The Fourth British Defeat in Afghanistan

‘Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!’
Rudyard Kipling ‘Recessional’
The last British soldiers were airlifted out of Afghanistan last week, marking the sorry end of Britain’s fourth failed invasion of Afghanistan. With them went the last detachment of US Marines in Helmand.
Well has Afghanistan earned its title, ‘Graveyard of Empires.’
To be more precise, this honor belongs to Afghanistan’s Pashtun (or Pathan) mountain tribes, who bend their knees for no man and take pride in war.
In my book, ‘War at the Top of the World,’ I called Pashtun ‘the bravest men on earth.’ Later, I would add the fierce Chechen to that illustrious fraternity.
The old imperialists are gone, but the occupation of Afghanistan continues. The new regime in Kabul just installed by Washington to replace uncooperative former ally Hamid Karzai, rushed to sign an ‘agreement’ allowing the United States to keep some 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan for years. This garrison will be exempt from all Afghan laws.
However, there’s much more to this arrangement. The US combat troops, tactfully labeled ‘trainers’ or ‘counter-terrorist forces,’ are too few in number to dominate all Afghanistan. Their task is to defend Kabul’s sock puppet government from its own people and to defend the all-important US Bagram airbase.

This post was published at Lew Rockwell on November 1, 2014.