Don't look for heroes in Afghanistan (not the old kind, at least)

Tuesday, 15 January 2008

Joshua Grenzsund - The Campus Word

The US needs to lose its self-image as a gallant hero to make real progress in Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia.

A soldier—US Army Special Forces—rides on horseback under the Afghan sun amidst gunfire, explosions and falling enemy fighters. If you think back about six years you’ll remember those images from the news in late October of 2001. The US, attacked and threatened, was overtly sending troops, our country’s rugged Western heroes, to a ravaged and dangerous land to fight the “evil doers.”

But if you browse through your local video store or NetFlicks you’ll remember it was actually 13 years earlier, in May of 1988, that Sylvester Stalone acted out these same scenes in "Rambo III," fighting Soviet troops with his US muscles.

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, many in the US saw Afghanistan as the battle that ended the Cold War. Though US involvement was officially covert, there was a feeling that the US won the war. That embellishment prepared us to accept, or even cheer, the 2001 images of our soldiers on horseback. The imagined invincible Special Forces hero, John Rambo, who fought alongside the Mujahideen in 1988, had become the actual Special Forces fighting alongside the Northern Alliance in 2001. However this realization of cowboy bravado in Afghanistan has given way to another change.

Through the 1980s the US was interested in prolonging the guerrilla war with the Soviet military as part of its general Cold War strategy (and incidentally recently chronicled in the much-hyped film “Charlie Wilson’s War” starring Tom Hanks), but now the US military, along with the Afghan National Army and their NATO and ISAF partners, are on the receiving end of a similar guerrilla strategy on the same battlefields. Six years after the country of Afghanistan was “liberated” and “stabilized” there are increasing signs that the US has started playing the same imperial role the Soviets did in the '80s. They don’t ride horseback any more, but they try the same balance of infrastructure rebuilding and large scale human hunting that failed the Soviets.

The pressure and trials of the extended conflict neared their climax in the seventh year of Soviet Union occupation and ultimately forced their withdrawal. Though Soviet tactics were admittedly more brutal, there are many similarities in the detentions and raids of the ‘80s and the ‘00s that arguably create more resistance to an occupying force than they resolve. No one can say for sure, at this point, that the US and its Western allies will fail to achieve the stated goal of fostering a stable democracy in Afghanistan, but given history, the outlook is less than encouraging.

One major factor that leads to this assessment is the Afghan peoples’ defiance of foreign influence. Among the Afghan population the Pashtun, those who traditionally live along the Afghan-Pakistan border, have a reputation of being defiant and proud fighters, and this reputation is well supported by anecdotal evidence. While I was in Afghanistan in 2004 I met several Pashtun men who had faced detention and interrogation not only by the Soviets in the 1980s, but also now, by US forces. These men were often unfazed, emboldened, and bragged of their ability to defeat transient superpowers.

But an even more ominous aspect of the situation is that the US now occupies Soviet-built airfields as its main bases in Afghanistan. In a Hollywood sense, we know the heroes of the Afghan-Soviet war were the ones who attacked these bases, not maneuvered from within them. And in a political sense, one only need imagine the challenge the US would feel if Russia occupied similar positions not too far from our borders. From 2001 until late 2005 the US also used a former Soviet airfield at Karshi-Khanabad in Uzbekistan. However, after Uzbek President Islam Karimov refused to allow a full investigation of the May 2005 massacre in Andijan and faced US criticism, Karimov demonstrated a shift away from ties with the West by ordering the US to vacate the airfield.

Karimov is a holdover from Soviet leadership who shows no signs of letting go of his 16 year “democratic” rule and his continued control is evidence of a longing for Soviet-style government and influence. Russia, with President Vladimir Putin at its helm, certainly welcomes this sort of hold-over cohesion within former Soviet territories.

While the US exudes ambivalence about its desires of influence in Central Asia while claiming to support Afghanistan’s sovereignty, Russia is more open about its intentions. While it is now the world’s tenth largest economy, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported in December on Russia’s intentions to “be among the world's top five most-developed countries” by 2020. Such a move will not come through bashfulness or allowing US influence into former Soviet territories. It will be accomplished by a consolidation of power in Russia and within its former spheres of influence, focused greatly on fossil fuel resources.

A marked recent development that underlines the willingness to follow through on this is the parallel between Putin’s choice for Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, and the newly appointed Kyrgyz Prime Minister, Igor Chudinov. Medvedev ,42, served as chairman of Gazprom, and First Deputy Prime Minister before becoming Putin’s candidate. Chudinov, 46, is an ethnic Russian who does not speak Kyrgyz and was a former director-general of Kyrgyzgaz.

Though Putin’s announcement about Medvedev has received world-wide press coverage and RFE/RL and several Russian language news outlets have reported on Chudinov, there has been little mention, so far, of how Chudinov may play into Russia’s attempts at a wider economic reconsolidation. The placement of these young men with experience in the petrol sector is not a coincidence when viewed with Russia’s goals by 2020 and beyond.

The US presence in Afghanistan and its desire to spread western-style and western-friendly governments in Central Asia run counter to Russia’s interests and will meet with increasingly strong overt and covert resistance. The US has to come to terms that they are no longer the dashing heroic liberators on horseback in Afghanistan, but rather occupiers in the shadow of a strengthening Russia, facing mountain fighters who have driven out every occupying force in history.

2007 www.thecampusword.com