Unexpected twists and turns stalk almost all wars. The law of unintended consequences impacts their results. This is so even in wars where the power differential of the combatants is enormous. Hence, prudent statesmen seldom push their countries into armed hostilities unless they have a clear, certain and early passage out of them with their objectives achieved. In these situations too statesmen hesitate before embarking upon war. President Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister have obviously not read the histories of past wars though the US President was intimately involved in ending the US’ ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan.

They would have found it instructive if they had studied two wars in the last century and refreshed their memories of the Afghan war in this century. The First World War and the Second World War in the first half of the 20th century lasted for four and five years respectively. The course of these wars had surprises. Both changed the map of the world but the latter brought about systemic changes which none of the combatants could have imagined at its beginning. America’s Afghan war continued for two decades and ended in America’s humiliating defeat and the return of the Afghan Taliban to Kabul from where they were ousted. Who could have imagined this to happen when the war began?

The First World War was........

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