A conversation with a Soviet Afghan War vet

[DFW]

He was there for a year, and it was clear to him then that no one from the outside would ever tame the place. He now lives in our part of Germany (he is from the Ukraine). When we're together, we speak a mish-mosh of Russian and German, using expressions in the one language when there isn't a suitable one in the other. We usually get together for an hour or so on weekends when I'm here. Both my wife and his wife have given up on trying to follow our conversations.

He said that in Kabul, you would see men wearing a hat from one tribe, a shirt from another, and trousers or footwear from a third, so they weren't easy to pinpoint. However, in the provinces, there were about 16 different areas where the locals had absolute control, all dressed in the garb of their tribe, and "outsiders" weren't just Russians or Americans, but anyone who wasn't local to them. One has only to look at the Dari speakers of the Panjshir Valley today to see that he was right. They are already battling the Taliban as if the fighting had only stopped for a coffee break.

[evolves]

1. Wasn't Genghis Khan

the last to conquer the Afghan territories?

[DFW]

3. Who knows?

Maybe he passed through, saw it was a hopeless case, declared "mission accomplished" and pushed on, ignoring the place altogether. Who was going to call him a liar in those days, and live to repeat it?

[orwell]

2. Hey Talibums...

...be careful what you wish for, you might actually get it.

[moondust]

4. Decentralize?

I remember when Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) proposed dividing Iraq into three regions--Kurds in the north and the rest divided between Sunni and Shia.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6166796

At the time it looked to me like it might work but I was just a bystander with little knowledge of the region.

If Afghanistan is so tribal and divided maybe something like that should be considered. It has already demonstrated that its national army may not hold together. I have doubts that the Taliban can hold it all together especially since they apparently know little about economics.

[DFW]

5. Keep in mind that both Iraq and Afghanistan are artificlai countries with colonial power borders

The British Empire carved out large regions into administrative areas without any regard of whom they were lumping together into their administrative areas. These areas later were "given" independence, but the artificial inclusion of sworn enemies within those borders was not addressed along with independence.

If the local people had been consulted, Iraq would never have been a country with anything like its present borders, and the same goes for Afghanistan.

The dividing line between India and Pakistan may not have been drawn with surgical precision, but at least they got to split up into separate countries, with Bangladesh later becoming a country instead of "East Pakistan." Friendly neighbors they are decidedly not, but at least no ongoing full scale civil war involving one and a half billion people has been raging there for the last 75 years.