Kenneth Ikonne, Esq.
The lesson of history, which is somehow peculiar to Afghanistan, is that Afghanistan eventually prevails against all foreign invaders.
Afghan indomitability predates even Ghengis Khan, the Mongol Emperor, who was also one of the greatest conquerors of all time. In the 13th Century, he conquered Afghanistan, a mountainous landlocked Central Asian country of rugged tribes. In Afghanistan, he installed Governors, and proceeded to the conquest of India. From India, word reached him that the province of Herat, Afghanistan, had revolted, and had even removed the Mongol Governor. Ghengis Khan then returned to Herat, to teach the city a lesson. In one blood – filled week of vengeance, the Emperor Ghengis Khan supervised the slaughter of one million, six hundred thousand men, women and children. And before many of these were allowed to die, they had to undergo torture on a scale the modern mind cannot now imagine. Cowering Herati men had lances thrust through their anal cavities, and jutting out through their mouths, and then hung on mounted beams, and skewered like hashkebab on lances. Shrieking babies were sprung from their howling mothers’ arms and cast into roaring infernos, while their hapless mothers were made to watch – and to await their turn. A man is a product of his time; and the times were harsh. But under Ghengis Khan’s example, and at his command, men performed prodigies of savagery in Herat, unrepresentative of any time – including their own!
But despite this, and in the course of the next twenty years, the ruggedness of the Afghan spirit, and the nation’s unforgiving terrain, connived to ensure that Afghanistan eventually repelled the Mongols, and regained its independence.
In the 1980s, the next nation to test the incomparable resilience of the Afghan spirit, and the prohibitive ruggedness of its terrain, was the mighty Soviet Union. It had set up a satellite regime in Kabul, the Afghan capital, and then sent forth a formidable Soviet force to prop up the Communist regime, and ensure dominance. The Afghan resistance, which included the Taliban, retreated to the mountains, from whence they dared and confronted the Soviets, wearing them out eventually, after ten years, in a fearsome war of attrition. The Soviets pulled out in disgrace, and their client regime in Kabul capitulated.
After September 11, 2001, ie 9/11, as talks of an Afghan invasion filled the American airwaves, I did write an article then in the Guardian, in which I cautioned against the futility of such an adventure – unless it was limited essentially to retaliatory air strikes aimed at punishing the Taliban for harbouring, and colluding with, Osama bin Laden. To put boots on the ground, in the hope of effecting a regime change and maintaining dominance, would eventually prove a capricious act of folly.
This, unfortunately, is what it has turned out to be. As America pulls out of Afghanistan, Kandahar, Herat, and several other provincial capitals have already fallen to the Taliban, and Kabul is even within striking range!
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