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Thread
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What secrets lurk in the filecards?
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11-28-2009, 02:48 AM
zuludelta
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Lifeline 71
At the risk of being too political:think back about 10 years or so ago and you'll have your answer.
Well, from a historical perspective, and side-stepping any political agendas or the whole "Left vs. Right" mentality that threatens any of these discourses, I'd say that killing Bin Laden would be a stopgap solution at best to the problem of radical Islamists waging war on the West. The terrorist network, as it stands right now and as it was composed a decade ago, is de-centralized to the point that eliminating a single node (even one as significant as Bin Laden, and the argument can be made that he's a relatively minor player these days) would be a temporary victory in the ongoing battle against religion-based organized terrorism. There are too many people waiting in the wings to take his place.
The immediate militant roots of the current guard in the Islamic terrorist community can probably be traced to the Cold War. Many of their leaders rose to prominence during the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, fighting against the invaders. At the time, the United States and other NATO countries funneled men, weapons, and training into fundamentalist Islamic militias based in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, as they fought a "proxy war" against the Soviet Union. Many of those US and NATO-backed
mujahideen
, including Osama Bin Laden and Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani (founder of Abu Sayyaf, who traveled all the way from the Philippines to help defend Afghanistan against the Soviets), would eventually become regional warlords (with help from the equipment and training they received from the West) and form a loose terrorist network that would eventually evolve into Al-Qaeda.
In hindsight, funding and training the
mujahideen
was a successful but short-sighted strategy fraught with dangers, whose long-term effects we in the West are only experiencing now.
In my mind, the strategy was the result of a single-minded, almost paranoid fear of Soviet expansionism, a fear that led to policy-makers and military commanders putting on blinders with regards to potential future threats. Additionally, it wasn't just the Soviets who suffered from excess hubris and underestimated the resolve of the Islamists. The Western powers treated the
mujahideen
as fodder for their "proxy war" against the Soviet Union, not once thinking that men capable of such fervor-fueled violence placed in positions of command and power would eventually pose a danger to everybody, not just the invading Soviets.
But such speculation raises more questions: had the West not empowered the
mujahideen
, would the Soviet Union have conquered Afghanistan and used it as a platform for expansion into the Middle East? Would a successful incursion into Afghanistan prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union and worldwide communism in the early 1990s? Are we better off now than we would have been had the Soviet Union indeed gained a foothold in the Middle East?
I'd like to imagine that the events of the past decade have led NATO policy-makers and commanders to weigh their decisions thinking about future repercussions, and not just immediate fallout. Indeed, the decision to support political and ideological moderates in the start-up governments in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to be a step in the right direction (although we have to remember, at one time, Saddam Hussein was an ideological and political moderate, too, with the full backing of the US government... and look where that ended up).
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