Posted on 09/30/2001 10:20:10 AM PDT by branicap
"In my opinion, the reaction by the international alliance will be soon," Abdullah Abdullah, the foreign minister for the Northern Alliance, said at a news conference in Tajikistan, speaking in English. "We have offered our willingness to cooperate."The NA's foreign minister calls himself Abdullah Abdullah. Hehe.
The first question s what is "our interest". Interest of U.S. taxpayer, interest of CFR or what?
Some of the benefits:
-Create lasting cancer in the underbelly of Europe that will harm Europe in the long run.
-find a place to relocate U.S. forces from Germany after 1992
-token of appreciation to muslim regimes of the Middle East who follow U.S. line
-training ground for similar operations in Chechiya and China
The cost:
Terrorists get access to the latest U.S. weaponry, intel and know-how. That makes them difficult to fight, because "us vs. them" cold war mentality still prevailing in U.S. (just one example: while bin laden's terrorist manual teaches muslim terrorists how to blend in, U.S. shows clear lack of understanding and sheer stupidity by using words "crusade" and "indeffinite justice").
Terrorists, through first-hand experience learn how U.S. intel works, thinks and are able to exploit it s ihnerent shortcommings
U.S. operatives who trained terrorists are security risk, prone to blackmail due to child prostitution, drugs and all other imaginable vices provided by their terrorist trainees.
I don’t know how old you are so I don’t know if you remember the communist threat perceived or otherwise.
On this very site today I read many threads talking about Islam and the threat it represents to us.
The West is seen as soft too politically correct, not up to the fight, too easily divided while Islam is seen as strong dynamic, almost monolithic.
Well everything being said about the Islamic threat today is what was said about the Communist threat.
I accepted it as fact that the Soviets would invade and would probably win because we in the West were soft and they were hard disciplined, better armed and motivated to hate us and want to destroy us.
As a stay behind op I swore I would kill myself rather than be a POW of the soviets a fate seen as worse than death.
The Soviet Union was not going to collapse well not from where I was standing in 1983/84, and it was accepted that war would break out in 1985, so against a cruel aggressive powerful enemy any tactics were acceptable, this included the arming of the afghans, and not only the Afghans we fought a War with the Soviets all over the world by proxy.
Today things are different the Soviets never invaded, in fact they collapsed from within, there are many lessons we can take from that era.
If we truly want to eliminate the Islamic threat, more effort should be out in into creating a workable Arab democracy, Islam or the Arab people should not be demonised when the enemy is the corrupt leadership, who exert control using a mixture of threats and lies.
We made many mistakes in the 80s, I hope we don’t recreate them in the beginning of the 21 Century.
Tony
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