After nearly 20 years, the U.S. military left Bagram Airfield, the epicenter of its war to oust the Taliban and hunt down the al-Qaida perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, two U.S. officials said Friday.
...
20 years of latest hot war but almost 40 years span covers full overt/proxy US military involvement there. Media experts' customary analyses on the return for
lost tens of thousands of American lives/limbs in blood & $Trillions in treasure will be splashed across media for a week or so after marking the historic milestone of leaving behind about a 1000 US troops (plus few thousand American contractors) but no guarantee if any lasting lessons will be learnt.
Afghanistan: Remembering the Long, Long War We Would Rather Forget
A now declassified memorandum that National Security Advisor
Zbigniew Brzezinski sent to
Carter on Dec. 26 offers a rare historical example in which it is possible to trace the origins of major consequences to a single document. In it, Brzezinski, the anti-Soviet son of a Polish diplomat, misused history by claiming that if Moscow succeeded “the age-long dream of direct access to the Indian Ocean will have been fulfilled.” The fall of the Shah of Iran in January had enflamed the Middle East into what Brzezinski termed an “arc of crisis;” Carter was facing a tough reelection challenge from Republican front-runner Ronald Reagan and badly needed to reverse the perception that his foreign policy was failing. The President began to hyperbolize that Moscow’s aggression in Afghanistan “would threaten the security of all nations.”
Determined to deliver the Soviet Union its own Vietnam, Brzezinski advised the president that it was essential that the Afghan resistance continue. Carter approved a covert action finding that increased the program, code-named Operation Cyclone, to $50 million. He took to calling the
mujahedeen “Freedom Fighters” (a label that
Ronald Reagan and Charlie Wilson later appropriated as they poured support into the program). Brzezinski outlined four courses of action in the Dec. 26 memo, each of which Carter approved. They would have enduring and fateful consequences.
In Afghanistan, the purposes of Saudi Arabia, jihad against the atheistic foreign invader, and the United States, the Cold War against the Soviet Union, overlapped. With the Inter-Services Intelligence as executive agent, this intersection brought the most radicalized Islamists among the Afghan mujahedeen into association with the Afghan Arabs, including
Osama bin Laden.
Defeat of the Soviet superpower in Afghanistan was the inspiration for 9/11, which bin Laden organized from sanctuary the Taliban gave al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Most of the attackers were Saudi, while the Wahhabi program thrives throughout the Muslim world today. The Afghan Arabs were also the model for the foreign fighters who flowed to Iraq and Syria, first under al-Qaeda in Iraq and then under the self-proclaimed Islamic State. No one responsible for Operation Cyclone realized at the time they were sowing the wind.
How A Quest To Save Soviet Jews Changed The World
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman speaks at an award ceremony for immigrant scientists at Tel Aviv University on Oct. 26. Lieberman is one of the Soviet Jewish emigres who moved to Israel.
On Dec. 12, 1987, a quarter-million people gathered in Washington, D.C., on the eve of a historic summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. They came from all over the country to a rally aimed at freeing Jews in what was then the Soviet Union.
Among the speakers was George H.W. Bush, who was vice president at the time. In his speech, he echoed the words of Reagan at the Berlin Wall, "Mr. Gorbachev," he said, "Let these people go. Let them go."
Author Gal Beckerman explores that moment, and that movement, in his new book
When They Come For Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry.
He tells NPR's Guy Raz that the day after the rally, Reagan stood with Gorbachev in the Oval Office and asked if he'd seen footage of the demonstration.
"Gorbachev kind of shook it off, but it was clear this sent a very strong message," Beckerman says.
A History Of Persecution
Jews had been persecuted in the Soviet Union through much of the 20th century. In 1970s Moscow, a city with hundreds of thousands of Jews, there was only one synagogue. Beckerman says there was no way to become a rabbi or even eat kosher food.
Desperate To Flee
While Soviet Jews could apply to leave the country, the vast majority were denied. They became known as "refuseniks" and were often unable to get a job.
"You became almost a pariah inside of Soviet society and it led to a whole series of bad things that could happen to you," he says. "You'd lose your job, but then it was illegal to be without a job -- you would be accused of parasitism. And then you suddenly had people who were former world renowned scientists working as stokers, shoveling coal or elevator operators, because the government would assign you to a job."
Beckerman says many of those who were desperate to flee were Zionists -- they wanted to go to Israel. In the summer of 1970, a group from Latvia was determined to make it there any way they could.
They decided to hijack a plane.
The group found a 12-seater scheduled to fly to Sweden. They planned to take over during a stopover in Finland.
But the plan never came to fruition. The KGB tackled and arrested some of the group on the tarmac the day they planned to hijack the plane.
"Just in the Soviet Union, if you had two people involved in anything, you could be sure that one of them was somehow talking to the KGB," Beckerman says.
However, he says, the group wrote a sort of "suicide note."
"They wanted to make sure that if they were caught or killed in the process, the world would know somehow why they did this. The Soviets couldn't just paint them as criminals who were trying to hijack a plane."
After the arrest, the Soviets seized the opportunity to paint the Latvians as religious extremists. The knew "they could put on a very large show trial and show the world in fact, that these were not these idealistic Zionists that they said they were, but Zionism was really a mask for 'hooliganism," Beckerman says.
And the end of a swift trial, the judge sentenced the group's two leaders to death. Beckerman says the verdict reverberated across the world.
The Effect On U.S. Policy
As the movement gained more prominence, it began to influence the way the United States formulated its foreign policy. At the forefront of the shift was a senator for Washington state -- Henry "Scoop" Jackson.
Beckerman says Jackson's interest in the movement was triggered in August 1972 when the Soviets started to let out some Jews, but was requiring them to pay a "diploma tax" for education they had received from the Soviet state. This bothered Jackson especially because, at the same time, they were involved with the U.S. in trade talks and seeking so-called "preferred trading status."
"Henry Jackson said, 'You know what, no. If they want these things -- these goodies from the U.S. -- they have to do something as well. And what we want from them in exchange is for them to change something about their internal policy that's making Soviet Jews in particular suffer,' " Beckerman says.
Over the next decade, those sentiments had a profound influence on American foreign policy.
"Every time Gorbachev would walk into meeting with Reagan by the mid-'80s, the first thing Reagan would do -- and we see this in memoirs and oral histories -- is Reagan would pull out a piece of paper with names of Soviet Jews who had been refused visas or had been somehow sent to prison for their activism and he said, 'Well if you want to talk, first we have to discuss these names,'" Beckerman says.
Eventually emigration restrictions eased and Soviet Jews were allowed to leave in larger numbers. Among those who left are Avigdor Lieberman, now Israel's foreign minister, and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.
Jihad with US-Arms – The Soviet–Afghan War
The moment the Soviet Union inserted itself in the Afghan Civil War, they started a domino-like spiral of violence that continues even to this day nearly 40 years later. On one side of the situation, the Soviets were never able to assert and gain control over the huge country.
On the other side of the problem, the United States, via CIA operatives and neighboring Arab countries, supported guerrilla fighters by delivering arms to support their resistance efforts.
Naming themselves the Mujahideen, the resistance fighting militias considered themselves embroiled in a Holy War against the invading communist infidels. Even after the Red Army pulled out of the country Afghanistan remained in a continued state of chaos.
The Taliban rose to and seized power in the war-torn nation. Following the events of 9/11 NATO forces invaded the embattled country making roughly the same mistakes the Russians did a generation earlier.
The Soviet–Afghan War lasted nearly a decade from December 1979 to February 1989. The Mujahideen resistance fighters fought a war of attrition against the Soviet Army and allied Afghan forces. In all, approximately 850,000 to 1.5 million civilians were killed over the decade long conflict and millions of other Afghans were forced to flee their homeland as refugees. Most resettled in Pakistan or Iran.
warhistoryonline.com/featured/jihad-with-us-arms-the-soviet-afghanwar.html
1980s: Reagan's MAGA Revolution
USA prints extremist textbooks to radicalize Afghan children
"Every time Gorbachev would walk into meeting with Reagan by the mid-'80s, the first thing Reagan would do -- and we see this in memoirs and oral histories -- is Reagan would pull out a piece of paper with names of Soviet Jews who had been refused visas or had been somehow sent to prison for their activism and he said, 'Well if you want to talk, first we have to discuss these names,'" Beckerman says.
The former Soviet citizens who flooded into Israel decades ago have changed the country's demographics.
The Soviet–Afghan War lasted nearly a decade from December 1979 to February 1989.
The Mujahideen resistance fighters fought a war of attrition against the Soviet Army and allied Afghan forces. In all, approximately 850,000 to 1.5 million civilians were killed over the decade long conflict and millions of other Afghans were forced to flee their homeland as refugees.
Related
Reckless Putin: "US nurtured Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden, supported terrorists in Chechnya"
The Immorality of Leaving Iraq and Afghanistan
By Dennis Prager
https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/...dennis-prager/
From:
Biden says no more questions on Afghanistan, wants to ‘talk about happy things’
July 2, 2021
