All this talk about Obama being a student of history. Maybe he should spend some time studying this history:

Alexander the Great had trouble crossing the Khyber Pass in 326 B.C. He wisely decided to pretty much leave the tribesmen alone and moved south to India. From the Middle Ages on, waves of invading Mongols, Moghul rulers of India, and Persians have swept through the area, but the Afghan tribes have always proved fractious and hard to rule.

Foreign domination ended in 1747 when the Persians were expelled from the western part of the country and a local dynasty was established that survived into the 20th century. For the following two centuries Britain and Russia vied to control the area because of its vital trade routes across Asia but found it largely indigestible. An entire British army was annihilated in the First Afghan War of 1839-1842. Britain did not trouble the Afghans again until 1878, when a modern army advancing on Kabul was ambushed and nearly overwhelmed at Ahmed Khel before British firepower gave the advantage to the invaders. The British chose to leave the Afghans alone, paying a large subsidy in gold to the country's rulers while only stipulating that a British minister would have veto authority over Afghan foreign policy, a move designed to keep the Russians out. In 1919, the Afghans rose up, invading India before being driven back and defeated inside Afghanistan by an expeditionary force armed with field artillery and machine guns. The British wisely withdrew and, by the Treaty of Rawalpindi in 1919, the British Empire accepted complete Afghan independence.

The next great power that tried to occupy Afghanistan was the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1992. Moscow eventually sent 110,000 soldiers supported by tanks and helicopters to Afghanistan before withdrawing in failure with at least 10,000 dead. A Soviet-backed puppet regime survived for a short time before being replaced by the Taliban. Now there is a U.S.-backed puppet regime in Kabul headed by Hamid Karzai, sometimes referred to as the "Mayor of Kabul" because of the limits of his authority, who reportedly became president in the first place because he spoke good English. His government is largely ineffective and is extremely corrupt, with much of the corruption coming from drug money, which makes up the bulk of the country's economy. There have been numerous attempts to kill Karzai, who is protected from assassination by a praetorian guard from Blackwater International.

In short, invaders who seek to control Afghanistan either directly or by proxy become involved in long, bloody wars, and they eventually decide the best choice is to depart and leave the Afghans to their own devices.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php?artic...