Welshman's excellent post,
The Startling Revelations that the Media Ignored, gave me a strange sense of
deja vu. About a year ago, I picked up a book called
Afghanistan: The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower. Since cracking it open, I've regularly recommended it on these boards. It's a detailed account of the campaign waged against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan, as told by Brigadier Mohammad Yousef. Yousef worked his way up through the Pakistani government, eventually ending up as the head of the Afghan Bureau of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence from 1983-87, during the "last throes" of the Soviet occupation. To simplify, he literally planned the guerilla war against the Soviets. As I read his book, I couldn't help but be both stunned and shocked. The similarities between our occupation of Afghanistan and that of the Soviets is eerily similar. And it strikes me with that God must have a sense of humor because what's happening to us in Afghanistan right now is supremely sad irony.
Now back to the article hilighted in Welshman's diary.
He wrote:
.... Another document said the Taliban and an allied militant group were working with Arab Al Qaeda members in Pakistan to plan and launch attacks in Afghanistan. A map presented at a "targeting meeting" for U.S. military commanders here on Jan. 27, 2005, identified the Pakistani cities of Peshawar and Quetta as planning and staging areas for terrorists heading to Afghanistan.....
Yousef writes, in Chapter 2 of his book, of Quetta:
Quetta is the capital of the Baluchistan Province in Pakistan... Today it is an important Pakistan Army garrison town with a large military cantonment area housing numerous units and a corps headquarters. It is the centre of a base area for possible operations in Baluchistan, or along the border. A hundred kilometers to the NW, over the Khojak Pass, is the southern gateway into Afghanistan.
Indeed, as you read chapters 3 and 4, you realise how strategically important Quetta is to the Pakistani ISI, who supplied major operations against the Soviet occupiers via the Quetta highway. (map is here)
The other important gateway from Pakistan to Afghanistan is via the Kheyber Pass, along the highway from Peshawar. It too is a major military operations area. The highway there was used to supply anti-Soviet attacks in Jalalabad and the mountainous regions that we're familiar with today as the place where Osama bin Laden hid, eventually eluding capture by warlords to whom the US outsourced the job.
Welshman's article also writes:
A document dated Oct. 11, 2004, said at least two of the Taliban's top five leaders were believed to be in Pakistan. That country's government and military repeatedly have denied that leaders of militants fighting U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan operate from bases in Pakistan....
...... Other documents on the computer drives listed senior Taliban commanders and "facilitators" living in Pakistan. The Pakistani government strenuously denies allegations by the Afghan government that it is harboring Taliban and other guerrilla fighters....
I am not suprised in the least to learn that:
a) attacks on Afghanistan are being launched from Pakistan, and
b) that Pakistan denies it.
After all, this is the same game they played when WE were sending them weapons to supply the Afghan mujahideen. Yousef writes in chapter four (titled "Another Vietnam") of the symbiotic relationship and convergence of US and Pakistani interests. He begins by quoting former Congressman Charles Wilson, congresional mouthpeice for continuing US aid to the mujahideen:
"There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam and we owe the Russians one. I have a slight obsession with it because of Vietnam. I thought the Soviets ought to get a dose of it. (01-14-85)"
[...]
The Soviets had kept the Viet-Cong supplied with the hardware to fight and kill Americans, so the US would now do the same for the mujahideen so they could kill Soviets... Certainly it seemed there were numberous similarities between the two wards. At the political level both involved superpowers fighting in a foreign country on the Asian continentl in both cases they fought to prop up a government that was corrupt and unpopulat with the majoritty of the population; in both Vietnam and Afghanistan huge, modern, conventional forces fought, at least initially, a guerilla force; and in both instances the superpower fatally underestimated their enemy, considering, at the outset, speedy victory within their grasp.
Stretegically the terrain favoured the guerillas in both countries, with the jungle-covered mountains of Vietnam, and the high, barren, rocky mountains of Afghanistan proviing reguge and cover from the air to the insurgents... For the conventional armies it was primarily a defensive war on land, with each trying to retain control over citiies, communications centres, towns, and starteic military bases, leaving the rutral areas to the guerillas.
So no, I'm also not suprised to read about the increase in insurgent attacks reported in the other diary:
Militant attacks on U.S. and allied forces have escalated sharply over the last half year, and once-rare suicide bombings are now frequent, especially in southern Afghan provinces close to infiltration routes from Pakistan.
I'm also not shocked that once again, Afghan warlords are controlling the rural areas and causing trouble for their current occupiers:
A chart dated Jan. 2, 2005, listed five Afghans as "Tier One Warlords." It identified Afghanistan's former defense minister Mohammed Qassim Fahim, current military chief of staff Abdul Rashid Dostum and counter-narcotics chief Gen. Mohammed Daoud as being involved in the narcotics trade. All three have denied committing crimes.
sigh
It's funny how this administration seems absolutely determined not to learn from our history. In chapter six, Yousef describes the arms supply in Pakistan during his tenure. He describes what he calls a "pipeline", beginning with CIA arms shipments into Pakistan, where the ISI would take possession. The ISI in turn would distribute the weapons to the various "Parties" (in other words, tribes of mujahideen and their warlord leaders).
To understand how the arms reached the battlefield from places as remote from Afghanistan as the USA or Britian it is neccessary to know that the pipeline was divided into three distinct parts. The first part belonged to the CIA, who bought the weapons and paid for their delivery to Pakistan; the second stretch was the ISI's responsibility, getting everything carried across Pakistan, allocated to, and handed over to the Parties at their headerquarter offices near Peshawar and Quetta; the third and final journey belonged to them. The Parties allocated the weapons to their Commanders, and distributed them inside Afghanistan.
The Bush administration's solution here seems to be a delicate balancing act which involves placating the warlords just enough to dissuade them from toppling Karzai's government. But what our administration seems to oblivious to is the fact that you cannot play carrot-and-stick over in Afghanistan.
Yousef writes glowingly of the mujahideen. He paints them as a proud, stubborn, resilient people. He describes them as reckless and hard to "manage". They deeply resented the Soviet occupation and fought to the best of their ability. But they could not eject the Soviets without substantial assitance from the Pakistani military (and thus the CIA and the US government). Makes you wonder who's pulling the strings behind the scenes in Pakistan at the moment, doesn't it?
In conclusion, Yousef described the Pakistani government as disappointed in the United States for essentially abandoning the Afghans after the Soviets were expelled. I imagine they relish the opportunity to "get back" at the US by helping the Taliban/mujahideen to inflict upon us a similar punishment. Of the strategy of defeating the USSR, Yousef explains it thusly in the introduction:
Death by a thousand cuts - this is the time-honoured tactic of the geurilla army against a large convetntional force. In Afghanistan it was the only way to bring the Soviet bear to his knees; the only way to defeat a superpower on the battlefield with ill-trained, ill-disciplined and ill-equipped tribesman, whose only asset was an unconquerable fighting spirit welded to a warrior tradition. Ambushs, assassinations, attacks on supply convoys, bridges, pipelines, and airfields, with the avoidance of set peice battles; these are history's proven techniques for the guerilla.
I fear that the US is going to suffer a similar fate, and each new article out of both Iraq and Afghanistan lead me to believe, sadly, that we are headed in that direction.
Iraq and Afghanistan are central fronts not only in the "War on Terror", but also in the War on Repeating History. What's at the end of the road remains to be seen, but after reading this book I admit I'm less than optimistic.