Upping the ante in Afghanistan
I’m reading Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization. I had wanted to say something about this whole increasing committment to Afghanistan thing but was hoping to finish the book before saying anything. Having weighed the tome, I now fear that if I wait until I finish it, we may well be on to invading Iran too. And if I don’t say something now, I won’t be able to say “told ya so” later.
Fisk’s book opens with the story of his two meetings with Osama bin Laden (long before the whole 911 thing happened), and his experiences covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Ten years, countless lives and an economic cost that many argue brought down the Soviet Union, the red army left the country, vanquished.
It was in good company, we learn as Fisk recounts his own family history of great grandfathers, uncles etc going off to Afghanistan to fight in one of Britain’s three “Afghan Wars”. I’ll spare you the details, but the full time result: Afghans 3, Brits, 0.
The bin Laden interviews come into focus when Fisk describes the sorts of things bin Laden, millionaire construction engineer that he is, was up to in his ten year jihad against the Soviets. Some examples: hollowing out mountains to make into underground bases, hospitals, digging tunnels to move troops and supplies back and forth. In short, like Ho Chi Minh with fewer supporters but a lot more money.
And without saying it, (Fisk is ever the journalist and refuses to be a supporter of anyone) he leads us to conclude: if three British invasions, and one massive, empire-killing Soviet invasion have failed to conquer the country, what hope has NATO (aka the US and now, tragically, embarassingly, Canada) of doing whatever it is we’re supposed to do to claim victory?
We are sending more innocent people to take innocent lives in a war that has no moral justification whatsoever – hell, it doesn’t even have a point.
The Afghanis want the foreigners out. Period. They’ve been expelling them successfully for hundreds of years. We don’t scare them. Hell – we don’t know what we’re even doing there.
This must stop.
