- The US is not only repeating all the Soviets' mistakes
in Afghanistan, it is showing remarkable creativity in the horrors department,
says Eric Walberg in the first of a two-part series
- Twenty years ago this week the Soviet Union began its
withdrawal from Afghanistan, eight and a half years after it was invited
by the desperate People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which
had degenerated into intra-party squabbling and was beset by Islamic rebels
massively financed by the United States. The straw that broke the Soviets'
back was when the US began providing Stinger missiles to Osama bin Laden
and his friends.
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- Now, after eight years of US/NATO occupation, the parallels
- and differences - between the two occupation are many and stark, as confirmed
by the current Russian ambassador to Afghanistan , Zamir Kabulov.
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- "There is no mistake made by the Soviet Union that
was not repeated by the international community here in Afghanistan ,"
Kabulov said. "Underestimation of the Afghan nation, the belief that
we have superiority over Afghans, that they are inferior and cannot be
trusted to run affairs in this country. A lack of knowledge of the social
and ethnic structure of this country; a lack of sufficient understanding
of traditions and religion."
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- Not only that, but the country's new patrons are making
lots of new mistakes as well. "NATO soldiers and officers alienate
themselves from Afghans - they are not in touch in an everyday manner.
They communicate with them from the barrels of guns in their bullet-proof
Humvees." As a career diplomat who was posted to Afghanistan in 1977,
he sees some divine justice in the US 's current predicament. "But
I am even more satisfied by not having Russian soldiers among ISAF [International
Security Assistance Force] because I don't want them to suffer the same
results."
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- Kabulov explains that things are even harder now than
they were in the 1980s. "The structures of government then were very
much there and our task was very much to support and to win loyalty - if
you will, hearts and minds - but we had a working administration."
These are long gone, though, ironically, in Helmand province and elsewhere,
NATO forces are fighting from military posts originally built by the Soviets.
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- At least the Soviets were invited in, if only by one
faction - Parcham, by far the most benign one - of the ruling PDPA. The
US merely issued an ultimatum to the ruling Taliban to hand over their
own erstwhile ally, Osama bin Laden, knowing full well no devout Muslim
would turn a guest over to the enemy. The offer of the Taliban to send
him to a neutral third country until proof of his masterminding of 9/11
was made was dismissed out of hand, and US and eventually NATO forces proceeded
to illegally invade and depose the legitimate government, launching a merciless
air attack, using depleted uranium "bunker busting" bombs, that
makes the horrors of Vietnam and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan pale
in comparison.
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- Another difference is that the US managed to con the
world into supporting its invasion, while when the Soviet troops arrived
in 1979, the US was already arming Islamic rebels with the most advanced
military hardware, as Under-Secretary of Defense Slocumbe said at the time,
"sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire." The Americans
made a point of maintaining the flow of arms, even after Soviet president
Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear the troops would be withdrawn, intending
to use this golden opportunity to stick the knife as deep as possible into
the now unravelling Soviet Union . On this basis alone, the current invasion
should be miles ahead of where the Soviets were after eight years. But
no.
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- Yet another contrast is that while the Soviets were providing
massive aid, effectively dragging Afghanistan into the 20th century with
universal education, equal rights for women, safe drinking water - the
standard communist fare - the US/NATO strategy has been mostly to fight
the remnants of the Taliban, with aid well down the list. As for the quality
of the aid, while Soviet teachers and engineers earned not much more than
locals, and were generally selected for their idealism, Western-backed
aid is channelled almost exclusively through foreign NGOs, with Western
professionals earning the bulk of the money and living in conditions that
locals can only dream of, causing well-earned resentment.
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- It should be noted that from the Soviet withdrawal in
1989 till the US invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was mostly forgotten, with
no Western programme of reconstruction. Russia , of course, had been bankrupt
by then and there was nothing to be expected from it either. Ahmed Shah
Ahmadzai, a mujahideen leader and prime minister in exile during the 1990s,
admits the mujahideen failed in the years following the Soviet withdrawal.
He is now an opponent of the government who stood against President Hamid
Karzai in the last election. "To my opinion the ground situation is
no different because the Soviets were imposing their Communist regime on
us. The present forces - they are imposing their so-called democracy on
us. They were wrong then and the present NATO forces are doing wrong now
by killing innocent people - men, women and children."
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- Given the huge advantages over the Soviet experience,
and given the possibility to learn from Soviet mistakes, there really is
no excuse for the current tragedy unfolding with no end in sight. But then,
in carrying out their invasion of Iraq , the Americans apparently learned
nothing from the British invasion of the 1920s, repeating to the letter
all the horrors the Brits inflicted on the Iraqis.
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- Is it possible the chaos and murder is intentional? While
the Taliban were no sweethearts, they did completely disarm the nation
and wipe out the production of opium. Similarly, while Saddam Hussein would
hardly be one's favourite uncle, he presided over a stable welfare state
where its many ethnic groups were at least not blowing each other up. In
contrast, the US has destroyed the state structures in both countries,
and made both into arms dumps. It has managed to turn the peoples of both
countries against each other, with the likely prospect of civil war and
disintegration into various malleable statelets.
- All in keeping with Israeli plans first published in
1982 as "A Strategy for Israel", a plan to ensure its "security"
(read: expansion) with the Middle East a patchwork of small ethnically-based
states which it could keep in order.
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- One brilliant innovation by the US, with Israel's Haganah
and Irgun as possible inspirations, is the use of private mercenaries to
carry out murder and espionage that the NATO troops can't do because of
their "concern" for international law. This policy is already
well known to Iraqis in the guise of Blackwater. Special investigator for
the UN Human Rights Council Philip Alston referred to three such recent
raids in south and east Afghanistan during a visit last week, clearly alluding
to US intelligence agencies, though he didn't dare state this publicly.
Alston said the raids were part of a wider problem of unlawful killings
of civilians and lack of accountability in Afghanistan . In one incident,
two brothers were killed by troops operating out of an American Special
Forces base in Kandahar . Another group, known as Shaheen, operates out
of Nangahar, in eastern Afghanistan , where US forces are in charge. "Essentially,
they are companies of Afghans but with a handful, at most, of international
people directing them. I'm not aware that they fall under any command."
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- A Western official close to the investigation said the
secret units are known as Campaign Forces, from the time when American
Special Forces and CIA spies recruited Afghan troops to help overthrow
the Taliban during the US-led invasion in 2001. "The brightest, smartest
guys in these militias were kept on," the official said. "They
were trained and rearmed and they are still being used. The level of complacency
in response to these killings is staggeringly high," he said.
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- Yet another innovation - the most frightening of all
- is the role of the US in allowing, perhaps even facilitating, the huge
increase in opium production, which, as already mentioned, was wiped out
by the Taliban, which will be discussed in Part II.
- It is very hard to exaggerate the extent of the abyss
that is Afghanistan under US/NATO occupation or to conceive of an honourable
exit for the occupiers. Mercenaries, opium and who-knows-what, in a script
written in Israel 's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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- Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach
him at www.geocities.com/walberg2002/
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