ABSTRACT
Afghanistan is being sucked into the growing geopolitical rivalry between the USA and China, just as previously it was sucked into the rivalry between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War and the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century. In Afghanistan, the different ethnicities have no history of separate statehood. As for the ordinary people of Afghanistan, their deep war weariness and desire for peace has been shown by the Peace March initiative of 2018, calling on the government and Taliban to negotiate peace and denouncing both for continuing the war. As of early 2018, the military situation in Afghanistan appears to have reached a stalemate that cannot be resolved by military means or rather not by military means alone. The reason for this is rooted in a specifically military dynamic, the difference between guerrilla warfare and siege warfare.
