I draw a line between partisans, guerrilla fighters, and terrorists. I would not be pleased, morally, with us funding people that are blowing up apartment buildings. But I would have no problem with us funding people who are killing Iranian soldiers through guerrilla attacks and et cetera.
As I said, we’d be remiss in not taking advantage of dissent within Iran, but there are limits to what sort of groups we should support, and we should be careful of how we spend our money.
The only reason I instinctively say we should not be supporting terrorists is precisely because they are so volatile and many of them have farther reaching goals which will never be sated. Whereas often times more focused guerilla fighters have more limited goals and thus are less likely to turn on the United States. But, it is a hard decision to make either way.
It’s usually better to be propping up a regime than it is to be propping up its dissenters, as strong men tend to bring more stability to a region.
Our support for fundamentalist Islamic extremists in Afghanistan worked out splendidly? I’d hate to know what your version of failure would be. It would seem to involve the annihilation of the entire solar system.
I glossed over that in talking about Saddam Hussein, but mostly, yeah.
The people we funded in Afghanistan created for the USSR its own Vietnam War, it worked out great. Some of those same people later turned on us, but I honestly don’t see how us funding them really affected that, they were people who evolved from being Afghani guerrilla fighters to more widespread anti-Western terrorists. And that’s really only the case for some of the prominent leaders, a lot of the ground-level personnel who fought against the USSR in Afghanistan are not remotely the same people flying planes into buildings.
Sometimes allies turn against you, that doesn’t mean you never have allies in the first place, those entanglements mostly served their purpose at the time, and I’ve honestly not seen funding Afghanistan anti-USSR fighters to really come back to bite us. Funding Saddam did, but we had a chance to correct that and failed to do so, that’s our fault.
It didn’t work out so great for Afghanistan. A million and a half dead, five million refugees…
Didn’t work out so great for us, either, with the rise of the Taliban, their support for Al Qaeda, 9/11, the ensuing war in Iraq, that whole thing. That we’re still involved in Afghanistan, nearly 30 years after their war with the Soviets began, is painful evidence of failure.
Again I say, if all that counts as success in your book, don’t tell me what failure looks like. These interventions by the U.S. almost always end badly, and mostly because we have little idea what we’re actually getting into.
Come on! You act as if things would be hunky dory if we had never intervened, when history shows that that isn’t so.
Remember, the choice in Afghanistan wasn’t whether to leave a happy people alone or not. The Soviet invasion was a brutal one, and the subsequent occupation even worse. To quell rebellion, the Soviets did use chemical weapons. They also scattered bombs around the countryside shaped like toys, and carrying just enough explosive to permanently maim a child and keep his parents too busy caring for him to fight.
Providing support to people fighting the Red Army was the right thing to do.
You cannot allow the fear of consequences down the road to completely paralyze your actions now. That will make things far worse in the end. Should we have feared the long and agonizing Cold War, and thus not fought the Nazis and Japanese in the 1940s? We’d be in a worse fix now, that’s for sure.
Things may be pretty bad in Afghanistan right now, but how worse would it be as an oppressed and occupied Soviet client state, with the Soviets still in power?
If you ask me, things could scarcely have gone worse for Afghanistan. They are now one of the poorest countries in the world, and have lost a staggering proportion of their population to war, disease, and flight. What’s worse is that the U.S. has now been dragged into it. First we were supporting the mujahideen, and then, when their success gave an opening to the Taliban, we found ourselves fighting them and their Al Qaeda clients, and then because of Al Qaeda (supposedly), we found ourselves fighting in Iraq, and now that we’re fighting in Iraq, we find reason to quarrel with Iran and possibly intervene there. Where does it all end? And what does it all amount to? Have we succeeded in pacifying a single one of those places – Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran – that we have been contending with all these years?
We love to look at these things through the lens of geopolitics, but when we do, we become callous about the staggering toll we inflict on the Afghanistans and Iraqs of the world. That’s the point here – not some incremental geopolitical advantage we could theoretically gain from intervention.
So, by logical extension, you really couldn’t find any fault with any state choosing to support the bombing of the USS Cole, then, with material or “moral” support?
That’s not my, or the United States concern whatsoever.
I’m not seeing the cause and effect here.
We supported various mujahideen through Pakistan, they fought against the Soviets, they drained the USSR of lives, and resources military and economic.
The rest of it, I’m not sure how you can link it to our funding. It wasn’t something that “came back to hurt us” but just something that happened, unrelated to our support of the mujahideen against the USSR. We didn’t create Al Qaeda, we didn’t do anything which lead to the Taliban harboring Al Qaeda, hell, we aren’t even remotely responsible for the Taliban being in power. That happened because of the failure of the mujahideen to establish stable government following the collapse of the Soviet lead government, and by the then U.S. involvement was largely over.
That pro-Soviet government almost certainly would have collapsed in any case following the collapse of the Soviet Union, so linking the U.S. funding mujahideen to the collapse of the Soviet puppet government is specious at beast, it seemed like something that was going to happen either way, so too was the chaos that followed. Our funding the mujahideen just made them more effective at hurting the USSR, it didn’t create the infighting that was there before we got involved and was there afterwards, which ultimately lead to the Taliban forming and taking power.
And I have to disagree with this assessment completely.
You’re linking the success of the mujahideen to us, that just isn’t the case. That’s like linking the failure of the United States in Vietnam to support from the USSR for the North Vietnamese, it just wasn’t the case. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan was an incredibly hostile place that was not going to accept Soviet occupation or the Soviet puppet government. All the funding from the West did, at most, was spell the fall of the Afghani puppet government earlier. But, when the Soviet Union itself collapsed in the early 1990s you can br certain that sans any help from the United States, the mujahideen would have toppled that government–assuming it would have held out til the collapse of the USSR with or without U.S. aid for the mujahideen.
The Soviets could never win in Afghanistan because it was an unwinnable situation for them. That meant the mujahideen were always going to succeed, be it a few years prior to the collapse of the USSR like they did, or around the same time as the USSR collapsed, with the USSR collapse imminent there was no way the mujahideen were going to fail to topple the Soviet puppet government at some point, which would ultimately open the way for the Taliban either way.
It’s curious as to how the particular ideology that created the Taliban became powerful enough to give it so many supporters, but that combined with the failure of the mujahideen to come together and create a national government is what allowed the Taliban to take over. The mujahideen’s own success opened the power vacuum, but that success was something that would have happened with or without the financial backing of the West, simply because the Soviet’s were in a position that was not sustainable.
Do you really think that, if Bush I had given orders to push on to Baghdad in 1991, the resultant occupation would have gone any better than the present occupation?
:dubious: This is a good thing?! Something future administrations should emulate?!
Pardon me, but “partisans” and “guerrilla fighters” are synonymous terms.
And partisans/guerrillas, having a limited range of effective actions available to them, are always liable to charges of terrorism, sometimes justified. Terrorism is a tactic sometimes used by political dissidents with little power, who cannot hope to win their cause on the battlefield or at the ballot box, to puff up their perceived power. Can you not see the close relationship between this tactic and the whole concept of “asymmetrical warfare”?
I’m tired of repeating it on this board, but the Soviets did not invade Afghanistan. They sent in troops to support a homegrown Communist revolution, at the Afghan Communist government’s invitation. (See here.) It was more like the Soviet support for Castro than the Soviet conquest of and domination of Poland. At least, it started out that way. As time went on, the Soviets acted more and more like an occupying foreign army. But in the beginning, it was not so.
Me, I would just point out that the Kurds were in open war with the Mullahs from ~79-83 and have been in low level war since – that intensified and opened up again with the Iraq war. There is no need to create International boogie men. The Kurds have been fighting the Mullahs with various levels of intensity since the Mullahs took power.
Bottom-line: any support we are offering is fueling the fire and not, as the OP shapes it, creating it nor is it something we can stop.
Would that be the oil that westerners discovered ,had the drilling equipment to extract ,the logistics and organisation to move ,the refineries to process and finally amongst other things the internal combustion engine that the locals had never actually invented to use it in?
The oil that if westerners hadnt of come along would still be there under the ground today a subject of total disinterest to the locals? (Oh did I mention turning worthless desert into valuable real estate)
Oh nearly forgot ,also even today an industry that couldnt function in their countries without massive Western technical day to day assistance.
Typical thieving Western Colonialist bastards!
Almost as blatant as the French !
They invest millions,mobilise huge amounts of plant,do the surveying ,the chemical analysis and then organise a collossal logistics organisation everything from shelter ,food ,medical backup ,transport and policing in a country where if you take your eyes off of a 20 ton excavator for more then a few moments it is liable to vanish.
They then go on to construct a canal in truly awful geographical conditions and a climate that is pretty bloody awful for Europeans (and I do know that the bucket and spade merchants were locals)
Once again turning worthless desert into valuable realestatel
And then they have the cheek to think they own it !
Though they hadnt actually got around to it in the last few thousand years the Egyptians (with as usual their democratic and totally incorrupt government)
were on the point of doing the self same thing in a millenia or two …maybe…perhaps.
Once again I point the finger at the greedy colonialist scum!going into a country and stripping it bare .
Just HOW ?do you sleep nights Whitey?