Should U.S. soldiers follow the implications of Republican spokesman Michael Steele and simply refuse to fight the war in Afghanistan? U.S. soldiers have a strong patriotic precedent for just such a refusal.

Steele, current chairman of the Republican Party, recently observed that “the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan…because everyone who’s tried over a thousand years of history has failed.”
Although much of what else he said was inane (for example “Obama chose this war…”) Steele was mostly correct about land wars in Afghanistan. His mistake was in understating the history of defeats of invaders in Afghanistan, which actually go back more than 2,000 years, all the way to 572 B.C. when the Persian King Darius was unable to defeat the locals in the same Afghan mountains that U.S. soldiers are trying to occupy today. Those who have been defeated in Afghanistan include Alexander the Great, and the Kushans (Indians) the Huns, the Turks, the Russians (numerous times, first in 1885) and British (also numerous times.) The history of defeats by Afghan invaders is as long as your arm.

If U.S. soldiers were allowed to think for themselves, which they did in the first war, the Revolutionary War, they might simply refuse to engage such an obviously futile bloodletting. General Philip Shuyler, of the Continental Army was somewhat dumbfounded when his troops simply “refused to move” when ordered to do so against the obviously better trained and equipped British regulars.
Not only did the earlier American soldiers often refuse to move, they often openly questioned the tactics they were being asked to follow. According to historian Ray Raphael, General Richard Montgomery observed that his revolutionary troops “carry the spirit of freedom into the field and think for themselves,” and that they even “felt it necessary to call a sort of town meeting” to plan any maneuvers.
And finally, when push came to shove, they just walked away, heading home, openly, fearlessly, in broad daylight. According to the historian Dick Hoerder, as many as 50% of the Revolutionary militia walked away at one time or another from the battles that the senior officers wanted them to engage.

A large conservative population is now urging for the return of the “original spirit” upon which this country was founded. George Washington observed that spirit when he pointed out that his soldiers “come in, you cannot tell how, go, you cannot tell when, and act, you cannot tell where.” These men, he observed, were accustomed to “unbounded freedom, and no control.”
Ahh, that’s the spirit, as observed by none other than George himself.

So what should our soldiers do now, with the objective in Afghanistan absolutely unclear, the leaders of the country in obvious dispute, and the death toll among their comrades and among the civilian Afghans unconscionably, inhumanely heartbreakingly high? What should they do?
“The wars will only end,” Napoleon observed, “when the soldiers refuse to fight.”
Thank you, Michael Steele, for saying again what we all know: land wars—not only in Afghanistan but around the world, are un-winnable. As are air wars and sea-wars. Wars themselves are un-winnable: it’s like trying to win an earthquake, or a tornado, or uncontrollable well in the gulf.
Nobody wins. Would the bravest thing to do be simply to refuse to fight?