The forever war.

by HARLEY

Posted by on 08/19/09 at 03:55 PM from

If Alexander the Great couldn’t subdue Afghanistan, and he understood tribes and tribal warfare, who or what else stands a chance?

Besides E=mc2.

Posted by AlexinCT on 08/20/09 at 06:37 AM from

The problem with most of the countries in Africa and ME, and Afghanistan is one of the best possible examples, is that to one degree or another most if not all of the people have no real concept of a nation. Their loyalty is to family and tribe primarily or only. That attitude creates some real difficulties. Afghanistan’s problem is compounded by the fact that there is really nothing there worth conquering, so nobody has really had a reason to make it work. Not even the Soviets. This was one of the reasons that the focus in the GWoT was shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq.

E=mc2 would taint the place and leave it unusable to everyone for the foreseeable future. Not to mention that genocide tends to make other people really not like you. Breaking the lock that the crazy fundamentalists that do not want education have on the people and teaching them about the concept of a nation – a long, daunting, and arduous task – is the only way to change things there.

Posted by AlexinCT on 08/20/09 at 06:39 AM from

Before some lunatic thinks that in the above comment I made the assertion that we went to Iraq to conquer it or steal their wealth , let me clarify that I was using it in the sense of military action intended to pacify the populace and the subsequent actions to build something of substance there.

Posted by on 08/20/09 at 04:49 PM from

Still not seeing the problem concerning E=mc2.

Iran and Pakistan, not to mention Russia and western China, would certainly start paying attention.
Of course this would only be possible in a “perfect world” ;-)

Posted by on 08/21/09 at 09:09 PM from

I saw a map of ethnic divisions in the area.  Pashtuns traditional territory takes up the eastern half or so of Afghanistan and the Western half (or more) of Pakistan.  If we really wanted a rational solution we would carve out the nation of Pashtunistan. While there are many Pashtun tribes and they fight against each other, a large part of the fighting takes places between them and all the other ethnicities of Arghanistan.  Of course the Pashtuns make up the majority of the Taliban and sometimes frame their fight as a sort of religious Pashtun Liberation Front. 

It is the old problem of colonialists drawing the maps (There is a long simmering dispute in Africa-can’t remember the two countries-because their border was drawn by a British diplomat on a very small map with a very dull pencil-taken out to scale, the line was about twenty miles wide).