Iraq is the New Afghanistan (Asia Times & Others)

tiggers thotful spot

19 years ago

Cross posted to Daily Kos 3.0 Orange Beta

I’ve been thinking that our ill-advised, illegal invasion of Iraq might turn out a lot like Afghanistan. For the USA, we’ve earned the enmity of a lot of the world. Witness the polls that say China is more trusted, or the polls that say the USA is the number one threat to peace. And for Iraq? 100,000 dead, countless families destroyed, infrastructure destroyed, chaos and violence, unemployment, hunger.

We’ve squandered and will (apparently) continue to squander the blood of our own youth for the PNAC’s imperial adventure. Not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is the way the history is written about the USSR in Afghanistan, isn’t it? It bled them. That’s what the cold-warriors were proud of, in fact.

There has been much hand-wringing about how much of our treasure has already been squandered there, but we are morally obligated to pay for the reconstruction of Iraq. We should be so lucky that money will be the only thing required of us, and that money will solve the problems we’ve created!

Others are reaching the same conclusions, such as today’s editorial in The Asia Times: “Iraq, the new Afghanistan.”
From today’s editorial in The Asia Times:

It’s virtually impossible for US President George W Bush’s Iraq to be “on its way to democracy” when real unemployment reaches a staggering 50% (a scarier prospect for most people than car bombs or snipers), 25% of children under five years old are malnourished, 78% of the households in the country (and 92% in Baghdad) have electricity only a few hours a day, only 37% of urban households (and a mere 4% in the countryside) have sewage-disposal systems, only 61% have access to drinking water, 5% of households have been destroyed by bombing or search-and-destroy missions, only one in 10 households in rural areas can be reached by a paved road, and more youngsters than in any previous generation are illiterate. This is the appalling legacy of the occupation – and the US and UN-imposed regime of sanctions in the 1990s.

Now, to complete the picture, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has just “discovered” in a classified report leaked to the New York Times that Iraq – rather, Bush’s Iraq – is breeding the new, lethal generation of jihadis, just like former president Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters” were bred in the 1980s in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad. Anyone familiar with the invasion and occupation of Iraq knew this for a fact as far back as two years ago – at a time when Pentagon supremo Donald Rumsfeld was, on the record, very happy with the idea of Iraq as the new jihad Mecca. The CIA report cannot but conclude that the new jihadis – who are now taking their higher education in urban warfare in the Sunni triangle – will be even deadlier than the famous Arab-Afghans. There was blowback in Afghanistan – after the US financed a jihad. There is now blowback in Iraq – after the US invented a jihad out of the blue.

Lew Rockwell wrote a column about this a couple of days ago. Although I’m not exactly a Libertarian Party member — and I have to weed out a lot of the rhetoric about the wonders of privatization (etc) — I can’t help but pause on this part:

I mentioned earlier that the Iraq failure has many precedents. Consider the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. The ostensible goal of the Russian government – which invaded the country by citing security concerns – was to replace a backward religious regime with an enlightened one that brought rights to all, guaranteed a higher standard of living, and put the country on the path to progress.

Of course we all saw through these lies. To us, the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was a transparent and brutal exercise of empire. It was evidence of the moral rot in the Kremlin. In the end, the Soviets controlled only the ground underneath their tank treads. It was the last hurrah of an evil empire.

Americans need to face the reality that most of the world sees our nation as the new evil empire, and many people in the Gulf region are dedicated to making sure that the Iraq War is the last hurrah for American militarism. How tragic to admit that the analogy is not entirely implausible.

The Asia Times editorial goes farther, suggesting the problem is more than just our militarism, and criticizing the imposed economic policies that Lew Rockwell might approve of (privatization, etc):

Iraq is the new Afghanistan in more ways than breeding a new generation of jihadis. The US has alienated Sunni Arabs in Iraq, just as it has alienated the Pashtun in Afghanistan. Sunni Arabs control the heart of Iraq’s industrial economy, just as the Pashtun control the heart of Afghanistan’s rural economy – based on opium-trading. The Pashtun will fight to the death against the remake of Afghanistan as a docile pupil of International Monetary Fund/World Bank dictates, just as Sunni Arabs – and many Shi’ites as well – will fight to the death the remake of Iraq as a US-controlled neo-liberal paradise.

The old cold warriors are proud of Afghanistan:

January 18, 1998, Brzezinski was interviewed by the French newspaper, Nouvel Observateur on the topic of Afghanistan. He revealed that CIA support for the mujaheddin started before the Soviet invasion, and was indeed designed to prompt a Soviet invasion, leading them into a bloody conflict on par with America’s experience in Vietnam. This was referred to as the “Afghan Trap.” Brzezinski viewed the end of the Soviet empire as worth the cost of strengthening militant islamic groups.

“Iraq Trap” must have a mighty nice ring to Osama, kinda sounds like this:

Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee, it’s good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
I’m back in the USSA

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