"The Great Game"

Maureen Dowd goes to the theater to see “The Great Game,” a seven-hour play that uses "real and fictional characters, actual transcripts and imagined scenes, to trace the trellis of foreign involvement in Afghanistan from 1842 to the present."

Here's my comment, scotched again by the Times moderators:

Herman Melville saw the folly of outsiders trying to take Afghanistan. Early in his most famous book, Moby Dick, published in 1851 (nine years after the 16,000 Brits & Indians lost their lives near Jalalabad), there is a scene in which the narrator Ishmael takes account of his place in the world:

 And doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

Here, Ishmael imagines the headlines:

     Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States

     Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael

     Bloody Battle in Affghanistan

Only the headline that describes Ishmael's whaling voyage is fictional. Throughout recorded history, many have tried to conquer Afghanistan, and many have taken it for a short time -- from Darius I in about 550 B.C.E., to Alexander the Great (probably the greatest military leader in history, Alexander took three years to conquer Afghanistan) to various Eastern tribes, to the Moors in the 7th century C.E. to the Turks in the 10th century C.E., etc., etc., to the British in the 19th century to the Soviets in the 20th. The Afghans usually just wait 'em out & commit sabotage & other mayhem in the waiting. They'll do the same with us.

I'm aware that the justification for continuing the Longest War in Afghanistan is our fear of a nuclear Pakistan. But might I suggest that subduing Afghanistan & propping up one more hated dictator (who is stealing millions of U.S. tax dollars) is not the best foreign policy strategy for deterring Pakistani nukes? Let's save our soldiers' lives and direct our attentions, through diplomatic negotiations and other means, to the source of the problem.

The Graveyard of Empires is not the best place for the United States to die.