The Pernicious Theory of the ISI and Pakistan on Afghanistan

There is a pernicious theory doing the rounds that Afghanistan is the grave yard of all occupying armies and the Afghans have never been defeated. The origin of this theory is Pakistan and its powerful ISI. They point to the fact that Afghans made the Russian army bite the dust and even earlier the British fought their Afghan wars without much success.

But this is a simplification and its purpose is to force the United States to have a rethink about its operations in Afghanistan and perhaps withdraw from that country, creating a vacuum that Pakistan would like to fill along with the Taliban.

But the facts speak otherwise. The theory that the Afghans have never been defeated is far from truth. A look at the pages from ancient history will show that the Greeks under Alexander subdued the Afghans as well as the Persian rulers. Much later the hordes from central Asia -the Mongols also occupied Afghanistan. In the recent past the Sikh Maharajah Ranjit Singh also subdued the Afghans. The Sikh general Hari Singh Nalwa spread terror among the Afghans and won a string of victories.

The fact remains that the Afghans have been subdued in the past and this pernicious theory spread by the ISI to demoralize the Americans is worth for what it is-a selective interpretation of History. What however stands out is that Afghanistan is a barren and mountainous country, which was not worth holding and the occupying armies thus just left the place.

Now that equation has changed as Afghanistan is supposed to be sitting on mineral wealth valued at almost 3 trillion dollars and thus perhaps the foreign powers may not like to leave easily. The afghan war thus has to be seen in another perspective. The first thing General David Petraeus the new commander of US forces in Afghanistan must do is to draw sustenance from history that the afghans represented by the Taliban and Al Qaeda can be defeated. The entire war strategy has to emanate from that point of thought.

The new US commander must also realize that a defeat for American arms in Afghanistan will be the beginning of the end of the USA as a world power. The extreme Islamic groups will be heartened and will follow up with strikes on the USA itself. Let us hope that President Obama does not go down in history as the man who threw down the towel in Afghanistan. A retreat there will have disastrous consequences.