{"id":22366,"date":"2018-10-29T08:00:47","date_gmt":"2018-10-29T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/?p=22366"},"modified":"2020-11-10T09:46:10","modified_gmt":"2020-11-10T14:46:10","slug":"the-doormat-of-empires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/blog\/afghanistan-the-doormat-of-empires\/","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan – The Doormat of Empires"},"content":{"rendered":"

Afghanistan – The Doormat of Empires<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I first traveled through Afghanistan in 1963 at age 19. You could go anywhere. I met guys who bicycled from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul with no problem.\u00a0I saw women in full <\/span>tshadris<\/span><\/i> (the complete burqa with a mesh netting to see through) walking next to women in high heels, knee-length skirts, and beehive hairdos on the streets of Kabul. It was a wonderful, exciting \u2013 and peaceful \u2013 place.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was back in 1973 and the end had begun. It\u2019s been a ghastly mess ever since. The U.S. military has been bogged down there for the last 17 years with no light at the end of the tunnel. Thus, we frequently see, from news magazines like <\/span>TIME<\/span> to journals like <\/span>The Diplomat<\/span><\/a>, the old bromide of Afghanistan being \u201c<\/span>The Graveyard of Empires<\/span><\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a myth. Afghanistan has been steamrolled by conquerors for millennia.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

I spent considerable time in Afghanistan all through the 1980s with various groups of Mujahaddin fighting the Red Army of the Soviet Union. Take a look at this picture:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"pictureWhen my son, Brandon, was a senior at the Virginia Military Institute in 2005, one of his courses was on Modern Military History. In his lecture on the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan, the professor showed this photo slide of \u201cfour typical Mujahaddin fighting the Soviets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Brandon\u2019s hand went up. \u201cYes, Cadet Wheeler?\u201d the professor called on him. \u201cProfessor,\u201d Brandon responded, \u201cactually only two of them are Afghans \u2013 the man standing and the man in the middle, a commander named Moli Shakur. The man on the right is Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. The man on the left, who took Dana into Afghanistan, is my father. The picture was taken in November 1988.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Shocked, the professor stammered, \u201cAre you sure, Cadet Wheeler?\u201d Brandon answered, \u201cYes, professor. I\u2019ve known Dana all my life. Pictures like this are all over my father\u2019s study. And I recognize my own father.\u201d It was a pretty funny moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Afghans are incredibly brave people. They had the guts to take on the Soviet Red Army face-up, armed initially with single-shot, bolt-action <\/span>pre-WWI <\/span><\/i>Lee Enfield carbines:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"AfganPhoto by Jack Wheeler<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Nonetheless, as we\u2019ll see, the Soviets had them fully defeated by summer of 1986, until President Reagan began supplying them with Stinger missiles. So let\u2019s take a walk down the path of history to see how, for thousands of years, Afghanistan has been not the graveyard but The Doormat of Empires.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 327 BC, Alexander the Great married a beautiful princess named Roxanne in Balkh, the capital of Bactria.\u00a0She was the daughter of the King of Bactria, Oxyartes, and Alexander had just conquered his kingdom. Bactria is now northern Afghanistan \u2013 Alexander\u2019s wife was Afghan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Alexander subdued all of Afghanistan because, for over 200 years, it had been part of the Persian Empire he had vowed to conquer. The tribes of Afghanistan had been conquered by the founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus (599-530 BC) in the 550s. After Alexander\u2019s death in 323, Afghanistan was ruled by his general, Seleucus Nicator (358-281 BC) as part of the <\/span>Greek Seleucid Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Afghanistan\u2019s second-largest city (after the capital Kabul) is Kandahar. The city was founded by Alexander in 330 BC and is, in fact, named after him, from the original <\/span>Iskandaria<\/span><\/i> (Alexandria \u2013 <\/span>Iskander<\/span><\/i> being the Persian pronunciation of Alexander\u2019s name).<\/span><\/p>\n

In 250 BC, the Greek governor of Bactria, Diodotus, saw his chance to break free of the Seleucids and established the <\/span>Greco-Bactrian Kingdom<\/span><\/i><\/a>. It expanded until it became known to the Romans as “the extremely prosperous Bactria of a thousand cities.” Under the rule of Demetrius Aniketos (Greek for “Invincible,” r. 200-180 BC), Greco-Bactria expanded to control present-day eastern Iran, Pakistan, and northwest India.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"MapUnder Menander Soter (Greek for “Savior,” r. 165-130 BC), the Greek kingdom expanded across northern India to what the Romans called the Menander Mons (Mountains of Menander), today\u2019s Naga Hills that form the border between India and Burma. The religion and art of the entire region was a syncretism known as Greco-Buddhism.<\/span><\/p>\n

After a series of invasions by Hun-like nomadic peoples from China and Central Asia \u2013 the Yuezhi, Parthians, and Scythians \u2013 Greek rule of Afghanistan and northern India was reduced to a pocket of the Punjab and came to end under Strato II in 10 BC. <\/span><\/p>\n

A branch of the Yuezhi called the Kushan came out on top and became so Hellenized in taking over Greek Bactria they adopted the Greek alphabet and Greco-Buddhism, worshipping Zeus and Herakles (Hercules) as a demigod.<\/span><\/p>\n

The <\/span>Kushan Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a> expanded in the 1<\/span>st<\/span> century AD to control a vast swath of Central Asia and India. By the 3<\/span>rd<\/span> century, it was so huge that it fell apart \u2013 in the west to resurgent Persians known as the Sassanids (named after Sassan, grandfather of their founder Ardashir I, r. 206-241 AD).<\/span><\/p>\n

The <\/span>Sassanid Persians<\/span><\/a> conquered what is now Afghanistan in the 240s, imposed their religion of Zoroastrianism upon the inhabitants, and incorporated it into a gigantic empire stretching from current Kazakhstan to Egypt. Their main focus, however, was war with Rome.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 259, King Sharpur I captured Roman Emperor Valerian, and after killing or enslaving 70,000 Roman soldiers, flayed Valerian alive and kept his skin as a trophy. <\/span><\/p>\n

Sassanid wars with Rome and Constantinople continued for 350 years, culminating in the Persian army of Khosrau II destroying Jerusalem in May, 614, slaughtering 90,000 Christians in cold blood and demolishing the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. <\/span><\/p>\n

This prompted Emperor Heraclius in Constantinople to invade Persia in 621, wiping out Khosrau\u2019s army at the Battle of Nineveh in December 627, and terminating the Sassanids. <\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately for mankind, the resultant anarchy made it easy for wild tribes to pour out of Arabia and seize Jerusalem, the whole Middle East, and Persia in the name of Islam 20 years later.<\/span><\/p>\n

The main city of western Afghanistan is Herat. It is dominated by a huge ancient fortress known as the Citadel of Alexander, <\/span>Qala-e-Iskander<\/span><\/i>, because it was originally built by Alexander in 329 BC.\u00a0 In 652 AD, fresh from sweeping across Sassanid Persia, an Arab army seized Herat. From there, Arabs and Moslemized Persians began forcing Islam upon the peoples and tribes of Afghanistan. It took them 300 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, in the 960s, a group of Turkic slaves, guards of the Arab-Persian rulers, seized control of the eastern Afghan city of Ghazni.\u00a0The son of one of them, Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030), conducted a horrific reign of Moslem pillage and slaughter, directed primarily at Buddhist-Hindu India, prompting historian Will Durant to comment:\u00a0 “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The Ghaznavid horror was ended by a far greater one:\u00a0The Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan (1162-1227). In 1220-21, Mongol butchers decimated much of Afghanistan, killing over a million people each in Herat and Balkh alone. A Chinese scribe with the Mongols registered surprise at seeing a cat in the ruins of Balkh \u2013 surprise that the Mongols left one single thing alive.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Afghanistan has never recovered to this day.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the <\/span>Mongol Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a> dissolved in the late 1300s, a new one arose, led by yet another horrific conqueror, Tamerlane (Timur-e-Lang, 1336-1405).\u00a0He was a Moslem Persian-speaking Mongol-Turk from near Samarkand in present-day Uzbekistan dedicated to massacring entire cities \u2013 Moslem or infidel, it didn\u2019t matter to him.<\/span><\/p>\n

In creating his <\/span>Timurid Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a>, his first invasion of Afghanistan was to wipe out a just-rebuilt Herat in 1370. Then he rebuilt it again from which to rule Afghanistan. By 1390, his subjugation of Afghanistan was complete. <\/span><\/p>\n

100 years after Tamerlane, a new conqueror arose.\u00a0Zahir ud-din Mohammed (1483-1531) was born in the Fergana Valley of current Uzbekistan.\u00a0Dreaming of ruling an empire like his great-great-grandfather, Timur, he adopted the nickname of Babar (“Tiger” in Persian), recruited an army of Tajiks, crossed the Hindu Kush, and captured Kabul in 1504.<\/span><\/p>\n

He then made a deal with the new Shah of Persia, Ismail I, to divide Afghanistan in half, Ismail getting the west, him the east. With his back covered, he launched his completion of Timur\u2019s goal of conquering India.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

With his victory over the Sultan of Delhi at the Battle of Panipat in 1526, the <\/span>Mogul Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a> was born. The Hindus of India called Babar “The Mogul,” The Mongol.<\/span><\/p>\n

Afghanistan remained divided between the Persian and Mogul Empires for 200 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1730s, a Turkmen bandit chief in northern Persia named Nadir figured out how to seize control of the disintegrating Persian Empire and declared himself Shah. Even before he consolidated his control over Persia, Nadir Shah (1688-1747) focused on subduing revolts in Afghanistan.\u00a0He conquered Herat in 1730, then Kandahar and all of Afghanistan in 1738.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Herat, Nadir Shah recruited Pushtun fighters of the local Abdali clan into his army. He was particularly taken with one of them, Ahmad Abdali, for his “young and handsome features,” who became his personal attendant or <\/span>yasawal<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0Sufficiently pleased with the very personal services such a yasawal provided, Nadir promoted Ahmad \u2013 at age 16 \u2013 to commander of the Pushtun forces, and then later promised to make him King of Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly thereafter, in 1747, Nadir Shah managed to get himself assassinated.\u00a0Ahmad thereupon declared himself heir to Nadir\u2019s Afghan dominions and his title <\/span>padshah durr-i dawran<\/span><\/i>, “king, pearl of the age.” He was 25 years old. The Abdalis changed their tribal name to Durrani, after Ahmad\u2019s new title.<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, the country of Afghanistan was born.\u00a0Ahmad Shah Durrani (as he is known to history, 1722-1773) and his army quickly gained control of Kandahar, Ghazni, and Kabul, took Herat from the Persians, and on to take Nishapur and Mashad in northeast Persia. Then he went for India, taking Punjab, Kashmir, and sacking the Mogul capital of Delhi in 1757.\u00a0 He declared a <\/span>Jihad<\/span><\/i>, Holy War, against the Hindus and slaughtered them wholesale.<\/span><\/p>\n

His particular animus was towards Indian Sikhs, who constantly rebelled. He finally could not put them down, retreated back to Kandahar, and died at age 50.\u00a0The <\/span>Durrani Empire<\/span><\/i><\/a> subsequently disintegrated.\u00a0By the early 1800s, Afghanistan was fragmented into warring tribal units with the Durranis controlling only the Kabul Valley. So, in stepped the Brits.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Great Game had begun. England had established their rule over India \u2013 the British Raj \u2013 and Russia was spreading its rule over Central Asia.\u00a0Afghanistan was in between.\u00a0By 1809, the Brits had a relationship with the last Durrani ruler, Shuja Shah in Kabul.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Shuja Shah was overthrown and there was a chaotic Afghan Civil War that lasted until the leader of the Barakzai tribe, Dost Mohammed (1793-1863), managed to gain control of Kabul and Kandahar in the 1830s.\u00a0When Dost became buds with the Russians, the Brits freaked and decided to try and put Shuja Shah \u2013 an exile in India for 30 years \u2013 back in power.<\/span><\/p>\n

Big mistake.\u00a0The <\/span>First Anglo-Afghan War<\/span><\/i> started well enough.\u00a0The Brits took Kandahar, Gazni, then Kabul, Dost fled, and Shuja was installed as Afghan Emir in 1839.\u00a0The Brits then tried to keep Shuja in power with a garrison of less than 5,000 troops.\u00a0Dost\u2019s son, Akbar Khan, began a guerrilla war against them.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 1842, the Brits had to flee.\u00a0Led by the amazingly incompetent General William Elphinstone, 4,500 soldiers (of whom less than 700 were European, the rest mostly Indian), along with 12,000 Indian servants and Afghans, retreated out of Kabul for Jalalabad. Of the 16,500, only one, army surgeon William Brydon, made it to Jalalabad alive.<\/span><\/p>\n

This horrific annihilation of January 1842 is the source of the “Graveyard of Empires” myth.\u00a0It was never repeated.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

By September, a British army had marched back into Afghanistan and leveled Kabul to rubble. Akbar Khan was put to the sword.\u00a0Dost Mohammed promised to do as he was told, which he did as Emir until his death in 1863.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Sher Ali Khan, Dost\u2019s son as Emir, began making nice with the Russians, the Brits tried to send a diplomatic mission to Kabul which Sher Ali stopped at gunpoint.\u00a0This triggered the <\/span>Second Anglo-Afghan War<\/span><\/i> in September 1878.\u00a0When Sher Ali found that Moscow would not help him against 40,000 Brit soldiers, he fled, and the Brits took Kabul and Kandahar without much problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

By May of 1879, the new Emir, Mohammed Yaqub Khan, had signed a peace treaty with the Brits that granted Afghanistan sovereignty in exchange for England formally controlling all Afghan foreign affairs.\u00a0When warlord revolts broke out in Ghazni, Herat, and Kandahar, the Brits handily snuffed them out.\u00a0Then they replaced Yaqub with his cousin Abdur Rahman Khan. This second war was over by July 1880.<\/span><\/p>\n

Abdur Rahman (1840-1901) was Dost\u2019s grandson.\u00a0He spent his emirship pacifying and putting down constant tribal revolts through his country.\u00a0In 1893, he and British diplomat Mortimer Durrand negotiated the demarcation of the border between Afghanistan and British India.<\/span><\/p>\n

The resultant Durrand Line demarcates Afghanistan\u2019s entire eastern border (now with Pakistan), 1,610 miles long, from China to Iran.\u00a0It was confirmed by Afghan rulers by treaty in 1919, 1921, and 1930 \u2013 then rejected in 1949 after Pakistan became independent. Nonetheless, it remains the border today:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"MapMortimer Durrand then negotiated a treaty between Russia and England in 1895 to demarcate the <\/span>Wakhan Corridor<\/span><\/i>, which we went through last week in \u201cThe Pamir Knot.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A panhandle 100 miles long and 10-40 miles wide stretching all the way to China, it was designed so that the British and Russian Empires would, however thinly, be separated by a strip of Afghanistan.\u00a0The Wakhan now separates Tajikistan from Pakistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"MapRahman\u2019s son, Habibullah (1872-1919), signed a Treaty of Friendship with Britain in 1905 and made a state visit to Buckingham Palace in 1907.\u00a0He resisted every demand of the Ottoman Sultanate \u2013 the spiritual leader of Islam \u2013 to join World War I on Turkey and Germany\u2019s side.\u00a0He brought Western medicine to his country and made a number of educational and legal reforms.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Tragically, he was assassinated in 1919, with heavy suspicion falling on his son, Amanullah \u2013 which was increased when Amanullah seized power and declared himself King of Afghanistan. As revolts mounted against him, he decided to distract them by declaring war on the infidel British. Thus, began the <\/span>Third Anglo-Afghan War<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Brits, however, were ill-equipped to fight it, with their units in India, and the Indian Army, hollowed out just after WWI.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Amanullah gathered thousands of Afghan tribesmen and, on May 3, 1919, invaded through the Khyber Pass.\u00a0The Brits quickly rallied, and they, together with Gurkhas with bayonets, chased the Afghans back across the Khyber.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fighting became dicey, and a lot of it took place in what is now ultimate Apache country, Waziristan.\u00a0Yet, it took only a month before Amanullah sued for peace on June 3.\u00a0Yes, the Third Anglo-Afghan War was won by the Brits in one month.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amanullah lasted until 1929, when one too many revolts broke out, he abdicated, and his commanding general, Mohammed Nadir, went to India to ask for British troops.\u00a0The Brits complied, and a British army marched to Kabul and installed Nadir as King.\u00a0The main achievement of Nadir\u2019s rule was to combat tribal revolts against him by setting the tribes against each other in race wars, primarily Pushtuns against Tajiks and Hazaras.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Hazara teenager bumped him off in 1933. Then Afghanistan got lucky.\u00a0Nadir Shah\u2019s son, Mohammed Zahir Shah (1914-2007), became King at age 19 \u2013 and Afghanistan entered a golden age of peace that lasted 40 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

I was lucky to be there during that golden age, back in \u201963. When I was there in \u201973 on my way from Europe to India, Zahir Shah\u2019s cousin, Mohammed Daoud, had staged a coup with Soviet money.\u00a0Soviet weapons flooded in, along with Soviet agents.\u00a0The Afghan Communist Party exploded in growth \u2013 so much so it alarmed Daoud.<\/span><\/p>\n

With good reason. Its leader, Hafizullah Amin, decided Daoud was more Afghan than Communist and staged a coup in April 1978, having Daoud and his family shot. All Afghanistan erupted in uncontrollable rebellion.\u00a0In December 1979, Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, ordered the Red Army to invade. KGB and Spetsnaz agents entered the presidential palace in Kabul on December 27, shot Amin, and installed another Communist, Babrak Karmal, as the Soviet puppet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Karmal lasted until 1986, when the Soviets replaced him with the thuggish head of KHAD, the Afghan KGB, Mohammed Najibullah. As of August 1986, the Soviets had won. The Afghans were defeated. I saw it with my own eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then, on September 26, 1986, the first Stinger missiles were fired, shooting down two Soviet helicopters, and the war was back on.\u00a0On February 15, 1989, the Soviets finished their retreat.\u00a0 It was Stinger missiles from Ronald Reagan that defeated the Soviets, not the invincible unconquerable Afghans who make a graveyard of every army that ever attempted to conquer them in all of human history.<\/span><\/p>\n

As you\u2019ve now seen, this is rubbish. So how come the greatest military force on the planet \u2013 America\u2019s \u2013 remains stuck in Afghan quicksand? Primarily because of the perverse incompetence of the CIA and U.S. State Department in refusing to recognize what really is the problem.<\/span><\/p>\n

That problem is the <\/span>ISI<\/span><\/i>, the Pakistan CIA, <\/span>Inter-Services Intelligence<\/span><\/i>. Ragingly radical Islamist, it\u2019s the sponsor of the Taliban. No ISI, no Taliban. Langley and Foggy Bottom are completely aware of this, yet they resolutely refuse to do what it takes to get rid of the ISI. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Further, State has an anaphylactic allergy to changing a country\u2019s status quo, particularly its borders, and especially recognizing its existence as a failed state that can\u2019t be resuscitated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Afghanistan has a 19<\/span>th<\/span>-century <\/span>raison d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/span><\/i> \u2013 it was created quite specifically and for no other reason than to be a buffer state between the British Empire in India and the Russian Empire in Central Asia.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

That rationale shifted into a 20<\/span>th<\/span>-century context of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union \u2013 but with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the rationale has, in the 21<\/span>st<\/span> century, been rendered totally obsolete.<\/span><\/p>\n

The world is a better place, clearly and objectively, because the Soviet Union no longer exists. The world will be a better place if Afghanistan no longer exists. Just as what ended the Cold War was the disintegration of the “Union” of Soviet Socialist Republics, so the War in Afghanistan can only end with Afghanistan\u2019s disintegration.<\/span><\/p>\n

The solution is not a futile effort of “nation-building” \u2013 <\/span>that<\/span><\/i> effort is doomed to fail \u2013 it is nation-building\u2019s opposite:\u00a0get rid of the problem by getting rid of the country. It\u2019s a salvage operation \u2013 carve the wreck up and parcel it out to its neighbors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Which means we first have to look at the neighbors. The problem of Afghanistan cannot be solved in isolation, but within its geopolitical context. Those neighbors are Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.\u00a0You can\u2019t really count China\u2019s tiny roadless border at the tip of the Wakhan Corridor.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Brits created Afghanistan in the 19<\/span>th<\/span> century as a Pushtun Empire \u2013 Pushtuns ruling the other ethnic peoples in the country. Indeed, “Afghan” is a Pushtun word, another name Pushtuns apply to themselves. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, Pushtuns are way less than half of the population \u2013 14 million out of 35 million, or 40% \u2013 yet they continue to dominate both the government and the Taliban.\u00a0The Taliban is essentially a Pushtun movement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the Durrand Line divides \u201cPushtunistan\u201d so that there are more than twice as many Pushtuns in Pakistan \u2013 32 million \u2013 than there are in Afghanistan. The Afghan Pushtuns have always dreamed of being united with their ethnic brethren right across the border in Pakistan \u2013 so let Pakistan absorb them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tajiks comprise a full 33% of Afghanistan\u2019s population, 11.5 million \u2013 way more than Tajiks in Tajikistan (7.5 million out of 8.5 million total. They live in a wide swath of northern Afghanistan with 750 miles of border with Tajikistan reaching west to the border with Iran). They\u2019d love to join Tajikistan, and they\u2019d be welcomed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Uzbekistan\u2019s Afghan border only runs 85 miles. To the south of it lives a bit more than 2.5 million Uzbeks. The region is run by a warlord named Abdul Rashid Dostum, who\u2019s also Afghanistan\u2019s current Vice-President. A deal with him to retain control of his region as part of Uzbekistan is doable.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Even though Turkmenistan\u2019s Afghan border runs about 450 miles, it\u2019s mostly uninhabited wasteland.\u00a0Less than a half-million or about 400,000 Turkmen live in the region. The leader of Turkmenistan is an odd duck dictator, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamadov. Nonetheless, no need to antagonize him by excluding him \u2013 he\u2019ll jump at the deal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Next is Iran. Afghanistan\u2019s border with Iran runs 580 miles \u2013 but there are almost no Persians in Afghanistan.\u00a0Western Afghanistan is mostly Tajik, as is Herat, the largest city in the region. So there is no reason to carve up Afghanistan for Iran\u2019s behalf.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s central Afghanistan, a region called the Hazarajat because it\u2019s peopled by descendants of Genghis Khan\u2019s Mongols called Hazaras.\u00a0They are Shia Moslem and number (together with Sunni Hazaras called Aimaqs) about 4 million.\u00a0Since they bear an extreme antipathy towards the Taliban and Pushtuns in general, most likely they would opt to join Tajikistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

In sum: The basic problem is the obsolescence of Afghanistan as a nation-state. The solution is: \u00a0northern and western Afghanistan to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan; eastern and southern Afghanistan to Pakistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

And get rid of Pakistan\u2019s ISI.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few years ago, when Adm. Mike Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, \u00a0he was worried about “the Tajik-Pashtun divide that has been so strong.\u201d In an interview, Admiral Mullen said, \u201cIt has the potential to really tear this country apart. That\u2019s not what we are going to permit.” <\/span><\/p>\n

Trapped in a 19<\/span>th<\/span>-century thought-box, Mullen, like almost everyone else at Langley, State, and elsewhere, doesn\u2019t grasp that it\u2019s exactly what we should not only permit, but should work to achieve as the solution to this war. For what could be called the Dissolution Solution to Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to end the necessity of putting American and NATO soldiers in harm\u2019s way there. It\u2019s time to ask, why should there be an Afghanistan?\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Helicopter<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Christmas<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jack Wheeler is the founder of\u00a0<\/b>Wheeler Expeditions<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Afghanistan – The Doormat of Empires I first traveled through Afghanistan in 1963 at age 19. You could go anywhere. I met guys who bicycled from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul with no problem.\u00a0I saw women in full tshadris (the complete burqa with a mesh netting to see through) walking next to women in high […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":366,"featured_media":22370,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[10641,10628,8951,8947,10629,10632,10630,10461,10633,3776,8943,10637,10635,10638,10634,10099,10631,3046,3353,10636],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/image4.gif","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/366"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22366"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43266,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22366\/revisions\/43266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22366"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=22366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}