Instead of the usual defensive guerrilla war against an occupying power; for the FIRST time the Taliban are engaging in a conventional open warfare against a patriotic professional army defending its territory. Historically Afghanistan and Afghans ( regardless of any form or shape what is today known as Afghanistan has existed) have never EVER been successful in any war with Muslim adversaries, from the Turks, Iranians, Timur, Babar, Nadir Shah etc.
In 1947 the Afghans attacked Pakistan at its most vulnerable moment when Pakistan had a depleted army with no armor, infantry fighting vehicles, or an air force with ground attack capabilities. Pakistan was already heavily engaged fighting India in Kashmir, The Afghans used proxies as well as direct attacks. The Afghans were crushed in days.
Afghanistan is trying to invade a country that has a professional army trained to fight an enemy 7 times superior in numbers. They have sown the wind
A punishment by Pakistan is likely to be far more severe than what the Taliban could ever have estimated
What folks don't understand or realize is that "Afghanistan" as a state didn't exist until the around the 1840s when the Barakzai dynasty formed it.
Before that point, there was no "Afghanistan" in the sense of a nation state, but rather, the land was home to many different dynastic leaders who ruled parts of modern day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and other surrounding regions. It was never as one united bloc, but a flux of both small and big powers (e.g., Samanis, Ghaznavis, Delhi Sultanate, Mughals, etc).
None of these great dynasties saw or called themselves "Afghans" nor did any of them have a mission of building an "Afghanistan" or "Afghan" empire or whatever.
So, this BS about them being the graveyard of empires and stuff is just that, BS. If such ideas held true, then Islam wouldn't have spread to them via the Arabs, Persians, and Turkic folks who ruled lands that make "Afghanistan" for centuries and centuries.
Not only that, but this land at one point was also under the brutal occupation of Mongol hordes, during which refugees flowed into the lands we now know today as Pakistan when it was under the Delhi Sultanate.
The Delhi Sultanate in fact spearheaded the resistance against the Mongols in this period, leveraging the expertise of the refugees (some of whom were Pakhtun, others Persians, Turkic, Khorasani, etc) while adding India's resources and manpower into the mix to fight the Mongol hordes many, many times.
Afghans, like the rest of humanity, are just a bunch of humans. There's nothing special or unique about them, and no, they didn't 'sink' the Soviets or Americans or NATO. With USSR, for example, it was a combination of Afghan fighters, Saudi money, Pakistani support, and US coordination that sunk the Soviets.
And with the US, the Americans came in and scattered these guys into the caves. Yes, the US didn't have the stomach to deal with the constant insurgency, but they also couldn't build any legitimacy with any of the locals either. The US was totally alien to the region and shared nothing with the locals.
Pakistan, OTOH, shares the wider historical identity and is of the region. It's native. And Pakistanis have the wherewithal to absorb damage (as we had in the COIN/CT ops in the 2010s) and our Pakistan Army knows how to fight cave to cave, stone-to-stone (
@Blain2) as we had under Lt. Gen Tariq Khan.
Our men lack as much fear in death as their counterparts in the Taliban and are GROUNDED to the land as they were born there. They're sons of the soil too. For every 1 of ours down we will also produce 10.
So, whatever come of this conflict, there's no analogy or parallel to the USSR or the US. The tragedy, IMO, is that our Pakistani leadership doesn't carry a great vision when it prepares to make big sacrifices like this.
Afghanistan as a nation-state entity is a failure -- it's people are all dependents on others like Pakistan. We basically get all of the burden and none of the material benefits that could be used to better both Afghans and Pakistanis from this relationship.
Plus, with any people, you can't solve things with just the sword. Yes, we need to fight and deal with things militarily, 100%, but we also need to build roots in Afghanistan and unify, ensuring that whatever emerges in the future sees itself as part of Pakistan's fabric. If it's our territory, we can 100% eliminate external Indian influence (rather, now, our interface changes to facing Central Asia, Russia, etc directly).
Otherwise we'll constantly end up with the same damn situation over and over again, i.e., you clear the place of X, then Y comes in and backstabs us, and we're back to square-one.