In an earlier message, Michael K wrote: >>>Slings and arrows and accusations of pedantry aside, I think it's important not to allow history to be glossed over by the use of misleading terms like "Russo-Afghan war". Afghanistan was used as a proxy for the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, and it was the US, as emerging evidence makes clear, that stoked the flames in Afghanistan. <<<
I wrote:>> sure, but there was a lot of home-grown Afghan fervor against the central government as part of the mix. Though the US played a big role -- no argument there -- it's a mistake to treat the Afghans as a "dependent variable," as pawns. People in third world countries have consciousness and wills, too. They aren't pawns or puppets.< Michael now writes:> Sure, but Russo-Afghan war sounds like Russo-Japanese war, i.e., a war between two states, < that's not what I meant. The Russians, I am told, refer to the "Afghan war." Adding the "Russo-" makes clear which Afghan war is referred to. I don't really care what the war is called (since that doesn't change the nature of the war), but the name I used identifies the main sides that lost lives, etc. (BTW, the US "Revolutionary War" (1776 and all that) was partly a matter of French meddling in the British empire. But we can't blame the creation of the US on the French.) >when in fact it was one state (Soviet) coming in to prop up another (Afghan) being undermined by yet another (US) soon to be joined by yet another (Pakistan) and all in a context where there had never been any "democracy" as such and where the very idea of an "Afghan" people was always subject to the careful mediation of successive regimes in Kabul. < The "Afghan people" if it's ever created, would be a result of a long historical process (just as with the "English people"). But I was simply referring to people, tribes, etc., located in Afghanistan, rather than to a nationality. >These regimes were legitimated on the basis of their careful attention to the balance of interests within the borders nominally governed by the Afghan state. It is wrong to treat any of the constituent parts of Afghanistan as pawns, but it was certainly in the interests of outside powers (particularly the US) to tilt the balance in a certain way, all with the express intention of giving the Soviets "their own Vietnam".< right. Michael continued:>>> The modernising regime in Afghanistan was destabilised as was that of Chile, indeed that of Argentina, around this period, and Soviet intervention was a response to this.<<< saith I: >>You should be careful with these analogies. Though I use analogies all the time -- that's what economic theory is about -- it's important to remember that no analogy is perfect, so they can fool you. For example, the "modernizing regime" in Afghanistan wasn't elected the way the Chilean one was.<< also sprach Michael: >Very true. Coming on the heels of Nestor's post re Argentina and the undoubted efforts of the US during the 1970s to stamp out nationalist modernisation agendas it was careless of me to give the impression that somehow Najibullah and Allende derived the same legitimacy, although you will be familiar with the endless pathetic hand-wringing and outright sophistry of rightwingers who justify support of Pinochet on the basis of the minority status of Allende's electoral support. That's no justification for what happened in Chile, it's not even an excuse. But Najibullah and Allende did head "modernising" regimes, both striving to be independent of the whims of US power, and both vulnerable to those very whims, as we know with hindsight. < I see the Najibullah regime as more like that of Algeria in recent decades. The latter evoked a fundamentalist response. I don't know if the US was actively involved in that response, but there were lots of reasons why the fundamentalists could oppose the corrupt Francophone "modernizing" regime there. I wrote that Michael's earlier post >>makes it sound as if people from "obscure madrassas" don't belong in politics, or that just because they were "obscure," they remain that way without external intervention by the puppet-masters in Washington. But civil wars and foreign interventions normally disrupt the existing social situation, undermining established elites and creating new ones, often independent of what the superpowers want. (People make history, but not exactly as they please.) When you refer to the "creation of an entirely new element," is that a reference to the US elite _wanting_ to create a bunch of fundamentalist no-nothings? or were they created by the situation, something that the US elite didn't really want? I think the US elite would have preferred bringing back the tame king from Rome, but didn't have the time/energy/resources to intervene in Afghanistan to fine-tune the situation to create the desired result. That's the key: the US elite isn't really -- and can't be -- a bunch of puppet-masters (just as the old Soviet elite didn't control everything). Thus, they get stuck with allies they don't like.<< Michael now writes: >The finer points regarding the specifics of the Taliban can be debated, but I don't think there is any doubt that, such was the fervent anti-Communism of the US decision-makers, that any alternative was preferable.< This is partly because the US elite doesn't give a rat's ass about the people in Afghanistan and what regime rules them. Until recently, with the development of Caspian oil possibilities, I don't think they saw it as very strategic, except as a way to get at the USSR. >That the CIA and national security apparatus of the US bought and paid for the elevation of a hitherto obscure group/perspective is well known. This is not to deny the position of the "obscure" in politics. But Pakistani training camps and coordination financed and supervised by the US sounds an awful lot like Contra camps in Honduras during the 1980s. Were these legitimate expressions of Nicaraguan political perspectives?< Of course the contras weren't legitimate expressions of the interests of workers and peasants of Nicaragua, but they weren't simply puppets of the US. They represented "middle class" and big-bourgeois interests, together with a lot of remains of the Somoza regime and discouraged Misquito Indians. Unless it is willing to spend a lot of capital and political capital, the US elite has to work with the raw material available (classes and ethnic groups) rather than conjuring up anti-government forces out of thin air. RENAMO in Mozambique may be an exception, but that was an expensive operation, which was mostly financed by South Africa, I believe. >Here's something I dragged from the PEN-L archives on the subject of US financing of radical Islamism. There's also been stuff circulating of late regarding a 1998 interview given by Brzezinski concerning Afghanistan -- maybe someone can dig out the relevant pieces in that. My copy of the "Grand Chessboard" is at home so I'll have to look it up later. But this review, forwarded in the days when we used to get "The Internet Antifascist", seems to be sufficient for the moment: <an interesting article> I continued:>>Further, fundamentalism has always been with us. It's nothing new. It's not an "entirely new element."<< MK: >Sure, but the help it has received from US financial muscle, armaments support, political intriguing and then the vacuum created by the eradication of Left/nationalist alternatives to the tinpot dictators imposed upon the peoples of the Middle East means that the very same radical Islamist fundamentalists are now more powerful, influential, threatening than ever before. It's a prime example of what Chalmers Johnson calls "blowback".< It's not _just_ blowback (though Johnson's thesis tells us a lot) since Saudi Arabia has a lot of power and wealth of its own and a chunk of that has gone into support Pakistan's efforts in Afghanistan and directly into the Taliban. I continued:>>still, there was a lot of fervor on the part of many Afghans against the modernizing Afghan government and their Russian allies. Many Afghans died as a result (along with lots of Russians). It wasn't just the US elite pulling strings. The war wasn't just a campaign in the broader Cold War. Similarly, the Vietnamese weren't puppets of the Russians and the Vietnam war wasn't just a campaign in the broader Cold War.<< MK writes: >Yes and no. I am reluctant to draw parallels with Vietnam because of the express intentions of the US national security apparatus to "give the Soviets their own Vietnam". The two examples are very different, even if both superpowers were given bloody noses.< My point is yes, they both involve Cold War intrigues, but they _also_ involve indigenous revolt. (BTW, as you might guess, the Vietnamese government is more my cup of tea than the Taliban.) >Yes many Afghans fought against Najibullah, but wasn't it telling how long Najibullah survived AFTER the USSR pulled out its troops. And what occurred, with the USSR entering to prop up the modernising regime, was the first real assertion of centralised state power within the Afghan borders that threatened not only the balance between the various warlords and tribes within these borders, but their legitimacy within the territories they supposedly "controlled". The USSR, not understanding this, naturally fell prey to attacks from people concerned to protect their regional autonomy (this explains the fragmentation of the mujahideen post-1992). But Najibullah held out for another three years ... < It's important to remember that (1) the Kabul regime increasingly draped itself in orthodox Islamic symbols while retreating from its modernist program and (2) the various anti-government factions started fighting amongst themselves. This helps explain why Najibullah held out for three years. Summary: In addition to "foreign affairs" elements (e.g. the Cold War contention of the two superpowers or the current effort by the US power elite to create a world government in its image), if we want to understand an event like the recent wars in Afghanistan, we have to look at class, ethnicity, and the like inside the country. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
