Cheney's Bagram Ghosts
By Roger Morris
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Friday 02 March 2007
"I heard a loud boom," Vice President Dick Cheney remembered of the
suicide bomb at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, where he stopped over this week.
Said to be aimed at Cheney himself, the attack left him untouched while killing
twenty-one Afghan workers and two Americans - still more casualties in
Afghanistan's thirty-year, million-and-a-half-dead civil war.
In that setting, one hopes Cheney heard symbolically more than a "boom."
Bagram thunders with relevant ghosts, many of them American.
In the fourth century B.C., it was a fort in one of the first of many
ill-fated attempts to subdue the Afghans. Even Alexander's campaign-hardened
Macedonians were shocked when the local insurgents left battlefield dead to
devouring wild dogs. For ancient Afghans it was religious practice, but for
invaders a telling mark of a people capable at once of tender poetry and
chivalrous hospitality along with the most ferocious, indomitable resistance to
conquest.
Bagram was a mocking ruin as Britain came and went in the nineteenth
century to parry imperial Russia in the Great Game. The English killed,
tortured, bribed and subverted the Afghans, and in the end, like Alexander's
legions, left their bones to bleach at Gandamak and on the stony plain of
Maiwand west of Kandahar. They left, too, the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan
from the subcontinent. Cut for colonial convenience through the heart of
Pashtun tribal lands, the fateful boundary with its separatist ambitions and
fears still makes Pakistan the furtive nemesis of Afghan stability, and the
inconsolable frontier now a sanctuary for the resurgent Taliban.
The Cold War brought Bagram back to life in the mid-1950s as an air base
of the old Afghan royal regime. Having begged in vain for US help - Washington
at the time thought the Hindu Kush of no strategic value and preferred as
clients the crisp military dictators in Pakistan - the Afghans turned to Russia
to modernize their antique armed forces.
As Bagram hummed with Soviet advisers and MIGs, America took up the
competition, albeit on the cheap. Over a quarter-century, US aid to Afghanistan
would be only a fraction of Moscow's. All the while, the Great Game continued.
Whatever the visible policy, the CIA relentlessly used Afghanistan to spy on
Soviet Central Asia, feeding perennial Russian fears and the inevitable counter
intrigues.
Intent on each other, both superpower rivals dispensed their foreign aid
wares - and a corrupt Kabul oligarchy took them - heedless of the impact. As
aid spawned an educated class without jobs, as the army grew better armed but
no better paid, as grinding poverty only worsened, the turmoil built that would
plunge Afghanistan into unimaginable disaster and haunt the world into the next
century.
Bagram was always emblematic. The neutrality of its officers allowed
strongman Mohammad Daoud to overthrow the venal monarchy of King Zahir in 1973.
It was from Bagram five years later that a leftist commander launched his jet
fighters with withering effect on Daoud's presidential palace in the 1978
communist coup that neither Russia nor the U.S. expected - and Moscow soon
regretted more than Washington.
Into Bagram then poured Soviet advisers and materiel in the Kremlin's
vain attempt to shore up a weak, divided communist rule in Kabul that remained
typically Afghan, and thus fiercely independent of its patrons. The regime's
reforms were now crudely anti-religious and culturally insensitive, now
laudably democratic in land reform and the education of women. Change in any
case ignited a reactionary Islamic revolt which the US, Pakistan, China, and
briefly the tottering Shah of Iran quickly moved to foment with covert arms and
training.
Results were horrific. When a CIA- and Iranian-instigated Islamic
uprising in Herat massacred hundreds of Russian aid workers and their families
in March 1979 - the bloodiest episode in the history of foreign aid - sorties
from Bagram indiscriminately bombed monuments, homes and schools of the ancient
capital even after rebels had left, killing as many as 20,000.
In the face of a deliberate US policy to provoke an invasion of
Afghanistan - "giving to the USSR its Vietnam War," as National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told President Jimmy Carter - we know from the
post-Soviet release of Politburo minutes the Kremlin warily resisted what some
knew would be a disaster.
When that trap was sprung by self-deception and fear on all sides, it was
Bagram that saw the elite KGB unit that killed Afghan President Hafizullah Amin
in a December 1979 coup to replace his regime with a more agreeable puppet. It
was Bagram's runways that took wave after wave of Soviet invasion forces whose
masters expected a victorious, low-casualty show of force lasting only months.
It was Bagram that saw the last Russian troops, more than nine years later,
after some of the most savage warfare in history and twice as many casualties
as the Kremlin admitted.
Over a decade of carnage, the base was a center of war and portent.
Trained by the Americans and Pakistanis with the latest explosive devices and
eventually Stinger missiles, the Mujahideen, as the Islamic radicals were
known, constantly stalked Bagram. Tuesday's attack this week was in a tradition
begun by US-directed car-bombing squads sent to terrorize not only Soviet or
Afghan military, but also civilians, including Kabul's intelligentsia and
university professors at sites like movie theaters and cultural events.
After the fall of the USSR and the Kabul communist regime, the base was a
shifting prize between Mujahideen factions abandoned to the chaos of further
civil war and then the bloody Pakistani-sponsored rise of the Taliban. With the
US occupation in 2002, Bagram was expanded as never before as a hub of the NATO
war, including conversion of one of its cavernous hangars into the most
notorious prison in Afghanistan, eclipsing even the infamous Pul-i-Charki
outside Kabul, where the Mujahideen, the communists, the Daoud regime and
monarchy before them, jailed and tortured thousands.
Did Cheney hear any of it? In the 1970s, as Afghanistan slid to calamity,
he was a rising young aide to Don Rumsfeld in the Nixon and Ford
administrations. In 1978, as the communists seized power and the US began its
covert intervention, he was maneuvering for a Wyoming congressional seat. In
1979, as Washington provoked and Moscow invaded, he was finishing his first
year in the House, positioning for the leadership he gained a decade later. In
the 1980s, as the Mujahideen attacked Bagram, he ardently supported the Reagan
administration's covert wars in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Iran,
though he took no interest in places or issues - like his colleagues, looking
the other way amid questions about the drug trade, atrocities, terrorism..
It was all there at Bagram - the consummate folly of corrupt clients, the
false valor of historical ignorance, and the presumption once again to conquer
the unconquerable in what the Greeks called the "land of the bones." A "loud
boom" indeed.
-------- Roger Morris writes regularly for the Green Institute. He
is an award-winning and best-selling historian who worked on the National
Security Council under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon before
resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. Morris is a Senior Fellow of the Green
Institute, on whose web site his work originally appears.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030207J.shtml
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