I apologize for I cannot recall who coined this phrase…..but no truer statement has ever been uttered.

The Mongols tried and failed…….The Brits tried and failed miserably…….the Soviets tried and were soundly defeated and internationally embarrassed.

A country that is basically in the 9th century and few have ever succeeded in defeating it.  A country whose literacy rate is about 28%.  A country whose people earn about $800 a year.  A country whose major industry is the cultivation of poppies for the purpose of opium production.  The country in question is Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama and other top officials in his administration have made it clear that there can be no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the non-military efforts to win over the Afghan population will be central to its chances of success.

The reality, however, is that U.S. military and civilian agencies lack the skills and training as well as the institutional framework necessary to carry out culturally and politically sensitive socio-economic programs at the local level in Afghanistan, or even to avoid further alienation of the population.

But why will it be an impossible task?

In fact, the U.S. government does not even have a minimum corps of people capable of speaking Pashto, the language of the 14 million ethnic Pashtuns who represent about 42 percent of the population of Afghanistan. It is in the Pashtun southern and eastern regions of the country that the complex insurgency that has come to be called the Taliban has been able to organize and often effectively govern at the village level in recent years.

The United States needs “thousands” of Pashto speakers to have any chance of success in winning them over, said Mason, recalling that 5,000 U.S. officials had learned Vietnamese by the end of the Vietnam War. “The Foreign Service Institute should be turning out 200 to 300 Pashto speakers a year,” he said.

Beyond the language barrier there are other impotent responses being repeated by the US troops even after the Soviets proved it was not the way to fight in Afghanistan.

One of the hallmarks of that role, which has continued since 2006, is heavy reliance on air power as a means of trying to weaken the insurgency. Barno, now director of the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, told IPS in an interview last September, “There is a predilection to use air power in lieu of close up encounters [with insurgents] to avoid U.S. casualties.”

Barno recalled that he dramatically reduced reliance on air power, because he regarded the Afghan tolerance for the U.S. military presence as a “bag of capital” that was used up “every time we used air power or knocked down doors or detained someone in front of their family.”

And then there is the Afghan people.  These people have no problem with the hardships of war, the terrain, the weather, etc.  But they do have a problem with civilian deaths, it was one of the driving forces of resistance when the Soviets were playing the war game.

Growing Afghan anger at the hundreds of civilian casualties from U.S. air strikes, often based on bad intelligence, has been exploited by insurgents across the country.  If the amount of casualities cannot be lowered, then the US is in for a long stay in Afghanistan, remember Vietnam, it too was unwinnable.