Today, Friday, December 4th 7-8 am.
The 5th weekly Sojourner Truth roundtable will discuss: the increase of
troops to Afghanistan; the latest news on jobs and the economy; post
election Honduras. And we want to hear from you!
Our distinguished panelists are: Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas
Program for the Center for International Policy in Mexico City; and regulars
Tom Hayden and Professor Gerald Horne.
- - -
Robert Fisk: This strategy has been tried before - without success
Independent Thursday, 3 December 2009
"They shoot Russians," the young paratrooper told me. It was cold. We had
come across his unit, the Soviet 105th Airborne Division, near Charikar,
north of Kabul, and he was holding out a bandaged hand. Blood seeped
through, staining the sleeve of his battledress. He was just a teenager with
fair hair and blue eyes. Beside us a Soviet transport lorry, its rear
section blown to pieces by a mine - yes, an "improvised explosive device",
though we didn't call it that yet - lay upended in a ditch. In pain, the
young man raised his hand to the mountain-tops where a Soviet helicopter was
circling. Could I ever have imagined that Messers Bush and Blair would have
landed us in the same sepulchre of armies almost three decades later? Or
that a young black American president would do exactly what the Russians did
all those years ago?
Within weeks, we would see the Soviet Army securing Kabul and the largest
cities of Afghanistan, abandoning the vast areas of mountain and desert to
the "terrorists", insisting that they could support a secular, uncorrupt
government in the capital and give security to the people. By the spring of
1980, I was watching the Soviet military stage a "surge". Sound familiar?
The Russians announced new training for the Afghan army. Sound familiar?
Only 60 per cent of the force was following orders at the time. Yes, it does
sound familiar.
Victor Sebestyen, who has researched a book about the fall of the Soviet
empire, has written at length of those frozen days after the Russian army
stormed into Afghanistan just after Christmas of 1979. He quotes General
Sergei Akhromeyev, commander of the Soviet armed forces, addressing the
Soviet Politburo in 1986. "There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has
not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another.
Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We
control the provincial centres, but we cannot maintain political control
over the territory we seize."
As Sebestyen points out, Gen Akhromeyev demanded extra troops - or the war
in Afghanistan would continue "for a very, very long time". And how's this
for a quotation from, say, a British or US commander in Helmand today? "Our
soldiers are not to blame. They've fought incredibly bravely in adverse
conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in
such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills."
Yes, of course, this was Gen Akhromeyev in 1986.
I watched the tragedy play out in those bleak early months of 1980. In
Kandahar, the people cried "Allahu Akbar" from the rooftops and on the roads
outside the city, I met the insurgents - the Taliban of their time - bombing
the Soviet convoys.
North of Jalalabad, they even stopped my bus with red roses in the muzzles
of their Kalashnikovs, ordering Communist students from the vehicle. I
didn't care to dwell on their fate. No different, I guess, than that of
pro-government Afghan students caught by the Taliban today. Outside the
city, I was told that the "mujahedin" - President Ronald Reagan's favourite
"freedom fighters" - had destroyed a school because it was educating girls.
Too true. The headmaster and his wife - after they had been burned - were
hanging from a tree.
Afghans approached us with strange stories. Political prisoners were being
taken from the country and tortured inside the Soviet Union. Secret
rendition. In Kandahar, a shopkeeper, an educated man in his fifties who
wore both a European sweater and an Afghan turban, approached me in the
street. I still have the notes of my interview.
"Every day the government says that food prices are coming down," he said.
"Every day we are told that things are getting better thanks to the
cooperation of the Soviet Union. But it is not true. Do you realise that the
government cannot even control the roads? Fuck them. They only hold on to
the cities." The "mujahedin" infested Helmand province and crossed and
recrossed the Pakistani border, just as they do today. A Soviet Mig
fighter-bomber even crossed the frontier in early 1980 to attack the
guerrillas. The Pakistani government - and the United States, of course -
condemned this as a flagrant breach of Pakistan's sovereignty. Well, tell
that to the young Americans who control the unmanned Predators so often
crossing the border today to attack the guerrillas.
In Moscow almost a quarter of a century later, I went to meet the former
Russian occupiers of Afghanistan. Some were now addicted to drugs, others
suffered from what we call stress disorder.
And on this historic day - when Barack Obama plunges ever deeper into
chaos - let us remember the British retreat from Kabul and its destruction
in 1842.
***
Subject: Open letter to Barack Obama from the founders of Military Families
Speak Out
November 23, 2009
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama:
As you prepare to announce a new strategy for Afghanistan that could mean
deploying tens of thousands more of our loved ones to fight a war with no
foreseeable end, we call on you to terminate the military occupations of
Iraq and Afghanistan, bring our troops home now, and ensure they get the
care they need when they return. We urge you to stop billions more from
being misspent overseas to misuse young men and women and instead utilize
those funds to help overcome the pressing domestic issues of our time; a
growing population of veterans suffering from post traumatic stress
disorder, a fractured health care system, and a woeful economic climate all
desperately demand your attention and action.
Our family is intimately connected to these issues. My husband, Charley
Richardson is slowly but surely dying of an aggressive, metastatic cancer,
and dealing regularly with the fractured and overstressed medical system. He
also lost his job of twenty years at a state university last April as a
result of recession-related budget cuts. And our son served one deployment
in Iraq as a Marine and was sent to Afghanistan twice after he joined the
private army of contractors that is so central to the war efforts in both
Iraq and Afghanistan. We are acutely aware of how political will has been so
wrongly misdirected toward military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan
instead of achieving economic recovery and sorely needed healthcare reform
at home.
We were fortunate. Our son returned to us in good physical health and we
were able to hold him in our arms and not just keep him in our hearts. So
many of our friends within the organization we co-founded, Military Families
Speak Out, have not shared this outcome. Their loved ones returned in
flag-draped coffins; or with life-altering physical wounds; or with the
hidden, often deadly, psychological injuries of war.
We hope you will think again about the faces of the families that you saw
when you were at Dover, and the faces that won't be seen again, hidden in
caskets and arriving under the cloak of darkness. We know you are concerned
about the unfair burden that this war is placing on a relatively small
portion of our population, and the burden that will continue for decades to
come. Suicides in the Army have hit a record high. Our returned troops
should be re-building their lives rather than seeing depression, violence,
divorce and suicide tear those lives apart. The bombs of these wars are
indeed exploding at home.
The people of the United States don't want these wars. Even without a draft,
even as we deficit fund the wars, they don't want them. Public opposition
continues to grow, with 57 percent opposing the war in Afghanistan,
according to a recent Associated Press poll. The latest CNN poll found that
49 percent of Americans favored reducing the number of troops in
Afghanistan -- with 28 percent saying they should all be withdrawn
immediately -- compared to less than 40 percent who want to send more.
Imagine what the polls would tell us if the burden of the wars, financial
and service, were actually shouldered and shared throughout our nation.
The American people want safety and security, as do the people of Iraq and
Afghanistan. But we don't believe these wars are helping to achieve these
goals. The more we bring bombs and guns into Afghanistan, the more civilian
casualties there are and the more our troops are seen as occupiers rather
than liberators.
We put the same challenge before you now that we put in front of President
Bush and in front of Senators and Members of Congress. Consider the options
available to you as if the lives of your loved ones hang in the balance.
Consider if it were your daughters being deployed, would you be so quick to
stay, or escalate, the course?
Please do not be the one to dash our hope for an end to these wars; for the
swift and safe return of our troops; and for a new foreign policy that truly
respects the lives of our service members who volunteer to put themselves in
harm's way, as well as the lives of children, women and men of other
countries who are caught in the crossfire.
Please continue to build hope in the world. Send no more troops. Bring our
troops home now.
In Peace,
Charley Richardson and Nancy Lessin
Co-Founders, Military Families Speak Out
Charley@mfso.org
Nancy@mfso.org
Military Families Speak Out (www.mfso.org) is an organization of over 4,000
families with loved ones who serve or served in the military over the last
eight years, and who are speaking out to end the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. MFSO was founded in November, 2002 and is the largest
organization of military families speaking out against wars in the history
of this country.
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