Few Words In Defense of the West.

You all know how critical I am of the modern combined West in general and the United States in particular. Being a United States citizen I am absolutely appalled by the direction America took in mid-1990s and where is she heading both in foreign and domestic policies. My political creed is that of the real Realist which could be summarized by a desire to see a moderate and cooperative foreign policy and in domestic economic policies I am somewhere in between of proper state regulatory functions and free enterprise, culturally, however, I am not only Russian but I am a man who recognizes not only West's crimes and failures but also an enormous contribution to human civilization, some of which is simply without parallels in the history of humanity. I am talking about the finest art, incredible scientific achievements and humanism before it was reduced to a complete absurd by Western "elites". In this sense I am a Western man too. And here is the deal: some idiot started to apply an old cliche' about Afghanistan as a "graveyard of the empires" to modernity. 

One guy tries to explain why Afghanistan has this title attached to it. I get that, but the reality of this "graveyard" in a modern era is not supported by facts in the least. This propaganda BS was overused in the West during and after the Soviet War in Afghanistan, wrongly and deliberately attributing the collapse of the Soviet Union to that war. Reality is, Afghan War has been a minor factor in the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet Union exited Afghanistan not as a "defeated" side. I am not the only one who writes about it. Soviet collapse was due to a completely different set of reasons but the combined West needed a credit for this collapse in fields in which no credit could have been given. It is the same BS myth as US-made Stingers "winning" the war for mujahedin against Soviet Air Force, which actually adapted well to a new threat and found a counter, largely neutralizing it. Nor, as the history tells us, were British necessarily unsuccessful in their Afghanistan adventure and the collapse of British Power had nothing to do with British wars there, because Great Britain lost the Empire de facto on the battlefields of the WW II and that was long after British adventures in the mountains of Hindu-Kush.

Now comes the United States, which actually wraps her Afghanistan adventure on a very minor note, to put it politely, but the truth is--never in the modern times (starting from the times of Dr. Watson wounded in Afghanistan and before him getting together with Sherlock Holmes, wink, wink) did Afghans, in their wild ethnic variety, from Pushtu to Tajik, realistically best Western soldier in non-guerilla warfare, they simply can't. They surely had their share of tactical successes, everybody does once in a while, but they simply never caused any modern Empire to collapse or in any way have proven that Afghanistan is a "graveyard of (modern) empires" by influencing such a collapse in a significant way. America's loss in Afghanistan is primarily a PR and financial disaster, which is very bad as it is, but even if the United States were to collapse tomorrow, this collapse would have had very little to do with Afghanistan and would be a consequence of a sum of the America's failed military commitments and downright insane foreign and domestic policies and, to be sure, the graveyard for Pax Americana (a euphemism for American Empire) is NOT in Afghanistan. Not even close. 

But the risible cliche endures and is very detrimental, in fact, to a sober military-political analysis which is badly needed in our media-driven sensationalist (and grossly incompetent and ignorant) times. Western Cold War propagandists and politicos, such as Zbig, didn't have enough intellect and foresight to grasp a simple fact that they were doing a disservice primarily to themselves by spreading an utterly false but gratifying, in a short run, cliche about "the graveyard of empires". Nor did they have an idea what they were doing fanning the flames of Islamic terrorism, which ultimately resulted in the tragedy of 9/11 and de facto attack on the Bill of Rights, America's most important and valuable treasure. All three: British Empire, Russian/Soviet Empire and modern American one have collapsed largely because of the problems of their own making and primarily domestically and they surely haven't been buried in Afghanistan. In the end, even the best of the bestest Pushtu warrior needs a night vision scope and googles and good radio if he wants to survive on the modern guerilla battlefield and last time I checked, those are not produced in Afghanistan, if you know what I mean.