Afghanistan, where no war has been won

By Luke Harding

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: If George Bush manages to subdue Afghanistan, he will have succeeded where many illustrious names have failed. Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British and the Soviet Union all sent their armies into Afghanistan, only to mount an inevitable retreat.

The problem, put simply, is geography: the landlocked country is dominated by the rugged Hindu Kush mountains that sweep from the west to the east. The range finally peters out near the northwestern city of Herat, and sinks into the desert.

Afghanistan's jagged scree-strewn mountains and rugged valleys provide an ideal territory in which to fight a guerrilla war. They might almost have been designed by a military commander on a shoestring budget.

Much of the debris from the last conflict with the Soviet Union more than a decade ago has not been cleared away. The unmade road from Torkham to Kabul winds past rusted Soviet tanks and the carcasses of armored personnel carriers, a grim reminder of the perils of foreign intervention. At Sarobi, a strategic point 45 miles south of Kabul, field guns still litter the high ground.

Invading Afghanistan is comparatively easy. The problem is defending the territory you have seized from determined groups of fighters armed with rocket-launchers who occupy the high ground.

"Afghans are once again waiting for a foreign army to capture Kabul," one Pakistani intelligence officer, speaking from Quetta, close to the Afghan border, said on Monday. "In 1979 Russian tanks took two days to reach and conquer Kabul, but it took them eight years with complete loss of Russian military pride to start a return journey."

The fact that Afghanistan's civil war has gone on for so long is a testament to how difficult it will be for the Americans to mop up all pockets of resistance, should they invade.

With the prospect of an imminent U.S. attack, the Taliban have sent their fighters out of the cities to dusty hideouts in the countryside. Taliban soldiers are busy renovating the network of bases in the mountains used by the mojahedin to devastating effect in the 1980s in their guerrilla war with the Soviet Union.

Afghanistan's opposition Northern Alliance controls less than 5 percent of the country. It has the beautiful Panjshir valley 65 miles to the northeast of Kabul, and a small enclave around the far northern provinces of Badakhshan and Takhar. There are also anti-Taliban fighters from the Hazara ethnic minority who control parts of the exquisite, ravaged Bamiyan valley.

But it is not clear how much assistance Afghanistan's indigenous opposition would be able to lend to an American attack on the Taliban. The one commander who prevented the Taliban from completing their conquest of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Masood, was buried on Sunday. He died of wounds inflicted by two Algerian suicide bombers apparently sent by Osama bin Laden.

Masood controlled Kabul from 1992-1996. He eventually abandoned the city in the face of a devastating Taliban offensive from three directions. Over the past 18 months Masood's forces have received military help from Iran, Russia, and India. But he has fewer fighters than the Taliban, whose numbers are swollen by volunteers from the hardline Islamist madrassas or religious schools just across the border in Pakistan.

Should the Americans advance towards Kabul, the Northern Alliance could be counted on to surge southwards from their stronghold in the Panjshir valley and across the Shomali plains, the gateway to the capital from the north. They know the territory; and they could provide the Americans with logistical advice.

But even if a U.S. force manages to capture Kabul with relative ease, this would merely be the beginning of a nasty, brutish and protracted war. Ex-Soviet commanders who fought against the mojahedin, the Taliban's forerunners, have cautioned the U.S. against sending in ground troops.

"If the Americans go to war, I pity those boys," Yuri Shamanov, a former Soviet colonel, said last week. "I pity their mothers and sisters and brothers. It will be 10 times worse than Vietnam. Vietnam will be a picnic by comparison. Here they will get it in the teeth. Oh, they will get it good."

The impregnable terrain in Afghanistan made conventional warfare impossible, he added. "Rockets won't save you: there's nothing out there to shoot at. Blast away years' worth of ammo, the mountains will survive anything. My soldiers would ask me why we were fighting in Afghanistan. I couldn't give them an answer. We had no business being there."

Another factor also cautions against a U.S. offensive involving ground troops: the weather. In six weeks' time Afghanistan starts to become very cold. By November swirling snow will have descended on the mountains, sealing off many of the valleys and high plateau.

The Taliban and the opposition rarely attack each other during the winter months; it is too cold. The peak fighting months are August and September. To start a ground campaign now would be to invite disaster.

All the signs are, meanwhile, that the Taliban are digging in for the long haul. Reports on Monday suggested that a unit of "foreign" militants has been stationed at a former mojahedin camp 40 miles south of Kabul to repulse any American attack. The fighters -- Arab, Pakistani, Uzbek and Tajik volunteers -- have taken up positions in Kahki-I-Jabbar, in Darband village. Bombing from the sky on its own will not be enough to dislodge them.

Every foreign invader of Afghanistan has left some kind of legacy. Alexander the Great swept into Afghanistan with his armies in 329 B.C. En route to India, he founded a handful of Greek settlements. They blossomed several centuries later into Greek-influenced dynasties, among them the pleasure-loving Kushans who produced exquisite works of art and sculpture (including the Bamiyan Buddhas).

After that things went downhill: Genghis Khan and his Mongols left little behind except destruction. It took three wars with the stubborn Afghans and several chapters of colonial adventurism before the British finally granted Afghanistan independence in 1921.

Nobody knows what Bush's legacy in Afghanistan will be, except perhaps further devastation in a country that has already been ruined.

-- Guardian News Service