From: MaxPlumm@aol.com
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 01:13:29 MST
Amara responded to Matus:
"For me, it takes too much energy to talk about that
here, fighting against narrow-minded views and I see little interest
with these people to look into it further and study the sources"
So instead, you would simply label those with a differing opinion with
descriptions that one could just as easily use to describe your position?
"My personality doesn't relish fighting in general, and my hands
don't have the typing ability, and it is not worth my time in general.
I see too many knee-jerk responses here. The answer is to set up
kill-files, but I have the same psychological blocks with using
kill-files as those discussed by Emlyn."
I cannot hope to judge all of the posts you refer to here, not knowing all of
the many that you have no doubt read. However, in terms of Matus's response
to you, it is simply not appropriate. He brought up legitimate concerns with
your position on the Afghan War, to which you responded quite rudely that he
should "read some history" and that you would not "read or respond to this
thread anymore". If that is not a "knee-jerk response", I don't know what is.
"The title of the message is of course, referring to what the Afghan
people called the invasion of the Soviets in 1979. How many millions
disappeared? Nobody knows."
Strange how that is always a feature of Communist governments.
"By the crudest estimates, some 10 million
Afghans by 1986 no longer existed and a generation of Afghans mostly
gone (dead, in prisons, in refugee camps, escaped to the west). The
largest population of refugees in the 1980s were the Afghan
population. The world was very silent during this time."
Hardly unique, unfortunately, especially during that era. The world was
equally silent about the hell inflicted on the peoples of Indochina when the
Communist "peace" came in 1975.
"Please read some history and please talk to some Afghan refugees
from that time. There is no better source than the people who were
actually there."
"A history note:
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The Afghans fought
them with little help, surprisingly successively for a large
part of that war. Please look to Soviet sources or talk to Russians
for how difficult of a time the Soviets were having."
This is simply not the case. Perhaps it is inspiring for people to believe
that tyranny was abated with only sticks and rocks, but that is at best
wishful thinking. The United States, China, and Israel provided crucial arms
to the rebels throughout the war. I would suggest that it is you who should
read further on this topic. To start, here is an excerpt from James Mann's
About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship With China, from
Nixon to Clinton. p. 136
"Nothing could better symbolize the depth of the intelligence cooperation
between America and China in the 1980's than the Afghan Mules.
After the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the United States launched its
biggest covert intelligence operation since World War II, aimed at supporting
the moujeheddin rebels in their guerrilla war against the Soviet forces. The
CIA, working closely with Pakistan's intelligence service, rushed to arm,
train and support the Afghan resistance.
China was a partner in these clandestine operations. Starting with CIA
Director Stansfield Turner's visit to Beijing in late 1980, American and
Chinese intelligence agencies had established a formal working relationship.
China, like the United States, was happy to see the Soviet Union bogged down
in a protracted war, one that might teach Moscow the dangers of trying to
expand its power in Asia.
One of the main logistical problems for the moujeheddin was finding ways to
distribute arms and ammunition to its fighting units. Soviet forces
controlled the roads and the air. For resupply, the Afghan rebels relied on
pack animals, moving overland at night. As the fighting in Afghanistan
intensified, the moujeheddin discovered that there simply weren't enough
four-legged animals inside the country to support their operations. The
rebels desperately needed mules.
Enter America and China. The CIA studied briefly the possibility of
transporting mules from the United States to Afghanistan, but finally decided
that the idea wouldn't work; transportation was expensive, and American mules
weren't sturdy enough. Instead, the CIA turned to its Chinese partners and
agreed to buy thousands of Chinese mules. Chinese intelligence officials
arranged to have the mules bred inside China and then marched along the
Karakoram Highway, the route of the old Silk Road, from Xinjiang Province in
far western China into Pakistan. There, the mules were laden with mortars,
machine guns, rocket launchers, and other guns and ammunition and sent on
another journey into Afghanistan.
While the mules were the symbol of the Sino-American intelligence cooperation
on Afghanistan, arms were the substance of it. Chinese intelligence supplied
many of the weapons used by the moujeheddin, under a similar agreement with
the CIA: The United States paid the costs, and China supplied the goods."
He continues on p. 137:
"Furthermore, the Chinese arms enabled the CIA to maintain the fiction that
the United States was not supplying the Afghan resistance. Through the first
half of the 1980s, it was official American policy to make sure that the
weapons used by the moujeheddin came from Communist countries, so that the
Soviet Union could not accuse the United States of direct involvement in the
war.
The CIA obtained some of the arms it needed for Afghanistan from Egypt, which
had stocks of Soviet-built weaponry. In addition, the agency found that
Israel was happy to sell some of the Soviet-made weapons it had captured
during the war in Lebanon; the Afghan moujeheddin didn't realize that their
jihad against the Soviet forces was being fought with the indirect help of
the Israelis.
Despite these other sources of supply, however, the overwhelming share of the
CIA's arms purchases for Afghanistan, particularly during the early stages of
the war, came from China. At the Pakistani port of Karachi, Chinese ships
unloaded cargoes of small arms, assault rifles, mines, anti-tank and
anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers and 107 mm rockets. Mohammed Yousaf, the
general who headed Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate
operations to supply the moujeheddin, estimated that the Afghan resistance
received 10,000 tons of weapons in 1983. The arms supplies increased year by
year to a level of 65,000 tons n 1987, with most of the shipments coming from
China, Yousaf later wrote. By some estimates, China made $100 million a year
through its weapons sales to the CIA."
As you noted Amara, who better to tell the tale than those who lived it?
"The U.S weapons to the Afghan fighters were not until some
7 or 8 years later."
It is true that American weapons were not given to the Afghan rebels until
relatively late in the war, but the US had been arming the moujeheddin from
the very start.
"We all know how that turned out, don't we?"
Yes we do, the Soviet Union was bogged down and did not achieve its goal of
expanding its empire into Afghanistan.
"Oh yes, it's lovely to have two superpowers using an innocent
people for their political goals."
It's even lovelier when someone suggests, as you seem to be doing here, that
the goals and moral validity of the United States and the Soviet Union were
of equal merit.
"I will stop responding to and reading this thread, now."
If it is your general policy to make hit and run attacks, as you did on
Matus, without waiting to have your position debated, then that is fine. But
I feel that you are ultimately doing yourself a disservice to wrap yourself
in a blanket of complete self-assurance on these complex matters.
Regards,
Max Plumm
"Don't talk to me about socialism. What we have, we hold."
-Leonid Brezhnev
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