Opus 2017-200: Afghanistan Viewed with a Little History

President Trump is preparing to send more troops into Afghanistan.  We need to try to get an historical perspective on invaders of this country.  We are familiar with the way in which the Soviets were decimated.  I believe even Alexander the Great bumped up against these people.  Let’s look back a hundred years.

At the turn of the 20th century Great Britain was in the process of subduing the Subcontinent of India.  When Winston Churchill, as a young man, took time off from the cavalry to be a journalist he was a front line observer of the cultures they were dealing with.  When he was there the British had the lower area under control but the tribesmen from the mountains were continually raiding and causing problems.  The Empire decided to take on the tribesmen.  Here is how Churchill described these people.

    “They, when they fight among themselves, bear little malice, and the combatants not infrequently make friends over the corpses of their comrades or suspend operations for a festival or a horse race. At the end of the contest cordial relations are at once re-established. And yet so full of contradictions is their character, that all this is without prejudice to what has been written of their family vendettas and private blood feuds. Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honour so strange and inconsistent, that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind.”  Kindle location, 128-132

I am not sure that anything has changed in the last hundred years.  I doubt if much changed for a thousand years.  I am not sure what we think we can do to change the situation.

Churchill, Winston S.  The Story of the Malakand Field Force, Project Gutenberg.

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