Over centuries, Afghanistan has been the seductress of destruction of empires at their zenith, from the British to the Soviets and now, most recently, the Americans. Its location, at the tri-junction of Persia, Bhārat and Central Asia, overseeing the Pamir knot of the Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindu Kush high ranges, has made it an object of great-power geostrategic desire. History, however, always remains the handmaiden of geography and it has been difficult, if not impossible, for a foreign power to subdue and vanquish Afghanistan for any length of time, earning it the melancholy sobriquet, “Graveyard of Empires".

The Great Game of the last several centuries seems to be playing itself out yet again, judging from recent events in this harsh land, the home of the redoubtable Pashtuns. While the match that lit the present fire was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the second-order effects of American actions in subsequent decades have clearly had an impact. The US, India, China, Iran and Russia all have vested interests and favoured outcomes in Afghanistan now. As in every multiplayer game, there will be alliances of convenience if many players feel that a single powerful player, in this case the US, needs to be contained.

The US view of the Eurasian landmass has always been distorted. It does not understand the mentality of those who do not think like it; it does not understand that their way of looking at things might be different; it does not understand that their actions and underlying motivations might be quite different from theirs in similar circumstances. With specific reference to Afghanistan, the US has burned its hands repeatedly, replacing one group of leaders with another, innocent largely of the intricacies of the relationships between various groups of Pashtuns who apparently belong to different sets of the Taliban on either side of the Durand line, which most Pashtuns do not see as any........

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