That after 16 years of counterinsurgency, we resorted to
deploying the largest conventional bomb in our inventory to kill only
36 militants begs a question.
How much more of Afghanistan might we have to flatten to defeat an adversary
that doesn’t even have an air force? It’s an ominous question. It has come up
before.
Mohammed
Najibulah holds a certain world record, launching 1,700 to
2,000 SCUD missiles between
1988 and 1992, following the withdrawal of Soviet 40th Army from Afghanistan.
When the Soviets began extracting their army from the Democratic Republic of
Afghanistan (DRA) in 1986, they transferred power to Najibulah’s
National Reconciliation government. Afghanistan would become an “Islamic state”
rather than Marxist. Regardless, it was the Soviet Army that still held
everything together. As the Soviets left, counterinsurgency degenerated into
civil war. To everyone’s’ surprise, the Afghan National Defense Force (army)
actually could fight rather well once the Mujahedeen became less accommodating
to defectors. More important, however, were continued Soviet air
assistance and three SCUD missile batteries. The collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991 prevented resupply. The DRA fell shortly after. The CIA warned that the new government would be worse
than Najibulah’s.
America
facilitated all this by providing the Mujahedeen with Stinger Missiles.
The Soviets had actually begun to win in 1984, shifting to innovative
small-unit tactics, air assault, and strategic bombing. But it was still a
bankrupt war, the projected cost
exceeding anything
Afghanistan had to offer. And then, there would be the mess left behind. At the
time, the USSR bordered on Afghanistan. In the end, the end of the USSR was
the end of the DRA and the war in Afghanistan was the end of the USSR.
General
Boris Gromov marched the
Soviet 40th out of Afghanistan in 1989. He left prophetic messages to the West
and NATO. “In fact, we [the Soviet Union] were the first to defend Western
civilization against the attacks of Muslim fanatics. No one thanked us.’
It
was a victory for us, to be sure. The Soviets were our enemy. We paid them back
for Vietnam. The Cold War and the threat of mutually assured nuclear
destruction finally came to an end. But the Mujahedeen never were the “freedom
fighters” as so often portrayed in American propaganda. Some of
them became the Taliban who perpetrated 9/11. Victory has unintended
consequences.
Today, the Islamic State and its
brothers in arms such as
Ahrar ash-Sham and an-Nusra, started as proxy fighters for foreign powers,
mostly America and Turkey, fighting Bassar Assad. Hizb’allah and Hamas are on
the other side.
Proxy
wars gone sour has become a new theme in the 21st Century.
Between
the Red Lines of Obama and Trump lies an investigation of the alleged Syrian sarin attack at
Gouhta in 2013. Chemical
analysis of samples taken on
site didn’t match Syrian army stockpiles. MB-14 rocket fragments recovered from
the site didn’t match Syrian Army inventory or even standard issue. Some
fragments appeared to have been moved after detonation. It began to appear that
the Russians were right. The rebels had staged
a false flag, on the eve of peace
talks, probably to bolster their bargaining position.
Evidence of a supply system feeding al Qaeda
labs in Syria through Turkey for the purpose of false flags also emerged.
Obama
backed away from his red line. He’d shot his mouth off too soon. Putin offered
him a way out before he did something really stupid and the compliant media
spun it all as a triumph of statesmanship. The Russians would supervise Assad’s
chemical disarmament. They probably did. The last thing either wanted would be
another close call.
Naturally,
Turkey’s President Erdogan is very pleased with Trump’s attack onShayrat
airfield. It’s exactly what Erdogen wanted Obama to do, but paralysis by
analysis stole the show. As it turns out, our establishment interventionist
intelligence agencies were frustrated by
Obama’s dithering. That they’re suddenly ecstatic about Trump, a man they
once considered a menace to democracy, says a lot. But perhaps this is not
good.
Then,
there is the hysterical Jingoist media. The “new sheriff in town”: testimonials by authentic Syrian refugees!
Americans -- win our war in Syria so we can go home! There’s something
wrong with that. Few rebellions have ever succeeded without foreign assistance.
Both sides seek allies in war. Ideology will become expendable in pursuit of
victory.
Look
at video footage, purported to be on the site of the latest Khan Sheikoun
attack. They present anomalies similar to the Ghouta attack in 2013. Here, a
doctor treats
a sarin victim without
protective gear. A helper kisses the contaminated baby. There is more if
one looks with a cynical eye. All the “conclusive proof” propagated by the
media is really circumstantial. It doesn’t really tell us much of anything that
we didn’t already know. There has been yet no formal investigation
-- presuming, of course, such an investigation wouldn’t be biased to
begin with. The problem here is that our intelligence people seem to feel
entitled to make policy rather than just support it. Classified information is
a cagey way to do it.
Did
Trump make a big mistake? No, not really. He exposed Susan Rice as coarchitect
of the failed Assad chemical disarmament. He discredited the Trump-Putin
conspiracy theory regarding the election. This is a big win against the enemy
within, who would like nothing better than to relive those halcyon days of
their Vietnam protests.
Make
no mistake. Whatever we do in the Middle East, the Council for American Islamic
Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, current Bill Ayers affiliates, and other
Democrat allies will make it all go sour. It’ll end another in Iraq War blame
game. We cannot fight the Jihad without first defeating Democrats as well as
RINOs like Lindsay Graham and John McCain as well as all the foreign lobbying
groups which have an agenda of their own.
U.S.
policy toward Russia actually remains ambivalent. The Russians play
brinkmanship, policy stated in action. So does Trump. Here, we can only hope
that if America’s war on terror escalated into war with Russia, the one that we
avoided during the Cold War, a war from which Al Qaeda could emerge the winner
in a devastated Western world.
There
is, of course, a certain amount of speculation here. But even if it’s wrong in
some places, all the powers are still in the same boat of frustration sailing
into global chaos of their own making. In the new century, proxy wars are no
longer an option. Proxy fighters have become much more sophisticated. They’ve
established themselves as polities that can not only resist conventional armies
but can manipulate them and even bring down the very governments that sponsor
them. The great powers need to settle their disputes between themselves rather
than by reducing entire subcontinents to no man’s land. They need to destroy
the menace that they created before it destroys them. Resorting to things like
SCUDs, MOAB or sarin -- presuming Assad did use it at Kahn Sheikuon --
indicates that we are running out of time. We are in a phase of imperial overkill,
a last gamble of violence against a situation that had gotten out of control.
This global chaos is the fault of neocon interventions and Obama appeasement.
Whether Trump can pull order out of disorder remains to be seen. He’s on the
right path with China concerning North Korea. Iran is the rogue nuclear
aspirant in the Middle East. Nuclear weapons are the game changers.
This
may be giving credit for more scheming than any of these characters are
actually capable of, the stuff of conspiracy theory. However, there is a test
for this one. Reports of collateral damage and casualties will follow the MOAB
bombing and use of similar weapons. There will be more false flag attacks and
some may even use poison gas again. Our enemies will play our sentimentality,
which they regard as simply a weakness. Jihadis don’t mind dying for their
cause.
Ultimately,
and unfortunately, conspiracy theory is the way for the voters to run our
republic when so much of the required information is classified. This is
inevitable in protracted wars.
We
can only hope that Dr. Sebastian Gorka is correct, that the new Trump policy
is neither neocon interventionist nor Obama appeasement. Insisting upon an
“evil” in the world is not reassuring, however. This is the stuff of
intervention and empire. But, it may also be a just a ploy to unite the less informed
masses to a new policy. We have seated a new player in the White House, but the
game remains the same as it’s always been.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/04/imperial_obsession_and_the_war_on_terror.html