Reply #1: Duh! NOBODY has ever controlled Afghanistan for long [View All]

[Slyder]

The area we call Afghanistan has never been a stable nation. It is an artificial state. (Merely Kabuled together--groan--I couldn't help myself.)The failures here are legion and I don't know all the details. This area has often been in the Persian cultural sphere, but not always controlled by Persia or Iran. The Persians had a time with it. Alexander the Great went though but didn't hold it long. Parts of the country became Buddhist due to the Silk Road. A Greek upper class seems to have controlled the area around Kandahar for a while. Sometimes urban culture supported by irrigated agriculture stabilized parts of the country. The Mongols destroyed cities and irrigation infrastructure in the 1200s. Some areas and cities never recovered. Timur came through. The Moguls controlled it for a while. Some of the worst defeats experienced by the British during the rise of their empire occurred in Afghanistan. Toward the end of the 20th century Russia tried to dominate Afghanistan with disastrous results. "Graveyard of Empires" is right! The fierce independence of the people, the rough and geographically isolated terrain, several languages and ethnic groups, and religious factions, make permanent peace almost hopeless. It is pure hubris to assume America will have a different experience.

Nation building has been going on in Afghanistan for thousands of years. It might happen, but I kind of doubt it. I have a bad feeling about continued instability in central Asia. This will be the source of terrorism for a while. There is a lot of real estate to monitor. We will need lots of speakers of obscure Turkish dialects, such as Uighur, and several Indo-European languages, and then Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Manchu(?), and Mongol. Ural-Altaic languages too, perhaps. This will not be easy,