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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (42091)	9/5/2002 8:00:40 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Successes and failures, post-Sept. 11 By Pat M. Holt Commentary > Opinion The Christian Science Monitor from the September 05, 2002 edition WASHINGTON – With the war on terror nearing its first anniversary, this is a good time to take stock: What have we accomplished? What mistakes have we made? What lessons have we learned? What do we do next? On the positive side, we have disrupted, if not destroyed, the Al Qaeda leadership. We have brought about a badly needed regime change in Afghanistan, but at a heavy price. Much of the country lies in ruins from 20 years of war. The cost of rebuilding will run into billions and take years. The Bush administration has often expressed its skepticism about nation-building, but in this case American responsibility is more direct. All of South Central Asia desperately needs a model of democratic stability. Even if we fail, we should at least try to turn Afghanistan into such a model. In a recent interview with the BBC, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said that morality requires us to invade Iraq. There is a greater moral obligation to help Afghanistan. A costly mistake in Afghanistan was to allow much of Al Qaeda, perhaps Osama bin Laden himself, to escape to Pakistan. There is no guarantee this could have been prevented, but it would have been less likely if the United States had committed more of its own ground troops to sealing the Afghan-Pakistan border around Tora Bora. Instead, the US relied on bribe-prone Afghans of uncertain loyalty. This mistake arose from an aversion to risking American casualties. The Bush administration has to accept that if it is going to fight a war, American soldiers are going to get killed, regardless of the fancy high-tech weapons in our arsenal. There seems to have been a dispersion of Al Qaeda and its sympathizers not only to Pakistan but also to other surrounding countries, so that there may be more terrorists today than before the war. There are terrorists in Palestinian areas who no doubt sympathize with Al Qaeda without being part of it. The Arab-Israeli and Kashmir disputes have gotten more, not less, violent. It is in Al Qaeda's interest to encourage this. Aggravating either conflict would make things worse for the United States. While we must continue our efforts to identify and contain or eliminate Al Qaeda, we need to think ahead about our long-term policy toward Islam and the world. Our policies should be aimed at bringing Islam into Western society, following the model of Japan after World War II. In order to do this, and especially to improve our position in the world generally, we need friends and allies. It avails us naught to be the only superpower with a military establishment and an economy towering above all others if we are viewed as the neighborhood bully. The Bush administration has been slow to recognize this. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," the president proclaimed in September 2001, sounding like John Foster Dulles during the cold war. This is a black-and-white view of the world, and the world is not like that. The last year has made starkly clear what was never far below the surface, and this is a rift in the administration reminiscent of the rift in the Carter administration between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. The president's policy seems to be to let the vice president and the secretary of defense appeal to his core conservative supporters and the secretary of state appeal to moderates and liberals. He has no more urgent task than to assert his mastery of his foreign-policy team so that it speaks with one voice. President Bush has also developed an exaggerated vision of presidential powers. This is typical of presidents. It will eventually lead him into trouble with Congress and the American people. See the example of President Johnson in Vietnam. The issue is not whether the president has authority or power to invade Iraq on his own; the issue is whether it is good politics. The answer is an emphatic no, and the consultation with Congress had better not be pro forma. Leading the parade in enlarging executive power is Attorney General John Ashcroft, who is well on his way to becoming the worst attorney general since A. Mitchell Palmer in the Wilson administration. If it were not for a stubborn federal judiciary, the Constitution would be in tatters in the Justice Department shredding machine. __________________________________________________ • Pat M. Holt is former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. csmonitor.com

To: maceng2 who wrote (42091)	9/5/2002 9:54:17 AM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Hekmatyar is a name that comes up often. He's mentioned in the opening paragraph of theatlantic.com , an article that's been noted here a time or two. Another similar account, though somewhat less detailed, is at comebackalive.com . It also mentions Hetmatyar prominently: The war in Afghanistan was the largest covert operation of the Reagan era. Over the course of the war, Western countries pumped in from $25 million to several billion dollars a year. The CIA, Saudi government and Gulf States signed most of the checks, with 70 percent of the U.S. aid going to training and arming the Islamic radicals. Pakistan was hired to provide training to the volunteers, and nobody ever thought about what these people were going to do after the war. The Russian people simply went bankrupt and flushed the Communist Party down the drain; the Russian army went into business for itself, renting and selling weapons to any social or political group that wanted them, and the well-trained and ideologically infused Afghans became terrorists for hire. Keep in mind that the term "Afghan" refers to fighters who traveled or were trained in Pakistan to fight Russians. They are typically young Muslim men (now in their thirties) turned on by clerical haranguing and with little financial incentive to remain in their home country. Their home countries are usually Muslim, have high birth rates, high unemployment and strong representation by Iranian-backed political and religious groups (usually from Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Libya or Pakistan). It is no coincidence that all the men arrested in the World Trade Center bombing were trained or involved in the war in Afghanistan. It is no coincidence that all these men have links to Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was the most entrepreneurial and most dedicated anti-Soviet. He allegedly blew over $1 billion of U.S. aid during the war against the Soviets, but the truth is he squirreled away enough weapons to fight a civil war after the Russians left. That Hekmatyar hated the West didn't seem to bother Ronald Reagan. In the mid-'80s Hekmatyar set up an Afghan refugee center to coordinate and support the works of fundamentalist activities in America. The taliban recently told DP that when they took control of Hekmatyar's stockpile of arms, they acquired enough weapons and ammunition to fight a war for 20 years. Most of the Afghan volunteers whom Hekmatyar recruited and trained did not come from America but ended up in America as refugees from Afghanistan. The CIA facilitated the handing out of visas and green cards, and many of these recent transplants can be found driving taxis in New York City. Using the funds supplied by the CIA, Hekmatyar set up a center in Brooklyn to raise funds for the mujahedin in Afghanistan and to send volunteers to fight in Afghanistan. The center also organized paramilitary training in the United States for Muslims. Today mujahedin can be found in the refugee camps and mosques of Algeria, Morocco, France, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Egypt and other poor Muslim countries. There is not much paying work for the surplus of fighters, but they gladly accept infidels if they have special skills. There is something to be said for Hekmatyar, though. It looks like he refused to be lumped together with "the moral equivalents of the founding fathers". Masoud and Hekmatyar were both projected in the Western media as charismatic leaders, but after 1986 when Hekmatyar refused to meet with then US president Ronald Reagan - and called US policies in the Middle East tyrannical - he was essentially blacklisted by the West. atimes.com So, Hekmatyar at least has a patina of honesty about him, something it would be hard to credit most locally popular accounts of the Reagan era in Afghanistan with.