Recently, Pakistan went to war against Afghanistan. From the Afghan side, one began hearing the old trope that “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires”. First of all, Pakistan is not an empire, and secondly, the trope is mostly a myth.
In an August 2021 speech, delivered during the withdrawal of US military forces from Afghanistan, former US President Joe Biden said, “The events we’re seeing now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, secure Afghanistan that is known in history as the graveyard of empires.” The researcher Alexander Hainy-Khaleeli wasn’t impressed. He wrote, “Biden labelling Afghanistan ‘the graveyard of empires’ is historically illiterate.” Truth is, the phrase has nothing to do with any grand historic narrative or fact.
According to Hainy-Khaleeli, the phrase (in the context of Afghanistan) first appeared in a 2001 article written for the magazine Foreign Affairs by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) former Pakistan Station Chief, Milton Bearden. The article was titled ‘Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires’. There is scarce evidence of this phrase being used before Bearden’s article.
In 2001, when US forces were readying themselves to invade Afghanistan to dislodge the Taliban regime and hunt down the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, Bearden cautioned the US government, claiming that major armies across history had tried to conquer Afghanistan but had run into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribes. Bearden named the armies of the ancient Greek king Alexander, the ferocious Mongol warlord Genghis Khan, the British Empire and the Soviet Union that were all ‘defeated’ by the Afghans.
The phrase ‘Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires’ is perpetuated by the Taliban as a way to mythologise the image of the ‘invincible’ Afghan, while non-Afghans use the trope as a way to rationalise defeat. But does this phrase make any historical sense?
But according to Hainy-Khaleeli, “Bearden’s argument is utterly at odds with the realities of history.” Alexander and Genghis Khan not only conquered Afghanistan, their successors ruled it for centuries after them. The ‘graveyard’ narrative also overlooks the fact that many empires — such as the Achaemenids, Kushans, Mughals and others — successfully ruled large parts of Afghanistan for extended periods.
Indeed, in the 19th century, British armies did suffer defeats in Afghanistan (after conquering Kabul), but this hardly dented the British Empire as a whole. The Empire remained one of the largest and most powerful in the world till its disintegration from the mid-1940s onwards. This was mainly due to the impact of World War II and the period of decolonisation that followed. Afghanistan had absolutely nothing to do with this.
Yet, many military experts do agree that Afghanistan is a tough nut to crack. However, their views in this regard have little to do with the mostly romanticised and idealised notion of the ‘legendary fighting spirit of the Afghans’ that turns empires into dust.
According to Patrick Porter, who teaches defence studies at Kings College in London, it is Afghanistan’s geography that makes it a tough country to conquer and keep. It is a country of mountains, deserts and severe winters that make it difficult not only to fight in but also to operate logistically. It limits mobility and it is difficult for an invading force to project power.
The phrase “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires” is likely to have been extracted from Bearden’s experiences as a CIA man during the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The CIA and Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the ISI, were working together to finance, arm and train Afghan groups (the mujahideen) to fight against Soviet troops that had invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.
The mujahideen were also provided narratives to rationalise their insurgency. The fight was explained as a ‘jihad’ against an ‘atheist invader’ and a war of liberation. From within these macro-narratives also emerged many micro-narratives based on mythologised portrayals of the ‘historical warrior ethos’ of the Afghans.
American and Pakistani governments strengthened these portrayals. Popular culture tools were also employed to solidify them. Examples include the Hollywood blockbuster movie Rambo 3 and the Pakistan TV play, Panah. A 1985 pamphlet published in Peshawar by an anti-Soviet jihadist group claimed that the mujahideen had begun to blow up Soviet tanks by simply standing in front of them and shouting “Allah-o-Akbar [God is great]!”
One can therefore assume that the “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires” myth, too, could’ve been circulating as one of the many micro-narratives at the time. But it was mainstreamed by Bearden in 2001. It most certainly has immediate roots in the anti-Soviet insurgency. But there are scholars who claim that the story of the mujahideen single-handedly defeating the Soviet military with American weapons is also a myth.
In his 2011 book Afgansty, British diplomat Rodric Braithwaite wrote that the war between Soviet troops and the mujahideen actually ended in a stalemate. The Soviet Army successfully controlled major cities and infrastructure, while the mujahideen controlled the countryside. According to Braithwaite, Soviet withdrawal (in 1989) was driven more by domestic Soviet politics and a desire to end a costly war than by a decisive military defeat.
The ‘graveyard’ narrative has often been worked in two ways. The Taliban began to use it from the early 2000s as a warning to invaders and as a way to further fortify the mythologised image of the ‘invincible’ Afghan. On the other hand, non-Afghans use the trope as a way to rationalise a defeat: everyone loses here, so did we. Biden was doing exactly that in his speech.
Either way, it is a simplistic trope that trivialises the geopolitical complexities that have shaped Afghanistan and the wars that have been fought there. As the Serbian historian Nemanja Jovanovi noted in 2022, despite its scarcity and lack of any desirable resources, Afghanistan has stood as an important geopolitical position for millennia. This made it a constant target for others to invade. Jovanovi suggests that it would be more apt to call Afghanistan a “battleground of empires” instead of ‘graveyard of empires.’ It is a place where major powers clash in their search for global/regional domination.
Attacks by India-backed Islamist militants on Pakistan from Afghanistan are, therefore, treated by Pakistan as a threat to Pakistan’s growing reputation of becoming a rising power in South Asia.
Published in Dawn, EOS, October 26th, 2025
