John Lawrence, a mid-19th Century British frontier official, once argued that his country’s biggest mistake was “occupying Afghanistan at all. The Afghan will bear poverty, insecurity of life; but he will not tolerate foreign rule. The moment he has a chance, he will rebel.”
As Loyn looks back on two centuries of warfare between Afghans and outside invaders, he shows how the Brits, the Soviets and the US never learned this lesson.
The terrific — and terrifying — tales in this short, sharp book allow that the Afghans can be beaten. The problem is that they don’t stay beaten.
Loyn, a veteran BBC correspondent, is far from being disdainful of our own military struggle. In fact, the author reserves his scorn for aid workers who achieve nothing while enriching themselves with $25,000-per-month salaries, and for the Kabul government — which fails the average Afghan catastrophically.
Here’s his verdict on President Hamid Karzai’s tenure: “Afghanistan did not need aid workers, it needed property surveyors and clean justice. But there was no appetite for that . . . as drug barons, warlords, and former mujahiddin competed for influence in a classic Afghan power struggle.”
But Loyn’s most-valuable chapters may be those covering the instantly forgotten Soviet debacle from 1979-1989. Moscow’s military and civilian commitment dwarfed our own — yet failed miserably. During the Soviet occupation, “150,000 people were arrested” and shut up in the notorious Pul-e-Charki jail outside of Kabul, and “50,000 of them were executed there.”
“In Afghanistan” targets the educated general reader, but it could educate generals: We aren’t exceptions to history, in Afghanistan or elsewhere.
Ralph Peters is a Post Opinion columnist and Fox News Strategic Analyst.
In Afghanistan
Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation
By David Loyn
Palgrave Macmillan