YOUNG men with scarves wrapped tightly across their faces were rampaging through Kabul’s deserted streets last week, hunting down foreigners in hotels and aid offices in an explosion of hatred sparked by a traffic accident.
Shouting “Death to America” and clutching Kalashnikovs, they brandished the poster of an unlikely hero: Ahmed Shah Massoud, the assassinated anti-Taliban commander who in death has been transformed into the symbol of resistance to the US-backed government.
Massoud, scourge of the Soviet occupiers and spearhead of the war on the Taliban, was murdered on Osama Bin Laden’s orders by a bomb hidden in a television camera two days before the September 11 attacks on America in 2001.
With the help of Massoud’s forces, the Taliban were toppled, ushering in the democratic era. But now history has turned full circle. It is in Massoud’s name that today’s rioters are seeking to rid Afghanistan of “all foreign forces and non-Muslims”.
Military analysts describe last week’s unrest as the worst witnessed in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban. Yesterday the government blamed police for the disorder and sacked Kabul’s police chief and 85 other commanders.
Paul Barker, country director of Care International, showed The Sunday Times around the ruins of his office. “We haven’t seen anything like this before,” he said.
“It’s hard to foresee what this could mean, but what’s for sure is that Afghans are frustrated. They have no money, no jobs and security is getting worse throughout the country. International aid isn’t getting through to them.”
Afghan and international leaders alike praise Massoud, dubbed the “Lion of Panjshir”, as a moderate Muslim leader whose vision combined military brilliance with pragmatic political compromise.
It looks like Rumsfeld and Bush are committed to repeating all the mistakes of the Soviet forces during their occupation of Afghanistan.
The people of the Middle East do not deserve Democracy.
Every day young Americans loose their lives – making the ultimate sacrafice. All for a people who hate us to the very core of their beings…
Sure, we have our tiffs with the French… but all around the D-Day invasion beachs you’ll see memorials to Americans. There are scores of French towns that truly love Americans for liberating and fighting with them.
Think we’ll ever see anything like that in Afghanistan or Iraq??
What we don’t hear very much of these days is that the US encouraged, trained and armed Osama Bin Ladin and the Muslim organizations that became the Taliban because it preferred religious political leaders over secular leftists or pro-Soviet communists. Interestingly, in the eighties, the Israelis permitted Hamas to develop their organization in the occupied Palestinian territories because they saw them as the enemy of Arafat’s PLO, who were secular nationalists.
IMO, the moral of these stories is that the US has no business messing around in the very complex political and religious affairs of countries about which it knows virtually nothing. I don’t think things can get any worse in Iraq and Afghanistan if the Americans would simply get out before they kill even more non-combatants and do still more damage to the infrastructure that the people there need in order to live. It has become apparent that American armed forces are neither helping nor stabilizing those places. On the contrary, they are angering the vast majority of people who live in the Arab world, which can only lead to the growth of more anti-American terrorist cells.
Moe >>The people of the Middle East do not deserve Democracy.
You do realize that Afghanistan is not the Middle East. It is central Asia.
Anyway, a lot of locals — especially radicals — would agree with you.
Howard >>IMO, the moral of these stories is that the US has no business messing around in the very complex political and religious affairs of countries about which it knows virtually nothing
You got that right! Have you hear that rumor that Bush was not even aware of the different types of Muslim even on the eve of the invasion?
I am absolutely convinced that bin Laden INTENTIONALLY baited Bush and the USA into a war of attrition in Afghanistan.
He had seen what happened to the mighty USSR when it got bogged down there. It took ten years but the Afghanis beat ’em. They would have been willing to many more years than that.
Those guys consider this one of the great victories for Islam.
Iraq was a huge bonus since it is even a deeper mire.
You guys (US) have a big armament industry to maintain. Many of yours jobs depends on the instability in the rest of the world. So, why complain?