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Quarry -> RE: What if we had helped the Mujahideen in Afghanistan? (10/1/2007 7:20:45 AM)
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So for those that may or may not know, in the 80s the Soviet Union was fighting rebel Mujahideen (sp?) fighters in Afghanistan. The CIA was funneling equipment to the Mujahideen through Pakistan.
There's a bit more to the story. We began arming the the Mujahideen six months prior, to provoke a reaction.The US wanted the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. We wanted them "bogged down" in a Viet Nam style conflict and we preferred they do it in Afghanistan - where we didn't care much about the people or the politics - rather than in, say, Germany or Poland. You can read more about it here: http://www.oilempire.us/afghanistan.html
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Unfortunately, we weren't so much interested in helping liberate Afghanistan
We were never interested in liberating Afghanistan. Quite the opposite. If we'd wanted a free, independent, human rights respecting, civilized country, we could have supported the (halfway decent) government they already had. It certainly wasn't paradise, but it was a lot better than what they had when the whole thing was finished.
But we didn't want them to be independent. This was called "the threat of a good example". If one country went independent, pursuing its own interests and telling both the US and USSR to go screw, and it got away with it, other countries in the region might start doing the same. Iran did it in the late seventies and holy jesus did it piss off the American government. We're still hoping to bomb them for this crime. What if Saudi Arabia or the UAE followed suit? Can you imagine the reaction in Washington?
In any case, since we ended up not controlling the country, we wanted it to remain chaotic, violent, and as close to destroyed as we could get it. It was, in some sense, independent, but it there was no way Syria or Pakistan or Iraq would ever look at it and say "Hey! Yeah! That's what want our country to look like!" It's kind of like the bully who beats the living hell out of the kid who dares to stand up to him. The other kids see it and know that they'd better not try the same thing.
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So my question is, do you think that if we had continued aiding the Mujahideen, and not just taken our ball home with us, would the situation in the Middle East be different now?
Well, it's impossible to know for sure, but we might ask the obvious question: what happened in other middle eastern countries where we DID continue to support fascist, oppressive governments? So take for example Saudi Arabia. They have an elite ruling class loyal to the United states and, through terror and violence, they keep in line the rest of their citizens. We supply them with arms and training - hell, they even get figher jets. Or, we could look at Pakistan: again, the government there does what we tell it to instead of what its citizens want. Both countries are, for obvious reasons, on the brink of violent revolution (Saudi more so than Pakistan, but Pakistan is gaining ground every day). Both countries use secret police, terrorism, torture, (not to mention suppression of democracy and freedom of speech) and all sorts of other nastiness to keep the general public in line. The situation in places like the UAE or Egypt may be a bit better, but it's hardly what you could call freedom and independence.
So sure, we could have an Afghanistan today that looked like that. Is that desirable? Well, for a lot of people who work in Washington DC, sure it is. But for those of us who like freedom, democracy, and human rights, it's not.
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