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

To: skinowski who wrote (90442)	4/6/2003 12:08:05 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

That was a good link Pearly provided. I am looking at it and have some things to say later on. It is too bad DARPA did not sponsor looking into right wing dictatorships and reporting on them...btw, our talk of Afghanistan reminded me of a couple of personal stories I can share with you. I had an Afghan friend in UNHCR office in Peshawar. She was very good looking with green eyes and brown/blond hair. She'd gone to the "American School" in Kabul (I think it was some kind of an emersion school for rich kids) and her father had been a political prisoner. One day one of the CIA guys asked her what are the Russians doing in Afghanistan (it wasn't a formal talk). She looked at him in the eye and said, "The same things that Americans did in Viet Nam"...I mean there she was, a young educated Afghan woman dressed in western clothing and speaking with only a little accent, and she was not optimistic about our intentions. I remember having a little chat on the bus with an Afghan doctor. He told me that the Afghans are selling themselves too cheap and are wage slaves to Americans. I asked him why he thinks that. He said "it's simple, we take their money to fight with their enemy". I gave him the lecture about the shared goals and all. He countered "the shared goals will disappear after the Russians leave and the Afghans will be left with a dark legacy. Americans are only here to use us. When they get what they want, they'll forget we are human". Then we got to his stop and he left. I can't say it didn't go as they predicted. These were of course the educated ones. There were plenty of lower social classes there. Most of them were good people. But the ones we really liked and supported were the real fruit cakes. But that is what we wanted. Some nut case to just go and kill as many Russians as he could. Nothing else mattered. BTW, it is not that Russians didn't deserve it. The bastards actually dropped toy bombs on Afghan camps and villages. Bombs shaped like little dolls, cars, or candy. People who have not been in situations like that, can never relate to it. It was just too surreal. But the reality is we were not after doing good. We were after destroying the Russians which I suppose they deserved it. But if you think we really cared about the Afghans, you did not live in the same world that I did. ST [edit: I can't be sure that guy was CIA. He may have been some kind of liason. Either way he was pretty close to the rebels]