Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tekboy who wrote (3480)	9/18/2001 4:26:14 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12231

Tekboy, Tajikistan has invited Russia into their country. Is that correct? I remember when USSR entered Afghanistan and my friend and I had the maps out, calculating time to the Arabian Sea via Southern Iran. The world looked very different then. The USA blew a huge opportunity with Gorby a few years later, who to us instantly looked like somebody who could work with the USA to resolve a LOT of problems. Unfortunately, the USA seemed dogma-bound and thought Gorby a trickster, hanging him out to dry, with his hopes ending in a coup. The USA took 3 years to understand that he wasn't just your standard old Stalinist out to rule the world. That was a huge failure of USA foreign policy. Well, the chickens have come home to roost in a very, very big way now. If the USA had been more thoughtful and less religiously fanatic themselves, they might have understood that a far greater evil than atheistic communism was totalitarian mysticism as manifest in rule-the-world Islamic Jihads. Now, even the Moslem countries struggle against their murderous Islamic fundamentalists. The USA is likely to use far more repressive military action than USSR ever did! What a mess. I just hope there are no Islamic Jihad nukes hidden somewhere in lead-lined boxes. I wonder if they are easily transported without being detected. I wonder if they will use one, or bluff with a fake to avoid being attacked. They would certainly use it if they had one. Do you think they can possibly have one stashed in the USA somewhere? It's a long way from box-cutters to nukes. Mqurice

To: tekboy who wrote (3480)	9/18/2001 5:39:41 AM
From: EepOpp	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12231

Our enemy's enemy may not necessarily be our friend. It's always good to have as much support as possible but does anyone trust them enough to have their back exposed to them?

To: tekboy who wrote (3480)	9/19/2001 11:30:51 PM
From: S100	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12231

There have been several articles on the various groups in Afghanistan. The LA times has had several, one picture of "downtown" Kabul, mud road, lots of trash and mud? buildings. This article today was interesting. latimes.com Afghanistan Is Like Nothing You've Ever Seen, Soviet Vets Say Strategy: Soldiers who fought there warn the U.S. to expect daily deliveries of coffins and few targets other than villages. By MAURA REYNOLDS, TIMES STAFF WRITER MOSCOW -- When Igor Lisinenko entered what he was told was an Afghan rebel base in 1982, he wasn't sure what to expect. It was, after all, his first assignment as a member of a Soviet army reconnaissance team sent to confirm that airstrikes a few hours before had destroyed the base. But the young lieutenant saw no ruined fortifications in the village near the Afghan city of Kandahar. No rebel corpses. All he saw was a handful of crumbly clay huts. And two old men carrying a little girl, no more than 3 years old. Her foot had been blown off. She was white from the loss of blood. The patrol loaded her into a helicopter to take her to a hospital. In those few minutes, Lisinenko said Tuesday, he understood two things: The girl was doomed to die and the Soviet military campaign was doomed to fail. "I didn't doubt for a second that her father would take a gun and come after me or any other Russian soldier he could find," Lisinenko recalled. "And he or some other father or brother or son 'found' many of my friends before it was over." As the United States prepares for possible military action in Afghanistan, Lisinenko and other Soviet veterans watch with trepidation. They know better than anyone what U.S. troops might be getting into. "Can it be that America is nostalgic for the times it was getting daily deliveries of zinc coffins from Vietnam?" asked Andrei Logunov, chairman of Moscow Afghan Veterans Assn. "This time it will be even worse." snip snip Moreover, there are few targets other than villages, the veterans warn. There are few bridges, no factories. Most of the country's infrastructure has been destroyed in decades of civil war. "Even in Iraq you had something to bomb," Lisinenko said. "But there are no targets in Afghanistan. There's nothing there to bomb." Bin Laden may be holed up in Afghanistan's formidable mountains, which are riddled with caves whose entrances are small, hidden and remote. Soviet veterans say they are impervious to bombing. "The Soviet air force tried hard to smoke fighters out of their hide-outs using various methods and weapons," said Col. Alexander Akimenkov, who piloted bombers and helicopters during the Afghan conflict and is Russia's top civilian test pilot. "The Soviet military dropped vacuum bombs [that pull oxygen from underground sites]. They even dropped 3-ton bombs designed to cause local earthquakes that would bury moujahedeen in their caves. But we still were unable to wipe out the rebels." The reason, Akimenkov said, is that the caves in the Kandahar gorge are actually deep tunnels. "In Soviet times, these caves could accommodate thousands of people, which rendered most of air raids meaningless," Akimenkov said. "The people sitting at the far end of such a cave would not even notice that you dropped a bomb that exploded at the entrance." Only Special Forces teams could rout Bin Laden from such lairs, the veterans said. But that requires good local intelligence, including reliable informants. Lisinenko worked firsthand with such intelligence--he has a degree in Persian languages and he was the reconnaissance unit's translator. Some informants were paid, others were not, he recalled. Either way, the information was mostly inaccurate. "They would take our money and then lie," Lisinenko recalled. Lisinenko said that to understand the Afghan mind-set, you have to set aside Western values. He learned this his first day in Afghanistan when he entered a family's hut. The poverty was more than he could fathom. There was no furniture. No light. The only object inside was a copy of the Koran, tucked into an alcove. "I asked an old man, 'Why do you live in such conditions? Don't you want to do something to improve your lot?' " Lisinenko said. "But the man replied, 'Don't you understand that the worse we live in this world, the better our lives will be in paradise? We don't want the same things in life that you want.' " That's when Lisinenko said he began to understand that Western ideas of warfare might not succeed in Afghanistan. How do you battle a foe who has so little to protect in this world? A person who may believe a greater good will come from sacrificing himself, his home, his family? How do you vanquish an enemy for whom categories of defeat and victory, life and death do not match yours? "Nothing we know works in their world," he said. snip