Recently, Pakistan went to war against Afghanistan. From the Afghan side, one began hearing the old trope that “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires”. First of all, Pakistan is not an empire, and secondly, the trope is mostly a myth.

In an August 2021 speech, delivered during the withdrawal of US military forces from Afghanistan, former US President Joe Biden said, “The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, secure Afghanistan that is known in history as the graveyard of empires.” The researcher Alexander Hainy-Khaleeli wasn’t impressed. He wrote, “Biden labelling Afghanistan ‘the graveyard of empires’ is historically illiterate.” Truth is, the phrase has nothing to do with any grand historic narrative or fact. 

According to Hainy-Khaleeli, the phrase (in the context of Afghanistan) first appeared in a 2001 article written for the magazine Foreign Affairs by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) former Pakistan Station Chief, Milton Bearden. The article was titled ‘Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires’. There is scarce evidence of this phrase being used before Bearden’s article.

In 2001, when US forces were readying themselves to invade Afghanistan to dislodge the Taliban regime and hunt down the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, Bearden cautioned the US government, claiming that major armies across history had tried to conquer Afghanistan but had run into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribes. Bearden named the armies of the ancient Greek king Alexander, the ferocious Mongol warlord Genghis Khan, the British........

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