[QUOTE=Princhester]
You got a cite for all that? I was talking to an Afghan last week and he’d just got back from a trip home. He said his friends and family had reached the point where they were lamenting the demise of the Russian days, because at least the Russians built roads, improved educational standards etc. He said that the common view was that the US were interested in the place as a battleground. Period.
[QUOTE]
Oh please, Russian assistance? The only assistance Russia ever provided was making sure the Afghan economy dropped 25-30% and then subsequently destroying the country.
We’re starting from a point where the countries been invaded, occupied fractured and then under another form of puritanical oppression, to base the Russian involement and the American one on a level playing field is ludicrious.
Yes, but the majority of the PDPA had been derivative from the army, and the officer korps, which were trained in the Soviet Union! Since Russia had wanted Afghanistan as a client state ever since the great game, what a perfect way to get what it wanted with no immediate or short term backlash!
Babrak Kamal requisitioned land with no effective plan when after he chucked out the land owners, which caused further chaos and disputiveness in the Afghan countryside, its nice to want to be fair and equal, but when you have a government at odds with itself and its people also, Afghanistan would never function in the way it could of done under PDPA leadership.
They were the only people they could turn to, as America regarded Afghanistan as a backwater. Its closest ally, India was seperated by Pakistan.
None of which detracts from Princhester’s point, which is that some Afghans, with some justice, remember the Soviet intervention in their country as comparing favorably with the current Amerian intervention.
3/5/05: I’m watching an episode of Law & Order – investigation of a drug-related shootout leads back to an Afghan warlord who has been smuggling heroin into New York – and has been working hand-in-glove with U.S. Special Forces (who have been using him to catch Taliban, but deny any specific knowledge of his poppy fields and drug trafficking). It’s only television, of course, and the writers, like most of us, can know only what they read in the papers or other media – but it still makes you think. Whatever happened to the “War on Drugs”? Has the Admin decided to put it on hold wherever the “War on Terror” takes first priority?
Same thing happened to the War on Poverty. No surprise.
The Drug Czar’s office is one door down from the Education Czar’s in the West Wing basement - if they haven’t been shipped out to the Beltway somewhere.
What like one in every thousand of the Population? The PDPA never had popular support, and the Soviets were hated ever since they started interfering in Afghan affairs.
You miss the point entirely. No one is suggesting that the Afghans wanted to give the Russians big warm cuddles. The point is that I am aware of at least one view that the Americans are not viewed much differently, and possibly viewed as worse in at least one respect.