Give me Kabul!

For almost a month, the sharks of domestic television have been saying in their Afghan reports: the hour of decisive battle has come, the Northern Alliance is about to launch its general offensive against the Taliban. “Our” Mujahideen nod in agreement, show visiting reporters a firing cannon (the only one?), drive a tank in front of the lenses - in general, they entertain the guests as best they can. But in general - not at all. And there is already resentment in the voices of the TV presenters: “How can this be? We have already gathered here with cameras and microphones, but there is still no performance. Disorder! You launch an offensive, general and beautiful, with noise, dust and gunfire! Go ahead, give Kabul, Herat, Kandahar! And you can lose count of how many times your colleagues “took” Mazar-i-Sharif in their offensive impulse. However, there are still no spectacles.
How can this be, the aces of the pen, the ax and the lens are indignant, but we have our arsenals wide open for them, and we are driving tanks in echelons - it’s okay that the hardware is very used, but, they say, they are easy to use and are great for the Afghan theater of military operations. In general, everything is there: the theater, actors, props, scenery, spectators in the stalls, but there is no performance.
But what did you actually want? An offensive according to the plan of the editors-in-chief and an assault according to the schedule of the operators?! And after all, guys, many of you have already been to wars. So why have you forgotten how and how attacks on dates and holidays usually end? Or don’t we remember the glorious times when the same excellent tanks with the best tank crews in the world plowed the endless expanses of Afghanistan, but to no avail?
And then, not even a couple of weeks had passed, when Abdullah from the Panjshir village saw this mountain of iron for the first time in his life, touched the levers, and they were already expecting feats from him in the style of the tankers Rybalko and Katukov, seriously demanding to create the Kursk Bulge in the foothills of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush, as if throwing to a cab driver: “Hey, boss, drive!”
The Northern Alliance is not pushing. And he does the right thing. War is what it always is: dirty, bloody and unromantic. And if anyone needs a show for their home TV channel, let them drive the T-55 to Kabul themselves. What a spectacle it will be.
Vladimir Voronov