A Good Old Fashioned War Movie

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2018)

I guess now that it has been something like fifteen years after the event I'm not surprised that we are now seeing movies appearing about some of the battles that were fought during the early days of the war on terror (probably because they have been declasified). Well, there have been a few movies previously, but most of them have involved Iraq, and weren't your traditional war movies. However, this one is, and one of the things that struck me was that it sort of reminded me of the raft of World War II movies that had been filling our screens for the last fifty odd years (as well as the occasional World War I movie).
The story goes that shortly after September 11th, the army was mobilised and some special forces operatives were sent into Afghanistan. The idea was to link up with the Northern Alliance, a loose collection of tribes that were joined together to fight a common enemy - the Taliban. However, the catch was that when they were dropped into Afghanistan the only form of transport that was available to them were horses. Well, not quite, it was just that the rebel leader that they were working with preferred horses to vehicles, and in a way I'm not at all surprised - while the traditional cavalry unit has changed over the years to now refer to mechanised infantry (and the last cavalry unit to use horses was in the 1940s), the good old horse still works quite well in that they are more agile, and can get to places that vehicles, and even tanks, can't.
One of the things that permeates through this film is how Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires, and many nations over the centuries have attempted, without success, to conquer the region. While they mention Alexander the Great as being one of the many who tried, and failed, to conquer Afghanistan, that isn't quite correct - he was successful, it was just that his empire didn't survive his death. Afghanis who I have spoken to (I used to work with one) actually said that he is treated as a legend, and a hero, among some of the tribes.
I guess that is the problem, and fifteen years since the events in the movie, Afghanistan still hasn't changed, and the Americans have been slowly winding down operations there. However, it could have been successful, if they had not used September 11 as a justification for an unprovoked attacked against Iraq.
It is interesting to see how they used airstrikes in the campaign, but then again it was suggested that while the Americans may have ruled the skies, it was the warlords who ruled the land. Yet, the attacks against America did tilt the scales of the conflict for a while since the rebels now had air support which gave them an edge over their enemies. However, as history has told us, the Taliban eventually changed tactics, and while the Americans didn't take long to reach Kabul, what eventually happened was that they disappeared into the population and soon they had an insurgent war on their hands.