AFGHANISTAN is a problem the world has never solved.

President Barack Obama, without doubt a student of history, acknowledged as much when he made getting aid for dealing with that nation a top goal of his trip to Europe last week.

The president told a town meeting in Strasbourg, France: “We have no interest in occupying Afghanistan. This is a joint problem requiring a joint effort.”

He left saying he was pleased with pledges to send troops there from Britain and the NATO countries.

Geography has sealed Afghanistan’s fate for two millennia. Bordered today by Iran, Pakistan, Turkministan and several other countries of the former Soviet Union, it has been fought over by many groups, but did not become a single country until 1747, when Ahmed Shah Durrani founded a monarchy that ruled Afghanistan until 1973.

IN THE 19TH and 20th centuries Afghanistan was situated between the expanding Russian and British empires.

Great Britain was pulled into fighting with Afghan tribes three times during its imperial days when nearby India was its colony. In wars carried on in 1838-41, 1878-79 and 1919, thousands of British soldiers were sacrificed to the fighting skills of the fierce tribal Afghans.

Rudyard Kipling, the British writer who was not born until 1865 but in his work reflected famously on the empire’s triumphs and defeats, was best known as a poet for his Gunga Din. (“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” said a British soldier in India about a native water-bearer who saved his life.)

For his use of dialect and other reasons, Kipling is not politically correct or highly regarded these days. But still relevant is his poem, The Young British Soldier. Its 13th and final verse has this macabre conclusion:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

MUCH MORE recently, in the 1980s, Lufkin’s congressman Charlie Wilson conspired with a rogue CIA operative, Gust Avrakotos, to launch a covert operation that is credited with helping to hasten the downfall of the Soviet Union.

With Charlie Wilson’s influence on the House Appropriations Committee, the mujahideen “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan received millions of dollars worth of munitions and armaments that led the Red Army to reluctantly withdraw in 1989.

George Crile, veteran producer of TV’s 60 Minutes, told the story in a best-selling book, Charlie Wilson’s War. (It was made into a movie by that title starring Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson.)

HAVING SPENT ALL of the 1980s trying to conquer Afghanistan. the Soviet forces withdrew in 1989 with 28,000 of their soldiers dead. The CIA viewed its part in the war as a noble cause, Crile wrote, and considered it the agency’s greatest victory. But the unintended consequence was that in a secret war, the funders got no credit.

In Crile’s analysis, the mujahideen and their Muslim admirers around the world never viewed U.S. support as a decisive factor in their victory.

“As they saw it, that honor went to Allah, the only superpower they acknowledge,” Crile wrote.

SO THE JIHAD continues today, when we face native Afghans harboring the Al Qaeda terrorists who have been considered such a serious threat since Sept. 11, 2001.

Crile’s book was published in 2003, and it was then that Charlie Wilson, who had become a Washington D. C. lobbyist, came to Nacogdoches to give a lecture for the East Texas Historical Association. I bought a copy of the book from Mr. Wilson and had him autograph it. A gripping read it is.

But by then the victory was far from the clear triumph it had appeared to be just a few years earlier.

ON TV NEWS Monday was a live transmission of the return of Staff Sgt. Phillip A. Myers’ body to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. According to CNN, it was a solemn moment that had been repeated more than 5,000 times at the base since the war in Afghanistan started in late 2001.

But it was the first time the media was allowed to cover the return. Sgt. Myers was killed in a roadside bombing in Afghanistan on Saturday. Through a recent change in policy, coverage was allowed with the family’s permission.

When I attended journalism school at the University of Texas in Austin not long after World War II ended, we had a textbook that warned future editors not to be guilty of “Afghanistanism.” This was a code word for filling up a newspaper with wire service dispatches from faraway lands instead of doing the more difficult work of covering local news.

It was beyond my imagination to think that six decades later, Afghanistan would have become a local story.

sgreene@tatertv.com Sarah Greene Archives