Putting the wolf in charge of the henhouse

An article in today's Guardian claims that the Taliban was far from 
the battle-hardened machine that was originally claimed. Indeed, that 
perception was reminiscent of how many of us saw the Iraqi army prior 
to engagement with the USA in Kuwait. Supposedly, the Iraqi army had 
toughened itself fighting with Iran and would be the greatest foe the 
USA had faced since Nazi Germany. All this, needless to say, is 
preposterous when you stop and analyze these societies from a 
materialist standpoint. Primitive and peripheral economies do not 
yield advanced military capabilities. In a revolutionary civil war, 
such conditions can be overcome partially, but Afghanistan and Iraq 
do not qualify. Here's what the Guardian says:

>>While Franks and his British and American colleagues were reading 
alarming assessments of the Taliban's fighting capabilities in the 
media, and being bombarded with pessimistic warnings about the folly 
of fighting a war in Afghanistan, the intelligence assessments they 
were receiving painted a different picture. 

Among these was a key document, prepared for the US Army War College 
Quarterly by Ali Jalali, the chief of the Farsi Service of the Voice 
of America, and a former colonel in the Afghan army and military 
adviser in the Afghan resistance following the Soviet invasion. 

According to Jalali, the Taliban, far from being a formidable and 
tenacious fighting force backed by thousands of fanatical 'foreign 
fighters', was a fragile organisation, badly led and equipped, 
enjoying questionable loyalty among many of its units. 

What Franks and his colleagues were being told about the military 
leadership of the Taliban was equally good news. Senior positions 
were held exclusively by religious figures - few if any of whom had 
former Afghan officers even as advisers. Intelligence agents also 
told Franks that the numbers of allegedly fanatical foreign fighters 
concentrated in the '55th Brigade', far from tallying thousands as 
they were being told, could in reality be counted in the 
mid-hundreds.<<

Full: http://www.observer.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,596830,00.html

---

Meanwhile, the media reports that the Northern Alliance is ordering 
British troops to clear out of Kabul. They have the surprising notion 
that Afghanistan belongs to them. Where could they possibly have 
gotten such an idea. Afghanistan belongs to imperialism, of course. 
Leftwing apologists for imperialism like Christopher Hitchens have 
painted this military adventure as the noblest act of Western 
Civilization since allied troops liberated Auschwitz. Probably, based 
on John Burns 1997 Pulitzer Prize winning articles, the last instance 
of a humanitarian intervention in the region occurred when the 
Taliban drove the warlords out of the country. We have simply 
returned things to the status quo ante and have put the wolves back 
in charge of the henhouse, as Malcolm X would put it:

>>Britain last night signalled its grave concern about the dangers 
facing coalition forces in Afghanistan as heavily armed warring 
factions demanded that foreign troops 'get off our sovereign soil'. 
In a series of developments which showed that the war in Afghanistan 
was in danger of slipping into diplomatic and military chaos, Geoff 
Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, told The Observer that the 
situation on the ground was 'pretty grim' and that a contingent of 
6,000 British troops may now not be deployed in Kabul. 

As fighting continued throughout parts of the country still under the 
Taliban's control, Hoon also indicated that the group of 100 troops, 
including members of the Special Boat Squadron, already in the 
capital could be pulled out as tribal warlords began carving up the 
country, demanding bribes from locals, killing captured Taliban 
soldiers and looting property from civilians. 

'It sounds pretty dangerous,' Hoon said in an interview with The 
Observer . 'If they have completed their work we will pull them out. 
We are not keeping them there for the sake of it.<< 

Full: 
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,596981,00.html

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 11/18/2001

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