Today's Stories

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Hillary Reclaims Her Innner Child

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Tim Wise
Testosterone is Not to Blame: Why Sexism isn't the Reason for Hillary's Loss

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

Robert Fantina
The Double-Talk Express Derails

Karim Makdisi
In the Wake of the Doha Truce

Harry Browne
Only Ireland Can Vote on EU's Future

John Ross
Suicide by Taco? The Demise of Mexico's PRD

Dave Lindorff
Fear at the Pump

Robert Weissman
Pharmaceutical Payola

Laray Polk
Bush Family Appeasement

David Yearsley
Puritans in Seattle

Ron Jacobs
Riot Squads, Privatization and the National Front

Paul Quinnett
My Last Flight

Sam Bahour
Refugees are the Key

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Poverty Wages

Dr. Susan Block
The Groom May Kiss the Groom

Kim Nicolini
Paranoid Park: Inside the Fractured Landscape of Male Adolescence

Jeremy Scahill
John Cusack's War

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Dominguez, Gerard and Davies

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

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Outdoing the Soviets in Afghanistan

Who is the Enemy?

By ERIC WALBERG

Twenty years ago this week the Soviet Union began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, eight and a half years after it was invited by the desperate People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which had degenerated into intra-party squabbling and was beset by Islamic rebels massively financed by the United States. The straw that broke the Soviets’ back was when the US began providing Stinger missiles to Osama bin Laden and his friends.

Now, after eight years of US/NATO occupation, the parallels — and differences — between the two occupation are many and stark, as confirmed by the current Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov.

“There is no mistake made by the Soviet Union that was not repeated by the international community here in Afghanistan,” Kabulov said. “Underestimation of the Afghan nation, the belief that we have superiority over Afghans, that they are inferior and cannot be trusted to run affairs in this country. A lack of knowledge of the social and ethnic structure of this country; a lack of sufficient understanding of traditions and religion.”

Not only that, but the country’s new patrons are making lots of new mistakes as well.

“NATO soldiers and officers alienate themselves from Afghans — they are not in touch in an everyday manner. They communicate with them from the barrels of guns in their bullet-proof Humvees.” As a career diplomat who was posted to Afghanistan in 1977, he sees some divine justice in the US’s current predicament. “But I am even more satisfied by not having Russian soldiers among ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] because I don’t want them to suffer the same results.”

Kabulov explains that things are even harder now than they were in the 1980s. “The structures of government then were very much there and our task was very much to support and to win loyalty — if you will, hearts and minds — but we had a working administration.” These are long gone, though, ironically, in Helmand province and elsewhere, NATO forces are fighting from military posts originally built by the Soviets.
At least the Soviets were invited in, if only by one faction — Parcham, by far the most benign one — of the ruling PDPA. The US merely issued an ultimatum to the ruling Taliban to hand over their own erstwhile ally, Osama bin Laden, knowing full well no devout Muslim would turn a guest over to the enemy. The offer of the Taliban to send him to a neutral third country until proof of his masterminding of 9/11 was made was dismissed out of hand, and US and eventually NATO forces proceeded to illegally invade and depose the legitimate government, launching a merciless air attack, using depleted uranium “bunker busting” bombs, that makes the horrors of Vietnam and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan pale in comparison.

Another difference is that the US managed to con the world into supporting its invasion, while when the Soviet troops arrived in 1979, the US was already arming Islamic rebels with the most advanced military hardware, as Under-Secretary of Defense Slocumbe said at the time, “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.” President Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski made a point of maintaining the flow of arms, even after Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear the troops would be withdrawn, intending to use this golden opportunity to stick the knife as deep as possible into the now unravelling Soviet Union. On this basis alone, the current invasion should be miles ahead of where the Soviets were after eight years. But no.

Yet another contrast is that while the Soviets were providing massive aid, effectively dragging Afghanistan into the 20th century with universal education, equal rights for women, safe drinking water — the standard communist fare — the US/NATO strategy has been mostly to fight the remnants of the Taliban, with aid well down the list. As for the quality of the aid, while Soviet teachers and engineers earned not much more than locals, and were generally selected for their idealism, Western-backed aid is channelled almost exclusively through foreign NGOs, with Western professionals earning the bulk of the money and living in conditions that locals can only dream of, causing well-earned resentment.

It should be noted that from the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 till the US invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was mostly forgotten, with no Western programme of reconstruction. Russia, of course, had been bankrupt by then and there was nothing to be expected from it either. Ahmed Shah Ahmadzai, a mujahideen leader and prime minister in exile during the 1990s, admits the mujahideen failed in the years following the Soviet withdrawal. He is now an opponent of the government who stood against President Hamid Karzai in the last election. “To my opinion the ground situation is no different because the Soviets were imposing their Communist regime on us. The present forces — they are imposing their so-called democracy on us. They were wrong then and the present NATO forces are doing wrong now by killing innocent people — men, women and children.”

Given the huge advantages over the Soviet experience, and given the possibility to learn from Soviet mistakes, there really is no excuse for the current tragedy unfolding with no end in sight. But then, in carrying out their invasion of Iraq, the Americans apparently learned nothing from the British invasion of the 1920s, repeating to the letter all the horrors the Brits inflicted on the Iraqis.

Is it possible the chaos and murder is intentional? While the Taliban were no sweethearts, they did completely disarm the nation and wipe out the production of opium. Similarly, while Saddam Hussein would hardly be one’s favourite uncle, he presided over a stable welfare state where its many ethnic groups were at least not blowing each other up. In contrast, the US has destroyed the state structures in both countries, and made both into arms dumps. It has managed to turn the peoples of both countries against each other, with the likely prospect of civil war and disintegration into various malleable statelets.

All in keeping with Israeli plans first published in 1982 as “A Strategy for Israel”, a plan to ensure its “security” (read: expansion) with the Middle East a patchwork of small ethnically-based states which it could keep in order.

One brilliant innovation by the US, with Israel’s Haganah and Irgun as possible inspirations, is the use of private mercenaries to carry out murder and espionage that the NATO troops can’t do because of their “concern” for international law. This policy is already well known to Iraqis in the guise of Blackwater. Special investigator for the UN Human Rights Council Philip Alston referred to three such recent raids in south and east Afghanistan during a visit last week, clearly alluding to US intelligence agencies, though he didn’t dare state this publicly. Alston said the raids were part of a wider problem of unlawful killings of civilians and lack of accountability in Afghanistan. In one incident, two brothers were killed by troops operating out of an American Special Forces base in Kandahar. Another group, known as Shaheen, operates out of Nangahar, in eastern Afghanistan, where US forces are in charge. “Essentially, they are companies of Afghans but with a handful, at most, of international people directing them. I’m not aware that they fall under any command.”

A Western official close to the investigation said the secret units are known as Campaign Forces, from the time when American Special Forces and CIA spies recruited Afghan troops to help overthrow the Taliban during the US-led invasion in 2001. “The brightest, smartest guys in these militias were kept on,” the official said. “They were trained and rearmed and they are still being used. The level of complacency in response to these killings is staggeringly high,” he said.

Yet another innovation — the most frightening of all — is the role of the US in allowing, perhaps even facilitating, the huge increase in opium production, which, as already mentioned, was wiped out by the Taliban, which will be discussed in Part II.

It is very hard to exaggerate the extent of the abyss that is Afghanistan under US/NATO occupation or to conceive of an honourable exit for the occupiers. Mercenaries, opium and who-knows-what, in a script written in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at www.geocities.com/walberg2002/

 

 

 

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