, of the mighty British army that marched into Afghanistan with almost 60,000 soldiers, only one reached the Jalalabad fort alive.

The Soviets didn’t let much out of the Iron Curtain about their rationale for the war, but Gen Zia’s government was convinced they were after our warm water ports, or that’s how they sold it. But the more the Russians used force to establish their comrades in Kabul, the more the Afghan guerilla resistance inflicted losses on them. Eventually the Red Army had to cut and run and the Kremlin was bankrupted beyond repair. Later, Gen Musharraf would boast in his book, “We did what Napoleon and Hitler couldn’t do, we beat the Russians!”

The Americans were repeating the mistakes of previous occupiers. The more they have targets to fire at, the more they simply grow opium, make windfalls, buy arms and fight back. Washington has long held Islamabad’s alleged ‘good vs bad Taliban’ policy responsible for its losses in the war. Since Trump, though, they’ve also cut off the financial lifeline and military training, effectively ending the alliance whose high point was Pakistan’s elevation to ‘major non-Nato ally’. And they couldn’t have rubbed it in better than by appointing Zalmay Khalilzad — former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, UN and perennial Pakistan hater — as special envoy for Afghanistan.

Yet, Zalmay is doing exactly what he blasted Pakistan for suggesting all through the long war. The Afghan resistance might never again be able to take Kabul, but it is effectively running more than half the country, reducing the capital to a cage. And just like the British and Russians, the Americans can no longer throw any more money into Afghanistan. Also like other times, it’s not the Americans that will decide the finer details of any possible arrangement, but the Afghans. History and hindsight, it seems, have been little help for empires crossing over into Afghanistan.

The Afghan resistance might never again be able to take Kabul, but it is effectively running more than half the country, reducing the capital to a cage