There is an old joke among Western intelligence officers: the Afghans have something no invading army can buy — time. The British found out in 1842, the Soviets in 1989, the Americans in 2021. Three empires, three failures, and a country that remains essentially the same as it was before any of them arrived.
The phrase “graveyard of empires” is already a commonplace, almost a journalistic cliché. But like every cliché, it conceals a truth worth pulling apart. Not because Afghanistan has something magical in its geography, but because the pattern that repeats there reveals a structural lesson about the limits of conventional military power against an insurgency in no hurry to win.
The British: The First Lesson Nobody Heard
The Great Game between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia led the British Empire to invade Afghanistan in 1839. The logic was simple, almost geometric: if Russia pushed south from Central Asia, it could threaten British India. A friendly government in Kabul had to be interposed.
The invasion was an immediate success. An army of roughly twenty thousand men crossed the mountain passes, took Kandahar without a fight, stormed the fortress of Ghazni, and entered Kabul in August. They installed Shah Shuja on the throne and considered the mission accomplished. The Duke of Wellington, who knew a thing or two about wars, warned from London that the real difficulties would begin after the military victory. Nobody listened.
What followed was a slow, almost imperceptible deterioration. The British cut subsidies to the tribal chiefs, their officers settled in Kabul with their families as though it were an Indian cantonment, and local clerics began preaching jihad against the infidel occupiers. In November 1841 an insurrection broke out. By January 1842 the British garrison negotiated a retreat towards Jalalabad, roughly ninety miles away. Of the 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians who left Kabul, one man arrived: Dr William Brydon. The rest were annihilated in the mountains and defiles by tribal warriors who knew every stone of the terrain.
The British later sent an “Army of Retribution” that razed the Kabul bazaar and recovered prisoners, but they did not stay. They left, and Dost Mohammad, the emir they had removed from power, returned to the throne as though nothing had happened. Three years of occupation, thousands dead, back to the starting point.
They would return twice more, in 1878 and in 1919. In the second war they managed to impose a protectorate controlling Afghan foreign policy, but never the interior of the country. In the third, Afghanistan gained full independence. The pattern was always the same: initial military victory, inability to govern, attrition, withdrawal.
The Soviets: Brutality Without Result
In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up a communist government crumbling under the weight of its own purges and unpopular reforms. The Red Army went in with some thirty thousand men, eventually rising to over a hundred thousand.
Unlike the British, the Soviets had no qualms about applying devastating force. They bombed entire villages, mined the countryside, destroyed agricultural infrastructure, and displaced millions of civilians. The strategy was to create a vacuum around the insurgency, to strip the mujahideen of their popular base. The war produced between one and two million Afghan dead and generated five million refugees, a quarter of the country’s population.
The Soviets controlled the cities and the main highways. The mujahideen controlled the countryside and the mountains. The conflict settled into that dynamic for years, with the Soviet army unable to eradicate a guerrilla force that blended with the population and knew the terrain with an intimacy no map could replicate.
The turning point was the introduction of the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, supplied by the United States through Pakistan as part of Operation Cyclone. The Stingers neutralised Soviet air superiority, which was the only advantage that truly mattered in that terrain. But it would be a mistake to attribute the Soviet defeat exclusively to the Stingers. The truth is more prosaic: the Soviets could not afford an endless war in a country that gave them nothing in return. Gorbachev called it a “bleeding wound.” In February 1989, the last Soviet soldier crossed the bridge over the Amu Darya back onto Soviet soil. Official figures put Soviet dead at around fifteen thousand and nearly fifty thousand wounded. The Afghan government they left behind survived three more years before falling in 1992.
The parallel with Vietnam is obvious and was noted from the first day of the invasion. But there is a key difference: in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese had a state, a conventional army, a unified chain of command, and the direct backing of China and the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, the mujahideen were a scattered confederation of tribal, ethnic, and religious groups that often detested one another. And they still won. Or rather, they did not lose, which in an insurgency amounts to the same thing.
The Americans: The War That Forgot Itself
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, the operation had a clear and limited objective: destroy al-Qaeda and topple the Taliban regime that sheltered it. In the opening weeks, a handful of CIA operatives and special forces, backed by overwhelming air power and local allies in the Northern Alliance, dismantled the Taliban government with a speed that surprised the world. Kabul fell in November. The Taliban regime came apart like a structure of sand.
The problem, as always in Afghanistan, began afterwards. What had been a surgical counterterrorism operation gradually transformed into a state-building project. Democratise Afghanistan. Educate girls. Create a national army. Draft a constitution. Build roads, hospitals, institutions. The scope of the mission expanded without anyone deciding it explicitly, through the accumulation of well-intentioned objectives nobody wanted to abandon.
Meanwhile, the Taliban did what any intelligent insurgency does when facing an enemy with overwhelming military superiority: they pulled back. They crossed the border into Pakistan, took shelter in the tribal areas, waited. They maintained their networks, their contacts with Pashtun tribal leaders, their recruitment capability. They did not need to win battles. They needed to survive.
And time was on their side. Each passing year, American political will eroded a little more. Iraq absorbed attention and resources from 2003 on. Public opinion tired. Electoral cycles shifted priorities. Obama increased troop levels in 2009 with a “surge” that peaked at nearly a hundred thousand American soldiers in the country, but simultaneously announced a withdrawal date. That contradiction, escalating and announcing your departure at the same time, was perhaps the gravest strategic error of the entire war. The Taliban read the message with total clarity.
Counterinsurgency: Why the Weak Win
There is a fundamental asymmetry in any counterinsurgency conflict that favours the insurgent. Mao formulated it with characteristic concision: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does not win. This is not a rhetorical mirror trick. It is a precise description of the dynamic.
The conventional army needs results. It needs to justify its presence, its cost, its casualties. It needs to convince its own public opinion, its congress, its taxpayers. It operates under constant time pressure. The insurgent has none of those constraints. He is accountable to no one, has no elections, no free press questioning him. He can lose a hundred battles and still exist. He can wait five years, ten, twenty.
The Taliban understood this with a clarity that Western analysts took years to recognise. Their strategy was not military in the classic sense. It was political. They maintained a constant presence in the Afghan countryside, collected taxes, dispensed justice, offered an alternative order. Corrupt and brutal, no doubt, but an order nonetheless. Against a government in Kabul riddled with corruption, detached from the tribal realities of the country, and held up by foreign bayonets, the Taliban offered something no USAID development programme could: permanence.
There is a figure that says it all: according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the United States spent eighty-eight billion dollars training and equipping the Afghan national army. That army existed mostly on paper. Ghost soldiers who drew pay without showing up. Officers who sold fuel and ammunition on the black market. Entire units that surrendered without a fight when the Taliban advanced. When the moment of truth came, everything evaporated in days.
Twenty Years, 2.3 Trillion, Back to the Starting Point
The figures are almost obscene in their disproportion. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, the United States spent approximately 2.3 trillion dollars in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2022, including military operations, reconstruction, interest on the debt incurred to finance the war, and medical care for veterans. Around 2,460 American service members died. On the Afghan side, estimates put civilian dead at over 47,000 and security forces killed between 66,000 and 69,000.
And the result was this: on August 15, 2021, the Taliban entered Kabul without firing a shot. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. The national army dissolved. American intelligence had estimated five days earlier that Kabul could hold for thirty to ninety days. It fell in hours. Within ten days, the Taliban had taken every provincial capital. Twenty years of investment in state-building vanished with a speed that stunned even the Taliban themselves.
The images from Kabul airport, Afghans clinging desperately to aircraft as they took off, are the visual epitaph of the entire project. There is something deeply unsettling about those images that goes beyond the immediate humanitarian tragedy: it is the evidence that everything invested, the schools, the rights, the institutions, had no roots. It was a construction sustained entirely from outside. When the support left, everything left.
The Logic of the Failure
Why did three such different powers, separated by more than a century, make such similar mistakes? The answer lies not in Afghanistan but in the nature of imperial power, which tends to confuse military capability with political capability.
All three, British, Soviet, and American, won the military war and lost the political one. All three underestimated the resistance of a tribal, decentralised society accustomed to war and deeply hostile to any form of external rule. All three attempted to impose alien political models: a puppet monarch, a communist state, a liberal democracy. And all three ran into the same reality: Afghanistan is not a state in the Westphalian sense. It is a mosaic of ethnic, tribal, and local loyalties where central authority has always been weak, when it existed at all.
There is something else that is rarely said with the necessary clarity: Afghanistan has nothing the invaders needed. There is no oil, no mineral resources exploited at significant scale, no strategic position justifying an indefinite cost. The British sought a buffer against Russia. The Soviets sought an ideological satellite. The Americans sought to eliminate a terrorist threat. None had a permanent material interest in the country. And without a permanent interest, no empire can sustain an indefinite occupation. The local insurgent does have a permanent interest: it is his home.
What This Tells Us About American Power
None of this implies the United States is weak. On the contrary: it is the most formidable military power in history. Its force-projection capability has no parallel. It can destroy any conventional army on the planet in weeks. That capability is what sustains the international order, what deters revisionist powers, what keeps trade routes open and the security guarantees that make the world function.
But that same capability has a precise limit: it cannot transform societies. It cannot turn a twelfth-century tribal federation into a twenty-first-century liberal democracy by force. Military power can break things; building things is another matter. And confusing one with the other is the error that repeats in Afghanistan with the regularity of a natural law.
The lesson of Afghanistan is not that force is useless. The lesson is that force serves limited objectives. Destroying al-Qaeda in 2001 was a success. Staying for twenty years to build a state was the mistake. Kissinger, who understood these things better than most, used to say that the guerrilla wins if he does not lose, the conventional army loses if it does not win. It is the same formula as Mao’s, spoken with a German accent. And nobody seems able to internalise it.
There is a temptation, especially in Washington, to believe that every problem has a military solution. Afghanistan demonstrates that some problems simply do not. And that strategic wisdom consists not only in knowing when to fight, but in knowing when to stop.