Dear Mr. President:

"Into the Land of Bones" by Frank L. Holt is one of the most significant books ever written about Afghanistan. It is a well-documented account of Alexander the Great's military failures in Afghanistan over 2,300 years ago. Also, it touches on the two British military disasters in the 1800s and the USSRs military fiasco from 1979 to 1989.

The book is significant because it details why all of these previous military operations failed and it places in dramatic context why the American and Coalition force invasion and occupation of modern Afghanistan is in trouble after eight years of conflict.

Occupation is a key term. No matter how successful Alexander's military campaigns were, his attempts at long-term occupation failed, miserably. The same can be said for the British and USSR occupations. In the 1838 British campaign, only one invader survived out of over 15,000 who went in!

The challenges facing invaders and occupiers of Afghanistan have not changed in critical ways in 2,300 years. The Afghans are a proud, hardy people. The tribes and warlords fight among themselves until foreigners invade. Such incursions unite the disparate groups into effective guerrilla forces, creating military and occupation nightmares. It is that long history that the Coalition forces are up against; it is that history that may eventually require the Coalition to leave Afghanistan to the Afghans.

In the view of one of the Taliban fighters, the US did an inestimable favor to al Qaeda and the Taliban by turning attention from there to Iraq; both were in total disarray until the US let them off the hook by focusing on Iraq. In a widely circulated comment, General McChrystal, the present Coalition commander, is quoted as saying that the situation in Afghanistan is "deteriorating and may be headed for failure."

Those in charge of the Afghan war were either ignorant of or paid no attention to the lessons from France's mishandling of insurgent movements in Vietnam and Algeria. In Algeria, the French did not win against a rather small force of internally divided insurgents even with 600,000 French troops and local militia help. The French forces pulled out, leaving about one million French citizens and the Algerian allies to fend for themselves. Unexpectedly and against the dire warnings by outsiders, the political situation in Algeria stabilized; there was relatively little post-pullout bloodshed.

More troops is NOT the answer for the Coalition in Afghanistan either. The way the process there as been "mucked up" for eight+ years, there will be no easy or quick solution.

Sincerely,

Hal Mansfield