- (january 2010)
Why the USA is not the Soviet Union.
The war in Afghanistan is not going well for the USA, and several experts
(including former Soviet generals) are comparing the USA military campaign in
Afghanistan with the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan that ended with
a Soviet retreat and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However badly the war has been managed by the Bush administration, the USA is not the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was fighting a national uprising supported by virtually every
ethnic group and social class.
The USA is fighting a rebellion by a section of the Pashtun ethnic group, which
constitutes 38% of Afghanistan's population. That section (which is not even
close to 100% of Pashtuns) mainly includes the Pashtuns of the lower classes
who live near the border with Pakistan.
Kabul has a majority of Pashtuns, and certainly many of them help the Taliban
stage terrorist attacks inside the city, but every poll has shown that the
number of people who think favorably of the Taliban is very low. The second
largest city, Herat, is not Pashtun. Kandahar is the only major city where
the Pashtun insurgency thrives.
The other ethnic groups of Afghanistan are: Tajik 25%, Hazara 19%, Uzbek 6%.
If 100% of Pashtuns joined the Taliban, it would become a civil war within
Afghanistan because the other ethnic groups never sympathyzed with the Taliban
(the "Northern Alliance" that eventually defeated the Taliban was precisely
an alliance of such groups).
Right now the war is not a civil war within Afghani groups but a war by
the USA (and the Afghani government for what it matters) against the Taliban.
The Soviet Union was facing a general insurrection by all ethnic groups against
its occupation.
Last but not least, mujaheddin that were fighting the Soviet Union had a
local and a global ally: Pakistan and the USA. The latter was a superpower.
There is no local ally supporting the Taliban (other than a few officials in
the Pakistani secret services) and there is no superpower providing the
Taliban with weapons, training and intelligence.
Marc Sageman has
widely publicized his own anti-Soviet activities in Afghanistan when he
worked for the CIA: today there is no equivalent campaign carried out by a
superpower against the USA invasion of Afghanistan.
That said, there are indeed similarities, the main one being the staggering
number of innocent civilians that are killed by the occupation forces.
See my article Losing in Afghanistan, after losing in Iraq.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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