Posted on 03/13/2008 7:11:19 PM PDT by Bokababe
One of the most ironic twists to the ongoing mission in Afghanistan emerged from the NATO meetings held in Brussels last week. With member countries either reluctant or unable to add military resources, NATO is now seeking assistance from Russia, its erstwhile Cold War enemy and one-time "evil occupier" of Afghanistan. In fact, the irony is so thick that we should first roll back decades' worth of propaganda and start at the very beginning.
NATO was formed in 1949 as a collective self-defence alliance to prevent any encroachment of the Soviet Union into Western Europe. The Soviets responded to this by creating their own defensive coalition of Communist countries (the Warsaw Pact) to protect them from any eastward expansion of NATO's influence. The nuclear arms race was at its zenith and even Europeans, still recovering from the massive destruction and carnage of the Second World War, understood the importance of maintaining large conventional armies. Troops and tanks were regarded as a preferable deterrent to an apocalyptic mushroom cloud.
The impasse that resulted in Europe did not prevent the U.S. and Soviets from waging war by proxy in non-aligned Third World countries around the world. Afghanistan, in fact, became a key battleground for the CIA and the KGB. Since it bordered the Soviet Union's central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, the U.S. knew that Moscow could not afford to ignore events in impoverished and underdeveloped Afghanistan.
Throughout the '50s and '60s, Soviet engineers undertook several major infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, including the construction of the Salang tunnel through the Hindu Kush Mountains, which provided the first viable access between the country's northern and southern provinces. A full-scale program was introduced to train Afghan army officers and a large number of economic aid packages were extended to Kabul's Communist government.
The Americans decided things were going a little too smoothly for the Kremlin, so they decided to stir things up a little. By arming and funding Afghan Muslim extremists who were already resisting the social changes, the Americans sought to draw the Soviets into a full-scale military intervention.
By 1979 events had escalated to the point where the instability, lawlessness and flourishing drug trade along their shared border could no longer be ignored by the Kremlin. Following a coup staged by the KGB in Kabul, the newly appointed Afghan Communist president invited Soviet troops to deploy a security assistance force to help him stabilize Afghanistan.
It would have been high-fives all around for the CIA planners watching the Soviet tank columns rolling south through the Salang tunnel. The Russian bear had taken the bait and put his paw squarely on the American trap.
On the surface, the U.S. vehemently denounced the invasion of Afghanistan and in protest they pulled their athletes out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Behind the scenes, the U.S. ramped up military aid to the Afghan guerrillas and assisted in bringing in foreign mujahedeen fighters - such as a young Saudi Arabian zealot named Osama bin Laden - to bleed the Soviets white.
The stated objectives of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were to provide a secure environment, equality for women, a centralized education and medical system, and the training of a self-sufficient Afghan army. While this may sound eerily similar to the current wish list for the NATO coalition in Afghanistan, a friend of mine at the American embassy was quick to point out one fundamental difference: "The (Soviets) were Communists," he emphatically stated, as if that in itself made any further explanation unnecessary.
The U.S. plan worked like a charm and by the time the last of the Russian troops retreated out of Afghanistan in 1989, they had left behind 50,000 dead comrades, the Moscow treasury was bankrupt and the Soviet Union was in a state of dissolution. The U.S.-equipped Afghan warlords finally triumphed over the Communist regime in Kabul and then turned on each other in an orgy of destruction and bloodletting. Whatever Soviet-built infrastructure was still intact in Kabul in 1996 was destroyed when the Taliban movement forced the mujahedeen warlords north of the Hindu Kush.
In the wake of 9-11, the planners in the White House must have suffered from short-term memory loss as they rushed to throw their troops into the very same trap they had built to destroy the Soviets. After using military force to topple the Taliban, the Americans appointed Hamid Karzai as president. His first act as leader was to invite the U.S.-led coalition to deploy a security assistance force to prop up his regime. Unlike the Soviets, the Americans didn't need to deploy in support of this request - they were already on the ground.
Now into the seventh year of their occupation and with the American economy on the point of collapse, NATO is looking to Russia for help in transporting troops and equipment into Afghanistan. With the skyrocketing oil prices boosting the Russian ruble to dizzy new heights and no one asking for their troops to fight and die in Afghanistan, it would seem that the wheel of fate has turned a full circle.
If you want to drive this point home, go out and rent an old copy of Rambo III. That's the sequel wherein Sylvester Stallone fights alongside the guerrillas, and the final credits dedicate the movie to "the brave mujahedeen in Afghanistan."
I kid you not.
The Canadian Parliament has just approved keeping their troops fighting in Afghanistan but with one condition = NATO allies will have to pony up more troops willing to fight in the bloody areas. Not bloody likely.
I find this very difficult to believe. Not least because the Russian military couldn't assist anything at the moment.
The good news of this is that we can't blame RR for Osama bin Laden and "blowback"!
How the Afghans got the Stingers that won the war is a fascinating story never fully told and can only be abbreviated here. The very condensed version is this: All the massive weapons flow organized by Charlie and the CIA had, by mid-1986, done no good as it was mostly going to Gulbuddin. ...The Soviets had won, most of the Muj had retreated back to the refugee camps in Pakistan. Soviet Spetsnaz teams were hunting down and killing the Muj who were left.Carter and Brzezinski supported the anti-American Khomeini-loving Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. It took Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey to see that the US weapons actually reached the right hands and the EVIL EMPIRE was defeated.Ronald Reagan had been well aware of the need for shoulder-fired heat-seeking missiles, and in April 1985 signed a classified Executive Order giving CIA Director Bill Casey the authority to provide the Muj with Stingers. The EO was blocked by CIA Deputy Director John McMahon.
McMahon was determined that the Afghans not get Stingers, and used every bureaucratic trick in the book in a constant stream of excuses to prevent their delivery, despite the demands of Reagan, Senator Gordon Humphrey (R-NH), Charlie, and many others in Congress such as Don Ritter (R-PA).
By late 1985, the entire conservative movement was demanding military aid to anti-Soviet freedom fighters, so we decided to make an end run around McMahon. A visit by UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was arranged to Washington, where he met President Reagan in the Oval Office on January 30, 1986.
Savimbi told Reagan about the coming Soviet-Cuban offensive scheduled at the end of the rainy season in April, that UNITA would be destroyed without Stingers against the Hinds. Reagan gave Savimbi his word that the Stingers would be provided.
The President then called Bill Casey and said he just didn't care what the excuses were anymore. Any reason given by McMahon was to be disregarded. He signed an EO to that effect on February 18. Two weeks later, McMahon resigned.
Now the way was cleared for Stingers to the Afghans. ...Finally, on September 26, 1986, the first Stinger missile was fired by an Afghan freedom fighter - and it shot down a Hind just like in the movie. The launcher of that first Stinger ended up proudly displayed in Charlie Wilson's office.
The CIA/ISI vainly tried to see that Stingers were only given to Gulbuddin, but now Charlie, Reagan, Humphrey, Casey et al were on to the scam, so the entire weapons flow along with the Stingers was redirected to Jamiat and other groups actually fighting. The Muj erupted out of the refugee camps, poured back into Afghanistan, and the war was back on.
After the loss of hundreds of Soviet warcraft and pilots from late '86 through ‘88, the Soviets retreated in defeat. Less than nine months after final retreat from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, the Berlin Wall was down, Eastern Europe liberated, and the Cold War won. - LINK
Osama bin Laden NEVER received ANY funding or weapons from the US, so "blowback" is nothing but a commie myth intended to smear Reagan and the USA and blame us for the creation of the Taliban, which did not even come into existence until the nineties after the war was over.
The article stinks of Dim revisionism—prior to an election.
Check out this part, "...with the American economy on the point of collapse..."
Have to admit, that's damn interesting. Never heard the specifics before now.
The author is Canadian and its from a magazine for the Canadian military. Scott Taylor, the author, was actually kidnapped in Iraq and held for five days by Islamists.
Other than being "Canadian" -- not exactly Leftist.
Bad Idea...
Anyway, Rambo would get Bin Ladin and stick that knife deep into his chest cavity.
Putin is not good for the Russian People either.
We have always felt safe on the streets, people can travel everywhere they want, etc. But this is not about us as tourists (special case), but people who live there. I can talk Russia with people and we stay in an apartment not a hotel, so we can see the good and the bad at street level.
Russia is coming back from the economic basket case it was under Communism and because of Communism, and has what we can only think of here: 13% flat personal tax rate, 23% corporate (at least last I heard). I had no problem finding newspapers there, despite what you hear about Putin allegedly shutting things down. The Russian parliament passed a bill to make abortion after 12 weeks illegal (can't do that here!) There's lots more.
Those in the US government who see Russia as the eternal enemy are mistaken. Why not celebrate the joint overthrow of one form of evil (Nazism) in war, the overthrow of another form of evil (Communism) without a war, and look forward to joint efforts against the current ascendant form of evil (Islamic attempts to destroy Christianity and take over the world)? US attempts to appease expansionist Islam by throwing one Orthodox country after another to the wolves will never lead to success. Russia under Putin has the moral high ground in her defense of Serbia against the most recent landgrab in the Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija (whose status is unchanged under UN Res. 1244 despite an illegal "declaration" of "independence".
I suspect that we have kept Russia as "a political enemy" largely because Russia is an economic rival of the US -- and more importantly, an economic rival of globalist financial interests. Russia isn't some little country that can be bullied or broken up into bite-size chunks & sold off like the Balkans. Worse, it has oil, making its economy potentially much more stable than ours.
Right now, I think that Russia may be our worse nightmare in the sense that, since they got rid of communism, Russia is where we think we should be economically and strategically, but we aren't.
And now that NATO that has opened the door for a Jihadist Kosovo opens the door for the Russians!
LOLOLOLOLOL!
Now you know how Mrs. Spitzer must feel!
But bin Laden was on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia and the Jihadists in Kosovo.
What sort of loser would want to get in bed with that bunch?
Oh, present company excluded of course!
It is the use of airspace, airfields and landing rights that NATO wants. The use of Russian airspace routes would make easy access to the ‘Stan’ bases and territories to the north of Afghanistan.
http://www.gulf-news.com/world/Russia/10197606.html
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