Afghanistan: the Roach Motel of Empires

[IndianaGreen]

Afghanistan: the Roach Motel of Empires

By ZOLTAN GROSSMAN

In just a few months, Afghanistan will surpass Vietnam as the longest single war fought by the United States in its history. In his West Point speech on December 1, President Obama denied that “Afghanistan is another Vietnam”--and in some senses he is correct. Vietnam in 1975 was a far more unified state--ethnically and politically--than Afghanistan ever has been. Afghanistan is far more mountainous and difficult to occupy, and is bounded by more artificially colonial borders than either Vietnam or Iraq.

But what Afghanistan has in common with both Vietnam and Iraq is its long history of resistance to foreign occupation—whether by Chinese, Japanese and French in Vietnam, the Turks and British in Iraq, or the British and Russians in Afghanistan--before the Americans ever arrived. This proud history is the main factor that has united Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic and sectarian groups in the past two centuries.

Afghanistan is the “roach motel”of empires. They check in, but they don’t check out. They get lured into battle, and then get bogged down in a quagmire they cannot win. British soldiers barely escaped with their lives from three colonial wars in Afghanistan, before their global empire finally collapsed.

The Russians withdrew in defeat only a few years before the Soviet Union and its Afghan allies collapsed. In 1979, President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had consciously lured the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by arming Islamist mujahedin fighting a pro-Soviet revolutionary government. The mujahedin (aided at the same time by Osama Bin Laden) defeated the Soviet superpower after only ten years.

Retaliation was a Trap

Bin Laden learned from this experience when he turned against the Americans in the 1990s, according to the British reporter Robert Fisk (who interviewed him in Afghanistan). By attacking U.S. embassies and eventually American cities, Bin Laden felt he could provoke another superpower to retaliate by occupying Afghanistan, and getting bogged down in the same futile war that the Soviets had lost. A few days before 9/11, Al Qaeda assassinated the only mujahedin leader who had unified the Northern Alliance, so the U.S. invaders would not be able to find a strong puppet ruler.

Two days after 9/11, Fisk published an article warning that “Retaliation is a Trap,” but few Americans listened to his prediction. After the U.S. quickly drove the Taliban from Kabul with a high-tech war, it seemed that his prediction was even ludicrous. Now, Fisk looks downright prophetic, as the Americans are blindly following the path toward eventual stalemate and defeat.

http://www.counterpunch.org/grossman12022009.html