A major new operation has been launched in the Taliban stronghold of Marja – an area reshaped 50 years ago to be “model villages” under an Afghan and American scheme to rejuvenate the Helmand River Valley.  An Obama administration adviser said the offensive is “not about the battle, it’s about the postlude” and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, that “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in.”  On the principle that there is nothing new under the sun, certainly not in Afghanistan, below are some accounts from the NYT’s archives and elsewhere of how the country’s former rulers and neighbors fared when they tried to install or prop up Afghan rulers and administrations. From 170, 140, 50 and 30 years ago.  From: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh (1910-1911) edition:  The British had installed their favored ruler Shah Shuja in Kabul in August 1839:  Barely three years later, more British soldiers were marched back in to try and recover the situation.  From: The New York Times – May 31, 1871  A dispatch informs readers of the fall of the western Afghan city of Herat:  In fact Yakoob Khan reconciled with Shir Ali Khan (his father), and later signed a treaty with the British.  From: The New York Times – Nov. 13, 1955  Pashtun tribesmen were shrewdly playing off two governments against each other, a correspondent found:  Louis Dupree’s encyclopedic 1973 history “Afghanistan,” on the vast Afghan and American-funded project to develop Marja and the surrounding region of the Helmand River Valley in the late 1950s and 1960s.  From: The New York Times – Dec. 28, 1979  Shortly after the Soviets invaded in 1979, reports emerged from inside Afghanistan that the Russians were already trying to solve their Afghan problem with rubles.  Less than a month later, other accounts suggested that the Afghan security forces were proving less than fully cooperative:  From: The New York Times – January 14, 1980
"A ruler imposed upon a free people by foreign arms is always unpopular; he is unable to stand alone." - 1910