As the West prepares to withdraw from another bruising encounter with Afghanistan, two books appear which underline the dangers of going there in the first place. As every pub pundit knows, invading Afghanistan is probably a bad idea. Just how bad is evident in William Dalrymple's history of the First Afghan War. The sensible approach is spelled out in Con Coughlin's account of Winston Churchill's 1897 encounter with the Pashtun warrior tribes of the North West Frontier. That is, that "the less the outside world interfered with the affairs of the frontier tribes, the less inclined the frontier tribes would be to interfere with the outside world" — a formula that could be applied usefully to the whole region.
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