Do the people waging wars know any history or geography?
When I read things like this I get very aggravated:
The tragedy happened early on in Britain’s deployment to Helmand province, at a time when 3 Para and others faced chronic shortages of everything from ammunition, helicopters and even - in some cases - food.
Few had realised the front-line would present quite such savage terrain.
Afghanistan has faced so many wars throughout its history that you’d think people would study what went wrong in those wars before waging war there again, but no :]
It’s not as if the terrain problems are new. Alexander the Great spent something like 12-13 years capturing everything between Greece and India and guess what? It took him 4 of those years to capture what is now Afghanistan. No other piece of land caused him that many problems throughout his campaign.
Take any of the wars in Afghanistan and it’ll always be the same story - it’s a damn difficult piece of terrain.
I just don’t get how Western armies can be that unprepared :-/
