[Peace-discuss] Liberal Dem on Afghanistan

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, 
unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US 
forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

     "The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send 
them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We've made it very 
clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know 
we're there to help and we're going to leave. We've made it very clear we are 
going to leave. And it's going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the 
mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them."7

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding 
US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious 
human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects 
of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young 
Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed 
next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It 
was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a 
government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the 
Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely 
what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in 
Canada or Mexico.

It's also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it's in 
Afghanistan to help the people there when it's killed tens of thousands of 
simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the 
wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been 
identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the 
US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification 
for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with 
depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch's brew 
of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop 
warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly 
susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving ... utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask 
the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; 
ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your 
life's savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and 
military contractor leaves?

It's not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was 
essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev's decision, and it was more of a 
political decision than a military one. Gorbachev's fondest ambition was to turn 
the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently 
wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were 
cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

FULL ARTICLE AT http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer72.html