There is an old Afghan folk tale that portrays a foreigner balancing two connected trays attached to the handheld weighing device used in South Asian bazaaars. The foreigner carefully loads one tray and then the other with frogs. Just as he puts the last few frogs on one tray and then the other, some frogs on the first tray hop off. As the foreigner returns those frogs to the tray, frogs on the second tray hop off or attempt to jump to the other tray. Before long, all of the frogs are in motion, moving in one direction or another, and the foreigner gives up.
In 53 B.C., marching through Syria toward Afghanistan, the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus found Parthian general Spahbodh Surena blocking his way. Their armies clashed at the Battle of Carrhae, which while little known was one of the decisive battles of world history.
The Persian-speaking Parthians were probably ancestors of today’s Pashtuns, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, and the 10,000 mounted archers under Surena’s command annihilated the 35,000-man Roman army, the worst defeat since Hannibal crushed the Roman army at Cannae in 216 B.C. The West would not appear again at Afghanistan’s doorstep until the 19th century when Britain launched two invasions from its bases in India.
The British would twice repeat the blunders of the Romans just as the Soviets would a century later, and in the wake of the 9/11 attacks a U.S.-led NATO coalition, as well. Each time the pattern was the same, as Peter Tomsen puts it: “Hubristic justifications, initial success, gradually widening Afghan resistance, stalemate, and withdrawal.”
This story is told to powerful and powerfully detailed effect by Thomsen, U.S. ambassador and specially envoy to Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, in The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers. Then there is the reality that virtually every Pakistani government in recent decades has worked to undermine efforts to build popular governments in Afghanistan while bankrolling the Taliban and giving Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cadre safe haven, all the while receiving tens of billions of dollars in aid from a U.S. government aware of this evil dynamic but seemingly impotent to do anything about it.
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