Why British Soldiers Feel Baffled In Afghanistan
There is an excellent piece from The Times correspondent in Afghanistan trying to understand the unexpected retaliation by the Afghans. “British commanders seem genuinely surprised by the level of resistance they are facing in Helmand. The Ministry of Defence described the Taliban attacks as ‘unexpected’.
“Unexpected? This is a country that has been battling foreign forces and their new-fangled weapons, almost as a way of life, ever since Alexander the Great arrived with his elephants.
“The Soviets were still being ‘surprised’ by the resistance when they finally pulled out in 1989, leaving 50,000 dead and a million dead Afghans.
“The British never ceased to be baffled by Afghanistan, where their trained troops with expensive equipment struggled to contain shadowy insurgents behind rocks with cheap muskets.
“The Afghans have a grim, semi-secret weapon: a wounded history, in which Britain played a central part that Britain has all but forgotten, but they have not.”
This detailed article can be read here.
5 Responses to “Why British Soldiers Feel Baffled In Afghanistan”
if the eternal afghan resistance to foreigners is the explanation, why is it that the resistance is confined to ethnically Pashtun areas, and mainly to four southern provinces at that? And why is that its great now than its been for several years?
This is about poor governance in the south by the increasinlyg tired Kharzai govt, about the politics of opium, and about support from across the border in MMA ruled parts of Pakistan. Whether it should have been expected is another matter, but not because of the eternal history of Afghanistan
My God Swaraaj…what a great post! I absolutely agree!
Pardon me while eat a mango and meditate.
I can’t take credit for either the Pakistan post earlier or this Afghanistan post for the simple reason that I merely reproduced the reports published in the two wellknown conservative but respected (more towards the right) British publications (The Economist and The Times).
Good you enjoyed this one. I am enjoying a mango anyway (it’s said to be grteat for virility if taken with milk). Ever since I have been doing meditation I don’t get angry any more. If you want to learn meditation feel free to contact me…Cheers
A little to much “virility” and a glass of milk will kill me dead Swaraaj. I suspect that was your intention?
These are South American mangoes. They are pithy and not very sweet. They do not allow them enough time to fully ripen before they pick them. Fairly crappy really. Makes for a bad attitude after paying more than two dollars each for them. The sad product of another crappy trade treaty our government has negotiated.
I suppose India will be shipping better and cheaper Mangoes?
There is a political phenomenon known as “blowback�. It represents the unintended consequences of foreign policy actions. For example, the United States and Great Britain overthrew a functioning democracy in Iran in 1953. Then, after years of extreme repression under the Western-backed Shah, the Iranian people finally rose up and installed an Islamic regime fundamentally hostile to the West.
We are living with the consequences to this day.
A similar process is going on in Afghanistan right now.
Afghanistan was always a wild and a lawless country, and there have been numerous attempts over the centuries to tame it. The British had a go in the 19th century. So did the Russians more recently.
In the years of the Russian occupation the West supported Al Qaeda and the narco-trafficking Afghan warlords. After the Soviet withdrawal we allowed that poor, dry, opium-ridden country to go back to its lawless ways.
The Afghans have been fighting each other for over thirty years. The irony here is that it was the Taliban who finally brought order and peace to the land in the mid nineties. It was the Taliban who stopped the heroin trade.
Now we are fighting the Taliban again, heroin is on the rise, and British troops are being killed in some obscure corner of the world that most of us never even knew existed. How many of you had heard of Helmand Province before the latest troop deployments?
It is worth asking who the Taliban are. On film they look like some ragged ghostly army haunting the dusty mountain wildernesses between Afghanistan and Pakistan, like vengeful warriors from a medieval past.
Well I can tell you EXACTLY who the they are. They are not ghosts. They have a history. They are the orphaned sons of thirty years of the Afghan wars, brought up in the madrassa schools of Pakistan, funded by our great “ally� Saudi Arabia.
The Taliban are oppressive to women because they have never known women. They have never known mothers or aunts or sisters or wives. They have had a peculiar, violent, repressive form of Islam whipped into them for endless years. That’s how they grew up. In other words, this is an army made up almost entirely of abused children.
This is what I mean by “blowback�. The Taliban are the unintended result of Western foreign policy, the creation of those two Islamic allies in the war on terror, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and of years of shameful neglect. We allowed them to fight our wars for us during the Cold War era, taking on the might of the Soviet Empire, and then left them to rot.
Tell me: why should we expect them to be grateful now?
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