How Not to Take Over the World (cont.)

The aforementioned amazing uncle gave another suggestion, which I will add word for word as there is no way I could do it justice in a paraphrase. So here's "A Suggestion of How Not to Take Over the World by Former Evil Villain, Chris"

9. "If you want to succeed at ruling the world, stay out of Afghanistan. Or any of the 'Stans,' for that matter. If a country's name ends in '-stan,' you can be certain that it is really good at devouring invading armies for breakfast."

Just let these names sink in: Pakistan, Kurdistan, Afghanistan... Need I say more? In the nineteenth century, William Wigram wrote a hilarious account of his travels through Kurdistan as an Anglican priest. He introduces sentences like this: "In this land, where it is more comfortable for a priest to shoulder a musket than to recite passages from the Holy Scriptures..." And, "upon hearing his guest's remark regarding the figure of the host's sister, the host felt bound by the laws of congeniality and hospitality to take up his saber and unseat the guest's head from his neck as they sat together at meat."

I made those examples up, but that's how The Cradle of Mankind reads. Things in Kurdistan have doubtless not improved in the last 150 years.

When I was in high school, I remember watching a film about Afghanistan. In one scene, an octogenarian in naught but a loin cloth was traversing a swift river that was fed directly by snowmelt. The water, we were told, was scarcely above freezing, and the old man was compelled to use an inflated goat bladder as a flotation device to cross the broad watercourse. This eased his swim, so that he took a leisurely pace and turned to smile long and broadly at the camera. Let me stress this picture: An eighty-year-old swimming almost completely naked in water that would have been ice if the current had been just a little less strong. Not only did he not have a heart attack immediately upon entering the stream, but he actually seemed to enjoy it.

What's remarkable about this is that it is NOT remarkable. Not in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is filled with people just like this, except that most of them are no doubt considerably TOUGHER than an eighty-year-old.

In 1980, the Russians decided to invade Afghanistan. They promptly got their butts kicked, mostly by eighty-year-old men, and grandmothers armed with RPGs.

They probably would have avoided the embarrassment if they had taken the time to read up a little on former failed attempts by the Russian tsars to subjugate the area. Or, barring that, they could have asked the Brits, who seemed to like going to Afghanistan every decade or so to get the snot beat out of them. Or, they could have consulted Nebuchadnezzar, Darius the Mede, Alexander of Macedon, or any number of guys named "Seleucus/Antiochus" to find out just how unruly Afghanistan was even when you did go to all the trouble to conquer it.

The moral to the story? Never invade a "Stan." Any "Stan."