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It's a delusion of grandeur to think that Islamic fundamentalism owes its existence to a transient American action. American exceptionalism but from the Left.
by varjag 6y ago
It'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.
- varjag 6y agoMujahideen force was never near the level of the U.S. military in basic training, and they suffered heavy losses even against the conscript Soviet army. Still that gets you rather far if you are motivated and fighting a war of ambushes on home turf. If the US training was all it is hyped to be, surely the US-trained ANA could have rooted the Taliban by now, even without American help.
- 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.