Afghanistan and Naploleon

Amazing how a bunch of ragged, lightly-armed, cave-dwelling goat herders have thus far managed to make fools of the combined armies of the worlds top military powers in all their majesty, dragging them into an endless quagmire of blood, with no real prospect of "winning" or even withdrawing whilst at least saving some face. It occurs to me, as the US sends tens of thousands of more troops to add to the hundred thousand or more already there to deal with what were told are about 2000 actual Taliban fighters, that the same way Russia could rely on it's winters to defeat invaders (Napoleon and Hitler) the Afghans can rely on their poverty and failed-state status. In the end, no invaders can really pacify that country, and the only question is how much positive spin the US can place on it's eventual defeat there. Some of you may know that the British landed troops on Iranian soil in the Persian Gulf region on two (3?) occassions when Iran under the Qajars tried to regain Herat, which was historically a part of Iran (Herat was the second Safavid capitol) the last being in 1857 when the Brits - who wanted to keep Afghanistan as a buffer against a Russian threat to their colony in India- shelled Abadan. There are still some British graves in Southern Iran from those days. Anyway , acting under pressure of the Brits, Iran signed the Treaty of Paris in 1857 and gave up claims to Herat. We live with the consequences.

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[Pirouz]

Coincidentally, earlier today at the Kings of War blog (a blog for various faculty and research students of the Department of War Studies, King's College London ), I made a very similar comment relating to Iran's former provinces of Bakhtar and Aryana. I also mentioned how the British went on to fabricate the country we now know as Afghanistan from Iran's eastern provinces.