By Iqbal Hamza
For years, the Russians rained explosives on Afghan soil, but in the end it was the Soviet Union that broke apart and collapsed. America and NATO poured nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of bombs and ammunition into Afghanistan, yet all they walked away with was disgrace, humiliation, and defeat. Pakistani generals have seen all of this with their own eyes.
If they still believe that bombing Afghanistan will bring them victory, they should first ask their own teachers, the American generals, how that experiment ended. Dropping bombs on Afghan soil is easy. Paying the price for what follows is another matter entirely. History shows that every power that tried to speak to Afghanistan through force and explosives eventually found itself facing defeat, decline, and, in some cases, collapse.
Enmity with the Afghan people is not a war that lasts a few days or a few months. It is a debt that sometimes takes decades to settle. If Pakistan’s generals think this conflict will remain limited to a few days of emotional airstrikes and retaliatory attacks, as happened with India, or that Afghans will surrender under bombardment, they are making a grave mistake.
Afghans fight long wars, but they fight with patience. They do not fear death, nor do they grow weary because a war drags on. The bombing campaign Pakistan’s generals have begun today is nothing new to Afghans. They have lived through the same thing for more than forty years. Their account with NATO and America, the very powers that trained and backed these generals, is not yet fully settled. Their account with Pakistan’s generals will be even harder.
The generals sitting in air-conditioned rooms in Lahore and Islamabad, numbed by comfort and drink, have never felt the heat of a car bomb or breathed its bitter smoke, the same gifts Afghan history has delivered to those who chose to wage war against this land. If they imagine that Afghans will take revenge for the killing of innocent civilians by turning against the people of Pakistan, they are mistaken again. Afghans know how to distinguish between a nation and those who rule it. They know that the real authors of the region’s misery are a handful of reckless men, and it is with them that the score will be settled.
This time, Pakistan’s generals are facing an enemy that knows them well. They can no longer hide behind the people of Pakistan. They should also remember that however many bombs they have managed to gather through debt, poverty, and foreign aid, NATO and America dropped many times more on this same land. Even then, the outcome favored the Afghans.
If Afghans could be defeated by death, the Russians would today be sitting in Karachi’s port. If bombs could frighten them into surrender, American forces would still be using Bagram to strike Iran. The irony is that a large part of Pakistan’s military arsenal was financed by the money it earned transporting NATO’s bombs into Afghanistan. Yet its generals still fail to understand a simple fact. Those NATO bombs, whose transport alone was worth far more than Pakistan’s entire arsenal, could not force Afghans to surrender. Why should Pakistan’s bombs succeed where theirs failed?
Afghans are neither frightened by bombs nor broken by them. Believing that Afghanistan can be defeated through bombardment is one of the worst miscalculations Pakistan’s generals have ever made. The world has already seen, more than once, that this path leads nowhere. If anything, this bombing campaign is more likely to leave Pakistan’s generals with the same fate that befell the American generals before them. It will end in defeat, physical and psychological wounds, and a permanent place in history as another failed experiment.
