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The answer is the how.
If 19th century Britain had been in charge of the Afghanistan war, they would have simply cut a deal with the taliban to let them govern themselves in exchange for tribute after however many battles were necessary(and coalition forces in Afghanistan won nearly all their battles against the taliban), and not worried about the taliban’s policies on women in school. Propping up unpopular puppet governments isn’t how you control territory when they’re that unpopular.
Russia in Chechnya and Syria won in the end- with lots of bloodshed, sure, but the British raj didn’t have clean hands, let’s not kid ourselves- because it allied itself with local factions that had some meaningful support, gave them a free hand on domestic policy in exchange for whatever concessions they wanted, and then won their battles for them. This is more or less what Britain did in India and Africa, and like Russia it didn’t do any house to house fighting- if the local allies couldn’t control a city after the opposing field army had been destroyed, they simply wrecked the city and didn’t worry about civilian casualties.
Isn't this pretty much what Bush actually did though? As I recall, the initial demand was, hand over Bin Laden and other Al Quada bigwigs, or we invade. And we then mostly sent the Northern Alliance that already existed some weapons, advisers, and air support. Seems pretty much like what any colonialist would have done to start. I wonder if the real mistake was trying to control it afterwards. I'm not sure what 19th century Britain would have done after they had run the Taliban out.
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Russia would've won if either place was turning a profit.
Perhaps "we pay you a billion dollars every year and you make sure no people from your republic try to explode" is a better deal than building and maintaining a wall around Chechnya (or at least the part south of the Sunzha), but the same amount of money is spent on Yakutia, which is the size of two Alaskas and full of literal gold and diamonds which Russia can and does mine. Chechnya is 250 times smaller and not even full of sheep.
The British empire didn’t turn a profit anywhere except India, either, and Russia gets plenty of benefit out of pacifying Chechnya.
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