President Obama recently announced that 9,800 U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan through the end of the year. This is a departure from the original plan to reduce the American presence in Afghanistan to 5,500 troops. Immediately, the announcement was met with criticism that it was an extension of an unwinnable war.
A common trope among those who oppose an extended U.S. presence in Afghanistan is that the country is the “graveyard of empires.” The idea is that the United States is bound to fail in Afghanistan because every other attempt to conquer Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union, has failed due to the nation’s difficult terrain, harsh climate, fierce locals, and complex tribal system.
The reality is far different; the idea of an “unconquerable Afghanistan” is one of history’s biggest myths. Not only has Afghanistan been conquered before, it has been conquered more than most other nations. Thomas Barfield, an anthropologist at Boston University who has been studying Afghanistan since the early 1970s, points out that for most of its history, Afghanistan was known as the “highway of conquest” rather than the “graveyard of empires.”
The Persian Empire, one of first great empires in history, was the first to conquer all of modern-day Afghanistan, which formed the eastern part of their domain. After the Persian Empire collapsed in the 330 BCE, it was Alexander the Great’s turn. Although the Macedonian pacification of Afghanistan was not easy (Alexander had to leave a fifth of his army behind to occupy the country when he moved on to India) it was nonetheless successful. Numerous Greek artifacts still being dug up in Afghanistan today are a testament to this success.
Furthermore, many modern-day Afghan cities, including Kandahar, were originally founded by Alexander. In fact, Alexander’s conquest of “the graveyard of empires” was so complete that Alexander’s successors (known as the Seleucids) were able to maintain control over the country for another 200 years.
After Seleucid rule of Afghanistan eventually ended, Afghanistan was conquered and ruled by various empires including the Mauryans, the Sassanids and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. Beginning in the 7th century, Muslim armies conquered the area and converted most of the population to Islam, which is why most Afghans today are Muslim.
Muslim control over Afghanistan ended in the 13th century when the Mongols invaded. In spite of popular belief, the Mongol Horde successfully incorporated the area into the empire. The only setback was a minor defeat at the Battle of Parwan, where a Mongol army was defeated by a force approximately twice their size that included 30,000 Afghan tribesmen. After this humiliation, the Genghis Khan personally took control and won a decisive victory at the Battle of the Indus.
Afghanistan could be considered the cradle of empires, rather than the graveyard. Tamerlane moved the capital of his empire from Samarkand to the Afghan city of Herat. Tamerlane’s descendant, Babur, used Afghanistan as a launching pad for his invasion of India, which established the powerful Mughal Empire.
All in all, the notion of Afghanistan as an independent country is relatively new, having only come about in the mid-17th century. Prior to that time, Afghanistan had usually been part of one empire or another.
The myth that Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires” does not arise until the British and Soviet invasions. The British experience in Afghanistan in the 1840s is famous for an incident where a 16,000 strong British-led contingent was completely annihilated as it retreated from Kabul. What narratives about the disastrous retreat often leave out is that afterwards, the British came back with more soldiers, brushing aside every army that opposed them.
In the final battle of the Anglo-Afghan War, the British avenged their previous defeat and seized Kabul. In the 1870s they came back to finish the job in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, decisively defeating the Afghans and forcing them to sign a treaty that gave the British control over Afghanistan’s foreign policy.
Britain’s political objective, to ensure that Afghanistan would be immune to Russian influence, was achieved in the end.
The Soviet experience in Afghanistan was less successful. After successfully invading the country in 1979, the Red Army became bogged down in a nearly 10-year long guerrilla war. They ultimately left the country humiliated and in 1992, the communist regime in Afghanistan collapsed.
However, the Soviet defeat was not due to any inherent qualities of Afghanistan. By 1984, the Soviets were actually winning the war due to a combination of brute force and the help of the local secret police. It was only when the United States seriously ramped up military aid to the Mujahedeen, including Stinger anti-air missiles and Milan anti-tank missiles, that the Mujahedeen started to gain the upper hand.
Furthermore, the connection between Afghanistan and the collapse of the British and Soviet empires is dubious at best. The British Empire didn’t collapse until the 1940s, a century after their initial forays into the “graveyard of empires.” While the Soviet Union collapsed almost immediately after they retreated from Afghanistan, the fall of the Soviet Union had much more to do with other factors like the arms race, inherent problems with Communism, and Gorbachev’s refusal to use force to keep the Soviet Empire together.
Although things look grim, all is not lost. Afghan living standards have gone through remarkable improvements since 2001; live expectancy has increased from 47 to 62, the largest increase in a decade the UN has ever recorded.
The Afghan National Army (ANA) has already survived the withdrawal of 120,000 foreign troops, and Afghan soldiers report that the ANA is united in spite of ethnic divisions (the ANA seems to be handling diversity better than the Iraqi Army).
While Afghanistan is a tough nut to crack, it is by no means unconquerable and this has major implications as America’s longest war comes to a close.