Graveyard of Empires

President O has a reputation as a scholar, but he demonstrates an inadequate grasp of history with his plan to ramp up the Afghan War. Not for nothing is Afghanistan well known among global historians as "The Graveyard of Empires."

Now Bob Herbert of the New York Times has written a piece explaining why Mr. Obama should reverse that decision, and the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan while the getting's good.

Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, wrote an important piece for Newsweek warning against the proposed buildup. “Afghanistan will be a sinkhole,” he said, “consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste.”

In an analysis in The Times last month, Michael Gordon noted that “Afghanistan presents a unique set of problems: a rural-based insurgency, an enemy sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan, the chronic weakness of the Afghan government, a thriving narcotics trade, poorly developed infrastructure, and forbidding terrain.”

Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan both recognized that Afghanistan was seemingly designed by God to favor guerilla fighters, and after getting bloodied there, avoided the place. The Afghan mujahadeen, with U.S. assistance, delivered the coup de grace which dispatched the Soviet Empire.

Are we really so determined to go the way of the USSR? sometimes it seems so.