Shoot with One Hand ...

Where do they teach you to talk like this?
Sell crazy someplace else.
We’re all stocked up here
--As Good as it Gets (1997)

Your name and your deeds were forgotten
before your bones were dry.
And the lie that flew you
is buried under a deeper lie ...
--George Orwell
___________________

Two recent Ranger reads seem baseline reading for understanding the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), and both were written prior to the PWOT: The Hidden War -- A Russian Journalist's Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (Artyom Borovik, Grove Press), and Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Ahmed Rashid, Yale U.P.).

Both books cover a period prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and both provide stunning entree to the labyrinthine complexities of life in Afghanistan and Central Asia, in general. After reading such works one wonders if anyone in the Department of State or the NSG -- going back to the Carter administration -- bothered to read any authoritative literature prior to planning U.S. entanglements.

After reading these books it is clear the Communist's objectives dovetail with those of the U.S., namely, fighting fundamentalism, introducing a stable secular environment to achieve modernization and the welfare of citizens, including women. The U.S. efforts have not neutralized Sharia law or the Pashtunwali social code of the Pashtun majority.

The question of an oil - natural gas pipeline allows for serious questioning of the U.S. effort. The Soviet goals seem more legitimate, grounded as they were in regional realities. At best, the Russo-Afghan war was a mirror-image of the U.S. effort.

Borovik's book is the more literary of the two, filled with poignant observation and eloquent quotations. Below are some excerpts to whet your appetite, from the deja vu department:

"When the soldiers first went to war, evil was a dushman. Then it became "the insurgents". A little later on, "the rebels." Finally, it was known "the armed resistance."

"The decision to send troops into Afghanistan was being made by several top government leaders behind closed doors, said E. A. Shevardnadze, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, in an interview in Izvestia."

" ... more though should have been given before the troops were sent in, It was necessary to know Afghanistan, to understand the Afghan people. If sending in the troops was a mistake, it was caused by a failure to understand Afghanistan -- by a poor knowledge of the country and the Afghan character."

"Many of the Kremlin leaders perceived life through the thick prism of ideological dogmas, which often played a decisive role in the process of political decision-making on the highest level."

"Alexander Haig, the former U.S. secretary of state, offered yet another explanation. the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, he told me in April of 1988, to undermine the strengthening of the Islamic fundamentalist belt at its southern borders."

"It is absolutely clear that without the help of the United States, Pakistan, China and Egypt, the Afghan armed resistance would have had nothing to fight with."

"Some hideous meaning was buried there, inaccessible to a sober mind. That's when I realized that what happened in Afghanistan outside the psychiatric wards was the true insanity. The psych ward, in fact, was only a way out of the insanity called war."

"But how could one rationalize such hatred when from a political standpoint the war was unofficially acknowledged as a tragic mistake and from amoral standpoint it was recognized as evil?"

"If we can't make it in a small-scale war, how can we possibly handle a big war?"

"I can't understand -- and I return to this question again and again -- how such a great country could trust the promises and assurances of a few men. How could it allow itself to be led into war without weighing all the pros and cons beforehand? Aren't policy decisions based on real information rather than promises?"

"Tell me, why did we first call the enemy, 'bandits,' then 'basmatch' [counterrevolutionary robbers in Central Asia during the civil war], then 'terrorists,' then 'extremists,' and now, 'the opposition'? It's impossible to fight with the opposition. Meanwhile, the enemy hasn't changed!"

"'He said that Russians soldiers are headed north to go home,' my translator explained. 'And later on they will go even farther north, leaving their Muslim republics behind.'"

"Most of the ordinary citizens, as long as they weren't hungry, didn't really care who controlled Kabul; their political sympathies and antipathies were determined by their stomachs."

"You shoot them with one hand, and put food in their mouths with the other."

"But as far as supplying only favorable information on Moscow, this undoubtedly happened. What's more, the diplomats weren't the only ones doing it. Unfortunately, this was the disease of the stagnation period: to inform the central offices only of what would be well-received, rather than what was actually taking place."

"The mood was quiet and gloomy. The joy that had accompanied the news that the nine-year war was about to end had been replaced by the heavy feeling of hopelessness."

NEXT: Rashid's, The Taliban