Red Wind, writing at the seminal (as I do) has rightly focused on one big gaffe McCain made last night in incorrectly describing the Pakistan of the late 1990s as a "failed state" (others have noted this as well). Since foreign affairs are supposed to be McCain’s strong suit, this is a big deal. When you pair that mistake with McCain’s even bigger gaffe, his strength is exposed as a glaring weakness–McCain actually managed to describe Bin Laden as a "freedom fighter" and demonstrated his absolute failure to understand that we picked the wrong people to help in the 1980s in Afghanistan.
Last night, McCain lamented what he called the "mistake" of ignoring Afghanistan after we helped what he called the "freedom fighters" who pushed the Soviets out of the country in the 1980s. I agree that it was a mistake to let the Taliban rise to power in Afghanistan–but McCain’s "freedom fighters" reference demonstrates an absolutely fundamental misunderstanding of history.
The freedom fighters McCain spoke of were the mujahideen, Afghan insurgents who the U.S. funded as they were battling our Cold War foe, the Soviet Union. Like McCain, Ronald Reagan called them "freedom fighters", but these weren’t exactly 20th century Minutemen fighting for the Declaration of Independence. The mujahideen counted among their ranks a young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden as well as the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Zayman Al Zawahiri. Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri got important training in how to run an insurgency, on the U.S. dime–of course, they have put that training to deadly use against their former benefactor.
You can, of course, connect the dots from McCain’s "freedom fighters" to September 11. In fact, Michael Moran, writing for MSNBC recognized the danger even before 9/11, in a 1998 piece where he noted that the arms, money and training we provided to Bin Laden and the mujahideen had come back to haunt us–this is known as "blowback".
Ten years after Moran’s observation, seven years after 9/11, McCain still thinks we were advancing the cause of freedom when we funded and trained Bin Laden! There’s not really anything more to say, other than to make the obvious point that McCain has utterly failed to learn the lesson of U.S. funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan: when we provide arms and training to people, our one-time friends can turn against us, with deadly results. I would have thought that went without saying, but when a foreign policy "expert" like McCain still thinks we did the right thing by helping Bin Laden in the 1980s, there is obviously a need to set the record straight.
also posted at The Seminal http://www.theseminal.com/...