I don’t know about recent times (meaning intervention of womanlike Brits, Ivans,Yanks)
, but surely in history afgans successfully waged war with a world famous aggressors like Jengizhan and etc. Funny! Mongolians crushed Persia within half year, and persians didn’t gave battle even once to mongolian aggressors, but afgans by joint efforts with central asian nomads smashed mongolian army several times
I can say that afgans are unique, because they always find peace only with warrior like natives, quite similar to chechnya-north caucaisians but differ from them with ethnic heterogeneity, mixed highlanders with nomads. Once they even conquered Persia, but they favoured to nomads to turkoman Nadirshah and voluntarily left persia, later on Nadirshah raised them along with turkomans, an army of world conqueror Nadirshah’s was made up from afgan and turkoman warriors, with the help of this afgan/turkoman army Nadirshah founded giant empire that stretched from Malaysia up to Africa. Historians mistakenly call Nadirshah as persian Napoleon, but actually most profit from his rule gained by afgan and turkic soldiers, the persian common population very much suffered from Nadirshah’s rule.