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Fascinating though this is, the negative long term impact of these guys tends to be much greater than their positive short-term impact. You go in, you train a
by PaulAJ 6y ago
Fascinating though this is, the negative long term impact of these guys tends to be much greater than their positive short-term impact.
You go in, you train a bunch of locals as guerrillas, you achieve the objective, and then you get out, leaving the local guerrillas behind.
These guys now have the knowledge, experience and organisation to make the place ungovernable. At least some of them will proceed to do so; either they will form a resistance movement to whoever is in charge and become a proxy force for some other power, or they will simply replace politics with profit and convert to organised crime. Either way, the new government is faced with an ungovernable mess.
Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible. Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.
- 082349872349872 6y agoin different contexts: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas#Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas#Foundation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_James#Quantrill's_Raiders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_James#Quantrill's_Raider...
- varjag 6y agoIt's a delusion of grandeur to think that Islamic fundamentalism owes its existence to a transient American action. American exceptionalism but from the Left.
- nerdponx 6y agoHuh? This is about military training, equipment, and logistics, not religion.
- baxtr 6y agoThese things sound like catalysts, but not as the fundamental reasons things were happening. Just look at history to see that violence was there before training, equipment and logistics were available.
- nerdponx 6y agoAnd the post clearly says that: Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible.
- varjag 6y agoMost of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event.
- danielheath 6y agoFighting being the relevant word. If they hadn’t been armed and trained, the fight would have been over before it began.
- varjag 6y agoIt's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point.
- callmeal 6y ago>It's hilarious how you can simultaneously make 10 years of Afghan and Soviet fighting a secondary act in this supposedly American performance. Just proves my point. You're making his by ignoring the fact that the Afghans were trained and armed by US to fight the Soviets. That training remains, just who they're fighting has changed.
- varjag 6y agoThe vast majority of Mujahedeen never underwent US training. Most of their small arms (those that didn't originally float in the always militant tribes) were provided by Pakistan and China. Also, becoming a half competent combatant is not like getting a PhD, more a function of you surviving your first few encounters. The world does not revolve around America, people were able to fight and kill each other well before the CIA was formed.
- vlovich123 6y agoIs all the combat training the US military gives its own grunts and leaders not effective at making the US military more formidable? Didn’t these mujahadeen stick around to train the next generation of soldiers? Aren’t there consistent conflict in the Middle East to harden that kind of training (eg Chechnya)? Aren’t there mercenary opportunities to deploy and evolve that training? Whether they would have developed it on their own is unclear but the US didn’t develop that knowledge on their own either, instead synthesizing it from experience of Allies during WWII and likely observing other insurgencies and criminal enterprises they helped back. To me the playbook is the same “drug” but way more potent and mass produced and perhaps the first to market in this distributable form.
- claudiawerner 6y agoIt's a delusion of Western blamelessness to think that any supposed relationship between the actions of Islamic fundamentalists, their strategies and growth, implies that "Islamic fundamentalism owes its existence to a transient American action". Islamic fundamentalism was around before American involvement and it'll be around after. Nobody is claiming otherwise.
- varjag 6y agoThe origin of Afghan resistance was Soviet invasion. It was the 120,000 troops of Soviet mechanised infantry over 10 years that made Mujahedeen who they are, not a dozen CIA instructors showing them jumping jacks in Pakistan.
- 082349872349872 6y agoMANPADs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Soviet_War_in_Afghanistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIM-92_Stinger#Soviet_War_in_A...
- varjag 6y agoMANPADs were not delivered until 1986: by that time my dad already completed two 18-month rotations to Herat. Anyway MANPAD handling skills are irrelevant to what we discuss here.
- 082349872349872 6y agoNot so irrelevant, because at USD 40k per, they were a bit more than teaching jumping jacks. I mentioned them specifically because they seem to have been the least-deniable part of the package. The author of the lines «Горы стреляют, Стингер взлетает / Если нарваться, то парни второй раз умрут» also seems to have accorded them more respect than you do... I've heard the Chechens were able to manufacture their own small arms. Afghanis certainly had that capability; did they have it at the scale provided? Would they have been able to source their own MANPADs?
- ageofwant 6y agoPerhaps a better example would be America's operation TPAJAX, that removed Iran's democracy and delivered its modern day Islamic theocracy. America certainly did not invent Islamic fundamentalism, but it had no issue using it to further its own cause.
- choeger 6y agoThis does happen but is not necessary. Cases in point: Norway, France, Eastern Europe, Germany after WW2. The crucial difference seems to be that the winner must immediately invest in nation building or the defeated must be crushed.
- gonzo41 6y agoYea, firing the Iraqi Army after the 03 invasion was a small whoopsie.
- 082349872349872 6y agoCynically put, the impending Cold War gave more of an impetus for nation building mid-century than existed by the turn-of-the-century. Hitler in his bunker doesn't seem so crazy if he'd had cause (such as foreign intelligence reports, or incidents of separate negotiations?) to believe the Allies would have fallen out much sooner than they actually did, and of course someone in his position might've believed that Nazi Germany had been worth more as a wholesale bargain, than (as actually happened) picked up individual by individual at retail. As to commitment to nation building, the (premature?) end of it in the former CSA came relatively rapidly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
- specialist 6y agoNot guarding the border was another facepalm slap. Even supporters of Bush's Folly have to admit Rumsfield and crew biffed the execution.
- jcaldas 6y agoChechnya after the 1994-1996 war is also an excellent example.
- 082349872349872 6y agoIndeed: Kadyrov (the current Marcher Lord) ought to know a thing or two, having been supported by both anti-Kremlin and pro-Kremlin regimes at varying times.
- conistonwater 6y ago> Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event. This is just plain false. A nice book that I can recommend on the actual history of it is Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.
- jessaustin 6y agoAssume that most of us haven't read that book, or even if we have that we don't recall it perfectly. What specific information in it would lead us to agree with the blanket statement "this is just plain false"?
- js2 6y agoYou can start with the US and Britain intervening in Iran in the the late 1940s to protect oil interests and work your way forward from there. You could arguably go back to post-WWI with Britain, France and Russia arguing over the remains of the Ottoman empire (Sykes–Picot Agreement). The last century has been one interference after the next by Western powers and Russia in the Middle East: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement So to say that "most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event" (the US training the Mujahideen) ignores many significant events over the past hundred years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_the_Middle_East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_conflicts_in_th... At best, it's an overly broad claim.
- jessaustin 6y agoOK, we all agree that USA's military-capitalism policy has been enacted in many places for many years. Thread parent's actual point, that this is very harmful to human people, seems confirmed rather than contradicted.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago>The last century has been one interference after the next by Western powers and Russia in the Middle East The last two centuries, the interference was so common in the 19th century it inspired the name "The Great Game."
- arminiusreturns 6y ago>Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible. Most of the Islamic fundamentalism that the USA is fighting today can be traced back to that one event. I disagree, but with some context. If you just go back to the cold war, you would be correct, but in a longer time-frame context, I would posit instead it was mostly at the British backing of the Saud's that created the later environment exploited in the 80s and then again later. I recently read a book, sorry I can't remember the name right now, written by an AQ guy turned intel-asset who actually spent time inside the Afghan camps. He mentioned enough times for it to stick in my mind how the funding came from SA, and how the more powerful people in the groups (trainers, etc) were either from SA or Wahhabists. That sent me on a journey of reading up on SA that left me really feeling a lot of it was due to Britain wanting to maintain the tendrils of Empire, not taking into account the possibility of blowback later, or rather, finding it an acceptable price to pay. Mark Curtis wrote a book that I found most illuminating on the subject, "Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam": "As Britain withdrew its military forces from the Middle East in the late 1960s, Islamist forces such as the Saudi regime and, once again, the Muslim Brotherhood, were often seen as proxies to maintain British interests in the region, to continue to destabilise communist or nationalist regimes or as ‘muscle’ to bolster pro-British, right-wing governments. By the 1970s, Arab nationalism had been virtually defeated as a political force, partly thanks to Anglo–American opposition; it was largely replaced by the rising force of radical Islam, which London again often saw as a handy weapon to counter the remnants of secular nationalism and communism in key states such as Egypt and Jordan."..." Britain continued to see some of these groups as useful, principally as proxy guerilla forces in places as diverse as Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Libya; there,they were used either to help break up the Soviet Union and secure major oil interests or to fight nationalist regimes," ... "Whitehall not only tolerated but encouraged the development of ‘Londonistan’–the capital acting as a base and organising centre for numerous jihadist groups –even as this provided a de facto ‘green light’to that terrorism.I suggest that some elements, at least, in the British establishment may have allowed some Islamist groups to operate from London not only because they provided information to the security services but also because they were seen as useful to British foreign policy, notably in maintaining a politically divided Middle East –a long-standing goal of imperial and postwar planners –and as a lever to influence foreign governments’ policies."... "Churchill later wrote that 'my admiration for him [Ibn Saud] was deep, because of his unfailing loyalty to us'" Yes, as another commenter said, I can also recommend Ghost Wars as one of my favorite books on Afghanistan, and Steve Colls more recent work Directorate S is also extremely well written in the same vein.
- barry-cotter 6y agoYou are far too kind to the US military. Afghanistan was too tough a nut for the British long before the Americans showed up. Pastoralist herders with a country that’s mostly mountain is practically perfect for making ungovernable people. See the Caucasus, Balkans and upland Indochina for further examples. All the more so when they were swimming with guns already.
- specialist 6y agoNot being a smart ass: Ditto Switzerland? IIRC, Hitler didn't invade for similar reasons. A well armed citizenry. (And a convenient fence for all the spoils of war.) Historically, was Switzerland it's own thing? Did Napoleon, the Hapsburgs, misc Papacies, Franks and Normans, etc, march around those mountains?
- iguy 6y agoWould be interesting to know more, but as far as I know Switzerland (or the area) was never especially like this. I mean it was always mountainous, obviously, but the people were not so different from their neighbors. Cheese-makers who worried about having enough hay for the winter, not cattle-rustlers. The obvious west-european example would be Scotland. And the "solution" was more or less to deport the people to Ireland & replace them with sheep.
- Wildgoose 6y agoI think it was the people of the ungovernable borderlands between England and Scotland (both sides) that ended up being deported to Northern Ireland, (and of course the Scots originally came from Northern Ireland anyway). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debatable_Lands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debatable_Lands
- vondur 6y agoThe Hapsburgs indeed tried to take over Switzerland. It didn’t go well. The Holy Roman Empire copied the tactics of the Swiss and incorporated it into the Landsknechts of Germany.
- ardit33 6y agoThis is not true. After the Kosovo war, the KLA (Kosova Liberation Army), disbanded, and some of their leaders joined politics. Most just did what they used to do before the war: teachers, mechanics, drivers, engineers, nurses, students and so on... Same thing happened in many European countries after WW2 was over.
- newdude116 6y ago"Afganistan is probably the best example. It was never easy to govern, but after the US trained a guerilla resistance to the Soviet invasion it became impossible." No, the soviet had a simple rational. 1. Can we win the war? no 2. Can we stay forever? Yes 3. How much will it cost? Every year X Billion Rubles and X russian lifes. The US has the same outcome. I would also be careful label it a "soviet invasion". "The Amin government, having secured a treaty in December 1978 that allowed them to call on Soviet forces, repeatedly requested the introduction of troops in Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 1979. They requested Soviet troops to provide security and to assist in the fight against the mujaheddin rebels. After the killing of Soviet technicians in Herat by rioting mobs, the Soviet government sold several Mi-24 helicopters to the Afghan military, and increased the number of military advisers in the country to 3,000.[137] On April 14, 1979, the Afghan government requested that the USSR send 15 to 20 helicopters with their crews to Afghanistan, and on June 16, the Soviet government responded and sent a detachment of tanks, BMPs, and crews to guard the government in Kabul and to secure the Bagram and Shindand airfields. In response to this request, an airborne battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel A. Lomakin, arrived at the Bagram Air Base on July 7. They arrived without their combat gear, disguised as technical specialists. They were the personal bodyguards for General Secretary Taraki. The paratroopers were directly subordinate to the senior Soviet military advisor and did not interfere in Afghan politics. Several leading politicians at the time such as Alexei Kosygin and Andrei Gromyko were against intervention."