The bad guys have read Mao, it seems
February 6th, 2008, 10:56 am · 1 Comment · posted by jhogg
There is a lengthy McClatchy story about the ongoing “insurgency” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a mix of reasonable journalism and unexciting hatchet job. I encourage you to look for yourself.
Western media does a bad job when it comes to defining conflicts. Western government press agents are culpable in this as well, but I suspect this might be partly by design. By and large, the conflict in Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree, Iraq, have ceased to be insurgencies and devolved into complicated civil wars. Because the civil war is waged largely with guerrilla tactics people default to an assumption that we are fighting an insurgency.
This is unhealthy for two reasons: First, labeling the opposition as “insurgents” allows us to underestimate them as a meager handful of hillbillies that we could mop up with one well placed bomb. Second, it lets us think that we are fighting an “insurgency” because that is all the bad guys can muster.
In reality, our opposition in Afghanistan have taken a play from Mao Zedong’s book. The Chinese civil war was largely put on hold to fight Imperial Japan during World War 2. While Mao’s communists would occasionally join Chiang Kai-Chek’s forces to engage the Japanese, they also used the distraction of the superior military forces to snatch the countryside out from under the ruling government’s nose. Once World War 2 concluded, Chiang’s government found itself holed up in isolated urban pockets. All that was left for Mao was to patiently grow his forces while Chiang’s withered.
Westerns have a hard time wrapping their minds about this. In our world, if you control Berlin, Paris or Washington then you’ve got the reigns of Germany, France or the U.S. Once you get into the wild lands, these rules no longer need apply. What NATO is grappling with is the fact that once you have Kabul, you control, in totality, Kabul. Taking Kabul was the easy part, getting all of Afghanistan to look toward Kabul for guidance would be a historical first.
February 6th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
If the USA was following a policy of fighting terrorists only, I would agree 100%. But there is an old saying in politics—if you want to understand what’s going on, follow the money. Why is Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservative controlled American government so enthralled with nation building in Afghanistan? Just follow the money.
“American oil companies have acquired rights to as much as 75 percent of the output from the rich oil fields of the Caspian and Central Asian region. The major problem in exploiting the energy riches of Central Asia is how to get the oil and gas from the landlocked region to the world market. US officials have opposed using either the Russian pipeline system or the easiest available land route, across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, over the past decade, US oil companies and government officials have explored a series of alternative pipeline routes—west through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean; east through Kazakhstan and China to the Pacific; and, most relevant to the current crisis, south from Turkmenistan across western Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.”
And who would build this pipeline through a unified Afghanistan? Why that would be none other than Halliburton, the company that has made Cheney a rich man, and vice versa.
One of the comments after the bottom of the McLatchy article said it best “I think it’s important to remember that what we are doing in Afghanistan (even more so than in Iraq) is routing out terrorists that would do harm to us and our western allies. What we need to do is maintain a good effort there remembering that the tribal leaders respect people that keep their promises. There is no true government backing the Taliban and the other bad guys that we are fighting there. That makes our situation entirely different than that of the Soviets. In that case we and a few other nations were funding the mujahadeen in their effort to oust a western communist power that was completely controlling the Afghan communist government.
If anyone thinks that we will beat the terrorists and then go home they are sadly mistaken. Our efforts there are to engender trust and develop a series of allies that control the terrorists within their borders with little or no help from us and NATO/EU. Before you decide for yourself whether this will ever happen talk to those of us that have been there and worked with the growing numbers of Afghan security forces that are learning to handle their own problems. It will not happen quickly but staying there is important if you want to feel safe at malls, sporting events and places of worship here at home.”
And that will never happen if the USA attempts to install a puppet government, which would be, as you say, a historical first.