On this grim anniversary, I would give anything for one brave reporter to ask McCain one simple question: "If you become President, will 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' be part of your foreign policy?"
To quote Juan Cole, "It is time for someone to start holding the Cold Warriors who deployed a militant Muslim covert army against their leftist enemies accountable for the blow-back they created." John McCain was a self-described "foot soldier" for the ultimate Cold Warrior, Ronald Reagan, and I think today is a good day to revisit McCain's support for Muslim extremists during the Afghan-Russian conflict.
In 1984, just like today, the United States depended upon Pakistan to help us fight our enemies. But back then the enemy was Russia, which made Afghan "freedom fighters" our friends. And back then, Pakistan was ruled by dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq.
a fundamentalist general who had his boss, PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto hanged on trumped-up charges in 1979 and who kept promising new elections that never came. Gen. Zia sponsored the Muslim fundamentalist Mujahidin that Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters," and which included the early al-Qaeda. He also put enormous resources into making an atomic bomb. Nowadays a leader of that description would be part of Bush's axis of evil. But Reagan cozied up to Zia like a cat to catnip.
And McCain went out to cozy up to the military dictator himself, in February of 1984. McCain supported the Reagan jihad, cynically deploying radical Muslim extremists like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against leftist secularists in Afghanistan... So lest we take any holidays from history, I have some questions for John McCain. Did you or did you not know about Gen. Zia's nuclear weapons program? Did you wink at it? If so doesn't that make you a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction to a radical Muslim extremist regime?
We cannot afford another short-sighted President. We can see echoes of this failed strategy in McCain's "We are all Georgians" rhetoric. What will be the blowback from provoking Russia? Do we really want to find out? I'd prefer a leader who will make force a last resort, will negotiate from a position of strength and has the vision to see the consequences of American action.