“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography”
-Ambrose Bierce
“Yawning is the Board’s response to another curious george post with no content other than someone else’s words”
<yawn>
-Fenris
There must be a certain amount of ignorance when the U.S. intelligence community is able to use 9/11 to justify the removal of restrictions on funding terrorist and criminal organizations. Why were those restrictions put in place? Oh, right. It isn’t fair to single out Americans, though. It’s pretty common in Canada, too. My girlfriend is convinced that Islam=Repression of Women, American Intervention=Liberation of Women. Period. She gets irate when I try to point out that if the U.S. didn’t support the mujahedin because a fanatic theocracy was useful to destablize the godless reds, then Afghan women would still be able to become lawyers and doctors. She says I’m blaming the U.S. instead of “their own fcked-up culture." Who’s fault would it be if the Soviets spent millions supplying Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Bob Larson, et all with the means effect a fundamentalist coup in the U.S. and impose their extremist values on the rest of us? These elements are part of our "fcked-up culture.” Thank god nobody’s helped them overthrow the government.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the Taliban is any less evil than they clearly are. Just a reminder that they were imposed on the Afghan people by U.S. foreign policy. Hooray.
Let’s get them the hell out of there and try not to do anything like that again.
Well, but the Taliban weren’t backed by the US. If any country “imposed” them on the Afghans, it was Pakistan, because they received a good deal of Pakistani funding and aid from the Pakistani millitary. They drove out the mujhadeen, who we had supported, and who now exist as the “Northern Alliance”.
May I be the first to ask – Huh?
The Mujaheddin (one thing I love about transliterated Arabic words and names - it’s impossible to spell them incorrectly :D) and the Taliban are two different groups of people. The Mujaheddin were the warlords and geurillas who fought the Soviets. They are the ones to whom the US provided weaponry and financing. During the Soviet occupation, Osama bin Laden worked with the Mujaheddin, and the US, through Pakistan, provided him with some funds (this is probably the source of your confusion). The Mujaheddin took over after the Soviets withdrew. The Mujaheddin are, by and large, conservative Muslims - their treatment of women wasn’t fantastic, but women could get education and hold jobs.
The Taliban, in contrast, did not fight the Soviet occupation (at least as an organization - individual Taliban members may have). The Taliban rose to power in rejection of the Mujaheddin in the mid-90’s. Their supporter was Pakistan, not the US. The remnants of the Mujaheddin now make up the Northern Alliance.
So, the Taliban kicked out of power the government “imposed” on Afghanistan by US foreign policy.
Sua
SuaSponte: “May I be the first to ask – Huh?”
The week after the events, John Ashcroft was pushing a bill that would remove the rules against CIA involvement with terrorist & criminal groups. To paraphrase, he said “The reality is we have to deal with people who aren’t boy scouts, and these regulations tie the hands of our intelligence community.” This was the same bill that eased up restrictions on wiretaps & whatnot. IIRC, the rules were a result of the Iran/Contra affair.
I understand that the mujahedin are not the Taliban, they certainly are not the Northern Alliance, either. It’s a muddle. But undoubtedly the mujahedin have turned around and bit the US in the ass:
Naturally, the official position is that the US did not create the Taliban.
Maybe not intentionally, but plenty of mujahedin assets and personnel went into forming the Taliban, and you should take a good look at who you’re dealing with before you give them over $7 billion dollars worth of artillery. And they knew:
Of course there’s no way to know what the situation in Afghanistan would be like today without the U.S.'s funding of the mujahedin. Maybe it would be part of the former Soviet Union. Maybe the Afghan monarchy would still be hanging on to power. Either way, it seems that it would be at least less nightmarish than it is today.
Um, the monarchy was overthrown in '73-that was before we got involved, right?
:o So right. What a depressing history.
To address MHL’s OP regarding Mr. Borchgrave comments in the link. Someone once had a good quote to the effect that Editorialists are to Journalists what reserve troops are to front line fighters: all they have to do is come in after it’s all over and shoot the wounded.
Frankly, a lot of us, even nobodies like me, knew how miserable is the daily life of the ordinary Palestinian in Israel, or the ordinary Iraqi under sanctions, and it offended our sense of justice (and also simply seemed dangerously stupid).
And we knew that any Saudi Arabian would see American troops in his country after ten years and, consulting any encyclopedia, see how the American military stayed 50 years in Germany, 50 + in Japan, 60 in China, 95 in the Philippines, over 100 in Cuba, and would naturally wonder when and if we ever plan on going home.
Also, whenever OJ or Monica or Gary Condit came on the TV we turned the channel, thank you.
What Mr. Borchgrave doesn’t say, while denying the existence of cursorily informed nobodies like me in the first place, is what the hell I was supposed to do about anything? Post crank letters to the editor or posts to my favorite message board? I know terrorism is supposed to make me feel helpless, But this last Sept 11 didn’t make me feel any more helpless than most Nov. 5ths I’ve seen.
I long for the day when an informed American leftist starts posting here.
We stayed in West Germany to defend it and the rest of Western Europe against a Soviet invasion. You will note that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have mostly dismantled our bases and our presence in Germany is now a shadow of what it was.
We rent land from the Japanese government, and they (although not the Okinawans) are glad to have us there to defend against China and North Korea.
We have no presence in China now. We did have a presence in China after the fall of the Qing (1911) and during WWII, when we fough the Japanese invaders. We left in 1949, so that is, at most, 38 years.
We won the Philippines from Spain after the Spanish-American war during our ill-fated attempt at empire-building. We gave the Philippines their independence after WWII and then rented land from the government until 1991, when popular sentiment and Mt. Pinatubo kicked us out.
We leased the rights to Guantanamo Bay from the Cuban government in 1903, then renegotiated the lease in 1976. Despite the mutual hostility between Cuba and the US, we are legally entitled to be there.
We’re currently in Saudi Arabia becuase they are unable to defend themselves against Iraq. We’ll leave when the king (or Prince Abdullah, the regent now that Fahd has lapsed into dementia) says to.
gobear: try this link: http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/5047/YANGTZE.html
I was wrong - we were in China from 1854-1942. That’s 88 years, not my 60, nor your 38.
The Japanese and the Germans “wanted” our military in their countries only in the sense that they preferred to lose their wars of agression to us rather than to the Russians. We liberated them in 1945, but occupied them for another half-century.
Yes, we “won” the Philippines from Spain in 1898. Then we killed tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of “our little brown brothers.” I don’t see that as “giving them their independence” (something they were entitled to anyway, not subject to a foreign power’s consent). What we did give was years of vital support to the murderous Marcos regime.
Of course, as you say, I’m both ill-informed and a leftist
(actually anyone can see I’m an old-fashioned conservative isolationist), so my argument just folds like a house of cards. Now go present your argument to the average Saudi Arabian (or, more correctly, an Arab living without his own consent under the Saudi dynasty). Like any other human being, he does not want the military of a foreign nation on his soil.
Or do you wish the French were still here, having stuck around after Yorktown just to be sure we Americans got ourselves set up ok?
Shoot, I was wrong on China. I hate when that happens.
Are you saying that we are in Japan (we’re barely in Germany) against the will of the government? Are we in Saudi against the will of the government?
Regarding the Philippines, you’re right on Marcos, but then we supported any number of tinpot dictators in order to have more points against the Soviets. I’ll agree that we have not done enough to promote democracy and justice abroad.
If Canada were a monstrous dictatorship poised to overrun us and make us eat fries with gravy, and wear goofy winter caps, then yes, I’d ask the French to stay.
We’ve been bitched out by Afghan refugees precisely because we left and did not set up bases there to defend them and help set up civil order.
I’m all for playing the world’s policeman; I just wish we did it a lot better.
Evidently you ARE ill-informed, or you are using definitions of words that do not appear in any dictionary. Japan and Germany were not “occupied” for 50 years; they were “occupied” for about five.
The present of foreign troops on one’s soil isn’t “occupation” unless the troops are actually controlling the country. Surely to God you know that the U.S. military wasn’t controlling Japan and Germany all those years?
Actually, your average Saudi, from what I understand, is thrilled to have the Americans there. It’s a Saudi tradition to have foreigners do their work for them.
I dunno, but if they were here at the invitation or with the permission of the U.S. government and it pissed me off, I think I’d take that up with my government instead of bombing the shit out of Paris.
de Borchgrave’s piece underlines the fact that a far greater emphasis must be placed on our overcoming the lack of information and propaganda that people in middle Eastern and other foreign countries must put up with (not to mention toxic dangling prepositions, or is it participles?).
Our media may be lackluster, but theirs are horrible.
Sua, isn’t Vanuatu one of them vampires? I think I saw him emerging from a coffin in that cool silent film AMC was running last Sunday.
Are we debating American ignorance, or American imperialism?
I don’t think this is a debate, but rather a hit and run by the OP. The Bad Astronomer doesn’t allow this sort of thing. Is it tolerated here?