Afghanistan: The USSR left, the US wants to stay
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Afghanistan-The-USSR-left-by-Pepe-Escobar-Afghanistan_Dominance_Iran_Pakistan-140215-202.html
The operators of a tea house with a big portrait of Afghan hero Ahmad Shah Masoud
Afghanistan: The USSR left, the US wants to stay
By Pepe Escobar
OpEdNews Op Eds 2/15/2014 at 15:23:10
Just before noon on Feb. 16, 25 years ago, Lieut. Gen. Boris Gromov, top Soviet commander in Afghanistan, solemnly walked across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River into Uzbekistan. He uttered the words: "Our 9-year stay ends with this."
The USSR was officially out of Afghanistan. It was a unilateral withdrawal -- even as Daddy Bush, then US President, wanted to keep weaponizing those Afghan "freedom fighters" (copyright Ronald Reagan).
Rewind to the Soviet invasion, in December 1979. Few will remember how then US President Jimmy Carter -- a hick Hamlet -- almost burst into tears because the USSR had invaded that "profoundly religious" country.
Well, a few months earlier, the US ambassador in Afghanistan had been assassinated by those "profoundly religious" characters. And guess who tried to save him? The KGB. Dr. Zbig Brzezinski himself -- the man who years later we would learn "invented" the USSR's Vietnam, six months before the Soviet invasion -- gleefully told the story to White House correspondents.