Originally published in the Friday Times on September 9, 2021
The return of the Taliban has left the world in a state of utter shock and amazement. In just a matter of days, the militant outfit’s accelerated sweep across the nation has helped it reclaim most of the provincial capitals, including the capital city of Kabul with virtually no opposition.
It would be reductive to perceive the prevailing situation as a hasty exit on part of the US as one attributed to botched geopolitical strategies and not account for the sheer resilience on part of the Afghan people in general that has helped deter colonizers despite their superior military might at different points in history long before Islamic militancy existed. The speed at which the current events in Afghanistan have transpired once again stands as a testament to that historical resilience, aided in part by possibly the most treacherous geographical terrain to wage war on.
While the colonizing states of the past i.e. France and Spain and especially Great Britain and the USSR have occupied territories for several decades and sometimes centuries on end, they met with a disastrous fate in Afghanistan.
The British Empire influenced the Afghan foreign policy for 40 years chiefly by controlling all neighboring states and subsidizing the government, it never could assimilate Afghanistan into the empire despite repeated invasions.
The more recent US occupation lasted two decades, and its predecessor, the USSR, a paltry 9 years which is minuscule compared to the occupancy of colonizing states in history.
To accurately analyze the current state of play, it is important to bring both history and context back into current affairs. The US may be the last, but certainly not the first nation to attempt to invade and occupy Afghanistan. The British and the Soviets preceded the US efforts long before, and much like the US failed in their attempts catastrophically.
It was during the eighteenth century – a time when the imperial struggle between Russia and Britain raged on – when the complex Afghan identity consisting of a fascinating mosaic of Islamic ethnic groups was born. Like many other countries occupying the Indian frontier, the nation emerged on the ruins of the great Mughal Empire, but unlike other nations that came under British rule a generation or two into their existence, Afghans preserved their independence due to their ferocious will to resist the British. And also because it ultimately suited the British for Afghanistan to remain sovereign and act as a buffer insulating the British Indian Empire from the threat of the rapidly expanding Russian Empire.
As the Russians pushed southward and the British East India company pushed northward, Afghanistan, due to its peculiar position sitting at the crossroads of Central Asia, ended up being the landlocked country in the middle – and thus began a period in history also famously known as the Great Game, which in part was about the British Empire peddling fear that the Russians will attempt to conquer and use Afghanistan as a springboard to either incite a rebellion among the Muslim minority population of the British Raj in India or declare an all-out war. Based on this confounded intelligence, the British launched two pre-emptive attacks to invade and occupy Afghanistan before the nefarious schemes of the Russians could come to fruition – one in the 1840s and then again in the 1870s, but met with a humiliating defeat each time.
It was during the first British invasion of Afghanistan that one of the worst military disasters in British imperial history occurred. Not accustomed to fighting in a jagged, dusty mountainous terrain, the British made one fatal error that cost them dearly: a garrison controlled by the British in Kabul was overrun by the Afghan army and had to retreat to the border of India as the blazing red uniform that had been the hallmark of the British military became easy pickings for the Afghan marksmen who decimated an entire army in course of the retreat.
In wake of the conflict, Afghanistan was regarded as strategic real estate with keen interest from both Americans and the Soviets to ingratiate themselves with top Afghan leadership to gain a geopolitical advantage over each other.
After having placed insurgents in the years prior, the Soviet Union, in 1979, deployed the 4th Army across the Afghan border. They made their way to Kabul, staged a coup, and installed a Soviet loyalist as the new leader of Afghanistan in an attempt to modernize and transition the country to communism. One way the Soviets strived to accomplish that goal in the first few years of their occupation was to try to break the Islamic identity and launched a persecution of the Islamic religion so severe that it provoked an almost suicidal resistance on part of the Afghans.
Seeing the opposition, by 1985, the Soviets had started employing genocidal policies to reinforce their occupation. It was here when the US saw its regional influence waning and took on a more clandestine role of arming the Afghan resistance with anti-aircraft weaponry, namely stinger missiles, to neutralize aerial attacks and by 1896 took control of the skies.
This had a domino effect as the ground forces fell soon after and the Soviet Union was left with no choice but to withdraw its expeditionary forces by 1989.
The British started out by trying to engage in combat with natives who had mastered traversing possibly the most hostile terrain on Earth to wage war on and ended with the British engaging in dialogue instead with the dominant political party of the time.
The Soviets adopted brutal methods to enforce their will upon the Afghan people in their drive to abruptly modernize an otherwise traditionally Islamic country but were met with a faith-driven uprising in the form of the Mujahideen that eventually overpowered and drove them out.
When the US invasion began, it subdued the Taliban fairly quickly by unleashing the full might of its airpower, but it was the Afghan people it failed to win over in the years that followed by botching reconstruction opportunities in the region, as well as its failure to establish a reformed rule of law that could maintain stronghold of the sovereign government in wake of the occupation.
To say this fight has entirely been about wanting to stop militants in their tracks for good and not gain valuable real estate in Central Asia to enhance geopolitical influence would be an understatement but despite the early strategic advantage, the US failed to sustain its presence in the long run.
Each time invaders have attempted to trespass and occupy Afghanistan during its 200-year warring history, they have stirred up a hornet’s nest. They break the cardinal rule of the Afghan politics which is now burnt in their consciousness: influence can be exerted in Afghanistan politically by subsidizing the government, but one thing that nation – militants or not – will never stand for is the presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil.