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

Sands of Time

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
--Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Pride goeth before destruction,
and an haughty spirit before a fall
-- Proverbs 16:18

I remember reading that scientists once believed
the universe was made of hydrogen,
because it was the most plentiful ingredient found.
If that theory holds any truth,
then I believe it to be made of stupidity
--Frank Zappa
_________________

Ranger is only now getting around to Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004) is a tour de force of Afghanistan, one war removed.

For anyone still four-square behind this little dust up, Mr. Coll will disabuse you from any patriotic notions of victory in that nation of shifting alliances and canny self-sufficiency. It is not an easy read, but once done the idea of a nation-state in our image is forever gone, and the ability of the Afghans to look out for the Afghans in the face of any intervention is firmly established.

Take one Mr. President Hamid Karzai and family, he of the sweeping silk cape, yak cap and Western business suit, rolled out the American people as an exotic but friendly ally:

• The Karzai family backed the Taliban in 1994

• Two Karzai brother operate Afghani restaurants in the U.S.

• In 1994, Hamid Karzai is reported to be working with Pakistani intelligenc

• Karzai contributed $50,000 of his personal funds to the Taliban

• Trucking overlords rather than Pakistan financed the first Taliban military success

• Pakistan ISI was implicated with the extremist elements of Afghanistan throughout the Russo-Afghanistan war

• Kandahar was not only a Taliban center of power but also an Arab-financed boom-town

The comments on Karzai show an opportunistic man constantly shifting alliances like the desert sand to consolidate power; as in 1994, so in 2011. His true loyalty and beliefs are safe under his yak cap, but they probably do not parallel U.S. interests. Not only are Mr. Karzai's actions wily as well as those of his Afghani brothers, but Pakistan's ISI plays U.S. operatives like a fiddle.

U.S. clandestine operations in the Russo-Afghan war were completely orchestrated through the Pakistani ISI. At no time did U.S. agents directly coordinate or recruit agents at a meaningful level. In effect, the allies of the ISI were funded and equipped by U.S. taxpayers. The ISI and Afghan resistance co-opted the entire war by transforming the effort into a religious endeavor, relegating the nationalists (as such) and monarchists to untenable positions.

U.S. policy became entwined with ISI policy, and U.S. agencies never questioned the empowerment of the Islamic fundamentalists. In fact, the anti-aircraft shoulder-fired weapon buy-back following the withdrawal of the USSR is accepted as the financial basis of the early Taliban successes in the post-war era (post-war may be a redundancy as more of Afghanistan's history has been in that state than not.)

The Central Intelligence agency bought back weapons which we had freely delivered to the Afghan resistance through the ISI. The Afghanis then funded themselves by selling them back, the Arab goniff reminiscent of the cartoon characters who would drop a coin into the vending machine, tied to a string, getting both the goody and the coin.

Large weapons caches and tunnel systems were also funded by the U.S. and built by Arabs like UBL throughout this era. These caves were later (and still) used by the groups opposing the current government and subsequent U.S. occupation -- in counterinsurgency terms, the perfect self-licking ice-cream cone.

As an old saying goes, an Arab can steal the yolk from egg without cracking it. We are just accepting that there are different kinds of intelligence. The U.S. may have the baddest technology on the block, but they sure seem to play their cards more ably than any we try to place on the table.

Both Sides, Now

You put a rifle in his hand;
You sent him far away,
You shouted, "Hip, hooray!"
But look at him today!
--Remember My Forgotten Man (1933)

_________________

Isn't it strange that in 1979 the U.S. cheered for and sponsored the Taliban and the seminal al-Qaeda in the Russian-Afghanistan War?

Strange that the Soviet Union and the U.S. had roughly the same agenda, which was and is secularism and the parity of women, and the suppression of Islamic radicalism, yet we saw fit to oppose them. Why did the U.S. oppose the Soviet invasion?

Why do the American people support the U.S.'s invasion and continued war in Afghanistan? Why do the Afghan people continue to fight U.S. aggression? Is it the same reason they fought the Soviets?

So 30 years ago U.S. policy was to oppose the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose objectives were in sync with those of the U.S. today. The terrorist's objectives were also the same -- evict foreign powers. The same enemy that fought the Soviets fight us today, but back then we supported the Afghans with funds, training and materiel, and best of all, Stinger missiles and safe haven in Pakistan.

Now bogged down in the same war, the only question that arises is: Do idiots run the U.S.? Are the Departments of Defense, State and Central Intelligence Agency so myopic and uncreative as to do a complete flip-flop in 30 years? What is gained and what is lost by such vacillation?

Which brings us to the present situation in tribal regions of Pakistan. The threat destabilizing the region was created, aimed, cocked and armed by shortsighted U.S. policy. Do U.S. policymakers create these cock-ups on purpose just to have something to do, or are they just clueless?

There are a lot of questions here. The entire Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) seems one big question mark.