In a new reoccurring feature, The Inductive will review relevant policy books.

David Loyn's In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation tells the story of history forgotten and repeated.  Afghanistan has never been important in and of itself, but it touches so many important things, geographically, strategically, politically and religiously, that the great powers sought to possess it and had to pay again and again to learn that it will not be ruled.  Peppered with references to current battles in its descriptions of the violence of antiquity and the permanent violence that we continue.  I felt overwhelmed by the sense that our current war there was not even the culmination of history, but its pathetic continuation as a lesson forever unlearned.  

The British, who are now fighting their fourth war in Afghanistan, spent the nineteenth century trying to use Afghanistan as a strategic buffer between the crown jewel of their empire, India, and the looming threat of Russia.  They found it much easier to conquer Afghanistan than to keep it.  Their first war, bookended by the brilliance of their campaign to take the country and the panicked rout of their eventual retreat, was to install a hand picked king the British found more to their liking than the grand Khan, Dost Mohammed.  Presaging "Mission Accomplished" by nearly two centuries, Lieutenant Colonel William Dennie remarked "The war may now be considered at an end, the King being once again on the throne" when the once deposed Shah Shuja was forcibly reinstated in 1839.  By January of 1842, amid escalating violence and logistical difficulties, the British garrison at Kabul agreed to withdraw from the country.  Despite a guarantee of safe passage, only a single Briton, Dr. William Brydon, out of 16,000 survived a retreat that disintegrated into panic and massacre.  The British re-invaded the country and razed Kabul in retaliation, but had learned tragically to leave immediately afterwards.  Shah Shuja spent the rest of his days on the British dole in India and Dost Mohammed died still king of Afghanistan in 1863. 

By the late 1870's the generation possessing bitter memories of the Afghan campaign had been replaced by a new one with a fresh sense of British infallibility and a belief in the pressing necessity of the Russian threat.  The "forward campaign" was back in vogue and so they invaded again.  After two years of hard fighting the British secured a treaty giving them to control Aghan foreign policy in return for domestic sovereignty and an annual fee.  With that in hand the British were able to negotiate the Durrand Line in 1893, extending the border of British India all the way to the Hindu Kush - a mountain range that literally means "Killer of Hindus - and ensuring British control of the Khyber Pass.  The new border effectively carved a line through the middle of Pashtunistan, simply because the geography was seen as the most strategically important.  With a formal buffer established between British India and Russia, the British thought they could finally rest.

Instead, the British, using a policy called "Butcher and Bolt," had to fight endlessly on the frontier against the Pashtun tribes.  There was constant turmoil, often exacerbated by what were known at the time as "Hindustani fanatics" - precursors of modern fundamentalist Islamic terrorists.  This constant unrest culminated in the third Afghan War, this time fomented by European rivals.  Germany became the first Western country to try to exploit fundamentalist Islam by spreading rumors that the Kaiser had converted to Islam during World War I and convincing their Turkish allies to call for jihad against the British.  The war weary British managed to repel an invasion of India by Afghanistan, but lost nearly twice as many men in the process, despite using airplane bombers for the first time in Asian warfare.  Further, the religious tenor of the war increased the tribal unrest.  Until the end of the British Raj in 1947, they would have to contend with unruly tribes and conflict complicated by the free movement across the Durand line.  Over a century of conflict the British had found Afghanistan to be untamable, uncivilized and extremely susceptible to the passion of Mullahs.

 Much of the rest of the twentieth century in Afghanistan was quiet, as Zahir Shah ruled peacefully for 40 years.  He was deposed while abroad in Rome in 1973 and his replacement, Daoud, tried to quickly modernize the country.  The modernization decreed from Kabul, including a massive expansion of women's rights, was opposed by conservative, rural Afghanistan.  The tribes rallied again to fight against a new invader from the West, this one ideological rather than military.  Daoud was eventually executed in 1978 by a military coup that put a Communist, Nur Taraki, in charge of the country.  Taraki tried to further modernize Afghanistan, this time along Soviet lines with massive land reforms and the execution of rebellious Mullahs.  Taraki was subsequently suffocated with a pillow and replaced by the Deputy Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin.  However, a persistent rumor that Amin had loyalties to the CIA was pretense enough for the Soviets to invade in 1979 and kill Amin, replacing him with Babrak Karmal.  The new ruler had little legitimacy as the fourth head of state in 6 years after 40 unbroken years of peace.  

The Soviet war was complicated by huge amounts of weapons and aid given to the "Mujahadeen" fighters by British and American intelligence agencies dispersed through Pakistan's shadowy intelligence services.  Representative Charlie Wilson from Texas loved women, liquor and anyone killing Communists.  By the end of the war he managed to send so much aid to Afghanistan that 2/3 of the CIA's budget consisted of funds for Afghanistan.  Muslims the world over rallied to the cause of Afganistan, attracting fresh bodies for Saudi financed Pakistani Madrassas that provided guns and bombs from the West.  The Russians faced against a guerrilla foe that never took ground, attacking and disappearing into the rugged terrain.  Consequently, the Russians had to fight for the same ground over and over.  With the introduction of donated U.S. "Stinger" missiles, the only effective weapon in the Russian arsenal, attack helicopters, was neutralized.  However, the withdrawal of the Russians after ten years of guerrilla warfare and 120,000 casualties left Afghanistan a festering wound.  The loose coalition of warlords from around the country who "won" could not manage to unseat Karbal for two more years and their eventual victory only led to new factionalism and violence.  Afghanistan reached its lowest ebb as the West turned it back on it after importing fanatics, warlords, guns and heavy weaponry to juice up the instability.  The country reverted to a prehistoric barbarism with rampant murder, rape and extortion.

Into this gap stepped a bitter medicine: uncompromisingly, brutally moral Taliban.  Loyn's picture of the Taliban as misunderstood is surely the most controversial aspect of the book.  That life under the Taliban was a marked improvement for most Afghanis understates the case.  Not only did they bring stability, but in a manner of speaking they brought political liberalization.  This is the bargain described by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan: it is better to live with a despot than in a state of nature where life is "nasty, brutish and short."  The Taliban's treatment of women, in particular, has galvanized Western outrage, but even here the picture is less clear than we believe.  The wearing of the burka and the sequestering of females from public were already universal features of rural Afghan life and considered necessary precautions.  Afghanistan is a ungoverned violent land of rapacious men.  The danger posed by these men isn't theoretical.  The "she was asking for it" defense has become rightfully discredited in the West, but protecting your women from any scrutiny might make more sense in a war torn, lawless country.  After Loyn describes a pitched, urban tank battle between two warlords over ownership of a particularly pretty boy, shielding women from public view seems positively pragmatic - even if the measures frequently go overboard.  This does not excuse the excesses of the Taliban, their imposition of sharia law in urban areas and in the Shia north were unjustified, but the picture is more complicated than immediately apparent.

The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, is described as completely disinterested in anything beyond securing a safe, Islamic Afghanistan.  Omar succeeded through a blitzkrieg offensive across the country leaving commanders who did not join him hanging from the barrels of tanks.  The Taliban were incorruptible, if barbaric in their methods, and Loyn praises their impossible feat of uniting and pacifying most of Afghanistan.  The honesty of the Taliban allowed them to secure funds from trucking companies seeking passage on a highway from Pakistan to Iran-  another tragedy of Afghanistan as its two most valuable industries are opium and a shortcut.  Loyn goes as far as to explain that the Taliban's most egregious act, the decision to allow Osama Bin Ladin to live in Afghanistan, is attributable to the Pashtun code of guaranteeing the safety of guests.  They supposedly asked Bin Ladin to leave and to cease provocations with the West, but were prevented from doing more than that by this code.  Nevertheless, after 9/11 they would have to pay for the consequences of this support and were toppled immediately.  The West did not take a single casualty in taking Afghanistan through a relentless bombing campaign and supporting the native rebellion Northern Alliance.

The final chapter of the book centers on harrowing parallels and lessons that can be learned from recent Afghan history.  The success of our initial invasion should not have surprised us, holding Afghanistan has always been the difficult part.  The imposition of Hamid Karzai, a dapper and Western educated expatriot, echoed the lesson of Shah Shuja: any leader who seems dependent on the West for support will struggle for legitimacy.  The Taliban explicitly followed this theme with posters asking: "Do you want to be a son of Shah Shuja or Dost Mohammed?"  The British Raj assumed that with an Afghan on the throne the tribes would support him, we assumed that democracy was self-fulfilling.  Instead Karzai proved corrupt, playing into the Taliban's strongest selling point.  We ignored the strength of their brand, because we saw them as barbaric, but they had a well deserved reputation for honesty.  When Kabul failed to provide fair governance the Taliban stepped in and settled disputes.  'The Karzai government banned Western attempts to encourage Taliban defections, going as far as asking for the removal of two diplomats who attempted to contact the Taliban.  In a country with a dearth of social infrastructure and recent regime change, co-opting middle management and power brokers into the state can spur legitimacy.  The similar de-Ba'athification of Iraq was a debacle that continues to this day, but in Afghanistan, where loyalties are often fluid and defections decisive to the fate of campaigns, this policy was simply absurd.

The Durrand line that Britain created and we exploited against the Russians became a thorn in our side, supposedly even allowing Osama Bin Ladin to escape to Pakistan where he might live to this day.  Obama's expansion of the CIA program in Pakistan has mitigated this, though only through a dangerous breach of sovereignty.  Moreover, the strategic shift to a full embrace of counter-insurgency under David Patraeus and Stanley Machrystal is unprecedented in two centuries: a foreign occupation that seeks to make the lives of average Afghans better.  Against the backdrop of two centuries of Western failure and three decades of war, stateless instability and religious extremism the task seems impossible, however noble.  Yet, reading the book made the Afghan people seem so remarkable in their customs, adaptability and resilience I hope they finally find peace.