Washington Square News
February 2009
'80s all over again for US in Afghanistan ...
by Aaron Leonard
I watched the film, Charlie Wilson’s War recently. I was not impressed.
It depicts the “heroic” efforts of U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson to defeat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The moral of the story is that the Soviets were bad for Afghanistan and the U.S. was good. The only reason things ended up badly is because the U.S. ‘dropped the ball.’ Now Barack Obama is President with the express aim of picking the ball up. As he told Foreign Affairs, “We must refocus our efforts on Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the central front in our war against al Qaeda.”
First, let’s dispense with the bedtime stories. The U.S. isn’t mainly in Afghanistan to “defeat al Qaeda” (or ‘keep us safe’). It is to protect the overall strategic interests of the the United States. There may be overlap at times, but they are not the same.
That is why Joseph Biden told congress in October 2001, that the U.S. needed to see Afghanistan as “a long-term operation.” He was talking about stabilizing a state in a strategic region (think of its proximity to Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, and its location on the way to the oil rich Caspian Sea region). It would be bad for U.S. imperial interests to have Afghanistan remain a failed state or worse.
Which brings me to my point. What the U.S. wants to do in Afghanistan, and what they will be able to do are two different things.
I remember reading remarks in October 2001 of a Soviet Afghan veteran. He told the South China News, "I believe it is useless to fight there, The only thing the Afghans hate more than each other is a foreigner. They will unite against any outsider, and the result will be a long, bloody story with no happy ending."
What was he talking about? Air-strikes on civilians, napalming, torture, drug abuse, selling military equipment on the black market. A 1988 Rand Study commissioned by the U.S. Army reported on the Soviet experience. It quoted one vet saying, “We were struck by our own cruelty in Afghanistan. We executed innocent peasants. If one of ours was killed or wounded, we would kill women, children, and old people as a revenge. We killed everything, even the animals.”
Compare that with today. The reports of torture going on at the U.S. Bagram Air Force Base, like the killing of a young Afghan Taxi driver known as Dilwar. His autopsy report noted that his legs had been beaten to the extent that they, according to the NY Times, "had basically been pulpified." Or listen to this U.S. officer telling the NY Times Magazine of trying to keep his squad in check, “I’ve got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people.”
As the U.S. escalates its efforts in Afghanistan you are going to see more and more similarities. Afghanistan is a country made miserable by the Soviets in a bloody nine year occupation. An occupation made even bloodier by the U.S. building up some of the most fanatical forces on earth (that is where Osama bin Laden came from). Now the U.S. wants to ‘fix’ all this by upping its intervention. This will mean more civilian deaths, more torture, more madness. The answer to Afganistan’s problems are ultimately the problem of the people of Afghanistan. When a force comes to genuinely aid them it will be worth getting behind. That is not what the new administration is undertaking.