WILL CHINA LEARN FROM AFGHANISTAN HISTORY WHAT THE BRITISH, RUSSIANS AND THE AMERICANS DID NOT?

William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("At the end of Kim, Kipling has his eponymous hero say, 'When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished. Not Before.' In the 1980s it was the Russians' withdrawal from their failed occupation of Afghanistan that triggered the beginning of the end of he Soviet Union. Less than twenty years later, in 2001, British and American troops arrived in Afghanistan, where they proceeded to begin losing what was, in Britain's case, its fourth war in that country. As before, in the end, despite all the billions of dollars handed out, the training of an entire army of Afghan troops and the infinitely superior weaponry of the occupiers, the Afghan resistance succeeded again in first surrounding then propelling the hated Kafirs into a humiliating exist. In both cases the occupying troops lost the will to continue fighting at such cost and with so little gain." Id. at 430-431. "'These are the last days of the Americans,' said the other elder. 'Next it will be China.'" Id. at 435.).