Surrender

Last night Rachel Maddow went over the history of other countries which tried to make Afghanistan their own, but failed .... England and Russia.

This reminded me of how all this has been portrayed, not just in history books, but in novels and movies.

When I was in college I read M. M. Kaye's novel, The Far Pavilions (1978), which dealt in part with the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

But a more recent and kind of silly example of this was the one James Bond movie I ever actually liked (because Timothy Dalton) - The Living Daylights (1987). In that film, Bond and his girl friend end up in Afghanistan, fighting the Russians with the help of a romanticized mujahideen ...



Who would have guessed back then that we would someday invade Afghanistan ourdelves and stay for 20 years, then end up surrendering, as both Britain and Russia had before us.