4,500 soldiers and their 12,000 camp followers retreated from Kabul in a long wintry death-march that only one European survived.5 Shah Shuja fell to assassins on April 5, and the country disintegrated into feuding bands led by tribal warlords. Dost Muhammed reclaimed his throne, for what it was worth, and Afghanistan reverted to its original status. But for the making of 15,000 ghosts, nothing at all had changed.
Later in the same century, the British took another turn at taming Afghanistan. Never successful at unifying his nation, Dost Muhammed died in 1863.6 He had outlived his three favorite sons, so the two dozen remaining settled into a spirited civil war that alarmed both the neighboring British in India and the Russians in central Asia. These anxieties fueled the infamous Great Game, in which both parties competed for influence over Afghanistan using all manner of spies and covert operations. When it appeared to the British that their own position was weakening among the tribal factions in Afghanistan, military intervention again seemed necessary. The Second Afghan War (1878–1880) commenced with a swift invasion by 33,500 troops on three fronts that promised complete success.7 Revenge sweetened the air, but the atmosphere soon changed. Cholera swept through the ranks as daytime temperatures soared above one hundred degrees in the shade. Commanders were warned not to visit troop hospitals because they might not be able to bear the shock of what they would see. Fortunately, the war soon ended—or so everyone thought—in 1879. The British government, conducting two wars at once, was glad to declare its victory in Afghanistan. The cause had been just, the casualties from combat relatively low, and the naysayers happily hushed. But then, as in the previous war, a high British official was butchered in Kabul. Reprisals came swiftly as the angry occupiers rounded up rebels and hung them ten at a time.
1. Modern Afghanistan
The war caught fire again and burned brightly. At the battle of Maiwand (July 27, 1880), a British force of 2,500 men suffered a devastating defeat near Kandahar. Reinforcements under Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Roberts soon arrived, including a mobile city of 10,000 soldiers, over 7,000 camp followers, more than 4,700 horses and ponies, nearly 6,000 mules and donkeys, and over 13,000 other transport animals. The march of this army from Kabul and its triumph at Kandahar made Roberts (“flawless in faith and fame”) a rare hero in the course of this raw and unromantic war; however, in the end, the general warned the West that Afghanistan should be left alone.8 He added prophetically: “It may not be very flattering to our amour propre, but I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us the less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.”9
A century later, the Russians did indeed dispatch over 100,000 troops to install a puppet government in Afghanistan (1979–1989).10 The twentieth century naturally brought new weapons to bear on the tribal warlords, who still controlled the countryside. Land mines killed and crippled Afghan civilians in unbelievable numbers (and still do); Soviet jets, helicopters, and tanks pounded guerilla forces armed and led much as they had been against the British. As before, the invaders seemed certain at first of an easy victory: “It’ll be over in three or four weeks,” Leonid Brezhnev promised Anatoly Dobrynin.11 For years the Soviets had prepared for such an invasion, building useful roads and runways allegedly to help the Afghans, while the West pulled back and put its money into Pakistan.12 Taking up the cause once espoused by Lord Roberts, the United States finally seized upon this Soviet intervention as a winning endgame in the long cold war. Détente crumbled with President Jimmy Carter’s recall of his ambassador to Russia, a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games hosted by Moscow, a grain embargo, and a mounting U.S. military budget. On the day of the Soviet invasion, Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised the president, “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War.”13 Under President Ronald Reagan, the CIA’s operations in the region became its largest in the world as thousands of Soviets and millions of Afghans fell or fled. American money and munitions kept the mujahideen (jihadist) warlords trained and equipped for their bloody crusade.14
In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered his famous speech likening Afghanistan to “a bleeding wound”; this pronouncement signaled Russia’s weakening resolve to dominate Afghanistan. To hasten the outcome, the United States decided later in the same year to supply Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the mujahideen via Pakistan.15 Terrorists today still have access to aging stockpiles of these dangerous weapons, but at the time the gamble seemed worthwhile: Soviet air losses mounted rapidly to 118 jets and 333 helicopters.16 The quagmire deepened. Finally, on February 15, 1989, the last Russian soldier retreated across the Amu Darya, leaving behind more than 13,800 Soviet dead as another superpower abandoned its hopes to subdue Afghanistan.17
For the next twelve years, victorious Afghan rebels struggled for control of the ravaged country. One warlord masquerading as prime minister callously bombarded the capital city on a daily basis, killing some 25,000 of his own people.18 Nations that had armed and trained these warlords to defeat the Soviets showed little interest in this dismal civil war. Chaos, crime, and corruption took hold and inflamed new resentments against the West. Helpless and hopeless, many Afghans welcomed a stern “law and order” movement touted by a militia of black-turbaned religious students called the Taliban (Seekers).19 Led by Mullah Muhammad Omar and financed in part by the billionaire Osama bin Laden, who had once assisted the CIA in its transfer of weapons to the mujahideen, the Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996.20 The fighting continued as thirteen other factions, including the Northern Alliance, stubbornly resisted the Taliban; but most of Afghanistan eventually fell under the authoritarian rule of these fundamentalists. Defying the outside world, these extremists blew up the gigantic Buddhas carved in the cliffs of Bamian, beat women senseless who failed to wear their burqas, and abetted the insidious growth of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Then dawned a deceptively fine day in September 2001 that defined a new era among nations. Out of crystalline autumn skies screamed four jetliners on paths of unspeakable destruction. Suddenly the sights of another superpower swung around to Afghanistan.
Intervention came quickly and with new weaponry. Within a month, a thick alphanumeric soup of sophisticated aircraft boiled above Afghanistan. Crews aboard B-1 and B-52 bombers spewed tons of munitions into the mountain hideouts of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Joining the fray were EA-6 Prowlers, F-14 Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, F-16 Falcons, F-18 Hornets, A-10 Thunderbolts, MC-130 Talons, KC-135 Stratotankers, UH-60 Black Hawks, HH-53 Jolly Green Giants, AC-130 Spectre gunships, and even RQ-1 A/B Predator drones flown by absentee pilots seated at computer screens in Riyadh.21 Stirring the pot were but a handful of Special Forces on the ground. Unlike the 100,000 Soviet invaders airlifted in the twentieth century, or the immense traveling cities dispatched by the British in the nineteenth, America and its coalition partners relied upon space-age technology to fight an asymmetrical war in and above Afghanistan.22 Rather than pack their cigars on camels, U.S. pilots could reach the battlefield at Mach 1 and return that same day for a smoke at their bases a thousand miles from central Asia. Even so, a few American personnel found themselves on Afghan ponies, fighting low and slow as if back in the regiments of Lord Roberts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proudly proclaimed the horse-borne assault on Mazar-i-Sharif “the first U.S. cavalry attack of the twenty-first century.”23 In the opinion of General Tommy Franks, the image of those horsemen seemed as iconic as the Marines raising Old Glory on Iwo Jima: “It was as if warriors from the future had been transported to an earlier century.”24 The tactic worked, and brought the latest superpower its first victory in the war. The Taliban fled, al-Qaeda soon abandoned its main terrorist training camps, and foreign invaders sanctioned—once again—the regime of a friendly ruler in a rebellious land.
The complete history of this latest invasion has not, of course, been written.25 So far, one senior U.S. intelligence official (notably anonymous in his critique) claims that “the conduct of the Afghan war approaches perfection—in the sense of perfectly inept.”26 For his part, the general in command of the war declared even