Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Lessons from the long war
By Tom Engelhardt
With that in mind, in tandem with Saudi funders, the CIA provided money, arms,
training and support (as well as thousands of American-printed Korans). The
funds and arms were all funneled through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI). At the time, the US's generosity even included offering Stinger
missiles, the most advanced hand-held, ground-to-air weapon of the era, to
favored Afghans. The CIA also came to favor the most extreme of the jihadis,
particularly two figures: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani.
In the early 1990s, after the Soviets left in defeat, the jihadis descended
into a wretched civil war, and Washington essentially jumped ship, a new
movement, the Taliban, initially a creation of
the ISI (with at least implicit American backing at least some of the time),
almost swept the boards in Afghanistan, creating a fundamentalist Islamic state
in most of the country.
Now, leap forward a couple decades. In that same country, who exactly is the US
military fighting? As it happens, the answer is: the forces of the old Taliban,
rejuvenated by an American occupation, as well as its two key allies, the
warlords Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who are now the US's sworn
enemies. And the US is pouring more billions of dollars, weaponry and
significant blood into defeating them. In the process, with hardly a second
thought, the Obama administration is attempting to massively bulk up a weak
Afghan army and thoroughly corrupt police force. The staggering ultimate figure
for the future combined Afghan security forces now regularly cited in
Washington is 400,000.
In other words, 30 years after the US launched its jihad against the Soviets by
arming the Afghans, it is now fighting almost all the people it once armed and
is arming a whole new crew. All sides in the debate in Washington find this
perfectly sensible.
Then, no one should forget al-Qaeda, which emerged from the same anti-Soviet
struggle in Afghanistan in the late 1980s - Osama bin Laden first arrived there
to fight and fund in 1982 - part of the nexus of Islamist forces on which the
US bet at the time.
Our man (and mortal enemy) Saddam
Above all, let's not forget Iraq. Indeed - not that anyone mentions it these
days - in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration threw its support behind
the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein against the hated Iranian Shi'ite regime of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the brutal eight-year Iran-Iraq War that began
when Saddam launched an invasion in 1980. According to Patrick Tyler of the New
York Times, Washington went far indeed in its support of Saddam's military on
the battlefield:
A covert American program during the Reagan
administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time
when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ
chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according
to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.
In other words, when it came to Iraq, the Us was in favor of weapons of mass
destruction before it was against them. Next thing, Saddam had transmogrified
into a new Adolf Hitler, and after his next invasion (of Kuwait), Gulf War I
commenced - another smashing American "victory" in the region that only led to
ever more war and greater disaster. A decade of regular US air attacks on
Saddam's various military facilities and defenses ensued before, in March 2003,
the Bush administration launched an invasion to "liberate" his country and its
oppressed Shi'ite and Kurdish populations.
Soon after, Washington's viceroy in occupied Baghdad would demobilize what was
left of Saddam's largely Sunni-officered 400,000-man army. (According to Bush
administration plans, liberated Iraq was to have only a lightly armed,
40,000-man border-patrolling military and no air force to speak of.) Soon,
however, the US found itself in yet another war, a bitter, bloody
Sunni-dominated insurgency amid a developing sectarian civil war. Once again,
the US chose a side and, after some hesitation, began rebuilding the Iraqi
military and its intelligence services, as well as the country's paramilitary
police force. The result: a largely Shi'ite-officered army for the new
government was set up in Baghdad, which the US proceeded to arm to the teeth.
Now, Iraq has a US-created army of approximately 262,000 men, and the Interior
Ministry, which oversees the police, employs another 480,000 people. This is a
gigantic security infrastructure, and not even counted are an estimated 94,000
members of the Sunni Awakening, mostly former insurgents and erstwhile
opponents of the army and police that the US paid and armed to make the "surge"
of 2007 a relative success. The Iraqi government recently purchased 140 Abrams
tanks from the US through the Foreign Military Sales Program and, as soon as
the price of oil rises and it feels less financially strapped, it's eager to
buy F-16s for its still barely existent air force.
Let me point out the obvious: no one yet knows whom all this fire power may
someday be turned on, but given that there is now a significantly
Shi'ite-dominated government in Baghdad and little short of a shuttle of key
Shi'ite leaders heading Tehran-wards, there's no reason to assume that the
Iraqi military will be our "friend" forever. The same would obviously be true
of a gigantic Afghan army, if the US was capable of creating one.
In a region where the law of unintended consequences seems to go into
overdrive, you choose and arm your allies at your peril. In the past, whatever
the US did had an uncanny propensity for blowing back in its direction -
something the Israelis also experienced when, in the 1980s, they chose to
support an embryonic fundamentalist Islamist organization we now know as Hamas
as a way of containing their then-dreaded enemy Fatah. (This "law" may turn out
to apply no less to the Palestinian army that US Lieutenant General Keith
Dayton has been creating on the West Bank for Fatah. As Robert Dreyfuss
recently reported, the general, speaking in Washington, warned that the
Palestinian troops he's training "... can only be strung along for just so
long. With big expectations, come big risks ... There is perhaps a two-year
shelf life on being told that you're creating a state, when you're not".)
The US now tends to think of blowback as something in its past, something that
ended with the attacks of 9/11. But in the Greater Middle East, one lesson
seems clear enough: for 30 years the US has been deeply involved in creating,
financing and sometimes arming a blowback world. There's no reason to believe
that, with the arrival of Barack Obama, history has somehow been suspended,
that now, finally, it's all going to work out.
There is a record here. It's not a pretty one. It's not a smart one. Someone
should take it into account before the US plunges in and arms future enemies
one more time.
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