The World's Jeb Sharp reports on Britain's painful history in Afghanistan. The British fought several wars in Afghanistan in an effort to control the country, and paid a heavy price for it.
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MARCO WERMAN: President Obama wants to refocus the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. His administration is reviewing troop levels there, too. Some observers warn that the country could become President Obama's Vietnam. In that context, Britain's 19th century experience in Afghanistan offers a cautionary tale. The World's Jeb Sharp has been studying that history.
JEB SHARP: It's tempting to quote Rudyard Kipling here. His poem about a young British soldier, wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, seems to epitomize everything we think we know about the British experience there. But why did Britain care about Afghanistan back then? The answer is India.
MAYA JASANOFF: Which was one of the focal points of the British Empire, and a place that was enormously important to the whole British world view.
SHARP: Maya Jasanoff is a historian at Harvard.
JASANOFF: So every area that bordered India, or that controlled important routes to India, was central to British thinking at this time. Afghanistan was one of the main access routes into India, and the British were always worried that other powers would sweep through Afghanistan, through the mountains, into India, and threaten British dominance there.
SHARP: Britain's main rival at the time was Russia, just to the north. Anxiety about Russian meddling in Afghanistan prompted the British to invade in 1838. This first Anglo-Afghan war was a disaster.
JASANOFF: The British had gone in; they thought they had won an easy victory. They had installed their own preferred compliant ruler on the throne, only to find, about two years later, that in fact there was a seething resistance against them, which culminated in a terrible retreat of the British forces from Afghanistan. The vast majority were killed.
SHARP: Jasanoff says the war was scored into the British consciousness as a failure that must not be repeated. But in 1879, the British invaded again, and installed another puppet leader. They ultimately got the sort of buffer state they wanted, but again, at a very high price. Britain's failure to subdue Afghanistan, coupled with the Soviet failure a hundred years later, does leave people with a certain conclusion.
ALEX THIER: You will never succeed in conquering Afghanistan.
SHARP: Alex Thier is an Afghanistan expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
THIER: I think that our mission, our military mission, combined with our political mission, has to be one that is creating space for the Afghans to take back their own country. If that is the intention, and if that is understood as the intention, then we have the ability to succeed.
SHARP: But Thier acknowledges the legacy of the British experience weighs heavily. It was a British official, Sir Mortimer Durand, who drew the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, then still part of British India. Thier says the Afghans have always resented the Durand Line.
THIER: They resent the border because they feel that it was imposed by a colonial power. They resent it because they feel that it took some lands that were traditionally Afghan, and they resent it because it divides the Pashtun nation between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
SHARP: As a result, the 15 million Pashtuns who straddle the line pretty much ignore it, but that whole border region is key to today's policy debate about Afghanistan. It's where elements of Al Qaeda are believed holed up, and where the Taliban and other insurgents operate. Robert Crews is a historian at Stanford. He doesn't think the British experience in Afghanistan is relevant to today's policy questions except, perhaps, to reinforce that Afghanistan's provinces have never been ruled effectively from Kabul.
ROBERT CREWS: And now to attempt to undo that by saying that these unruly areas need to be brought under control is to really invite a very serious military conflict. One is attempting to rewrite some 200 years of history by imposing, now, direct rule among communities who really, today, are fundamentally fighting about autonomy.
SHARP: Crews thinks the answer to Afghanistan's crisis is better power-sharing arrangements, which is why he looks to a different period in British history for his Afghanistan lesson.
CREWS: If the British have any lesson in this, I think it may actually be in Northern Ireland, where they did sit down and speak to the IRA. What lies ahead is probably a messy and unpleasant course of sitting down and speaking with unsavory people in the name of the greater cause of stability, and of an end to a civil war that's been raging since 1978.
SHARP: Of course, that's a hugely controversial idea, but the notion of trying to peel away some elements of the Taliban may be getting some traction in the U.S. policy debate. If so, maybe it's time to put away the Kipling and find a new template for thinking about Afghanistan. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp.
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