- ISLAMABAD (AFP) - Lieutenant
general G.N. Molesworth, of the British army in India in 1919, was scanning
the village below for signs of the antique Afghan cannon which was
beginning
to find its range on his position.
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- To his flank, he was worried about a band of armed
Pashtun
tribesmen, sympathetic to the Afghan regular forces and threatening a
guerrilla
raid against his nervous, underequipped group of British and Indian
units.
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- It was one of the first encounters of the so-called third
Afghan war against the British, and despite the bitter lessons of the two
earlier wars in the 1840s and 1870s, it seemed the imperial army had again
underestimated the Afghan fighting spirit.
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- "Hardly had they started to observe the Afghan
position,
when the Afghan gun scored a direct hit just below the 'sangar' (sandbagged
ditch) and showered the occupants with stones. It was a very near
miss,"
Molesworth wrote in his 1962 memoir of the war.
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- "In the meantime, binoculars had been searching
for the gun which was very difficult to locate. Eventually it was spotted
near the old fort on Kafir Kot, where the gunners were seen to run it out
of a cave, fire it and run it back again."
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- More conspicuously, the Afghans were also using an almost
obselete machine gun to rake the British positions overlooking the Afghan
entrenchments around Bagh village in the Khyber Pass, in what is now
Pakistan.
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- "The range was much too long for it to do any
damage,
but its solemn rate of fire and the cloud of smoke it made caused much
merriment among the troops," Molesworth said.
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- Once spotted, both weapons were silenced with three
well-directed
salvos of from a British battery, but the Afghans had made their point.
Despite their inferiority in arms and training, they could hold their own
with the most powerful army of the day.
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- The brigade commander, fearing a surprise attack on
another
section of the front, had kept too much in reserve, wrote
Molesworth.
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- "In other words, he sent a child to do a man's job.
He may also have underestimated the Afghan numbers, the strength of their
position, their fighting qualities and the difficulties of the ground over
which the attack would have to pass."
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- Seventy years later, the same words could have been
written
by Red Army commanders as the Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan after
a disastrous 10-year occupation.
-
- "The Soviet Union's example shows that Afghanistan
is an impregnable fortress," Yevgeny Zelenov, Russian lawmaker and
veteran of the wars in Afghanistan, told AFP last week.
-
- The Soviets withdrew in 1989, cementing Afghanistan's
reputation as a graveyard for invading armies. But it is really a graveyard
for the Afghans who have fought for their independence, most often against
each other.
-
- The country is dotted with the litter of past battles,
going back centuries, against powers such as Alexander the Great, Genghis
Khan and Tamerlane.
-
- The remains of bombed out Soviet tanks and armoured
vehicles
scatter the countryside, and whole villages lie in ruins, their surrounding
farmland sowed with mines and their irrigation canals deliberately
destroyed.
-
- More than a million Afghans are believed to have died
during the "holy war" against the Soviets, along with some 14,000
Red Army killed and 50,000 wounded. It has been called the Soviet Union's
Vietnam.
-
- Some three million Afghans, including the best and
brightest
of the country, fled the fighting to form the larest refugee population
in the world.
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- And as the United States contemplates becoming the latest
superpower to try to impose its will on the Afghans, a million more are
reportedly ready to flee.
-
- US forces are already believed to be in place around
the deeply impoverished country of 21 million people. Some are said to
be using old Soviet bases in Uzbekistan to the north.
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- US President George W. Bush says his military planners
have learned from the Soviet Union's debacle in Afghanistan.
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- "I am fully aware of the difficulties the Russians
had in Afghanistan. Our intelligence people and our State Department people
are also fully aware," Bush said last week, as he drummed up
international
support for his "war" against terrorism.
-
- "It is very hard to fight a guerrilla war with
conventional
forces," said the US president, who told reporters the coming US-led
campaign against terrorism would be "fought on a variety of
fronts,"
financial, diplomatic and military.
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- "There have been lessons learned in the past, and
our government is very aware of those lessons."
-
- Afghanistan's current rulers, the Taliban Islamic
militia,
have been testing their Soviet-era anti-aircraft guns in preparation for
a US attack. Their lessons have already been learnt.
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