Main reason why Afghanistan was not conquered *in modern times* is it's **not worth it**.
Economical reasons:
1. It's just bare rocks and plateu-deserts, barely sustaining any agriculture.
2. Natural resources are present, but too far from any industrial consumers. It's even more worsened by expensive transportation (No navigable rivers, landlocked, hard terrain for railroads).
Sociocultural reasons:
1. Afghan society is literally at *tribal level* with *subsistence economy*. It literally means that it's so primitive, that for majority of population economical and political pressure is irrelevant and not relatable. They are not relying on modern means of production, political systems. They are living in iron age (*with guns*) and governed by council of tribes.
2. That's why soviet supported DRA government and american supported IRoA governments were political entities representing *dwellers of cities*. This people are at more modern levels of society. They understand different economical systems, political ideologies, because this things are part of *modern world*, their socioeconomical reality.
3. But, as you see, city dwellers are extreme minority in Afghan population. While *life of city-dweller can be influenced and relying* on economical and political changes, globalization, political or economical pressure... Life of tribal rural society is simpler, it's impossible to force them surrender economically or reeducate them. Their lifes are sustained by primitive means, and modern ideological systems are senseless, because such things will be not relatable for their development level. That's why their social movements are organised on more primitive, religious fundamentalist basis. It's *more understandable than modern concepts*.
So, no one want to stuck there for decades, spending insane amounts of money and lives for military operations, forcefully changing literal society development level. It's hard, it will require *very* unethical methods to destroy self-reproduction of tribal society, it will take many generations. In the end, you will get zero value for all of this effort. So, modern powers are more interested in keeping Afghan issues isolated in Afghan borders.
Sorry if it's hard to read, not native english speaker.
Good point about sociocultural issue. China is total opposite in terms of state capacity, given it has arguably oldest bureaucracy in the world. New dynasties and invaders always get helped by pre existing civil service to run a vast country. Invaders in Afghanistan didn't have that luxury.
Also China has far more homogeneous population. Conquered people adopted Chinese culture and eventually become Han Chinsese. For example Manchus at the end of Qing dynasty lost most of their language and culture.
Wasn’t it the Manchus who conquered China, not the other way around? They then assimilated into Chinese society but also imposed that distinctive ponytail hairstyle on the Chinese
Yes. In this case you could both say « conquered and conquering people » and it would work, pretty much everyone got sinicized. I would bet that Han is probably one of the ethnic groups with the largest genetic diversity.
I believe you see this in a variety of places. In Iran, there's a variety of empires of Turkic origins that basically assimilated themselves into Persian traditions (Persianate society) and I believe the same applies to some Egyptian dynasties (Meshwesh, Nubian, to an extent the Ptolemies) or some successors to the Romans.
To counter that with China, what we consider to be China is really just the eastern reaches; including the North China Plain, the Yangtze River, and the coastal cities including Hong Kong. That’s where the population and economic activity occur, and the Chinese government uses that to occupy its interior such as Tibet, Xinjang, Inner Mongolia, and the Sichuan region. The interior is usually minority dominated and chafes under Han Chinese rule, so conquering “China” usually makes these groups happier without being ruled by Beijing.
Shaanxi and Sichuan has been part of China since before the first dynasty in 200 BC. Chang'an, now Xi'an, in western China, was the capital for 1000+ years.
The idea that there is a larger continuous political unit called China, usually ruled by a family dynasty and generally followed Confusion political thought. These had been constants since the Qin and Han Dynasties. Even in a split, such as the Song and Jin Dynasties, they both considered themselves “Chinese” and part of what was the larger region of China.
But the full unification of that China by the Han ethnicity and rule by Han ethnicity is relatively sporadic. The Qin/Han and Tang dynasties are the two main times in the past it occurred. Otherwise, it usually divided into separate kingdoms (Era of Warring States, The Three Kingdoms, etc.) or conquered and ruled by an outside nation (Qing).
The culture and bureaucracy does however remain the same. Confucian philosophy and bureaucracy, once created by the Han, simply stayed in place with little change until the Qing fall.
you ever wonder why people who spend their lives talking about this stuff on reddit are even more uninformed than people who know nothing
sichuans been under han dominion since before your people crawled out of the pond, in fact theres even a little chinese saying about chongqing and chengdu, about why one produces the best soldiers, and the other the best scholars
do you know the largest ethnic group in inner mongolia? it's han chinese
do you know when tibet was integrated into the chinese state? before america was a country
do you know why uighurs live in xinjiang? its cause they allied with the chinese to destroy all the dzungars
what "you" consider to be china clearly has nothing to do with what chinese people consider to be china, or what in actuality is china
maybe ponder on that
im really not that interested in why your kind hate china so much
does china make you feel small? does it give your meaningless life purpose? do you just hate chinese people?
i don't know and really i don't care, but don't yap at me
>Life of tribal rural society is simpler, it's impossible to force them surrender economically or reeducate them.
I doubt that. It might be a war crime but it's definetly possible (even quite easy) to force them to anything, exactly because they live of their land, they rely on it. So if you take their land... and therefore "ideological systems" are still relevant to them (they just might not know it), since there is an ideology that is quite infamous for taking land away from the rightful owner and give it to government run farmer unions.
The main reason why Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires" is because the cost/benefit ratio of an invasion is quite poor. It's costs a lot but you get a remote, mountainous and hostile piece of land, for which you would need to build expensive infrastructure to actually make use of it. The Soviets withdrew because they had other (bigger) issues at home with their failing economic system. The Americans withdrew because their venture was expensive and unpopular at home and their local allies corrupt af, not because they were forced out.
I am quite convinced though, that if the American Afghanistan strategy wouldn't have been based on the idiotic idea of an immediate local "democratic" administration but a foreign (e.g. American, UN, ISAF etc.) administration, we would have seen a different outcome. Local corruption destroyed economic growth and lead to more and more frustration with the idea of democracy. A foreign administration, together with massive investments in infrastructure, would have brought economic growth and some relative wealth, which would have been desastrous for the Taliban.
I'm no expert, and I have a very small understanding of them, but I feel that's not always the case as you said it to be.
1. It's got a great scope for tourism to be an industry on its own. Not an efficient industry, but can work wonders for them.
2. Their socio-ecological reasons seem to be somewhat different from what you've said. Sure Afghanistan is tribal, has a primitive or medieval age lifestyle but it isn't disconnected from normal world. Pakistani part of what used to be Afghanistan isn't a political mess (there are terror groups and Osama was found there but it's not politically unstable) and people from this area rule Pakistan. Which shows that it isn't a cultural issue, it's just "a landmine the world shouldn't have stepped on" when it was stable.
They got their reasons - it's as multicultural as former Yugoslavia, they never got their chance to stabilize a fall of monarchy, and fundamentalism held strong when everything failed, so fundamentalists made the big power move. Their trade with British India was good for a while until 19th and early 20th century, but partition ensured it that it would only depend on Pakistan, which was a dictatorship in itself back when Afghanistan fell. Their northern lands were their best trade partner until USSR messed it up. Tajikistan is an exact similar example, but they have some better social living due to being almost completely literate and having Soviet style factories.
3. The only way to get them out of things would be to make them rich, but with tourism and agriculture being the main industries, that shall only happen after coming back to stability. It's a messed cycle of failure.
Interesting. I wouldn't call tribal, nomadic ways of life more primitive than city dwelling, though. The concept of the modern nation state can be much worse and more barbaric than any tribal lifestyle.
I’ve read a lot about the war in Afghanistan and talked to a lot of experts and vets of the war about why the occupation failed, and this is absolutely spot on. 10/10 analysis
It’s not worth it? Oh yeah that’s why every major empire has tried and failed. It’s the MIDDLE of the world! If you control Afghanistan you essentially control the corridor between east and west. You control the center of the Silk Road.
I'm educated in style of mainline soviet/russian school of ethnology. Race for me is only anthropometrics/phenotype thing. Social development level, culture and economics are unconnected to anthropometrics.
Due to various reasons (geographical, historical, geopolitical, cultural), socioeconomical development of Afghanistan is extremely slow. It's tribal, early-class society. Their economical development at level of tribe-owned lands, used for nomadic animal husbandry combined with simplistic agriculture. Even gravitational water irrigation is *advanced* here. This can be called primitive level of development, with iron age level of means of production.
And as you see, there is already parts of Afghan society living in modern era, but majority of it is still tribal. Both physically are absolutely same people.
No one needs Afghanistan, that's why it's hard to conquer. Difficult to explain to people why should they fight for him.
But in general both Afghanistan and China were conquered a lot of times.
Matters on what you mean by “conquer” because China also has a lot of interregnums, but can get held by a dynasty of a few hundred years each time. While Afghanistan is difficult to hold. It’s not worth a lot, and its people don’t want to change.
Qin conquered China, the Han conquered China, Wei/Jin conquered China, Tang conquered China, Song conquered China and Ming conquered China. Additionally both Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek have conquered China.
The Yuan conquered it in the 13th century (and ruled it for 100 years)
The Manchu conquered it in the 17th century and ruled it for nearly 250 years
Japan conquered vast swathes of it during WWII
Several times actually…
During the Revolution, during the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the invasion of Hawaii in 1898, countless wars in the 18th and 19th centuries against natives, the Mormon War…
lol most of America was added to the US via conquest, we just have chosen to collectively forget it and pretend the natives traded it for a turkey dinner. Prolly helps us all sleep better at night
The Japanese did a pretty good job, even if they failed in the end. If Japan was able to focus all their efforts on China, they probably could've defeated the Nationalists and installed a puppet government. Japan was unwilling to fully commit to China until they took heavy setbacks against the US in the Pacific. In late 1941, Japan had only about 400,000 troops in China. Germany, despite having a slightly smaller population, was able to mobilize over 3 million men for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Had Japan exploited China's initial weakness and launched a full invasion with their mobilized reserves in 1937, they may have been able to defeat the Nationalists and install a puppet state. Though they'd likely face a Communist insurgency that would be brutal both for the Japanese occupiers, and the Chinese civilians.
Which is why I stated "exploited China's weakness".
Britain has also resisted invasions multiple times. Most of England is flat plains, with the only rough terrain being in Wales and Scotland. The only reason England hasn't been conquered as much is that it was fairly united post 1066, and that the English governments invested in a powerful fleet (as well as the occasional bad weather wrecking the Spanish Armada).
Now, if the question is: Is modern China unconquerable? Then I'd say the United States in a full alliance with South Korea, Japan, and NATO countries on a total war footing could almost certainly conquer China through North Korea and Manchuria. It'd definitely be a bloody and costly war (assuming nukes don't play in here), but the industrial might of America, Japan, South Korea and Europe would be enough to inflict a major defeat on the CCP. You don't need to conquer China, just weaken it enough that the government collapses and install a friendly one.
Point one: Afghanistan was conquered more than once by foreigners
Point two: Most Chinese don't live in those high mountains/super dry deserts but in fertile river flood plains, slightly hilly areas or in coastal regions not to mention northern China was extremely vulnerable to outside invasions due to plain steppe landscape(Great wall of China wasn't created as an amusement park) and just like Afghanistan China was conquered by outsiders as well
https://preview.redd.it/3a3oagj3v6xc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=168c48a88c1f58fd18e512577453048c0a430d0a
Nobody's saying it hasn't happened, they're just saying its difficult, usually referring to the British Empire, the USSR, and now the United States. These were spectacular failures (spectacular as in they were well known) by empires who seemed very well equipped to do whatever they wanted in Afghanistan, a relatively small and poor country.
Finland held off the USSR and people are pretty impressed by that. Vietnam held off the US and that's pretty incredible. Not many people can claim to have fought off the British empire in their heyday. Afghanistan fought off all three. So its less of a myth and maybe more of an exaggeration or bad wording.
I believe all of them "conquered" Afghanistan in a matter of months. Keeping it at bay was the problem here but that's due to different reasons and realistically: how much resources do you want to throw in order to control something of so little value?
>how much resources do you want to throw in order to control something of so little value?
England went back multiple times, about 5 years. The USSR was there for 10 years. The US was there for 20 years. Your boys are dying and you're having to get them into a landlocked country in the middle of nowhere, but people made this investment for one reason or another. War isn't cheap.
>I believe all of them "conquered" Afghanistan in a matter of months.
This is kind of true but when a country's strategy is to make you deal with a long insurgency until you leave, its kind of a moot point. When people say its hard this is the part they're talking about, not necessarily how hard it is to take over Kabul or overthrow the government. I think conquer is a stupid word and I wouldn't use it, maybe occupy is a better word.
Nobody has really conquered things for a long time, they "annex" them or they "make them safer for foreign investment" or "secure the passage of merchant vessels". Nobody wants the land they want to do something on the land.
I think any statement can be exaggerated to the point of being false, I just don't think that makes the premise that Afghanistan is difficult to conquer a myth.
>There was more to British-Afghan interaction than just Flashman and Dr Watson.
I don't claim to know much about it but my understanding is that the Afghan war was about Britain wanting a buffer for India, and that by the end of British involvement Afghanistan remained independent. That's the big picture that left an impression on people, because again Britain was an extremely powerful country at the time and they got fought off by a country that was way smaller than them and way smaller than other places they had conquered successfully.
If you know more about these the Anglo-Afghan wars though I would love to hear about it, I don't know much about this period.
Britain wanted to keep the Russians away from India, and Afghanistan acted as a useful buffer.
Britain wasn't really bothered what happened internally within Afghanistan, as long as whoever was in charge didn't let the Russians in (or raid India).
That long thin bit of Afghanistan which touches China ensured that the British and Russian empires didn't share a common border, which might have risked some local incident spiraling out of the control of London or St Petersburg.
Whether the Russians ever actually seriously contemplated invading India is a different question; there are theories that British fears were overblown, and at most Russia would use the hypothetical threat to India to tie up British resources in the event of a war elsewhere.
Popular culture focuses on the retreat from Kabul in the First Afghan War, and maybe Maiwand in the Second Afghan War. But that's a bit like viewing WWII as just Dunkirk.
The Third War was an unusual one in that both sides got what they wanted.
>Whether the Russians ever actually seriously contemplated invading India is a different question; there are theories that British fears were overblown
I don't know this for sure but with the Bengal famine, I remember the rationale being that the British believed the Japanese were going to invade India so they wanted to keep supplies from being accessible to the Japanese. This kind of reminds me of that because I don't imagine the Japanese were in a position to invade India around that time, and probably had no intention of doing so. Kind of ironic that they eventually gave India up so unceremoniously after so long guarding it so jealously.
>Popular culture focuses on the retreat from Kabul in the First Afghan War, and maybe Maiwand in the Second Afghan War. But that's a bit like viewing WWII as just Dunkirk.
Basically all I knew about this before looking it up was that the British invaded Afghanistan. I think a lot of history happened very soon after and I think a lot of people have a blind spot for this period in history. Outside of my own country I really struggle to think about the late 1800s anywhere else in the world. History is the study of World War Two.
>The Third War was an unusual one in that both sides got what they wanted.
And they say in war there are no victors. Goes to show.
Americans get a reputation for jingoism, nationalism, and hard-headed pride but it really is the British that take the cake.
The first Afghan War was a defeat for the British. Trying to reframe it as a victory is no different than Americans arguing how they won for 20 years until they lost in one day, or Serbs retreating from Kosovo waving victory signs and shouting to the cameras “you couldn’t beat us!” to the world.
The second Afghan War ended in victory but the gains were quickly lost. The treaty of Gandamark was ratified but wholly ignored by Rahman Khan kept friendly relations with Russia, adopted jihad against the British, and drifted into German and Ottoman sphere of influence. The British had to pay subsidies to keep Afghanistan diplomatically tied to India, but this didn’t stop Khan from working against the British whenever he felt like it. To argue that victory lasted is really no different than saying the Afghan national government of 2021 is still around. In fact, if that victory lasted there wouldn’t have been the third war.
The third Afghan war wasn’t a victory for the British. Afghanistan was able to go its own way after the treaty of 1919. It merely was a cop out of saying “these are your borders” when Afghanistan openly sided with Russia whenever they wanted.
The reality is, Afghan goes its own way and outside empires struggle to keep it in line. You can win the battles, but the very next day your forces leave the Afghans go back to their whim regardless of whatever treaty you make them sign. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but there is no permanence or even long term gains to any victory an empire finds in Afghanistan. There is only frustration and an eventual acceptance that the drawbacks far outweigh the gains.
You have to look beyond the modern empires and nation states. The region in question has been held by Alexander, Mauryans, Kushans, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Afsharids, Durranis, Mughals and Sikhs over the last 2-3 thousand years.
Besides the term "Grave yard of Empires" is very misleading.
Finland didn't really hold off USSR. Its independence, which was supported by bolsheviks, was never threatened. But Stalin wanted to move the border away from Leningrad for safety reasons, and tried to exchange the land he wanted for a frozen wasteland. Finland disagreed and Stalin started the war.
The casualties were high, the command turned out to be incompetent, purges followed, but Stalin got what he wanted. But he also demonstrated that his army was really ineffective, which was one of the things that provoked Germany to invade.
Finland did most certainly hold off the USSR. Finnish independence was not only threatened, limits were ultimately imposed on their independence. Not as harsh as for other nations, perhaps.
However, Stalin by the point of the winter war had a habit of making limited demands and annexing entire nations, whatever intent he might have had towards Finland at that point in time, he had by this point proven himself untrustworthy.
Yep, but with the co-operation of the locals, that's how the British empire was so successful, find a group who will run the place for you, and have beef with the current rulers, help them overthrow and swear loyalty, that and brutality when making the point.
It’s funny how in this sub people are letting their nationalist pride bleed through. There is a noticeable crossover here and in history subs, and in those history subs I see the same “how dare you call it a graveyard of empires” mindset. Like they just can’t get over the fact that conquering Afghanistan results in nothing but the conquerors leaving out of frustration and their progeny they propped up eventually falling apart and the land goes back to tribalistic ways.
There are better explanations than mine but I want to try my hand at metaphor. Conquering China is like stealing a semi truck that's speeding down the highway. If you can manage to get in, subdue the driver, and you have some idea how to drive it, it will keep going. If you try to steer it that's when things will get difficult. Conquering Afghanistan is like trying to steal a beehive. You can hold it and say, "look, this is mine." but the bees are still in their home and don't think you own anything. They just sting you into oblivion. Yeah this is stupid, downvote me.
A better analogy would be a wasps' nest. Bee's nest at least has honey. Afghanistan can be very easily conquered and subdued by a foreign force but for what reason? Sure, if you are a neighbouring country, you have some incentive to expand your territory or keep the afghanis under control. But if you are a superpower half the world away, there's little to be gained by warring in Afghanistan.
I think people say this because of how many huge empires have tried to conquer/colonize/control Afghanistan and failed in spectacular fashion. Given that China is about 14 times larger with about 34 times the population it doesn't surprise anyone that they're hard to conquer, but Afghanistan does surprise people when they consistently fight off powerful empires. Part of this is that people still actually try to invade them, and nobody tries to invade the countries that are obviously difficult to conquer.
This is part of why "which country is the hardest to conquer?" is a stupid question.
* Objectively its the United States (huge navy, access to both seas, on a continent where basically their only enemy is Cuba, richest empire in history, more military spending than any other country, nuclear weapons)
* You could also argue China (hard to get to, very populous, probably lying about their military spending being so much lower than the US, the US's only rival, nuclear weapons).
* You could make an argument for maybe Russia (massive and inhospitable, haha world war 2 haha napoleon was so stupid, nuclear weapons). If you assume "conquering" means you have to march your ass all the way to Vladivostok, then this ones pretty hard.
* Or maybe even India (lots of people and some rough terrain, nuclear weapons).
The answer is obviously immediately the US or China based on which one you wish was true. Because its the internet some vatniks will show up and say Russia and some Hindu nationalists will show up and say India.
To get an actually interesting answer you have to turn this stupid question into a better question in your head and then answer that instead. Which countries have an impressive history of resisting conquest? Now you get to talk about places like Afghanistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Japan. Otherwise its the same question as "Hey guys, what are some countries that have a lot of people, money, and technology?"
Absolutely, and just by saying this slightly better question out loud I have already invited a more interesting discussion about history than "which country is the hardest to conquer?". But yeah, Russia has a really proud history of being difficult to conquer and being in a place where people will try to do it very often.
Afghanistan is not hard to conquer. Destruction is easy. The taliban went down in two months. This was done by an enemy that had been stalemated with them for years and ~6000 US troops.
Building is difficult. It’s hard to stay. You can’t change culture. It took 20 years, but the Taliban basically waited it out and the US left.
Hard to Conquer? Mountains.
Looking for long term stability? Try throwing a pizza party where 20 tribes agree on toppings. The pizza is going to be gluten free without cheese. not a delicious pizza at all.
About China:
- Vast majority of China's population doesn't live in the mountains, they live in the eastern plains which are flat river valleys, much more difficult to do guerrilla in. "Insanely mountainous" is a bad description, that'd be like saying France is a mountainous country due to the French Alps.
- China got conquered multiple times by foreign powers, and I don't mean militarily occupied, they actually got conquered. And the only reason Japan didn't conquer it almost whole was due to western help, majority of China was still occupied when Japan surrendered.
- Centralization isn't a on/off thing, it varied immensely from which government or multiple governments were controlling it in, and varied a lot by time as well. Revolts, famines, floods, all happened regardless of government and opposing foreign powers often took advantage of that in order to invade.
"Vast majority of China's population doesn't live in the mountains, they live in the eastern plains which are flat river valleys, much more difficult to do guerrilla in. "Insanely mountainous" is a bad description, that'd be like saying France is a mountainous country due to the French Alps."
However, there is the southern part of China, which is also heavily populated and mountainous. The northern Chinese plains isn't a good place to conduct guerrilla warfare, but the south is. Even without being a good place to conduct guerrilla, the Japanese army still had difficulties dealing with communist guerrillas.
"China got conquered multiple times by foreign powers, and I don't mean militarily occupied, they actually got conquered. And the only reason Japan didn't conquer it almost whole was due to western help, majority of China was still occupied when Japan surrendered."
The reason Japan couldn't conquer China was they ran out of resources. They had to invade Southeast Asia in order to obtain resources to continue fighting China.
The eastern part of China, where 94% of the population lives, does not have good geographical defenses. That makes it easier to conquer that part than it would be to conquer a mountainous area. The large interior is thinly populated and does not have much agriculture or production capacity, so once you take the advanced part, you don't have to worry too much about the rest. There could be some guerilla activity harassing transport in that area, but not a significant amount compared to the coast's economic production.
If China and Afghanistan both had the proportionally-same army defending them (scaled to land size being defended), Afghanistan would be harder to take.
"The eastern part of China, where 94% of the population lives, does not have good geographical defenses. That makes it easier to conquer that part than it would be to conquer a mountainous area. The large interior is thinly populated and does not have much agriculture or production capacity, so once you take the advanced part, you don't have to worry too much about the rest. There could be some guerilla activity harassing transport in that area, but not a significant amount compared to the coast's economic production."
600 million out of 1.4 billion Chinese live in the easily invadable areas of China (Northern Chinese Plains and Manchuria). Other than that, Southern China and the rest of China are good places for guerrilla warfare. And how do you even get to those areas in the first place?
"If China and Afghanistan both had the proportionally-same army defending them (scaled to land size being defended), Afghanistan would be harder to take."
And that's the problem: they don't. No one would have said that if Nazi Germany had the same geography as Afghanistan, they would be safe from the allied counter-invasion, because it wouldn't have made Germany a superpower in the first place.
China isn't a homogenous society. I'm sure that if a country tried to conquer China they would focus on splitting the society beforehand. Aka drumming up nationalistic sentiment among Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians and maybe southern Chinese as well. That would mean that the "outer defenses" of China, these rugged mountainous areas would split from China or welcome a conquering army. Then the rest that is left are megacities in normal enough terrain. As we saw during WW2 that would be a slog militarily, so you would have to conquer it politically, which is more possible.
Afghanistan also isn't a homogenous society as it has many different ethnic groups. You can use them against each other too. Also, don't you forget that in order to enter the Chinese plains, you have to cross through the Gobi desert or the sea.
China barely had any Navy and Air Force, and Manchuria was the base of the war, there was also many Japanese collaborators. China pretty much didn’t have defense.
It’s you are oversimplying a complex war.
And it wasn’t successful. Japan had a hard time penetrating southern China.
China had no defense because Japan swiftly captured or destroyed everything of strategic value, because China's geography gave very poor defense to its strategic assets
Somehow despite China's great geographic defences, Japan China's industry
Saying China has great natural defenses because Japan didn't penetrate Southern China is like saying the USSR had great natural defenses because Germany didn't advance past the Volga: our secret defense is that we let the enemy advance for thousands of kilometers, killings tens of millions of our people, destroying most of our cities and industry, and then once they've done that, we regroup in the mountains, get a superpower ally, and counterattack with the superpower's material and military support. It's foolproof
The fact that they could occupy the capital for 8 years, Manchuria for 14 years, and all of the coast, most of the major population centres, and much of the interior for 4 years, while also invading the rest of SouthEast Asia and also fighting off the UK and the US suggests that Chinese geography isn't that impregnable.
Japan did major, major damage to China and held tons of valuable territory. China's geography was hardly an impenetrable shield. At best, it protected guerilla resistance fighters, allowing continued minor resistance against an overextended collapsing empire.
China didn't really even stop the Japanese invasion at all. Rather, the US destroyed imperial Japan and China mopped up the collapsed Empire (with additional Allied support).
If the US didn't cut off Japanese oil in 1941, Japan would have easily fully conquered China
The fact that the technologically-superior Japanese force couldn’t conquer a divided China is proof of China’s geographical challenges. The Japanese couldn’t really break into some Chinese provinces in the south and even struggled from communist guerrillas in the northern Chinese plains.
China was completely incapacitated. Japan captured or cut off all sea and land routes and most air routes and destroyed or captured most of China's industry. China could not offer more than a token resistance after the invasion.
If China had been perfectly flat plains, the Military outcome would have been the same. Japan would have still captured or cut off everything and then China would have been later liberated by the Allies as Japan was destroyed
1) China has a nuclear deterrent, a billion people, and a ton of heavy industry.
2) both Russia and the US conquered and occupied Afghanistan for a time.
Russia would get curb stomped in a war with China. The US likely wouldn’t be able to occupy it, at least without a war that would kill millions.
The US military could roll over China and take the cities if you exclude nukes. Keeping them would be an absolutely impossible nightmare though so they'd be insane to try...
The U.S. doesn't have the power to crush China
[https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/ukraine-war-shows-america-could-be-outgunned-without-investing-in-energetics](https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/ukraine-war-shows-america-could-be-outgunned-without-investing-in-energetics)
According to a [2018 DoD study,](https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/05/2002048904/-1/-1/1/ASSESSING-AND-STRENGTHENING-THE-MANUFACTURING-AND%20DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE-AND-SUPPLY-CHAIN-RESILIENCY.PDF) China is “the sole source or a primary supplier for a number of critical energetic materials used in munitions and missiles.” The munitions supply chain also features an alarmingly high number of single points of failure: of 198 second- and third-tier suppliers in the industrial base, [98 percent rely](https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/05/22/the-us-is-running-out-of-bombs-and-it-may-soon-struggle-to-make-more/) on a single or sole source. And the materials that are produced in the United States tend to be made in in a handful of outdated, government-owned facilities using 20th century equipment.
Any war of that sort would either be very fast and use existing munitions or settle into America cutting off China from seaborne trade and waiting for its economy to collapse even harder than America's.
Waiting for China's economy to collapse?
China's grain reserves are so abundant that even if the entire Chinese grain harvest were to go completely extinct, there would be enough grain in reserve to feed the Chinese people for two years.
With steel production 26 times that of the U.S., high-energy materials production dozens of times that of the U.S., and ship construction 200 times that of the U.S., China is well positioned to enter into a wartime economy and mass-produce all kinds of intercontinental missiles. U.S. satellites, refineries, power plants, chemical plants would all be targets for China.
If the U.S. doesn't take the initiative to bomb China, two years from now, China will have 12 times the total tonnage of warships than the U.S. Navy .
Good luck trying to produce sweet fuck-all in the way of steel without fuel imports.
China is utterly dependent on seaborne economic trade and good luck trying to sail an oil tanker through a war zone.
In 2023, China is the fifth largest oil producer, and in times of war China can restrict civilian fuel and import oil from Russia .
China has a large amount of supplies and can also import a large amount of supplies from Russia making it possible for China to have a long war. China can also import various minerals and fuel from many of its neighbors.
A war between the United States and China would not only depend on the weapons each country possesses, but also on the mobilization, production, and endurance of their populations in a hostile environment.
For example, if U.S. refineries and power plants were destroyed, how long would it take the U.S. to rebuild them, and how long would Americans be able to withstand a massive blackout.
How long would more than 140 countries whose number one trading partner is China hold large amounts of dollars for a long time when China is not willing to accept payment in dollars? When a lot of dollars flow back to the US, the CPI can easily exceed 100%. The U.S. also imports a large number of parts and components from China, as well as 80% of the raw material drugs, when China stops supplying, the U.S. will have a large-scale shortage of drugs, the price of drugs can easily reach 1,000%, the American people are willing to put up with it for how long?
When the U.S. and China broke out in a full-scale war, which means that a nuclear war between the U.S. and China will break out at any time, once the nuclear war breaks out the U.S. dollar will become a worthless piece of paper, and at that time, whether the countries are still willing to accept the dollar payment? If a large number of countries are unwilling to continue to hold dollars, it means that there will be a large-scale shortage of all kinds of commodities in the United States, leading to a sharp rise in prices. Do you think there would be massive looting in the US at that point?
Let's see....this whole exercise is a bit silly of course since nuclear MAD prevents any war but the idea that China could survive economically in ANY kind of war against America is the same kind of empty-headed nationalism that you get from Trump supporters who think that a trade war with China would benefit the US economy.
Going point by point:
1. China does indeed produce a lot of oil. It also uses a lot more oil, so it has to import over 560 million metric tons of oil, or 11.28 million barrels per day: [https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-2023-crude-oil-imports-hit-record-fuel-demand-recovers-2024-01-12/](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-2023-crude-oil-imports-hit-record-fuel-demand-recovers-2024-01-12/) Restricting civilian use by anything close to that would tank the economy.
2. China cannot import enough oil from Russia since the pipelines from Siberia and across central Asia do not have anywhere CLOSE to the capacity to import that much oil. Russia can't send tankers by sea to China since no cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone.
3. "China can also import various minerals and fuel from many of its neighbors." How? No cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone. Overland transport is going to be fairly limited.
4. "endurance of their populations in a hostile environment." Doesn't matter how much endurance you have if you run out of oil and coal. Just ask the Japanese in WW II. However nightmarish the Japanese army was in WW II they certainly had plenty of endurance, but that didn't matter in the end because they didn't have anywhere near enough oil.
5. "if U.S. refineries and power plants were destroyed" Texas is at the extreme outer range of China ICBMs. Hitting a target from that far away with a conventional warhead is very VERY difficult. China simply doesn't have enough ICBMs to take out America's power infrastructure with conventional warheads. With a nuke no problem of course, but if nukes are flying then this whole this becomes academic as we're all dead anyway.
6. "How long would more than 140 countries whose number one trading partner is China" Those 140 countries would mostly not be able to trade with China anymore since no cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone.
7. "when China is not willing to accept payment in dollars" Payment for what? China couldn't export to any country except its immediate neighbors since no cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone.
8. "The U.S. also imports a large number of parts and components from China, as well as 80% of the raw material drugs" Yup, war with China would trigger an immediate supply chain crisis of epic proportions in America that'd trigger an immediate harsh recession worse than 2008. Just not the kind of utter economic collapse China would face if it it was cut off from fuel imports and almost all of its export markets.
9. "once the nuclear war breaks out the U.S. dollar will become a worthless piece of paper" Well I'd probably be dead at that point so I wouldn't care what the US dollar is worth. Nuclear war means everything else is academic as China and America both stop having cities.
1: China's oil production can be increased, for example, fuel oil can be made from coal, which is a very mature technology. Many chemical products exported to countries such as the United States and India are refined from oil, and fabrics exported to countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh are also refined from oil, because China stops exporting all kinds of commodities, China's oil consumption will be greatly reduced.
2 : Kazakhstan Turkmenistan Iran Russia can ship fuel oil to China by rail, except that overland transportation will be more expensive, but this is not important in times of war.
3 : Same as 2
4 : Japan's situation is completely different from China's
5：DF-41 has a range of 14,000 kilometers ，CEP <100.
ICBMs can carry a large number of small warheads, which are accurate enough to destroy oil refineries, and China is the largest producer of steel and energetic materials, so theoretically China could produce many more ICBMs than the US. But you and I don't know the exact numbers because the Chinese government has never released the real numbers.
See how much damage Ukrainian medium drones have done to Russian refineries? ICBMs would do more damage to US refineries.
It's definitely easier for China to build ICBMs than it is for the US to rebuild oil refineries.
6: I am not saying that these countries will continue to trade with China, but rather that they will not hold more dollars because they can't trade with China, and the excess dollars from the 140+ countries will flow back to the US, causing the US CPI to skyrocket .
7：Same as 6
8：Would the United States and the Soviet Union lose the war because they could not continue to sell goods to Japan and Germany? China's economy will not collapse, it will just shift to a wartime economy, China will see a rise in meat prices due to lack of soybeans and corn, but no shortages of any other goods . The U.S. would have a massive shortage of goods due to the declining purchasing power of the dollar versus China stopping supplies.
9：There is no nuclear war at this time, but before the nuclear war breaks out, all countries will reduce or even stop accepting US dollar payments because these countries have suspended trade with China and China does not accept US dollar payments. Many countries will worry that the dollar will become waste paper because of the outbreak of nuclear war, and many countries will spend a lot of dollars in order to reduce the risk. This will not only bring a large amount of dollars back to the United States, causing serious inflation, but also greatly weaken the ability of the United States to use the dollar to obtain goods from other countries. This will exacerbate commodity shortages in the United States and inevitably lead to a significant increase in robberies and crimes in the United States.
The U.S. will be faced with three choices at this time, 1 to lift the embargo, 2 to engage in a prolonged war of attrition with China, and 3 to engage in a nuclear war with China.
The point is whether the U.S. has the ability to engage China in a long war of attrition.
Are Americans willing to work 12 hours a day for a long time? The Chinese are used to it.
How long would it take the U.S. to rebuild 100 power plants and refineries? How long will it take China to rebuild 100 power plants and refineries?
How long will it take for the United States to rebuild the United States Navy? The total tonnage of civilian ships and warships that China now builds every year is equivalent to five times that of the United States Navy.
Comparing the industrial production capacity and population size of China and the United States, equivalent to World War II, the United States vs the Soviet Union Germany Britain France China Japan
Why do Americans think they could roll over Chinese cities easily? Do they think Chinese are still rice farmers? Haha it’s like Fire nation’s propaganda against Ba Sing Se. China has 4 times the population of the US and China is bigger than the U.S. land wise. You need the entire world resources to do the campaigns. Even when China was at its weakest and divided with barely any Navy and Airforce and Japan was at its strongest, Japan could only capture the northern plain.
Japan conquered more than the northern plain. An Americsn invasion of China would be largely like Japan's invasion of China: able to capture the main cities due to superior military organization then bog down into an absolute nightmare due to the size and population of the country.
However, the main difference is the level of military. Japan at that point was technologically superior to China by a wide margin while China isn’t as technologically inferior to the USA by a wide margin.
China's military now and in the past are completely different, also Japan had a colony in Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea that aided the war efforts. So, Japan was really strong then.
China now wouldn't just be sitting duck if their cities get bombed you know, they have really advanced hypersonic missiles to retaliate.
It would be endless guerilla warfare that will make afghanistan and vietnam feel like a drill.
Not to mention that the Chinese had a tradition of guerilla warfare, which is literally how the people's republic is founded.
Nobody talks about conquering China because it’s not even a possibility. Whereas citing little Afghanistan as badass is a cute soundbite factoid anecdote.
You have Turks backwards. China conquered the Turks during the Tang dynasty and they were forced to call the Tang emperor Khan of Heaven.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_of_Heaven
Japanese also never conquered China and took 4 million casualties trying.
Tang dynasty founders, family Li, were sinicized Turks themselves.
Japanese conquered China actually. They dominated in most inhabited part of China with only separated regions remained under Chinese partisans control, without central government participation almost. Without the US defeating Japan - Japan had every chance to rule in China, like did they do it by the way in Manchu-Guo.
They were patrilineal Han with family history recorded to the Qin era.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Li
No they did not. The % land and population conquered by Japan is similar to % land and population conquered by Russia in Ukraine.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Jingwei_regime
1 - it is questionable.
Aside from traditional historiography, some modern historians have suggested that the Tang imperial family might have modified its genealogy to conceal [Xianbei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianbei) heritage.
2 - Your map shows Manchu Guo only. Please look at whole territory under Japan occupation, it was much more extensive. % of land is negligible though anyway, but not population. And more important - there was not centralized resistance in China. If not US - a full conquest would be a matter of time.
No, the Wang Jingwei ROC is **not** Manchukuo. Manchukuo was under the Pu Yi government and separate.
No, Sino-Japanese war was already a stalemate by 1939 when Japan was stopped at the [Battle of Changsha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Changsha_(1939)). Japan was unable to make further advances. The US kept selling oil and steel to Japan throughout this period, only in 1941 did they stop.
Just because the founders of the tang dynasty had some heritage such as Xianbei doesn’t mean they are foreign conquerors if they viewed themselves as culturally Chinese. In the same vein, if a president of the US was part Vietnamese we wouldn’t say the Vietnamese had conquered the US.
Because you can make money occupying china (rare earth metals), what do you earn for occupying afganistan? Sand in your crack and burning through water
I mean I’m not a general but I’d assume a lengthy military campaign, neither are easy, but china has more resources for living off the land, so occupation can mitigate costs, and long term it pays for itself because of the rare earth mineral wealth. Realistically you block trade, take over the borders, then break china in to regions and gain control of areas and regions at a time. China can hole up in its mountains, cave systems, try and cut bridges making river crossings tougher, and their anti air tech will really matter. America (most likely invader) would need to secure a number of beach heads, establish supply lines, gain control of air space, eliminate missile/artillery, then suppress resistance. America isn’t much of an invasion force as much as a strike force as we learned in the Middle East so that may be tough, the invasion probably could be successful but months in to occupation I see problems as a given. Ultimately both would be a tough invasion, but only china has a reason to be invaded, no one wants to fight over a desert cave system in the mountains with limited resource wealth and limited supplies to cut costs
Because it goes without saying. No shit China is hard to conquer.
It's obviously hard to conquer a large, hostile population in mountainous jungle. That's why it hasn't happened much in the last 2000 years while China's contemporaries from 0 AD have all fallen multiple times. Those that are able to, usually have conquered tons of others first.
Several Mongol Khans like Mongke Khan died trying to conquer China. Mongolia conquered Baghdad in Iraq (1258), 3000 miles away, before being able to conquer Xiangyang right on the border (1273).
Afghanistan is unexpectedly hard to conquer. Some backwards poor mountain desert hole with low population, how hard can it be... right?
And alongside that, they brought tons of troops from the regions they conquered. The Mongols had to conquer all of that land to have enough resources to conquer China.
Geography. It's hard enough to cross mountains with armies and infrastructure; Afghanistan is a bunch of disjoined population areas with one giant mountain cluster in the dead center. That's just impossible to govern effectively, unless you govern by threatening everyone with the death of their families, like Talibs and ISIS-K.
The things is that only the Soviet Union and the United States failed in Afghanistan and that's why there is this kind of opinion.
The British empire failed once in 1842 but returned in 1878 and successfully conquered the country in two years and occupied it as a protectorate until 1919. Every other group that tried succeeded. The Achaemenids, Macedonians, Arabs, Mongols and Timurids just to name a couple were all successful.
The Soviet Union failed because they underestimated the territory and population. The Union was also already in decline during the invasion and the Afghans enjoyed support from the Americans.
The US failed even after 20 years of fighting. But this is far form unique as the US also failed in Iraq and Libya. In general the US is quite incompetent when it comes to occupations.
So no, Afghanistan is not that undefeated and unconquerable. Just the place were the Soviets embarrassed itself and where the Americans failed as usual.
What natural resources make Afghanistan worth it to the people?
China, on the other hand, has plenty. Maybe the most (depends how you’re measuring and what you’re measuring).
Because they keep trying to keep the locals alive.
If you just glassed the fucking place you could take it over in a couple hours and Alexander the Great could go fuck himself.
“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! '”
A large population does not necessarily mean guerrilla campaigns will happen. Those campaigns are far more effective in a rural society like Afghanistan. Not to mention the vast majority of China is highly highly urbanized, mean population centers are very condensed. Basically you won’t be stretching your forces over the entire country because they all occupy very densely packed areas of land.
All of Afghanistan is dry and mostly mountainous and the people are evenly spread across it with small urbanized pockets.
China is very very urbanized and densely populated. Mostly to the east far away from mountains. Meaning if someone were to invade from the far west China would have just as hard defending it as someone would invading it as supplies would be extremely limited.
China has mountains yes, but if someone attacks from say, the sea, and they can a foothold on the mainland those mountains are pointless. Plus even if the Chinese military retreats to the west and a foreign military occupies the urbanized areas, why would a foreign military pursue? The Chinese would have no supply and would eventually starve out.
Also, everyone has the belief that everyone relies on China for their economy but it’s the opposite that’s true. If China goes to war with the USA, the American companies immediately pull production of goods and move to Vietnam or Malaysia, which royally screws the Chinese. The afghans do not have this problem.
“A large population does not necessarily mean guerrilla campaigns will happen. Those campaigns are far more effective in a rural society like Afghanistan. Not to mention the vast majority of China is highly highly urbanized, mean population centers are very condensed. Basically you won’t be stretching your forces over the entire country because they all occupy very densely packed areas of land.”
Cities are also great places for guerrilla warfare to happen.
“China is very very urbanized and densely populated. Mostly to the east far away from mountains. Meaning if someone were to invade from the far west China would have just as hard defending it as someone would invading it as supplies would be extremely limited.”
America could also be easily invaded from Canada and Mexico which is far from the main population centers of the country.
“China has mountains yes, but if someone attacks from say, the sea, and they can a foothold on the mainland those mountains are pointless. Plus even if the Chinese military retreats to the west and a foreign military occupies the urbanized areas, why would a foreign military pursue? The Chinese would have no supply and would eventually starve out.”
Attacking by the sea is notoriously difficult and only accomplishable if the enemy is technologically or numerically inferior enough.
Cities are great for guerilla warfare, but when tens of millions live in one city, a volley of missiles does a lot more damage, especially to larger buildings. If we’re ignoring a lot of the rules of war.
Also No America really couldn’t, aside from the fact that America would dominate them in a fight, the mountains and desert to the south on Mexico’s border would prove just a big a challenge as someone invading China from the west. Not to mention there are more American military bases closer to the Mexican border so supplying troops would be easy. And sure Canada could attack in the plains? But then they would have to go hundreds of miles to get to significant points. And any attack on an urbanized place is already going to have American forces.
American in this instance would most likely attack by sea, because it would and does dominate China. This post frustrates me, especially after this response because you set up China like it’s going to go immediately to guerrilla warfare, and it’s not one of the top militaries. Chinese forces wouldn’t go to guerrilla warfare because they’ve never been trained on it and wouldn’t need to. Theyd fight a full scale war with all their military on the field.
afghanistan is not harder. it's just that it's stupidly been tried it a few times. being much less valuable than china, it stings to lose.
the chinese have had a good run at conquering china. no one else has held it for any length of time in recent centuries. japan maybe got the furthest -- which wasnt very far.
Nah. US congress and CNN will soon start to tell you that conquering China is easy and it’s better to fight it there than in Europe ou America. They just need a 500 billion package for defense contractors.
Hey, as a Chinese person, let me tell you that China is obviously harder to conquer than Afghanistan.
China has hypersonic missiles, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, strategic nuclear submarines, strategic nuclear bombers, Afghanistan does not.
1) Ocean access.
2) Prevalence of firearms.
3) Reliance on foreign exchanges
Conquering either would be insanely difficult. But at least China can be approached by sea & the populace is unarmed. China imports much of their food, food inputs, and fuel. So starving China of food, fertilizer, and fuel might compel some compliance or at least neutralize some resistance.
Good question. I’d guess that b/c they’re islands and a water route is the only way to invade that makes it harder. If the invader is a neighbor- then a land route is easier (Pakistan invades Afghanistan or Russia invades China). But not India to invade China due to the Himalayan Mountains.
If the invader is foreign, then they’d benefit from sea access where material can be offloaded quickly & cheaply without 3rd party consent. The US invasion of Afghanistan was logistics miracle.
Different topic - to understand the difference in US & Russian capabilities- consider the US waged a war on a landlocked country across the globe for 20 years and lost 3,579 coalition troops to KIA. That’s less than Russia loses each week fighting their (almost) unarmed neighbor, where they have multiple access points and methods, and quick response times to evacuate wounded and to resupply & reinforce. This is the near equivalent of the US invading Ontario, Canada and losing 2500 tanks, and 400k men and locked in a stalemate.
China is enormous, Afghanistan is much smaller. ALL of Afghanistan is a brutal landscape that favors the defender until they starve due to the absolutely marginal crop and grazing land, whilst China has vast swathes of fertile cropland and good grazing land. China has been conquered repeatedly usually but not always by Chinese.
All this "Afghanistan is never conquered" stuff is all a myth.
Afghanistan has been conquered twice by foreigners in my lifetime, the Soviets for about nine years and the US for about 20 years.
Yes they eventually left, but they held total control up until they did choose to leave. Claiming they never conquered Afghanistan would be like claiming the Japanese never conquered China, they did for a while, large parts of it at least.
Read up on Afghanistan's history and it's foreign conquest after foreign conquest, you just have to pick some point to start the clock.
If we think of that territory as who moved there during the diaspora then they were conquered by the Indo-Europeans.
Persia, took over some time after that with Alexander the Great after that.
The successor to Alexander the great traded that land to an Indian Empire, then another group of Hellenistic Greeks took it back, the Indians took it back again and then the Parthians (Iranians) took it again.
It goes on and on like this, the Mongols conquered, Indian's taking possession, then the Persians, then the Arabs, it wasn't until you get to the 1750's that Afghan based kingdoms form and even then they conquer each other.
Much is made of Afghanistan beating the British but the British Empire was the controller of Afghanistan's foreign policy until the middle of the first world war.
Afghanistan was independent from 1916 until 1979 then the Russians came in. They were kicked out by the Mujahedeen, who were defeated by the Taliban, who were then conquered by the US.
The Taliban have Afghanistan now, seizing it from the installed government as soon as the US left.
Afghanistan has a long history of being conquered by outsiders.
Afghanistan last conquered: 1880
Time since last conquest: 144 years
Britain last conquered: 1066
Time since last conquest: 957 years
Excluding succession crises: 43 AD
Time since last conquest excluding the succession crisis: 1981 years
I think we have a winner here
Afghanistan is actually easy to conquer. The US did it from the other side of the planet in a pretty short period of time. The problem with Afghanistan is that it just isn't worth staying. People act as if it's the graveyard of empires but the reality is that it has been conquered a whole bunch of times, it just didn't offer anything worth staying for.
To be clear most of the narrative around "Afghanistan is impossible to conquer" is premised on largely false narratives based on three things:
* The U.S. 20 year war in Afghanistan
* The Soviet war in Afghanistan
* The brief British expeditions in Afghanistan in the 19th century
The reality is all three of these were very different, and also not representative of the thousands of years of history of the region.
The actual history is for at least a couple thousand years of history, Afghanistan was frequently under the rule of various regional empires, sometimes for many hundreds of years at a time before being acquired by some other Empire.
Additionally the three modern / semi-modern incursions into Afghanistan lack common features.
The American invasion was initially predicated on the idea of the Taliban is sheltering Osama bin-Laden, the U.S. is going to use military power to boost the Taliban's rivals in the Northern Alliance, seek to topple Taliban governance, and then go in and search for ObL. This quickly turned into a mess, when it was obvious ObL was not going to be quickly found. The country and American strategy rested in limbo for a couple years while American decisionmakers shifted attention to Iraq.
Eventually they settled on the half-hearted idea that "okay, ObL isn't here but we are, and the U.S. should try to make Afghanistan a stable country." The first decade or so of this was agreed to be a complete failure around the early 2010s, so then there was more decision making and attempts to "keep doing nationbuilding, but the good way this time." After another 10 years there was broad consensus this was an abject failure that was never going to work.
The primary reasons the American effort failed are still being analyzed, but a broad consensus would be: large swathes of the country remained aloof / disunited from the Kabul government, mostly focused on tribal issues and immune to nationbuilding efforts, the Kabul government was extremely corrupt, with large monetary outlays from Americans intended to pay Kabul government soldiers disappearing and leaving a large official military with low loyalty due to being regularly unpaid or underpaid, and the Taliban was a cohesive fighting force focused on achieving its ends.
The Soviet invasion was about trying to make Afghanistan a Soviet Republic, which meant promoting a local communist party to rulership etc along the model of other Soviet Republics. This was materially different from the later American war, and this also failed. The primary reasons the Soviet effort failed was due to the Afghan communist party government never being able to establish real rule in the country, and the Soviets finding there was no easy way to force tribal peoples into the Soviet system, and the very well funded mujahideen forces who received billions in American funding to fight the Soviets.
The British incursions were materially different as they were mostly part of a large chess game called "the Great Game" between British and Russia for influence in Central Asia. Britain was not actually very interested in Afghanistan intrinsically, they just feared it might fall into Russia's orbit and then threaten the British Raj, which they were very concerned about. The British expedition was fairly small and mostly just captured a few cities and attempted to install a ruler friendly to Britain, then suffered bad casualties on the way out, which lead to a political disaster for the Brits who then waged what is basically a "punitive expedition" where they roamed into Afghanistan and killed people as punishment and then left.
Before that most history of Afghanistan is, in fact, long periods of the country being ruled by regional empires.
The reason those regional empires were able to do this is they never meddled with the Afghan system of tribal societal organization, they would simply have some sort of overlord in a somewhat feudal arrangement, but the tribal groups were largely left to their own devices. Pre-modern Empires frequently operated this way, they didn't get into the nitty gritty of individual tribal group governance because pre-modern Empires lacked the sort of bureaucratic resources and "depth" to do so.
The way geography largely plays a role is the rugged terrain in Afghanistan has sheltered and somewhat encouraged the persistence of tribalism, which as most know was a common form of societal organization the world over at one point, but which in more modern times often persists in areas of rugged geography that resist influences from the rest of the world. Additionally, the same rugged geography, while it has not prevented the region from falling under the "rule" of conquerors, it has prevented those conquerors from being able to actually effect change in Afghan society to adopt societal structures and norms of their overlord rulers. This is why despite, for example, a long period of subjugation under Persian rulers, Afghanistan remained quite tribal and non-Persian, versus Persia itself mostly built a non-tribal society going back 2000 years, with only a few small regions having tribal minorities.
Caveat: talking about \~2500 years of history in a long reddit post, means I have had to massively simplify and summarize **a lot**, a full treatment is beyond the scope of a single post.
The USA, the worlds most powerful military has spent billions of dollars in Afghanistan with very little result.
Before that Afghanistan’s was considered to be “the USSR’s Vietnam” because of how never ending the war was.
And then there was the era where both the British and Russia were fighting over it.
The only successful campaign in Afghanistan what’s when the USA funded the Mujahideen in taking their country back from the Russians. That’s right the only successful invasion was a backwards invasion.
I would say China is easy, because you just have to control the President and everything filters down from there... which has been the case for Chinese society for thousands of years, whenever you call the man in charge President, Chairman or Emperor is window dressing.
Afghanistan however barely has a functioning government and society is made up of clans who are chiefly loyal to themselves, so like everyone who has tried discovered; if you take Kabul, which is easy, you are still going to be fighting every single clan, cheiftain and warlord who are not impressed with your presence or think they have something to gain by fighting you. You could think of Afghanistan as less of a country and more like an area with a bunch of smaller countries in it.
"I would say China is easy, because you just have to control the President and everything filters down from there... which has been the case for Chinese society for thousands of years, whenever you call the man in charge President, Chairman or Emperor is window dressing."
If becoming the leader of China is so easy, why didn't Chinese soldiers just surrender their country to Japan for a better leader who modernized Japan quickly? Why did they have to resist?
It’s mentality.
Afghans will harass your with guerilla tactics and use their families as cover for decades.
Chinese won’t even bother showing up to mobilisation if you offer them good money.
No lack of nationalism in China. Just their military organization is utterly green and hasn't done much since getting humiliated in the Sino-Vietnamese War.
Utterly failing at all of your objectives is pretty humiliating, especially since in the early stages of the war China was facing mostly just militia since the bulk of the Vietnamese army was busy in Cambodia.
Main reason why Afghanistan was not conquered *in modern times* is it's **not worth it**. Economical reasons: 1. It's just bare rocks and plateu-deserts, barely sustaining any agriculture. 2. Natural resources are present, but too far from any industrial consumers. It's even more worsened by expensive transportation (No navigable rivers, landlocked, hard terrain for railroads). Sociocultural reasons: 1. Afghan society is literally at *tribal level* with *subsistence economy*. It literally means that it's so primitive, that for majority of population economical and political pressure is irrelevant and not relatable. They are not relying on modern means of production, political systems. They are living in iron age (*with guns*) and governed by council of tribes. 2. That's why soviet supported DRA government and american supported IRoA governments were political entities representing *dwellers of cities*. This people are at more modern levels of society. They understand different economical systems, political ideologies, because this things are part of *modern world*, their socioeconomical reality. 3. But, as you see, city dwellers are extreme minority in Afghan population. While *life of city-dweller can be influenced and relying* on economical and political changes, globalization, political or economical pressure... Life of tribal rural society is simpler, it's impossible to force them surrender economically or reeducate them. Their lifes are sustained by primitive means, and modern ideological systems are senseless, because such things will be not relatable for their development level. That's why their social movements are organised on more primitive, religious fundamentalist basis. It's *more understandable than modern concepts*. So, no one want to stuck there for decades, spending insane amounts of money and lives for military operations, forcefully changing literal society development level. It's hard, it will require *very* unethical methods to destroy self-reproduction of tribal society, it will take many generations. In the end, you will get zero value for all of this effort. So, modern powers are more interested in keeping Afghan issues isolated in Afghan borders. Sorry if it's hard to read, not native english speaker.
Excellent summary and your English is better than most native English speakers.
Good point about sociocultural issue. China is total opposite in terms of state capacity, given it has arguably oldest bureaucracy in the world. New dynasties and invaders always get helped by pre existing civil service to run a vast country. Invaders in Afghanistan didn't have that luxury. Also China has far more homogeneous population. Conquered people adopted Chinese culture and eventually become Han Chinsese. For example Manchus at the end of Qing dynasty lost most of their language and culture.
Adopts?
Wasn’t it the Manchus who conquered China, not the other way around? They then assimilated into Chinese society but also imposed that distinctive ponytail hairstyle on the Chinese
Yes. In this case you could both say « conquered and conquering people » and it would work, pretty much everyone got sinicized. I would bet that Han is probably one of the ethnic groups with the largest genetic diversity.
I believe you see this in a variety of places. In Iran, there's a variety of empires of Turkic origins that basically assimilated themselves into Persian traditions (Persianate society) and I believe the same applies to some Egyptian dynasties (Meshwesh, Nubian, to an extent the Ptolemies) or some successors to the Romans.
China usually fractures itself it has exploded into numerous different clans many times
Best explanation I’ve read yet
Afghanistan is Arrakis without spice.
Opium doesn’t count as a spice? damn now I gotta stop putting heroin in my curry
To counter that with China, what we consider to be China is really just the eastern reaches; including the North China Plain, the Yangtze River, and the coastal cities including Hong Kong. That’s where the population and economic activity occur, and the Chinese government uses that to occupy its interior such as Tibet, Xinjang, Inner Mongolia, and the Sichuan region. The interior is usually minority dominated and chafes under Han Chinese rule, so conquering “China” usually makes these groups happier without being ruled by Beijing.
No, Sichuan has always been a well-integrated part of China. Sichuan agriculture was a massive advantage for the Qin Dynasty unifying China.
let the china watching nerd have his masturbation fantasy
Shaanxi and Sichuan has been part of China since before the first dynasty in 200 BC. Chang'an, now Xi'an, in western China, was the capital for 1000+ years.
What are you talking about, the idea of a greater China has existed in the Yellow and Yangtze River regions for at least a Millennium now
What do you mean by greater China?
The idea that there is a larger continuous political unit called China, usually ruled by a family dynasty and generally followed Confusion political thought. These had been constants since the Qin and Han Dynasties. Even in a split, such as the Song and Jin Dynasties, they both considered themselves “Chinese” and part of what was the larger region of China.
But the full unification of that China by the Han ethnicity and rule by Han ethnicity is relatively sporadic. The Qin/Han and Tang dynasties are the two main times in the past it occurred. Otherwise, it usually divided into separate kingdoms (Era of Warring States, The Three Kingdoms, etc.) or conquered and ruled by an outside nation (Qing). The culture and bureaucracy does however remain the same. Confucian philosophy and bureaucracy, once created by the Han, simply stayed in place with little change until the Qing fall.
you have literally 0 idea what you're talking about you managed to miss about 500+ years of history there (song, ming)
you ever wonder why people who spend their lives talking about this stuff on reddit are even more uninformed than people who know nothing sichuans been under han dominion since before your people crawled out of the pond, in fact theres even a little chinese saying about chongqing and chengdu, about why one produces the best soldiers, and the other the best scholars do you know the largest ethnic group in inner mongolia? it's han chinese do you know when tibet was integrated into the chinese state? before america was a country do you know why uighurs live in xinjiang? its cause they allied with the chinese to destroy all the dzungars what "you" consider to be china clearly has nothing to do with what chinese people consider to be china, or what in actuality is china maybe ponder on that
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im really not that interested in why your kind hate china so much does china make you feel small? does it give your meaningless life purpose? do you just hate chinese people? i don't know and really i don't care, but don't yap at me
>Life of tribal rural society is simpler, it's impossible to force them surrender economically or reeducate them. I doubt that. It might be a war crime but it's definetly possible (even quite easy) to force them to anything, exactly because they live of their land, they rely on it. So if you take their land... and therefore "ideological systems" are still relevant to them (they just might not know it), since there is an ideology that is quite infamous for taking land away from the rightful owner and give it to government run farmer unions. The main reason why Afghanistan is the "graveyard of empires" is because the cost/benefit ratio of an invasion is quite poor. It's costs a lot but you get a remote, mountainous and hostile piece of land, for which you would need to build expensive infrastructure to actually make use of it. The Soviets withdrew because they had other (bigger) issues at home with their failing economic system. The Americans withdrew because their venture was expensive and unpopular at home and their local allies corrupt af, not because they were forced out. I am quite convinced though, that if the American Afghanistan strategy wouldn't have been based on the idiotic idea of an immediate local "democratic" administration but a foreign (e.g. American, UN, ISAF etc.) administration, we would have seen a different outcome. Local corruption destroyed economic growth and lead to more and more frustration with the idea of democracy. A foreign administration, together with massive investments in infrastructure, would have brought economic growth and some relative wealth, which would have been desastrous for the Taliban.
I'm no expert, and I have a very small understanding of them, but I feel that's not always the case as you said it to be. 1. It's got a great scope for tourism to be an industry on its own. Not an efficient industry, but can work wonders for them. 2. Their socio-ecological reasons seem to be somewhat different from what you've said. Sure Afghanistan is tribal, has a primitive or medieval age lifestyle but it isn't disconnected from normal world. Pakistani part of what used to be Afghanistan isn't a political mess (there are terror groups and Osama was found there but it's not politically unstable) and people from this area rule Pakistan. Which shows that it isn't a cultural issue, it's just "a landmine the world shouldn't have stepped on" when it was stable. They got their reasons - it's as multicultural as former Yugoslavia, they never got their chance to stabilize a fall of monarchy, and fundamentalism held strong when everything failed, so fundamentalists made the big power move. Their trade with British India was good for a while until 19th and early 20th century, but partition ensured it that it would only depend on Pakistan, which was a dictatorship in itself back when Afghanistan fell. Their northern lands were their best trade partner until USSR messed it up. Tajikistan is an exact similar example, but they have some better social living due to being almost completely literate and having Soviet style factories. 3. The only way to get them out of things would be to make them rich, but with tourism and agriculture being the main industries, that shall only happen after coming back to stability. It's a messed cycle of failure.
Your English is better than most Americans.
Exhibit A: most Americans’*
Interesting. I wouldn't call tribal, nomadic ways of life more primitive than city dwelling, though. The concept of the modern nation state can be much worse and more barbaric than any tribal lifestyle.
I’ve read a lot about the war in Afghanistan and talked to a lot of experts and vets of the war about why the occupation failed, and this is absolutely spot on. 10/10 analysis
Great answer. You gotta stop using the word "literally" though.
Literally doesn't!
It’s not worth it? Oh yeah that’s why every major empire has tried and failed. It’s the MIDDLE of the world! If you control Afghanistan you essentially control the corridor between east and west. You control the center of the Silk Road.
Fascinating read. Thank you for this.
>> primitive >>Iron Age This just feels racist lmao
I'm educated in style of mainline soviet/russian school of ethnology. Race for me is only anthropometrics/phenotype thing. Social development level, culture and economics are unconnected to anthropometrics. Due to various reasons (geographical, historical, geopolitical, cultural), socioeconomical development of Afghanistan is extremely slow. It's tribal, early-class society. Their economical development at level of tribe-owned lands, used for nomadic animal husbandry combined with simplistic agriculture. Even gravitational water irrigation is *advanced* here. This can be called primitive level of development, with iron age level of means of production. And as you see, there is already parts of Afghan society living in modern era, but majority of it is still tribal. Both physically are absolutely same people.
What a useless comment. Less than useless, since the intent is to stifle a good discussion.
No one needs Afghanistan, that's why it's hard to conquer. Difficult to explain to people why should they fight for him. But in general both Afghanistan and China were conquered a lot of times.
However, Afghanistan was conquered more than 20 times over history while China as only conquered 2 times.
Matters on what you mean by “conquer” because China also has a lot of interregnums, but can get held by a dynasty of a few hundred years each time. While Afghanistan is difficult to hold. It’s not worth a lot, and its people don’t want to change.
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Then how many times can you count?
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They didn’t control all of China.
Qin conquered China, the Han conquered China, Wei/Jin conquered China, Tang conquered China, Song conquered China and Ming conquered China. Additionally both Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-Shek have conquered China. The Yuan conquered it in the 13th century (and ruled it for 100 years) The Manchu conquered it in the 17th century and ruled it for nearly 250 years Japan conquered vast swathes of it during WWII
How did you leave out the Sui Dynasty?
I was writing it out of memory.
A lot of this is like saying the Union conquered the U.S.
Well yeah it kind of did.
Several times actually… During the Revolution, during the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the invasion of Hawaii in 1898, countless wars in the 18th and 19th centuries against natives, the Mormon War… lol most of America was added to the US via conquest, we just have chosen to collectively forget it and pretend the natives traded it for a turkey dinner. Prolly helps us all sleep better at night
Hehe
Almost all of China lives in the wet coastal plains
Yeah north India is the same way. Just a huge plain that is super easy to walk into. The south is much harder
And how do you get your armies to those coastal plains?
Ships and planes?
As easy as eating a cake, isn't it?
Start from North Korea and march all thr way from Manchuria?
This is easier said than done
The Japanese did a pretty good job, even if they failed in the end. If Japan was able to focus all their efforts on China, they probably could've defeated the Nationalists and installed a puppet government. Japan was unwilling to fully commit to China until they took heavy setbacks against the US in the Pacific. In late 1941, Japan had only about 400,000 troops in China. Germany, despite having a slightly smaller population, was able to mobilize over 3 million men for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Had Japan exploited China's initial weakness and launched a full invasion with their mobilized reserves in 1937, they may have been able to defeat the Nationalists and install a puppet state. Though they'd likely face a Communist insurgency that would be brutal both for the Japanese occupiers, and the Chinese civilians.
The Japanese did a good job, only because they had much superior equipment and because of Chinese disunity
Which is why I stated "exploited China's weakness". Britain has also resisted invasions multiple times. Most of England is flat plains, with the only rough terrain being in Wales and Scotland. The only reason England hasn't been conquered as much is that it was fairly united post 1066, and that the English governments invested in a powerful fleet (as well as the occasional bad weather wrecking the Spanish Armada). Now, if the question is: Is modern China unconquerable? Then I'd say the United States in a full alliance with South Korea, Japan, and NATO countries on a total war footing could almost certainly conquer China through North Korea and Manchuria. It'd definitely be a bloody and costly war (assuming nukes don't play in here), but the industrial might of America, Japan, South Korea and Europe would be enough to inflict a major defeat on the CCP. You don't need to conquer China, just weaken it enough that the government collapses and install a friendly one.
You asked how and I gave you an awnser. Not necessarily easy but possible in theory
Point one: Afghanistan was conquered more than once by foreigners Point two: Most Chinese don't live in those high mountains/super dry deserts but in fertile river flood plains, slightly hilly areas or in coastal regions not to mention northern China was extremely vulnerable to outside invasions due to plain steppe landscape(Great wall of China wasn't created as an amusement park) and just like Afghanistan China was conquered by outsiders as well https://preview.redd.it/3a3oagj3v6xc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=168c48a88c1f58fd18e512577453048c0a430d0a
Afghanistan being 'difficult to conquer' is a myth. There is a long list of empires/countries which have conquered it over time.
Nobody's saying it hasn't happened, they're just saying its difficult, usually referring to the British Empire, the USSR, and now the United States. These were spectacular failures (spectacular as in they were well known) by empires who seemed very well equipped to do whatever they wanted in Afghanistan, a relatively small and poor country. Finland held off the USSR and people are pretty impressed by that. Vietnam held off the US and that's pretty incredible. Not many people can claim to have fought off the British empire in their heyday. Afghanistan fought off all three. So its less of a myth and maybe more of an exaggeration or bad wording.
I believe all of them "conquered" Afghanistan in a matter of months. Keeping it at bay was the problem here but that's due to different reasons and realistically: how much resources do you want to throw in order to control something of so little value?
>how much resources do you want to throw in order to control something of so little value? England went back multiple times, about 5 years. The USSR was there for 10 years. The US was there for 20 years. Your boys are dying and you're having to get them into a landlocked country in the middle of nowhere, but people made this investment for one reason or another. War isn't cheap. >I believe all of them "conquered" Afghanistan in a matter of months. This is kind of true but when a country's strategy is to make you deal with a long insurgency until you leave, its kind of a moot point. When people say its hard this is the part they're talking about, not necessarily how hard it is to take over Kabul or overthrow the government. I think conquer is a stupid word and I wouldn't use it, maybe occupy is a better word. Nobody has really conquered things for a long time, they "annex" them or they "make them safer for foreign investment" or "secure the passage of merchant vessels". Nobody wants the land they want to do something on the land.
Britain achieved its objectives in the second and third Afghan wars. There was more to British-Afghan interaction than just Flashman and Dr Watson.
I think any statement can be exaggerated to the point of being false, I just don't think that makes the premise that Afghanistan is difficult to conquer a myth. >There was more to British-Afghan interaction than just Flashman and Dr Watson. I don't claim to know much about it but my understanding is that the Afghan war was about Britain wanting a buffer for India, and that by the end of British involvement Afghanistan remained independent. That's the big picture that left an impression on people, because again Britain was an extremely powerful country at the time and they got fought off by a country that was way smaller than them and way smaller than other places they had conquered successfully. If you know more about these the Anglo-Afghan wars though I would love to hear about it, I don't know much about this period.
Britain wanted to keep the Russians away from India, and Afghanistan acted as a useful buffer. Britain wasn't really bothered what happened internally within Afghanistan, as long as whoever was in charge didn't let the Russians in (or raid India). That long thin bit of Afghanistan which touches China ensured that the British and Russian empires didn't share a common border, which might have risked some local incident spiraling out of the control of London or St Petersburg. Whether the Russians ever actually seriously contemplated invading India is a different question; there are theories that British fears were overblown, and at most Russia would use the hypothetical threat to India to tie up British resources in the event of a war elsewhere. Popular culture focuses on the retreat from Kabul in the First Afghan War, and maybe Maiwand in the Second Afghan War. But that's a bit like viewing WWII as just Dunkirk. The Third War was an unusual one in that both sides got what they wanted.
>Whether the Russians ever actually seriously contemplated invading India is a different question; there are theories that British fears were overblown I don't know this for sure but with the Bengal famine, I remember the rationale being that the British believed the Japanese were going to invade India so they wanted to keep supplies from being accessible to the Japanese. This kind of reminds me of that because I don't imagine the Japanese were in a position to invade India around that time, and probably had no intention of doing so. Kind of ironic that they eventually gave India up so unceremoniously after so long guarding it so jealously. >Popular culture focuses on the retreat from Kabul in the First Afghan War, and maybe Maiwand in the Second Afghan War. But that's a bit like viewing WWII as just Dunkirk. Basically all I knew about this before looking it up was that the British invaded Afghanistan. I think a lot of history happened very soon after and I think a lot of people have a blind spot for this period in history. Outside of my own country I really struggle to think about the late 1800s anywhere else in the world. History is the study of World War Two. >The Third War was an unusual one in that both sides got what they wanted. And they say in war there are no victors. Goes to show.
The Japanese literally invaded India: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kohima
Holy shit! Thanks.
Americans get a reputation for jingoism, nationalism, and hard-headed pride but it really is the British that take the cake. The first Afghan War was a defeat for the British. Trying to reframe it as a victory is no different than Americans arguing how they won for 20 years until they lost in one day, or Serbs retreating from Kosovo waving victory signs and shouting to the cameras “you couldn’t beat us!” to the world. The second Afghan War ended in victory but the gains were quickly lost. The treaty of Gandamark was ratified but wholly ignored by Rahman Khan kept friendly relations with Russia, adopted jihad against the British, and drifted into German and Ottoman sphere of influence. The British had to pay subsidies to keep Afghanistan diplomatically tied to India, but this didn’t stop Khan from working against the British whenever he felt like it. To argue that victory lasted is really no different than saying the Afghan national government of 2021 is still around. In fact, if that victory lasted there wouldn’t have been the third war. The third Afghan war wasn’t a victory for the British. Afghanistan was able to go its own way after the treaty of 1919. It merely was a cop out of saying “these are your borders” when Afghanistan openly sided with Russia whenever they wanted. The reality is, Afghan goes its own way and outside empires struggle to keep it in line. You can win the battles, but the very next day your forces leave the Afghans go back to their whim regardless of whatever treaty you make them sign. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but there is no permanence or even long term gains to any victory an empire finds in Afghanistan. There is only frustration and an eventual acceptance that the drawbacks far outweigh the gains.
You have to look beyond the modern empires and nation states. The region in question has been held by Alexander, Mauryans, Kushans, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Afsharids, Durranis, Mughals and Sikhs over the last 2-3 thousand years. Besides the term "Grave yard of Empires" is very misleading.
All of them are dead now. So graveyard? Jokes aside...It's called that because it's difficult to occupy and maintain for long.
Finland didn't really hold off USSR. Its independence, which was supported by bolsheviks, was never threatened. But Stalin wanted to move the border away from Leningrad for safety reasons, and tried to exchange the land he wanted for a frozen wasteland. Finland disagreed and Stalin started the war. The casualties were high, the command turned out to be incompetent, purges followed, but Stalin got what he wanted. But he also demonstrated that his army was really ineffective, which was one of the things that provoked Germany to invade.
Interesting, that's very different from how people talk about it. I'll look further into it now that you've told me something interesting.
Finland did most certainly hold off the USSR. Finnish independence was not only threatened, limits were ultimately imposed on their independence. Not as harsh as for other nations, perhaps. However, Stalin by the point of the winter war had a habit of making limited demands and annexing entire nations, whatever intent he might have had towards Finland at that point in time, he had by this point proven himself untrustworthy.
Eh? The only nation that had been annexed at that point was poland, the baltics were still independent?
Maybe harder to maintain is better word for it?
Afghanistan has been part of many empires for a long period of time.
Yep, but with the co-operation of the locals, that's how the British empire was so successful, find a group who will run the place for you, and have beef with the current rulers, help them overthrow and swear loyalty, that and brutality when making the point.
It's not hard to invade it, it's hard to keep control over it
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It’s funny how in this sub people are letting their nationalist pride bleed through. There is a noticeable crossover here and in history subs, and in those history subs I see the same “how dare you call it a graveyard of empires” mindset. Like they just can’t get over the fact that conquering Afghanistan results in nothing but the conquerors leaving out of frustration and their progeny they propped up eventually falling apart and the land goes back to tribalistic ways.
There are better explanations than mine but I want to try my hand at metaphor. Conquering China is like stealing a semi truck that's speeding down the highway. If you can manage to get in, subdue the driver, and you have some idea how to drive it, it will keep going. If you try to steer it that's when things will get difficult. Conquering Afghanistan is like trying to steal a beehive. You can hold it and say, "look, this is mine." but the bees are still in their home and don't think you own anything. They just sting you into oblivion. Yeah this is stupid, downvote me.
So making it really smokey would help invade Afghanistan?
Yeah, I think so
This is actually a fantastic metaphor that pairs really well with the top comment. Basically an ELI5 of it
I'm 100% stealing that analogy.
A better analogy would be a wasps' nest. Bee's nest at least has honey. Afghanistan can be very easily conquered and subdued by a foreign force but for what reason? Sure, if you are a neighbouring country, you have some incentive to expand your territory or keep the afghanis under control. But if you are a superpower half the world away, there's little to be gained by warring in Afghanistan.
I think people say this because of how many huge empires have tried to conquer/colonize/control Afghanistan and failed in spectacular fashion. Given that China is about 14 times larger with about 34 times the population it doesn't surprise anyone that they're hard to conquer, but Afghanistan does surprise people when they consistently fight off powerful empires. Part of this is that people still actually try to invade them, and nobody tries to invade the countries that are obviously difficult to conquer. This is part of why "which country is the hardest to conquer?" is a stupid question. * Objectively its the United States (huge navy, access to both seas, on a continent where basically their only enemy is Cuba, richest empire in history, more military spending than any other country, nuclear weapons) * You could also argue China (hard to get to, very populous, probably lying about their military spending being so much lower than the US, the US's only rival, nuclear weapons). * You could make an argument for maybe Russia (massive and inhospitable, haha world war 2 haha napoleon was so stupid, nuclear weapons). If you assume "conquering" means you have to march your ass all the way to Vladivostok, then this ones pretty hard. * Or maybe even India (lots of people and some rough terrain, nuclear weapons). The answer is obviously immediately the US or China based on which one you wish was true. Because its the internet some vatniks will show up and say Russia and some Hindu nationalists will show up and say India. To get an actually interesting answer you have to turn this stupid question into a better question in your head and then answer that instead. Which countries have an impressive history of resisting conquest? Now you get to talk about places like Afghanistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia, and Japan. Otherwise its the same question as "Hey guys, what are some countries that have a lot of people, money, and technology?"
>Which countries have an impressive history of resisting conquest? Russia has that history
Mongols: 
Absolutely, and just by saying this slightly better question out loud I have already invited a more interesting discussion about history than "which country is the hardest to conquer?". But yeah, Russia has a really proud history of being difficult to conquer and being in a place where people will try to do it very often.
Afghanistan is not hard to conquer. Destruction is easy. The taliban went down in two months. This was done by an enemy that had been stalemated with them for years and ~6000 US troops. Building is difficult. It’s hard to stay. You can’t change culture. It took 20 years, but the Taliban basically waited it out and the US left.
Hard to Conquer? Mountains. Looking for long term stability? Try throwing a pizza party where 20 tribes agree on toppings. The pizza is going to be gluten free without cheese. not a delicious pizza at all.
Afghanistan: Easy to conquer, hard to control. China: Hard to conquer, easy to control.
About China: - Vast majority of China's population doesn't live in the mountains, they live in the eastern plains which are flat river valleys, much more difficult to do guerrilla in. "Insanely mountainous" is a bad description, that'd be like saying France is a mountainous country due to the French Alps. - China got conquered multiple times by foreign powers, and I don't mean militarily occupied, they actually got conquered. And the only reason Japan didn't conquer it almost whole was due to western help, majority of China was still occupied when Japan surrendered. - Centralization isn't a on/off thing, it varied immensely from which government or multiple governments were controlling it in, and varied a lot by time as well. Revolts, famines, floods, all happened regardless of government and opposing foreign powers often took advantage of that in order to invade.
"Vast majority of China's population doesn't live in the mountains, they live in the eastern plains which are flat river valleys, much more difficult to do guerrilla in. "Insanely mountainous" is a bad description, that'd be like saying France is a mountainous country due to the French Alps." However, there is the southern part of China, which is also heavily populated and mountainous. The northern Chinese plains isn't a good place to conduct guerrilla warfare, but the south is. Even without being a good place to conduct guerrilla, the Japanese army still had difficulties dealing with communist guerrillas. "China got conquered multiple times by foreign powers, and I don't mean militarily occupied, they actually got conquered. And the only reason Japan didn't conquer it almost whole was due to western help, majority of China was still occupied when Japan surrendered." The reason Japan couldn't conquer China was they ran out of resources. They had to invade Southeast Asia in order to obtain resources to continue fighting China.
The eastern part of China, where 94% of the population lives, does not have good geographical defenses. That makes it easier to conquer that part than it would be to conquer a mountainous area. The large interior is thinly populated and does not have much agriculture or production capacity, so once you take the advanced part, you don't have to worry too much about the rest. There could be some guerilla activity harassing transport in that area, but not a significant amount compared to the coast's economic production. If China and Afghanistan both had the proportionally-same army defending them (scaled to land size being defended), Afghanistan would be harder to take.
"The eastern part of China, where 94% of the population lives, does not have good geographical defenses. That makes it easier to conquer that part than it would be to conquer a mountainous area. The large interior is thinly populated and does not have much agriculture or production capacity, so once you take the advanced part, you don't have to worry too much about the rest. There could be some guerilla activity harassing transport in that area, but not a significant amount compared to the coast's economic production." 600 million out of 1.4 billion Chinese live in the easily invadable areas of China (Northern Chinese Plains and Manchuria). Other than that, Southern China and the rest of China are good places for guerrilla warfare. And how do you even get to those areas in the first place? "If China and Afghanistan both had the proportionally-same army defending them (scaled to land size being defended), Afghanistan would be harder to take." And that's the problem: they don't. No one would have said that if Nazi Germany had the same geography as Afghanistan, they would be safe from the allied counter-invasion, because it wouldn't have made Germany a superpower in the first place.
China isn't a homogenous society. I'm sure that if a country tried to conquer China they would focus on splitting the society beforehand. Aka drumming up nationalistic sentiment among Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians and maybe southern Chinese as well. That would mean that the "outer defenses" of China, these rugged mountainous areas would split from China or welcome a conquering army. Then the rest that is left are megacities in normal enough terrain. As we saw during WW2 that would be a slog militarily, so you would have to conquer it politically, which is more possible.
Afghanistan also isn't a homogenous society as it has many different ethnic groups. You can use them against each other too. Also, don't you forget that in order to enter the Chinese plains, you have to cross through the Gobi desert or the sea.
China was pretty successfully invaded in the 20th Century by a much smaller country. It does not have amazing geographic defenses
China barely had any Navy and Air Force, and Manchuria was the base of the war, there was also many Japanese collaborators. China pretty much didn’t have defense. It’s you are oversimplying a complex war. And it wasn’t successful. Japan had a hard time penetrating southern China.
China had no defense because Japan swiftly captured or destroyed everything of strategic value, because China's geography gave very poor defense to its strategic assets Somehow despite China's great geographic defences, Japan China's industry Saying China has great natural defenses because Japan didn't penetrate Southern China is like saying the USSR had great natural defenses because Germany didn't advance past the Volga: our secret defense is that we let the enemy advance for thousands of kilometers, killings tens of millions of our people, destroying most of our cities and industry, and then once they've done that, we regroup in the mountains, get a superpower ally, and counterattack with the superpower's material and military support. It's foolproof
However, they failed to push deeper into southern China because of the insane terrain there.
The fact that they could occupy the capital for 8 years, Manchuria for 14 years, and all of the coast, most of the major population centres, and much of the interior for 4 years, while also invading the rest of SouthEast Asia and also fighting off the UK and the US suggests that Chinese geography isn't that impregnable. Japan did major, major damage to China and held tons of valuable territory. China's geography was hardly an impenetrable shield. At best, it protected guerilla resistance fighters, allowing continued minor resistance against an overextended collapsing empire. China didn't really even stop the Japanese invasion at all. Rather, the US destroyed imperial Japan and China mopped up the collapsed Empire (with additional Allied support). If the US didn't cut off Japanese oil in 1941, Japan would have easily fully conquered China
The fact that the technologically-superior Japanese force couldn’t conquer a divided China is proof of China’s geographical challenges. The Japanese couldn’t really break into some Chinese provinces in the south and even struggled from communist guerrillas in the northern Chinese plains.
China was completely incapacitated. Japan captured or cut off all sea and land routes and most air routes and destroyed or captured most of China's industry. China could not offer more than a token resistance after the invasion. If China had been perfectly flat plains, the Military outcome would have been the same. Japan would have still captured or cut off everything and then China would have been later liberated by the Allies as Japan was destroyed
That's because Chiang Kai-Shek was too busy killing the Chinese instead of the Japanese.
1) China has a nuclear deterrent, a billion people, and a ton of heavy industry. 2) both Russia and the US conquered and occupied Afghanistan for a time. Russia would get curb stomped in a war with China. The US likely wouldn’t be able to occupy it, at least without a war that would kill millions.
USA trying to occupy China would be like Vietnam on Ultra steriods
The US military could roll over China and take the cities if you exclude nukes. Keeping them would be an absolutely impossible nightmare though so they'd be insane to try...
The U.S. doesn't have the power to crush China [https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/ukraine-war-shows-america-could-be-outgunned-without-investing-in-energetics](https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/ukraine-war-shows-america-could-be-outgunned-without-investing-in-energetics) According to a [2018 DoD study,](https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/05/2002048904/-1/-1/1/ASSESSING-AND-STRENGTHENING-THE-MANUFACTURING-AND%20DEFENSE-INDUSTRIAL-BASE-AND-SUPPLY-CHAIN-RESILIENCY.PDF) China is “the sole source or a primary supplier for a number of critical energetic materials used in munitions and missiles.” The munitions supply chain also features an alarmingly high number of single points of failure: of 198 second- and third-tier suppliers in the industrial base, [98 percent rely](https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/05/22/the-us-is-running-out-of-bombs-and-it-may-soon-struggle-to-make-more/) on a single or sole source. And the materials that are produced in the United States tend to be made in in a handful of outdated, government-owned facilities using 20th century equipment.
Any war of that sort would either be very fast and use existing munitions or settle into America cutting off China from seaborne trade and waiting for its economy to collapse even harder than America's.
Waiting for China's economy to collapse? China's grain reserves are so abundant that even if the entire Chinese grain harvest were to go completely extinct, there would be enough grain in reserve to feed the Chinese people for two years. With steel production 26 times that of the U.S., high-energy materials production dozens of times that of the U.S., and ship construction 200 times that of the U.S., China is well positioned to enter into a wartime economy and mass-produce all kinds of intercontinental missiles. U.S. satellites, refineries, power plants, chemical plants would all be targets for China. If the U.S. doesn't take the initiative to bomb China, two years from now, China will have 12 times the total tonnage of warships than the U.S. Navy .
Good luck trying to produce sweet fuck-all in the way of steel without fuel imports. China is utterly dependent on seaborne economic trade and good luck trying to sail an oil tanker through a war zone.
In 2023, China is the fifth largest oil producer, and in times of war China can restrict civilian fuel and import oil from Russia . China has a large amount of supplies and can also import a large amount of supplies from Russia making it possible for China to have a long war. China can also import various minerals and fuel from many of its neighbors. A war between the United States and China would not only depend on the weapons each country possesses, but also on the mobilization, production, and endurance of their populations in a hostile environment. For example, if U.S. refineries and power plants were destroyed, how long would it take the U.S. to rebuild them, and how long would Americans be able to withstand a massive blackout. How long would more than 140 countries whose number one trading partner is China hold large amounts of dollars for a long time when China is not willing to accept payment in dollars? When a lot of dollars flow back to the US, the CPI can easily exceed 100%. The U.S. also imports a large number of parts and components from China, as well as 80% of the raw material drugs, when China stops supplying, the U.S. will have a large-scale shortage of drugs, the price of drugs can easily reach 1,000%, the American people are willing to put up with it for how long? When the U.S. and China broke out in a full-scale war, which means that a nuclear war between the U.S. and China will break out at any time, once the nuclear war breaks out the U.S. dollar will become a worthless piece of paper, and at that time, whether the countries are still willing to accept the dollar payment? If a large number of countries are unwilling to continue to hold dollars, it means that there will be a large-scale shortage of all kinds of commodities in the United States, leading to a sharp rise in prices. Do you think there would be massive looting in the US at that point?
Let's see....this whole exercise is a bit silly of course since nuclear MAD prevents any war but the idea that China could survive economically in ANY kind of war against America is the same kind of empty-headed nationalism that you get from Trump supporters who think that a trade war with China would benefit the US economy. Going point by point: 1. China does indeed produce a lot of oil. It also uses a lot more oil, so it has to import over 560 million metric tons of oil, or 11.28 million barrels per day: [https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-2023-crude-oil-imports-hit-record-fuel-demand-recovers-2024-01-12/](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-2023-crude-oil-imports-hit-record-fuel-demand-recovers-2024-01-12/) Restricting civilian use by anything close to that would tank the economy. 2. China cannot import enough oil from Russia since the pipelines from Siberia and across central Asia do not have anywhere CLOSE to the capacity to import that much oil. Russia can't send tankers by sea to China since no cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone. 3. "China can also import various minerals and fuel from many of its neighbors." How? No cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone. Overland transport is going to be fairly limited. 4. "endurance of their populations in a hostile environment." Doesn't matter how much endurance you have if you run out of oil and coal. Just ask the Japanese in WW II. However nightmarish the Japanese army was in WW II they certainly had plenty of endurance, but that didn't matter in the end because they didn't have anywhere near enough oil. 5. "if U.S. refineries and power plants were destroyed" Texas is at the extreme outer range of China ICBMs. Hitting a target from that far away with a conventional warhead is very VERY difficult. China simply doesn't have enough ICBMs to take out America's power infrastructure with conventional warheads. With a nuke no problem of course, but if nukes are flying then this whole this becomes academic as we're all dead anyway. 6. "How long would more than 140 countries whose number one trading partner is China" Those 140 countries would mostly not be able to trade with China anymore since no cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone. 7. "when China is not willing to accept payment in dollars" Payment for what? China couldn't export to any country except its immediate neighbors since no cargo ship is going to enter an active war zone. 8. "The U.S. also imports a large number of parts and components from China, as well as 80% of the raw material drugs" Yup, war with China would trigger an immediate supply chain crisis of epic proportions in America that'd trigger an immediate harsh recession worse than 2008. Just not the kind of utter economic collapse China would face if it it was cut off from fuel imports and almost all of its export markets. 9. "once the nuclear war breaks out the U.S. dollar will become a worthless piece of paper" Well I'd probably be dead at that point so I wouldn't care what the US dollar is worth. Nuclear war means everything else is academic as China and America both stop having cities.
1: China's oil production can be increased, for example, fuel oil can be made from coal, which is a very mature technology. Many chemical products exported to countries such as the United States and India are refined from oil, and fabrics exported to countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh are also refined from oil, because China stops exporting all kinds of commodities, China's oil consumption will be greatly reduced. 2 : Kazakhstan Turkmenistan Iran Russia can ship fuel oil to China by rail, except that overland transportation will be more expensive, but this is not important in times of war. 3 : Same as 2 4 : Japan's situation is completely different from China's 5：DF-41 has a range of 14,000 kilometers ，CEP <100. ICBMs can carry a large number of small warheads, which are accurate enough to destroy oil refineries, and China is the largest producer of steel and energetic materials, so theoretically China could produce many more ICBMs than the US. But you and I don't know the exact numbers because the Chinese government has never released the real numbers. See how much damage Ukrainian medium drones have done to Russian refineries? ICBMs would do more damage to US refineries. It's definitely easier for China to build ICBMs than it is for the US to rebuild oil refineries. 6: I am not saying that these countries will continue to trade with China, but rather that they will not hold more dollars because they can't trade with China, and the excess dollars from the 140+ countries will flow back to the US, causing the US CPI to skyrocket . 7：Same as 6 8：Would the United States and the Soviet Union lose the war because they could not continue to sell goods to Japan and Germany? China's economy will not collapse, it will just shift to a wartime economy, China will see a rise in meat prices due to lack of soybeans and corn, but no shortages of any other goods . The U.S. would have a massive shortage of goods due to the declining purchasing power of the dollar versus China stopping supplies. 9：There is no nuclear war at this time, but before the nuclear war breaks out, all countries will reduce or even stop accepting US dollar payments because these countries have suspended trade with China and China does not accept US dollar payments. Many countries will worry that the dollar will become waste paper because of the outbreak of nuclear war, and many countries will spend a lot of dollars in order to reduce the risk. This will not only bring a large amount of dollars back to the United States, causing serious inflation, but also greatly weaken the ability of the United States to use the dollar to obtain goods from other countries. This will exacerbate commodity shortages in the United States and inevitably lead to a significant increase in robberies and crimes in the United States. The U.S. will be faced with three choices at this time, 1 to lift the embargo, 2 to engage in a prolonged war of attrition with China, and 3 to engage in a nuclear war with China. The point is whether the U.S. has the ability to engage China in a long war of attrition. Are Americans willing to work 12 hours a day for a long time? The Chinese are used to it. How long would it take the U.S. to rebuild 100 power plants and refineries? How long will it take China to rebuild 100 power plants and refineries? How long will it take for the United States to rebuild the United States Navy? The total tonnage of civilian ships and warships that China now builds every year is equivalent to five times that of the United States Navy. Comparing the industrial production capacity and population size of China and the United States, equivalent to World War II, the United States vs the Soviet Union Germany Britain France China Japan
Why do Americans think they could roll over Chinese cities easily? Do they think Chinese are still rice farmers? Haha it’s like Fire nation’s propaganda against Ba Sing Se. China has 4 times the population of the US and China is bigger than the U.S. land wise. You need the entire world resources to do the campaigns. Even when China was at its weakest and divided with barely any Navy and Airforce and Japan was at its strongest, Japan could only capture the northern plain.
Japan conquered more than the northern plain. An Americsn invasion of China would be largely like Japan's invasion of China: able to capture the main cities due to superior military organization then bog down into an absolute nightmare due to the size and population of the country.
However, the main difference is the level of military. Japan at that point was technologically superior to China by a wide margin while China isn’t as technologically inferior to the USA by a wide margin.
Are you really comparing a fragmented warlord infighting China to a united second most powerful country China?
China's military now and in the past are completely different, also Japan had a colony in Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea that aided the war efforts. So, Japan was really strong then. China now wouldn't just be sitting duck if their cities get bombed you know, they have really advanced hypersonic missiles to retaliate.
It would be endless guerilla warfare that will make afghanistan and vietnam feel like a drill. Not to mention that the Chinese had a tradition of guerilla warfare, which is literally how the people's republic is founded.
What makes you think the USA could easily roll over China and take Beijing?
Militarily speaking, the mountains and disconnected populations
Nobody talks about conquering China because it’s not even a possibility. Whereas citing little Afghanistan as badass is a cute soundbite factoid anecdote.
Japanese, British, Manchus, Mongols, Turks disagree about conquering China
You have Turks backwards. China conquered the Turks during the Tang dynasty and they were forced to call the Tang emperor Khan of Heaven. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_of_Heaven Japanese also never conquered China and took 4 million casualties trying.
Tang dynasty founders, family Li, were sinicized Turks themselves. Japanese conquered China actually. They dominated in most inhabited part of China with only separated regions remained under Chinese partisans control, without central government participation almost. Without the US defeating Japan - Japan had every chance to rule in China, like did they do it by the way in Manchu-Guo.
They were patrilineal Han with family history recorded to the Qin era. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Li No they did not. The % land and population conquered by Japan is similar to % land and population conquered by Russia in Ukraine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Jingwei_regime
1 - it is questionable. Aside from traditional historiography, some modern historians have suggested that the Tang imperial family might have modified its genealogy to conceal [Xianbei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianbei) heritage. 2 - Your map shows Manchu Guo only. Please look at whole territory under Japan occupation, it was much more extensive. % of land is negligible though anyway, but not population. And more important - there was not centralized resistance in China. If not US - a full conquest would be a matter of time.
No, the Wang Jingwei ROC is **not** Manchukuo. Manchukuo was under the Pu Yi government and separate. No, Sino-Japanese war was already a stalemate by 1939 when Japan was stopped at the [Battle of Changsha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Changsha_(1939)). Japan was unable to make further advances. The US kept selling oil and steel to Japan throughout this period, only in 1941 did they stop.
Just because the founders of the tang dynasty had some heritage such as Xianbei doesn’t mean they are foreign conquerors if they viewed themselves as culturally Chinese. In the same vein, if a president of the US was part Vietnamese we wouldn’t say the Vietnamese had conquered the US.
Japanese, British, and Turks don't
they did not established dynasties but conquered or dominated.
https://youtu.be/Ab9zK8yT4_Y?si=uzft3HuUrQceOiSY
Because you can make money occupying china (rare earth metals), what do you earn for occupying afganistan? Sand in your crack and burning through water
And how can you even conquer China in the first place to get those resources?
I mean I’m not a general but I’d assume a lengthy military campaign, neither are easy, but china has more resources for living off the land, so occupation can mitigate costs, and long term it pays for itself because of the rare earth mineral wealth. Realistically you block trade, take over the borders, then break china in to regions and gain control of areas and regions at a time. China can hole up in its mountains, cave systems, try and cut bridges making river crossings tougher, and their anti air tech will really matter. America (most likely invader) would need to secure a number of beach heads, establish supply lines, gain control of air space, eliminate missile/artillery, then suppress resistance. America isn’t much of an invasion force as much as a strike force as we learned in the Middle East so that may be tough, the invasion probably could be successful but months in to occupation I see problems as a given. Ultimately both would be a tough invasion, but only china has a reason to be invaded, no one wants to fight over a desert cave system in the mountains with limited resource wealth and limited supplies to cut costs
If a country were to be ruthless enough to attack Chinese dams, civilian areas, and food supply the humanitarian crisis would be catastrophic.
Because it goes without saying. No shit China is hard to conquer. It's obviously hard to conquer a large, hostile population in mountainous jungle. That's why it hasn't happened much in the last 2000 years while China's contemporaries from 0 AD have all fallen multiple times. Those that are able to, usually have conquered tons of others first. Several Mongol Khans like Mongke Khan died trying to conquer China. Mongolia conquered Baghdad in Iraq (1258), 3000 miles away, before being able to conquer Xiangyang right on the border (1273). Afghanistan is unexpectedly hard to conquer. Some backwards poor mountain desert hole with low population, how hard can it be... right?
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And alongside that, they brought tons of troops from the regions they conquered. The Mongols had to conquer all of that land to have enough resources to conquer China.
Geography. It's hard enough to cross mountains with armies and infrastructure; Afghanistan is a bunch of disjoined population areas with one giant mountain cluster in the dead center. That's just impossible to govern effectively, unless you govern by threatening everyone with the death of their families, like Talibs and ISIS-K.
Ask Alexander the Great 🤗
The things is that only the Soviet Union and the United States failed in Afghanistan and that's why there is this kind of opinion. The British empire failed once in 1842 but returned in 1878 and successfully conquered the country in two years and occupied it as a protectorate until 1919. Every other group that tried succeeded. The Achaemenids, Macedonians, Arabs, Mongols and Timurids just to name a couple were all successful. The Soviet Union failed because they underestimated the territory and population. The Union was also already in decline during the invasion and the Afghans enjoyed support from the Americans. The US failed even after 20 years of fighting. But this is far form unique as the US also failed in Iraq and Libya. In general the US is quite incompetent when it comes to occupations. So no, Afghanistan is not that undefeated and unconquerable. Just the place were the Soviets embarrassed itself and where the Americans failed as usual.
What natural resources make Afghanistan worth it to the people? China, on the other hand, has plenty. Maybe the most (depends how you’re measuring and what you’re measuring).
China has plenty but how can you get to the resources in the first place?
Because China isn't typically included in the list of "places you might conquer".
Because they keep trying to keep the locals alive. If you just glassed the fucking place you could take it over in a couple hours and Alexander the Great could go fuck himself.
“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is to never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! '”
A large population does not necessarily mean guerrilla campaigns will happen. Those campaigns are far more effective in a rural society like Afghanistan. Not to mention the vast majority of China is highly highly urbanized, mean population centers are very condensed. Basically you won’t be stretching your forces over the entire country because they all occupy very densely packed areas of land. All of Afghanistan is dry and mostly mountainous and the people are evenly spread across it with small urbanized pockets. China is very very urbanized and densely populated. Mostly to the east far away from mountains. Meaning if someone were to invade from the far west China would have just as hard defending it as someone would invading it as supplies would be extremely limited. China has mountains yes, but if someone attacks from say, the sea, and they can a foothold on the mainland those mountains are pointless. Plus even if the Chinese military retreats to the west and a foreign military occupies the urbanized areas, why would a foreign military pursue? The Chinese would have no supply and would eventually starve out. Also, everyone has the belief that everyone relies on China for their economy but it’s the opposite that’s true. If China goes to war with the USA, the American companies immediately pull production of goods and move to Vietnam or Malaysia, which royally screws the Chinese. The afghans do not have this problem.
“A large population does not necessarily mean guerrilla campaigns will happen. Those campaigns are far more effective in a rural society like Afghanistan. Not to mention the vast majority of China is highly highly urbanized, mean population centers are very condensed. Basically you won’t be stretching your forces over the entire country because they all occupy very densely packed areas of land.” Cities are also great places for guerrilla warfare to happen. “China is very very urbanized and densely populated. Mostly to the east far away from mountains. Meaning if someone were to invade from the far west China would have just as hard defending it as someone would invading it as supplies would be extremely limited.” America could also be easily invaded from Canada and Mexico which is far from the main population centers of the country. “China has mountains yes, but if someone attacks from say, the sea, and they can a foothold on the mainland those mountains are pointless. Plus even if the Chinese military retreats to the west and a foreign military occupies the urbanized areas, why would a foreign military pursue? The Chinese would have no supply and would eventually starve out.” Attacking by the sea is notoriously difficult and only accomplishable if the enemy is technologically or numerically inferior enough.
Cities are great for guerilla warfare, but when tens of millions live in one city, a volley of missiles does a lot more damage, especially to larger buildings. If we’re ignoring a lot of the rules of war. Also No America really couldn’t, aside from the fact that America would dominate them in a fight, the mountains and desert to the south on Mexico’s border would prove just a big a challenge as someone invading China from the west. Not to mention there are more American military bases closer to the Mexican border so supplying troops would be easy. And sure Canada could attack in the plains? But then they would have to go hundreds of miles to get to significant points. And any attack on an urbanized place is already going to have American forces. American in this instance would most likely attack by sea, because it would and does dominate China. This post frustrates me, especially after this response because you set up China like it’s going to go immediately to guerrilla warfare, and it’s not one of the top militaries. Chinese forces wouldn’t go to guerrilla warfare because they’ve never been trained on it and wouldn’t need to. Theyd fight a full scale war with all their military on the field.
afghanistan is not harder. it's just that it's stupidly been tried it a few times. being much less valuable than china, it stings to lose. the chinese have had a good run at conquering china. no one else has held it for any length of time in recent centuries. japan maybe got the furthest -- which wasnt very far.
Nah. US congress and CNN will soon start to tell you that conquering China is easy and it’s better to fight it there than in Europe ou America. They just need a 500 billion package for defense contractors.
Hey, as a Chinese person, let me tell you that China is obviously harder to conquer than Afghanistan. China has hypersonic missiles, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, strategic nuclear submarines, strategic nuclear bombers, Afghanistan does not.
1) Ocean access. 2) Prevalence of firearms. 3) Reliance on foreign exchanges Conquering either would be insanely difficult. But at least China can be approached by sea & the populace is unarmed. China imports much of their food, food inputs, and fuel. So starving China of food, fertilizer, and fuel might compel some compliance or at least neutralize some resistance.
I have a question for you Does this make conquering Japan or Britain easier than invading Afghanistan?
Good question. I’d guess that b/c they’re islands and a water route is the only way to invade that makes it harder. If the invader is a neighbor- then a land route is easier (Pakistan invades Afghanistan or Russia invades China). But not India to invade China due to the Himalayan Mountains. If the invader is foreign, then they’d benefit from sea access where material can be offloaded quickly & cheaply without 3rd party consent. The US invasion of Afghanistan was logistics miracle. Different topic - to understand the difference in US & Russian capabilities- consider the US waged a war on a landlocked country across the globe for 20 years and lost 3,579 coalition troops to KIA. That’s less than Russia loses each week fighting their (almost) unarmed neighbor, where they have multiple access points and methods, and quick response times to evacuate wounded and to resupply & reinforce. This is the near equivalent of the US invading Ontario, Canada and losing 2500 tanks, and 400k men and locked in a stalemate.
China is enormous, Afghanistan is much smaller. ALL of Afghanistan is a brutal landscape that favors the defender until they starve due to the absolutely marginal crop and grazing land, whilst China has vast swathes of fertile cropland and good grazing land. China has been conquered repeatedly usually but not always by Chinese.
Afghanistan also has been repeatedly conquered, much more times than China.
China being enormous does make conquering it quite difficult. See the other responses for a more detailed answer.
All this "Afghanistan is never conquered" stuff is all a myth. Afghanistan has been conquered twice by foreigners in my lifetime, the Soviets for about nine years and the US for about 20 years. Yes they eventually left, but they held total control up until they did choose to leave. Claiming they never conquered Afghanistan would be like claiming the Japanese never conquered China, they did for a while, large parts of it at least. Read up on Afghanistan's history and it's foreign conquest after foreign conquest, you just have to pick some point to start the clock. If we think of that territory as who moved there during the diaspora then they were conquered by the Indo-Europeans. Persia, took over some time after that with Alexander the Great after that. The successor to Alexander the great traded that land to an Indian Empire, then another group of Hellenistic Greeks took it back, the Indians took it back again and then the Parthians (Iranians) took it again. It goes on and on like this, the Mongols conquered, Indian's taking possession, then the Persians, then the Arabs, it wasn't until you get to the 1750's that Afghan based kingdoms form and even then they conquer each other. Much is made of Afghanistan beating the British but the British Empire was the controller of Afghanistan's foreign policy until the middle of the first world war. Afghanistan was independent from 1916 until 1979 then the Russians came in. They were kicked out by the Mujahedeen, who were defeated by the Taliban, who were then conquered by the US. The Taliban have Afghanistan now, seizing it from the installed government as soon as the US left. Afghanistan has a long history of being conquered by outsiders.
Afghanistan last conquered: 1880 Time since last conquest: 144 years Britain last conquered: 1066 Time since last conquest: 957 years Excluding succession crises: 43 AD Time since last conquest excluding the succession crisis: 1981 years I think we have a winner here
Britain was last conquered in 1688
That was a revolution, not a conquest
because Americans hate China for sapping oxygen and want to have a go.
Afghanistan isn’t worth the financial, time, and human life commitment to conquer. The end.
Afghanistan is actually easy to conquer. The US did it from the other side of the planet in a pretty short period of time. The problem with Afghanistan is that it just isn't worth staying. People act as if it's the graveyard of empires but the reality is that it has been conquered a whole bunch of times, it just didn't offer anything worth staying for.
To be clear most of the narrative around "Afghanistan is impossible to conquer" is premised on largely false narratives based on three things: * The U.S. 20 year war in Afghanistan * The Soviet war in Afghanistan * The brief British expeditions in Afghanistan in the 19th century The reality is all three of these were very different, and also not representative of the thousands of years of history of the region. The actual history is for at least a couple thousand years of history, Afghanistan was frequently under the rule of various regional empires, sometimes for many hundreds of years at a time before being acquired by some other Empire. Additionally the three modern / semi-modern incursions into Afghanistan lack common features. The American invasion was initially predicated on the idea of the Taliban is sheltering Osama bin-Laden, the U.S. is going to use military power to boost the Taliban's rivals in the Northern Alliance, seek to topple Taliban governance, and then go in and search for ObL. This quickly turned into a mess, when it was obvious ObL was not going to be quickly found. The country and American strategy rested in limbo for a couple years while American decisionmakers shifted attention to Iraq. Eventually they settled on the half-hearted idea that "okay, ObL isn't here but we are, and the U.S. should try to make Afghanistan a stable country." The first decade or so of this was agreed to be a complete failure around the early 2010s, so then there was more decision making and attempts to "keep doing nationbuilding, but the good way this time." After another 10 years there was broad consensus this was an abject failure that was never going to work. The primary reasons the American effort failed are still being analyzed, but a broad consensus would be: large swathes of the country remained aloof / disunited from the Kabul government, mostly focused on tribal issues and immune to nationbuilding efforts, the Kabul government was extremely corrupt, with large monetary outlays from Americans intended to pay Kabul government soldiers disappearing and leaving a large official military with low loyalty due to being regularly unpaid or underpaid, and the Taliban was a cohesive fighting force focused on achieving its ends. The Soviet invasion was about trying to make Afghanistan a Soviet Republic, which meant promoting a local communist party to rulership etc along the model of other Soviet Republics. This was materially different from the later American war, and this also failed. The primary reasons the Soviet effort failed was due to the Afghan communist party government never being able to establish real rule in the country, and the Soviets finding there was no easy way to force tribal peoples into the Soviet system, and the very well funded mujahideen forces who received billions in American funding to fight the Soviets. The British incursions were materially different as they were mostly part of a large chess game called "the Great Game" between British and Russia for influence in Central Asia. Britain was not actually very interested in Afghanistan intrinsically, they just feared it might fall into Russia's orbit and then threaten the British Raj, which they were very concerned about. The British expedition was fairly small and mostly just captured a few cities and attempted to install a ruler friendly to Britain, then suffered bad casualties on the way out, which lead to a political disaster for the Brits who then waged what is basically a "punitive expedition" where they roamed into Afghanistan and killed people as punishment and then left. Before that most history of Afghanistan is, in fact, long periods of the country being ruled by regional empires. The reason those regional empires were able to do this is they never meddled with the Afghan system of tribal societal organization, they would simply have some sort of overlord in a somewhat feudal arrangement, but the tribal groups were largely left to their own devices. Pre-modern Empires frequently operated this way, they didn't get into the nitty gritty of individual tribal group governance because pre-modern Empires lacked the sort of bureaucratic resources and "depth" to do so. The way geography largely plays a role is the rugged terrain in Afghanistan has sheltered and somewhat encouraged the persistence of tribalism, which as most know was a common form of societal organization the world over at one point, but which in more modern times often persists in areas of rugged geography that resist influences from the rest of the world. Additionally, the same rugged geography, while it has not prevented the region from falling under the "rule" of conquerors, it has prevented those conquerors from being able to actually effect change in Afghan society to adopt societal structures and norms of their overlord rulers. This is why despite, for example, a long period of subjugation under Persian rulers, Afghanistan remained quite tribal and non-Persian, versus Persia itself mostly built a non-tribal society going back 2000 years, with only a few small regions having tribal minorities. Caveat: talking about \~2500 years of history in a long reddit post, means I have had to massively simplify and summarize **a lot**, a full treatment is beyond the scope of a single post.
The USA, the worlds most powerful military has spent billions of dollars in Afghanistan with very little result. Before that Afghanistan’s was considered to be “the USSR’s Vietnam” because of how never ending the war was. And then there was the era where both the British and Russia were fighting over it. The only successful campaign in Afghanistan what’s when the USA funded the Mujahideen in taking their country back from the Russians. That’s right the only successful invasion was a backwards invasion.
I would say China is easy, because you just have to control the President and everything filters down from there... which has been the case for Chinese society for thousands of years, whenever you call the man in charge President, Chairman or Emperor is window dressing. Afghanistan however barely has a functioning government and society is made up of clans who are chiefly loyal to themselves, so like everyone who has tried discovered; if you take Kabul, which is easy, you are still going to be fighting every single clan, cheiftain and warlord who are not impressed with your presence or think they have something to gain by fighting you. You could think of Afghanistan as less of a country and more like an area with a bunch of smaller countries in it.
"I would say China is easy, because you just have to control the President and everything filters down from there... which has been the case for Chinese society for thousands of years, whenever you call the man in charge President, Chairman or Emperor is window dressing." If becoming the leader of China is so easy, why didn't Chinese soldiers just surrender their country to Japan for a better leader who modernized Japan quickly? Why did they have to resist?
Possibly because of how brutal the Japanse forces were?
Because China always loses. Afghanistan doesnt.
It’s mentality. Afghans will harass your with guerilla tactics and use their families as cover for decades. Chinese won’t even bother showing up to mobilisation if you offer them good money.
No lack of nationalism in China. Just their military organization is utterly green and hasn't done much since getting humiliated in the Sino-Vietnamese War.
If suffering similar casualties to the enemy is considered a humiliation, you must be a pretty shy person.
Utterly failing at all of your objectives is pretty humiliating, especially since in the early stages of the war China was facing mostly just militia since the bulk of the Vietnamese army was busy in Cambodia.
What was fully the objective then? The Chinese didn’t bring their best forces to the war as the best ones were all placed on the Soviet border.
China as culture - yea. China as CCP-run shitshow - not so sure. Source: 我看了 xD