Ukraine lacks the glue that keeps Afghans bound to each other and their country. It makes all the difference. From Batiushka at thesaker.is:
There’s an east wind coming all the same. Such a wind as never blew…. It will be cold and bitter….and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.
His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, October 1917
Poor and mountainous Afghanistan is at the centre of the Eurasian Heartland. Around it, in clockwise order, lie Russia with Russian Central Asia, China, the Indian Subcontinent and Iran. As a result of its geographical position and despite it inhospitable terrain and the poverty of its natural resources, Afghanistan has been at the centre of wars ever since the first of the three failed British Afghan Wars in 1839. Then the 16,500 invaders of a Victorian Army were massacred by the Afghans, leaving fewer than ten survivors. Since then it has become known as ‘The Graveyard of Empires’.
It was here that the British Empire was defeated in the 19th century, that the Soviet Empire was defeated in the 20th century and that the American Empire was defeated in the 21st century, a new phase of whose defeat was seen so dramatically in Kabul in August 2021.
All three empires lost because they tried to impose a de facto atheist ideology on a strictly traditional society, which sincerely holds its Muslim beliefs, however alien they may seem to the atheistic, British, Soviet or American atheist invaders. When a people fervently adheres to its own civilisational traditions and values, it cannot be defeated by anyone. For this reason it is said that Afghanistan is easy to get into, but is very difficult to get out of. Thus, the Americans ran away, just like the British before them.
