Zalmai Rassoul: The case for afghanistan

 The long war in Afghanistan goes on. Despite the presence of thousands of US and NATO troops, the level of violence is still rising in the country.

The relationship between Afghanistan's government and its best ally, the US, has been sorely tested in recent weeks, with mass protests after copies of the Quran were burned and outrage when a US soldier massacred 16 Afghans.

With the Taliban strong at home and tensions simmering with its neighbour Pakistan, international forces are already starting to withdraw from the country. Most will be gone in 2014 and, adding to the uncertainty for Afghans, that is the very same year their president, Hamid Karzai, is due to step down.

So, is Afghanistan spinning out of control or has the country still a chance for peace?

The the reality about Afghanistan:  
The British tried in the 19 century  
In the 1800s, the British controlled India, and the Russians, to the north, had their own designs on southern Asia. Between these two imperial powers sat the rugged land of Afghanistan. In time the periodic collisions of empire in that unforgiving landscape would become known as “The Great Game.”
One of the earliest eruptions in this epic struggle was the first Anglo-Afghan War, which had its beginning in the late 1830s. To protect its holdings in India, the British had allied themselves with an Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammed.

 The Soviet Union tried in 1979:

 Afghanistan hit the world's headlines in 1979. Afghanistan seemed to perfectly summarize the Cold War. From the west's point of view, Berlin, Korea, Hungary and Cuba had shown the way communism wanted to proceed. Afghanistan was a continuation of this.

In Christmas 1979, Russian paratroopers landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. The country was already in the grip of a civil war. The prime minister, Hazifullah Amin, tried to sweep aside Muslim tradition within the nation and he wanted a more western slant to Afghanistan. This outraged the majority of those in Afghanistan as a strong tradition of Muslim belief was common in the country.

Thousands of Muslim leaders had been arrested and many more had fled the capital and gone to the mountains to escape Amin's police. Amin also lead a communist based government - a belief that rejects religion and this was another reason for such obvious discontent with his government.

 The U.S. tried in October of 2001

The War in Afghanistan, also called the Afghan war, began on October 7, 2001,^[37] as the armed forces of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the Afghan United Front (Northern Alliance) launched Operation Enduring Freedom. The primary driver of the invasion was the September 11 attacks on the United States, with the stated goal of dismantling the al-Qaeda terrorist organization and ending its use of Afghanistan as a base. The United States also said that it would remove the Taliban regime from power and create a viable democratic state. A decade into the war, the U.S. continues to battle a widespread Taliban insurgency, and the war has expanded into the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan.^[38]
The preludes to the war were the assassination of anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9, 2001, and the September 11 attacks on the United States, in which nearly 3000 civilians died in New York City, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The United States identified members of al-Qaeda, an organization based in, operating out of and allied with the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the perpetrators of the attacks.

 Yet none of these so called super powers were able to pacify Afghanistan because the Pashtun have always viewed any outside intervention as an occupying army and not as liberators.

Pashtuns (Pashto: پښتانه paṣtāná, Pax̌tun, also spelled Pushtuns, Pakhtuns, Pukhtuns), also known as ethnic Afghans (Persian: افغان‎) or Pathans (Urdu: پٹھان, Hindi: पठान Paṭhān),^[11][12][13] are an Eastern Iranian ethnic group with populations primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan.^[14][15] The Pashtuns are typically characterised by their usage of the Pashto language and practice of Pashtunwali, which is a traditional set of ethics guiding individual and communal conduct. Their origins are unclear but historians have come across references to various ancient peoples called Paktha (Pactyans) between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BC,^[16][17][18] who inhabited the region between the Hindu Kush and Indus River and may be the early ancestors of Pashtuns. Since the 3rd century AD and onward, they have been referred to by the ethnonym "Afghan".^{[19][20][21][22]}
Often characterised as a warrior and martial race, their history is spread amongst various countries of South, Central and Western Asia, centred around their traditional seat of power in medieval Afghanistan. During the Delhi Sultanate era, the Pashtun Lodi dynasty replaced the Turkic kingdoms as the ruling dynasty in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Other Pashtuns fought the Persian Empire and the Mughal Empire^[23] before obtaining an independent state in the early-18th century, which began with a successful revolution by the Mirwais Hotak followed by conquests by Ahmad Shah Durrani.^[24] Pashtuns played a vital role during the Great Game from the 19th century to the 20th century as they were caught between the imperialist designs of the British and Russian empires.