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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=post&forum=433&topic_id=34828&mesg_id=34828Afghanistan: 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.htmlPublished on Sunday, September 16, 2001 in the Independent/UK
Bush is Walking Into a Trap
by Robert Fisk
Retaliation is a trap. In a world that was supposed to have learnt that the rule of law comes above revenge, President Bush appears to be heading for the very disaster that Osama bin Laden has laid down for him. Let us have no doubts about what happened in New York and Washington last week. It was a crime against humanity. We cannot understand America's need to retaliate unless we accept this bleak, awesome fact. But this crime was perpetrated – it becomes ever clearer – to provoke the United States into just the blind, arrogant punch that the US military is preparing.
Mr bin Laden – every day his culpability becomes more apparent – has described to me how he wishes to overthrow the pro-American regime of the Middle East, starting with Saudi Arabia and moving on to Egypt, Jordan and the other Gulf states. In an Arab world sunk in corruption and dictatorships – most of them supported by the West – the only act that might bring Muslims to strike at their own leaders would be a brutal, indiscriminate assault by the United States. Mr bin Laden is unsophisticated in foreign affairs, but a close student of the art and horror of war. He knew how to fight the Russians who stayed on in Afghanistan, a Russian monster that revenged itself upon its ill-educated, courageous antagonists until, faced with war without end, the entire Soviet Union began to fall apart.
The Chechens learnt this lesson. And the man responsible for so much of the bloodbath in Chechnya – the career KGB man whose army is raping and murdering the insurgent Sunni Muslim population of Chechnya – is now being signed up by Mr Bush for his "war against people''. Vladimir Putin must surely have a sense of humor to appreciate the cruel ironies that have now come to pass, though I doubt if he will let Mr Bush know what happens when you start a war of retaliation; your army – like the Russian forces in Chechnya – becomes locked into battle with an enemy that appears ever more ruthless, ever more evil.
<snip>
And while Mr Bush – and perhaps Mr Blair – prepare their forces, they explain so meretriciously that this is a war for "democracy and liberty'', that it is about men who are "attacking civilization''."America was targeted for attack,'' Mr Bush informed us on Friday, "because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.'' But this is not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab-Muslim apocalypse, then it is intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of that democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr Bush has been telling them about. Instead, they get a president who wins 98 per cent in the elections (Washington's friend, Mr Mubarak) or a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortures and sometimes kills its people in prison. The Syrians would also like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America – in many cases, educated at US universities.
I will always remember how President Clinton announced that Saddam Hussein – another of our grotesque inventions – must be overthrown so that the people of Iraq could choose their own leaders. But if that happened, it would be the first time in Middle Eastern history that Arabs have been permitted to do so. No, it is "our'' democracy and "our'' liberty and freedom that Mr Bush and Mr Blair are talking about, our Western sanctuary that is under attack, not the vast place of terror and injustice that the Middle East has become.
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0916-06.htm
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