A Dark Anniversary in Afghanistan

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.afgha.com/?af=article&sid=47440

Moscow Times.com
Friday, December 31, 2004

Jean MacKenzie

Amid the bells and baubles of the holiday season, few in the West will pause to mark one of the year's darker anniversaries. Twenty-five years ago this month, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, opening a Pandora's box whose effluvia include Osama bin Laden and leader of the Taliban Mullah Omar.

Afghanistan has largely slipped from the collective consciousness since the U.S. bombing of 2001, which toppled the Taliban and brought a precarious, internationally enforced peace. But, as centuries of history have shown, it is dangerous to underestimate this turbulent land, whose mountains have swallowed the ambitions of more than one great power.

The events leading up to the Christmas attack were as banal as they were brutal: In April 1978, Afghan President Mohammed Daoud, along with his entire family, was murdered in a military coup. Sympathy for the martyred Daoud can be tempered by the fact that he had gained power by throwing his cousin, King Zahir Shah, off the throne five years earlier.

Daoud was replaced by Noor Mohammed Taraki, a Moscow-friendly thug representing the more radical wing of the Afghan Communist Party. Taraki instituted a series of highly unpopular reforms that provoked rebellion and led to his murder in September 1979. Next at bat was the more moderate, if largely ineffectual communist, Hafizullah Amin. The hapless Amin had just three months to enjoy his preeminence, before he, in turn, fell to a Soviet-orchestrated coup.

Babrak Karmal as head of state. On the surface a short, successful operation, but it would take another 10 bloody years before the Soviets admitted defeat. snip

By the time the last Soviet tank had slunk back up the Salang Highway toward Russia in 1989, millions of Afghans were dead and half the population displaced. More than 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed, countless more injured. The Soviet Union itself would crumble in just two years. The United States, having aided in the humiliation of its Cold War rival, grew bored with the mujahedin, until the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers brought Afghanistan back onto center stage. snip

But Afghanistan is no more likely to yield to its new conquerors than it was to the old.

more

[Cooley Hurd]

1. The genus of a monster...

We made Osama and the caves he hid in (until late 2001), all to defeat an empire that was on its way out, anyway.

That's what happens when you let Repugs run things...:thumbsdown: