Afghanistan, The Graveyard of Empires

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>"The Afghanistan area has been invaded many times in recorded history, but no invader has been able to control all of its regions at the same time, and at some point faced rebellion."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_Afghanistan

And yes it's wikipedia but the point still stands.

Britain and Russia vied over Afghanistan a lot in international brinksmanship. That was what the Great Game was about.

>literally no citation
Powerful stuff user.

>citations are in the hotlinked pages when it mentions what groups have invaded
You think circular citations make it into bibliographies, you moron?

>makes the claim that no one state has successfully dominated the entirety of the modern Afghan region
>claim is entirely unsourced
>claim is also demonstrably false as a simple look at any map of say the timurid empire will tell you
So are you retarded or what?

Claiming control of an area doesn't give you effective control of that area. That's doubly true in the pre-Westphalian era.
Maps of any pre-modern civilisation are unreliable because they don't represent fickle and changing feudal contracts between lower and higher nobilities. Sure, the Timurids weren't feudal per-se, but their power structure was still person based, not actually structure based, and claiming all the regions of Afghanistan doesn't give them control of any of those regions in a practical sense.

Except if you actually read a fucking history book you'd know the timurids mostly struck deals with various afghan polities instead of conquering them militarily. The areas who couldn't be bribed were mostly ignored as they didn't pose a threat.

Nice goalposts. The onus is on you to prove that the Timurids didn't have effective control of the Afghan region. Or that the Mongols didn't, or Alexander didn't.

You're the one making the claim that no empire ever successfully dominated the region and for evidence you provided a fucking wikipedia link with no citation.

>if you don't conquer something militarily you don't control it
Truly we are living in a renaissance of brainlets.

Well it's specifically named the case because Alexander's empire, the Ottoman empire and the British empire (as well as Indians, Russians, Soviets, Americans) all had huge difficulties trying to conquer and pacify the place.

As for why - it's horrible terrain that's just fertile enough to promote decent-sized tribes, who are tough as hell and hate everyone - each other, and especially invaders (of which there are many, due to the strategic position).

If you want to straight-up lose an army or two trying to hold a place, you'd struggle to find somewhere better - pic related

I wasn't the same guy you were replying to before, so they weren't my goalposts to move, I'm pointing out that in pre-westphalian states the same concept of control within borders simply did not exist. In fact the concept of external borders did not exist in the same way either, so your argument about effective control is kind of ridiculous.
In the context of "States" (your words) it could be argued that the King of France didn't have effective control of much outside of Paris and relied on his lords' loyalty. Even if we make the allowance that loyalty = control the fact of the matter is that the Timurids, Alexander et al simply did not have the loyalty of significant parts of what would one day become Afghanistan. In practical terms this means they did not levy taxes, raise troops from the citizenry etc. into the royal armies.

>post-ISAF mission

mixed steppes/mountains terrain across the country. Small pockets of civilization dot the landscape, filled with a variety of more sedentary natives, and the ruins of previous imperial states dot the landscape.

the land has recently been taken over by a powerful outside force that seeks to use the region as a buffer against expansionist elements to the northeast. they claim to be civilizing the natives, but it only seems to be taken up by the urban population. a former murder cult that held sway over the lands is slowly rebuilding its strength far from public eye.

outside the cities, warring tribes and small villages dot the landscape, whether mountainous or on a plain. life is short, harsh and crude, and the urban population has difficulty relating to or acknowledging their backwards cousins.

the occupying force tries to send diplomatic, humanitarian and trade missions to these outliers. Most of the time they never meet who they are sent after or are politely talked over util they leave. the unlucky ones who end up on the receiving end of a tribal grudge are killed quickly and horribly.

the occupiers find themselves in a guerrilla conflict. patrols are ambushed and annihilated, outposts overrun, sentries with their throats cut, treasuries looted and all sorts of other things. this aggravates relations between the rank-and-file members of the occupation and those they are nominally there to "protect" in the cities. incidents rise, and no amount of R&R can fix someone who the insurgents deliberately left alive and traumatized to send a message.

allowances for more medieval forms of justice and the ability of the occupying forces to be far more brutal, i think you could easily put Operation Enduring Freedom-era afghanistan into any fantasy empire and watch it sap their will like a crack in a septic pipe.

>It's a meme made up after the British Empire fucked up a few times there.
This. Afghanistan was conquered before. British Empire failed and decided to create a myth to maintain their face. It's sour grapes of history.

Firstly, It's packed with tribes of savages that you can't make treaties or peace with, because
1. There's 200 tribes who will never agree on anything

2. They have no concept of a promise or keeping their word and will betray you as soon as it's convenient. Even if they don't, tribal leaders won't bother stopping their people looting, raiding and being savages.

Secondly, the terrain is fucking horrible and very well suited to the aforementioned raiding parties who can be on you, rob you and drive your horses away and be over the next hill in about a minute.

Thirdly they're exceedingly cruel and violent people, even for Muslims.

Fourthly, it's the main barrier between Russia and India, so it was vital for Britain to keep hold of because that way you can stop the Ruskis trying to invade India.

era Victorian era
campaign types political/ military campaign as either soldiers of a invading country, or as a various tribal chiefs trying to consolidate enough power to make themselves king(s).

I'd go for Soviet-Afghan war because its AESTHETIC. Probably run something where the PCs are Soviet soldiers, going around doing all sort of shit, from convoy protection to attacks to Airborne operations. There were a lot of interesting battles in Afghanistan and the Soviets really started to innovate their tactics.

I'd probably base the battles on The Bear Went Over The Mountain, and the downtime on the movie The Beast of War or Afghan Breakdown.

And I would play period soviet music about the war all the time:
youtube.com/watch?v=jzhB0reqpJQ

Holy shit that song is great.

>named the graveyard of empires because anyone who tries to conquer it fails
>pacify the region through non-military means
>somehow doing the latter contradicts the former

An age of brainlets indeed

Its a tad bit hilly.

>How would you run an Afghanistan-themed setting Veeky Forums?
Somewhere between The Beast and Rambo III ... not sure where between, but somewhere

Modern Day

Just reskin the hellish planes of d&d

Post Soviet. The infidels are gone, and with them, the unity of the people. Split apart once again, old grudges re-emerge and war breaks out again. Militant zealots, Tyrannical despots, and worse now tread the land. The weapons of the old enemy are scavenged and used to have brother fight brother.

>The infidel should have waited. We do the job of killing us far better than they ever could.

The primary reason why it is the graveyard of empires is because empires invest in the area only to realise that no matter how much money they pour in it, it will never be self-suficient or centralized. It is better to thing of the place as a region than a real country. It's the muddy trench that empires eventually get sick of and just leave.

The war in Afghanistan is not one that can be won in the conventional sense. A "victory" as Americans define it requires not only the military defeat of the opposing force but also the reshaping of the region so that it cannot threaten the United States again. This is impossible in Afghanistan because Afghanistan is more accurately perceived as a geographic region than a country. The middle of the region is a mountainous knot that extends east into the Himalayas. There are no navigable rivers and little arable land. The remaining U-shaped ring of flat land is not only arid but also split among multiple ethnic groups into eight population zones that, while somewhat discrete, have no firm geographic barriers separating them. This combination of factors predisposes the area to poverty and conflict, and that has been the region's condition for nearly all of recorded history.

The United States launched the war in late 2001 to dislodge al Qaeda and prevent the region from being used as a base and recruitment center for it and similar jihadist groups. But since geography precludes the formation of any stable, unified or capable government in Afghanistan, these objectives can be met and maintained only so long as the United States stations tens of thousands of troops in the country.

>Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires

Where did you get this

That was a good movie

>Afghanistan, The Graveyard Empires that weren't Alexander's

We're off to India, suckers.

It's a meme from cultures and people who don't remember history before the European Middle Ages.

Afghanistan has been conquered and ruled plenty of times, and has been extremely wealthy for a lot of history.

He lost quite a few armies conquering it, and lost most of his armies on the way back.

Or the Mongols, the Mughals, or (initially) the Saffavids.

The Achaemenids, Sakas, Kushans, and plenty others in antiquity, and pretty much every single Persianate and Turkic dynasty in the later periods (even after the Mongols and Timur), ruled it with ease and prosperity.

>Saffavids
Do you mean the Saffarids? The Safavids had a lot of problems with their Eastern holdings....that's how the Shaybanids/Uzbeks, and later the Mughals started.

True, they lost it, and in the end they ended up with an ethnic Afghan Shah - but they did hold on to it for a fair while.

So what is the best case scenario for an American 'Victory' in Afghanistan at this point?

>ethnic Afghan Shah
The ethnogenesis of the "afghan" people only began around that time anyways. Are you referring to the Duranni?

One can argue that the Saffarids, Ghurids, Samanids, were all "ethnic afghans", as in, native ethnic groups to that region.

*Durrani

I love Afghans

It's isolated, mountainous, and about 500 years behind the rest of the world. The locals range from kind people to back stabbers to the jaded and the useless. The local government is corrupt, warlords dominate the isolated communities, and various international powers have fingers in the pot. Child abuse and drugs run rampant.

Foreign Soldiers are trying to train locals into an effective force, but largely things are to no avail. Bombs rain in the night, and special forces conduct raids daily. Sometimes the insurgents take ground, but they are beaten back through heavy firepower.

Beyond this land, no one even cares.

Basically Paranoia meets Dilbert in a modern military.

...Soooo kill everyone?

Shit will remain broken without the Paki/India-conflict being mended. The Pakis won't stop destabilizing Afghanistan to protect their flank as long as they feel that India is out to fuck them.

I'd run a Delta Green game with the PCs as a tank crew during the Soviet invasion, taking heavy inspiration from The Beast of War. Slowly progressing from pissed off locals to a cult of something as the enemy.

is it 5th edition?

>the Ottoman empire
>in Afghanistan
Are you sure you wrote the right empire?

Pulling everything out and forgetting about it, the Talibans are already seizing more ground than before and if they couldnt be defeated in 15 years then they wont be defeated with even less troops and investments, there's no other choice but get the fuck out because it was a failure.

terrain, weather, mad cunts

pulling everything out and letting the taliban and government form a new coalition that ends the bloodshed. Very unlikely to happen. The US strategy right now is just to be there forever with no endgoal in sight except for there to be an acceptable level of casualties. Pathetic shit

Kekistan vs Afghanistan 1448.

Well, the polity that became the Ottoman Empire tried to do it.

Yep. Use neutron bombs and chemical warfare.

These. America went in with entirely the wrong idea about how to fight the war, and by 2004 it was unwinnable.
You win wars like this by making the people like you and stop thinking of you as an invader, so your all your troops have to start learning the languages, you have to build roads, schools, power plants, water works. You have to become part of the local communities, not just patrol the local communities. The British did it in Oman in the 60s-70s and not only won, but turned Oman into one of the least shitty Arabic countries.
But the American military doesn't think like that and never has. American strategy only thinks about the shooty shooty bang bang and so Afghanistan is fucked, Iraq is fucked, it's how they lost Vietnam, and so on.

if States move out, Russia (or somebody else) move in - it's not about conquering the territory anymore, perhaps it never was, it's about denying it to competitors, real or perceived

Obligatory track
youtube.com/watch?v=gjdn2JYZhD8

Read about the post-Soviet Invasion civil war and the rise of the Taliban for starters.

America tried that though. The Taliban and other extremist groups kept blowing everything up afterwards and the locals became desensitized to being ruled over by one group one day and then another group the next. Everyone knows America has to leave eventually so while the Taliban slowly creeps into absolute power, everyone else just sits on their asses and waits for the US to up and leave for good.

Winning here has never been American goal

>mfw the invasion of Afghanistan was a front to stabilize the international opium market

That graphic is horseshit. Australia legally produces more Opium each year than Afghanistan does.
Those number are also lies, here's the actual UN report from last year.
unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/AfghanistanOpiumSurvey2016_ExSum.pdf#yuiHis=1|uploads|documents|/crop-monitoring|/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan|/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/AfghanistanOpiumSurvey2016_ExSum.pdf
Production never exceeded 8,000 tons and there are several years in that graphic that appear exaggerated.
Yeah, there's a shitload of problems with the drug trade in Afghanistan and it's fair to blame the US government for not doing enough to stop it, but talking shit and spreading misinformation isn't how you do that.

That graphic ends at 2009. Numbers are listed as 'potential' and 'estimated', your claim that 'production never exceeded 8,000 tons' is baffling, even your chart admits that numbers can be higher than estimated on average (or lower than that) at its peak exceeding 8,000 mark. Even the document you posted shows that opium production has increased since NATO invasion and was ever so higher than before US operation. US doesn't stop it, with one hand it milks money from budget for operations which do nothing to stop and with other hand it facilitates opium production. Not the first time CIA is involved in large scale drug trafficking, mind you. This is a great business model, if you ask me.

Yeah, and the highest estimates are between 7,000 and 8,000. And no, that peak you refer to does not exceed 8,000, look at the graph again.
I'm not even objecting to the idea that the CIA is involved in drug trafficking and the Afghan drug trade, you're right they have done it before and I actually happen to agree that they probably pad their operating budget with that cash, I'm just sick of misleading and misrepresented stats.

U wot

>I'm just sick of misleading and misrepresented stats
Just wait for the stats to be reevaluated again in 5 years depending on the political climate of the time. Stats by contemporary sources aren't misleading. They present the situation from the perspective of the viewers at the time, their perception of the whole situation and what they expected to happen. It's an important source of information as well.

The most hilarious part was that there was a widely reported all-time low of the opiate supply in medicine in the years before the invasion. We actually needed more of them as they are highly effective painkillers, but legal sources were at an all-time low.