Allied plans aim at defeating warlords through policing, reconstruction, and diplomacy, not by wiping out cities. The surge aims to protect civilians, not kill them. More important, the kind of war that the surge in Afghanistan represents could not be more different than the war that Alexander fought in the region.
The ancients had no thermal polypropylene and no snow tires. Western soldiers today enjoy protection from the elements that Alexander’s Macedonians could hardly have imagined. It still is a paradise for brigands and bandits, but there the similarity ends. Afghanistan still represents tough terrain for soldiers. He would have been better off staying in Iran and consolidating the huge empire that his army had already won, an empire that stretched from Egypt and Greece eastward. But the Afghan war was not worth the price Alexander paid for it. For example, Kandahar – today a center of the American war effort – was once known by the magical name of Alexandria. It took a toll on Alexander’s wonderful army, and to what end? Greek rulers survived for 150 years in Afghanistan, and Greek settlements lasted centuries more. Bandits and warlords proved challenging to an army used to fighting conventional warfare. Exposure to cold, wind, and snow raised his men’s casualty toll. Alexander found himself driven to massacre civilians in the tens of thousands and to destroy their towns. Alexander lost almost as many men in one bloody day as he had in the four years it took him to conquer all the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and eastern Iran. Nonetheless, the war spilled over into Afghanistan, which served Alexander as a base. It would be pedantic to point out that most of Alexander’s “Afghan” campaign took place outside today’s Afghanistan most of the fighting took place in the nearby states of what are today Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan. Alexander’s history offers a much more positive lesson. Well, so the argument goes, but I beg to differ. Who are we to surge 30,000 more troops into the graveyard of the great? And Alexander was one of the greatest generals in human history. Fine books by Steven Pressfield and Frank Holt have recently examined Alexander’s Afghan War – a conflict, as some say, that was the original quagmire. The specters stretch backwards from the Soviets, who failed in Afghanistan in the 1970s, to the British who suffered there in the nineteenth century, and all the way to Alexander the Great, who conquered Afghanistan long ago but at a terrible cost. When it comes to haunted battlefields, Afghanistan is second to none. We fight wars with men – and with ghosts.
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