If you believe Iraq is America’s only military morass, think again.

Think Afghanistan.

The United States is a newcomer to this old country, which has been swallowed, found indigestible and regurgitated by invaders for thousands of years. Although the current U.S. military campaign is being conducted at a low level of engagement, it promises to be long, frustrating and costly, in the tradition of past fruitless endeavors by other great powers.

An impoverished, but strikingly beautiful country of high mountains, barren deserts and rolling grasslands, Afghanistan, as the former seat of the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government, was the target of American fury after 9/11. The United States invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, ousted the Taliban, sent Al-Qaeda leaders (among them Osama bin Laden) fleeing to the Pakistan border and destroyed Al-Qaeda’s network of terrorist training camps.

That was then.

Since 2003, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have regrouped in Afghanistan’s southern provinces and Pakistan’s mountainous border region. They are employing many of the “jihadist” tactics of the Iraqi insurgency, such as ambushes, suicide attacks and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), to make a determined comeback.

Despite military backing by the United States and a multinational U.N. “stabilization force,” Afghanistan’s government, led by Hamid Karzai, has tenuous control over the countryside beyond the capital, Kabul.

Warlords control many provinces, and the country’s $3 billion opium crop is again feeding markets in Europe, Russia and the U.S. Ironically, opium profits help fund the Taliban, which had banned its cultivation while in power.

None of this should surprise students of Afghan history.

Afghanistan is less a nation than a patchwork of some 10 major ethnic and tribal groups, each fiercely independent of one another and the central government, yet united by their Islamic faith and desire to repel foreign intruders. Their politics are characterized by shifting alliances of convenience and intermittent outbreaks of factional fighting.

Located at the juncture of western, central and southern Asia – which some historians call the “crossroads of conquest” – Afghanistan has been invaded by mighty armies many times.

Macedonians under Alexander the Great, Mongols under Genghis Kahn, the British Empire and the Soviet Union are among those that have overrun the region, yet none of them able to pacify its rebellious inhabitants for long. Its rugged terrain, primitive economy and lack of social cohesion make it hard to conquer, and nearly impossible to hold.

Before the U.S., the last great power that attempted to subjugate Afghanistan was the Soviet Union in 1979.

The reasons for the Soviet invasion were complex. Although Afghanistan was already Communist, the USSR considered leader Hafizullah Amin, who had recently seized power, unfit to govern or deal with a strong rebellion against his rule. Fearing chaos on its southern border, and unrest spreading to its Islamic republics, the Kremlin sent troops into Afghanistan to depose and replace Amin.

An expected quick campaign turned into the Soviet Union’s version of Vietnam. Guerillas from around the Islamic world flocked to Afghanistan to join local tribes in a holy war against the Russian “infidel.” With weapons supplied by the United States, these “Mujaheddin” resistance fighters battled the Soviets to a stalemate.

More than 600,000 Soviet troops served, and almost 15,000 died, in a war which lasted nearly a decade. The Soviet invasion provided a training ground for the Mujaheddin, the forerunners of Al-Qaeda, who learned military and organizational lessons they later used against their sponsor, the United States.

When Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, Afghanistan became mired in a vicious civil war. Years of anarchy ended with the Taliban unifying the country under its harsh religious rule in 1996. With the Taliban’s blessing, Al-Qaeda used it as a base to plan and execute 9/11 and other attacks against U.S. citizens.

The U.S. now has about 27,000 troops in Afghanistan. Some 11,000 serve under the U.N. flag as peacekeepers, while the rest, under U.S. command, hunt Al-Qaeda terrorists and train the Afghan military. Compared with the American military presence in Iraq, the U.S. force in Afghanistan numbers about 20 percent of the troop levels and has suffered about 15 percent of the combat deaths.

While Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, still commands approval from a majority of Americans, this attitude could change if fighting escalates and American casualties rise. The “other war” is a simmering pot, which if brought to a boil, raises the risk that the American public will clamor for withdrawal.

Leaving Afghanistan could be more costly than withdrawing from Iraq. While it lacks anything close to the proven petroleum reserves of Iraq, Afghanistan is larger in size and population, and is strategically located amid Iran, Pakistan, India, China and Russia’s former Islamic republics. It is also a critical battleground of the war on terror.

Despite intense U.S. efforts to apprehend or kill him, Osama bin Laden is still at large along the Afghan-Pakistani border, a potent symbol of Al-Qaeda’s defiance and resilience. The beleaguered Karzai government could not probably survive an American pullout.

The resurgence of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda could not only turn Afghanistan back into a terrorist stronghold but destabilize the regime of Pakistani President Musharraf, who reluctantly threw in his lot with the United States at the time of the Afghan invasion, thereby incurring the hatred of Islamic extremists in his own country.

If this “other war” starts to go badly, the United States will join the long line of world powers that has achieved conquest, without victory, in Afghanistan.

Elliott L. Epstein, a Lewiston attorney, is founder and board president of Museum L-A and an adjunct history instructor at Central Maine Community College. E-mail him at eepstein@isaacsonraymond.com.