» Park No-ja.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This famous quote from the philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) may seem hackneyed, but it was all I could think of when I heard about Lee Myung-bak administration’s plan for renewing deployments to Afghanistan. There are probably no history majors among the main figures in the administration, but I feel it is part of a government’s duty to look at the history of the region, if only in the most superficial way, and determine whether the war the U.S. empire is currently waging has even a minimal justification or chance of success before sending citizens of the nation off into the jaws of death. At this point, it merely seems like this duty has been abandoned.

“Afghanistan, the tomb of empires.” This too seems hackneyed, but it is probably the only way to encapsulate the past of the land once referred to in ancient history as Sogdiana and Bactria. The country known today as Afghanistan is a land that is difficult to conquer and that quickly escapes from imperial control even when it has been conquered. Even Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king who conquered Persia and Mesopotamia in under a year, required three years of fierce fighting to conquer what is today Afghanistan. “All men in this land are Alexanders,” he said, lauding the courage of his foes.

The Arabs conquered almost the entirety of the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-7th century, but they ended up unable to seize control of most of the Afghan territory. From 1839 to 1842, the British rulers of India carried out their first attempted invasion of Afghanistan, or the First Anglo-Afghan War, only to see it end in utter defeat with more than 20,000 troops falling in battle. Such a welcome counterstrike by “indigenous peoples” was almost unheard of for any of the European colonial powers throughout the 19th century.

As a result of the second British invasion of Afghanistan between 1878 and 1880, the pro-British administration set up in Kabul came crashing down not 40 years after its establishment. From 1979 to 1989, the Soviet Union’s 100,000-strong army waged a brutal operation to wipe out insurgents while propping up the region’s socialist government, but it was all in vain. By 1985, the Soviet Union began secretly searching for an “escape strategy.” It seized the cities, yet 70 to 75 percent of the total territory was always under the control of the Islamist militias of tribes such as the Pashtun or in other words, the “insurgents.” Does it not give a true sense of the logic of history to see that indigenous militaries are prepared to make any sacrifices necessary to eradicate foreign forces, and continue to maintain effective control of that much territory even now?

Should we call this the limitless arrogance of empire? In 2001, on the pretext of the “war on terror,” the U.S. sought to strategically position and establish a stable puppet government in Afghanistan and use it as a foothold for an operation aimed at encircling Russia and China, and for advancement into the oil fields of Central Asia. It likely figured that the country that gained control of Afghanistan could scheme to control the center of Eurasia, but it failed to take into account the feelings of most of the population living in Afghanistan. It is ordinary for imperialists to ignore “indigenous peoples,” but, as the history of Afghanistan demonstrates, almost no invader that ignored the will of the people has ever succeeded in its invasion.

It is plain to see that the U.S. and other forces will ultimately find themselves pulling out sooner or later, worn out by a war of attrition with no chance of victory against militia forces who know the terrain like the back of their hand, are widely supported by residents, and are capable of continuously harassing the invaders, appearing out of nowhere and disappearing just as quickly. The imperialist invasion is bound to fail. Indeed, it is already lurching toward failure. Is deploying Korean citizens there as though it were some kind of tribute demonstrating a “moderate pragmatism?” One hopes the South Korean government understands just as the British Empire and Soviet Union that tried and failed to invade Afghanistan, the U.S. is no eternal empire and is not a subject for one's blind obedience.

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.