I think the Soviet efforts were haphazard and slipshod. Historically, Russian military strengths excel in the areas of endurance and overwhelming brute force at a given location - ill suited to suppression of generalized and irregular resistance. As I posted earlier, Genghis Khan was able to make the place a bed of carrion and contented ravens by means of bows, arrows and ponies. Afganistan is not unbeatable. No nation or people is.
The US and its predecessor colonies have a lengthy and effective history of exterminating tribes. We have the knowledge and the material ability to do so again. We lack the will. Lacking the will we have rejected victory and embraced defeat. Having embraced defeat we should cut our losses and leave. Our troops are few and precious. They are our people. Obama watches them die with the same cold satisfaction with which he delayed the implementation of BAIPA. He is what he is.
Strictly speaking, Afganistan is largely irrelevant except that we have been sucked into a war of attrition on a third world patch of rocks and dirt in the middle of nowhere. Our principal foreign enemies are the two rival leaders of the Islamic world - Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran. These are the two powers we - or someone - must eventually dispatch. Islam declared war on the entire world centuries ago. This war will continue until Islam’s ultimate triumph or its final extinction. Islam could be tolerated in the days of jezzails and scimitars. In the days of nuclear and biological weapons, the ability to tolerate this last relic of the Dark Ages is ended, or else we are.
Man, woman and child. Theirs or ours.
Well said.
Russians have built massive land empire by being really good at subjugating native populations.
What has changed? I think by 1970s USSR army just as most modern armies has gotten soft to a degree. It could still slaughter anyone and anything with complete lack of remorse but it’s soldiers now commonly drawn from relatively comfortable environments like cities just could not handle fighting a war in a forbidding place like Afganistan.
Mongols were some of the most hardened (mentally and physically) people to ever exist. They have conquered most of Eurasia by being that. Able to ride dusk till dawn they moved far above the speed of the modern blitzkrieg, they required no supply train, no tent, no sleeping bag. They did not even need to cook their food. They were also killers from very young age able to inflict personal brand of terror that few people now have stomach for. The most hellish outpost manned now in Afganistant would be something where Mongol would feel completely comfortable and at home. Lack of water and food, constant killing, desease thats was their life from beginning to the end. There was no home to go to, “after the war” or troop rotations.