same difference: American Iraq and Soviet Afghanistan

As the "the Naughties" come to close one has to wonder if the world has become better, worse of indifferent, we as a people (in the west) have become used to the American occupational wars being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the subsequent (sometimes daily) casualties that go with them), the former one has to wonder with detailed hindsight was a wise move to any stretch of the imagination.

The policy of using direct military might to promote an ideology over a third nation was something that drove the Americans to arming the Afghan Mujahideen rebels against the Soviet Army when they intervened on behalf of the socialist Afghan government in Kabul on Christmas Eve in 1979.

Regardless of the fact that 1,000,000 Afghans were slaughtered during the Red Army's nine year presence in the country the truth is from their point of view their comrades were being slaughtered since these rural dwellers of Afghanistan where being armed with high-tech portable anti-tank and anti aircraft guns, something that one their position couldn't take lightly.

Now lets look at Iraq since 2003:

The US had it's fair share in the killings of millions in Central America the same time the Soviets were doing their deeds with the Afghans, but when a third party arms insurgents (in this case Iran to insurgents in the Shia south of Iraq) the Americans don't take this too kindly when they feel the hurt it can cause:



What is different in this case however is the fact that the United States invading Iraq and the Soviets intervening in Afghanistan was that the US went in with the ideals of promoting freedom and democracy, however ended up bogged down in a bloody war with thousands of Iraqis fighting an occupational power for their own freedom instead of having their country transformed into a geopolitical platform for the countless cooperation's to promote their free market ideals.

Well over a million Iraqis have been killed in the past ten years, and probably a million more from the ten years before following the sanctions imposed after the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

The Iraq War has proven over the years that the US Army isn't fit for what it's doing there and most Iraqis resent them for what they have done, the same as the rural Afghans did with the Soviets back in the 1980's, making it okay (in one sense for the Americans) to arm the Taliban of its day, of which Ronald Reagan called:

"the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers"

The dissidents of which American forces in Afghanistan are saying is the main threat to eventual peace and democracy spreading across the region!

The Solution:

The western world should adopt a limited government when looking at countries such as Iraq (and Iran) and under the United Nations if necessary the powers of west (and east) should intervene unilaterally to secure regions directly threatened by these so called rogue states, instead of empires from both sides of the world competing on spreading ideals into indifferent countries and in turn ending up being hypocrites in their own modern history.

the psychology behind the 'Military Industrial Complex'

It's been a long time since America fought a war where it was under any serious threat, and that was World War II, following that war mainland USA was left virtually unscathed after emerging victorious.

However the threat in 1940 was the biggest direct threat to the United States in recent history:



In the liberation of Western Europe the Americans were on the side of common decency and actually liberating the European people from oppression.

The same cannot be said about the war against Imperial Japan, it was high in cost of not only military hardware and the recovering US economy but also on human life, half of Japan was burned and then the two famous nuclear bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were executed, most likely to deter the Soviets!

From then on America took to introducing its free market to the rest of the world setting up military bases overseas and riding on the high seas in massive aircraft carriers, intervening where it served their "National interests".

Such interventions were over economic greed and in several cases bankrupted other nations, but to this day the idea of a foreign army invading was always the threat if America lapsed in securing its far away foreign security interests.



This has seen it develop into a hyperpower with a greater military than the old Roman, British and Russian empires!

But even after promoting democracy militarily in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan (over 7,000 miles from the US) Americans don't consider themselves a militant nation, however when one looks at the hard facts its hard to ignore the fact that it really is!



The United States may be the sole hyperpower and may be the only superpower left in the 21st century to influence an ideology as the Soviets once had, however in trying to secure the vast resources in Eurasia a whole ocean away to serve their hefty economic needs may lead to a costly war with Iran and Pakistan.

During the 1990's it failed to reach the top of the global market and meantime several new economic superpowers such as China, Brazil and India have emerged.

As the US continues to send its army into the 'empire graveyard' that is Afghanistan while suffering serious economic burdens the eastern world is once again gone down the road of autocracy and communism.

Bottom Line: If the US continues such expensive oversea wars and military developments while swindling the budget it could see itself collapsing entirely in a manner similar to that of the Soviet Union, if this does happen not only may the North American continent be plunged into it's own 'Dark Ages' period of uncertainty, but with a new power in the east rising it may not be able afford the rich capitalistic society it had thrived on.

If this does happen and the world gradually goes down the road reform of the best option available the last years of the United States in history will be seen as wasteful and irrelevant, regardless of how big their military was!

the 'Twin Towers ship' and Afghan stabilization

The USS New York sailed up the Manhattan river today, it's commissioning ceremony watched over by relatives of 9/11 victims, along with members of the emergency services and the public, while it's motto being "Strength forged through sacrifice. Never forget."



This ship partially made with steel from the Twin Towers will probably be shipping marines to Afghanistan, while bearing with it the horrific memories of the attacks on the World Trade Center before going to war.

Afghanistan has of course been in the news a lot lately as Obama continues his war there in an attempt to stabilize the country in a manner similar to that of the Soviets (who also tried to spread and enforce their political ideology on the Afghan people).



The troop surge started by Obama is expected to reach something like 600,000, these troops will be used to secure a state of 11,000,000 people and stabilize it while maintaining a strong presence, while this may all be about spreading democracy in the region and destroying the Taliban (as Bush and Obama have both said) there is a major flaw.



Looking back on history once again Afghanistan is a soldiers graveyard, and increasing troop sizes for the United States Army to act as a regional tribal force to secure the smaller villages and towns across the mountainous region, this attempt to stabilize it may be a joint NATO effort of countries involved in Afghanistan (see map above) to secure oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea while keeping a NATO force present in the region will probably deter Afghanistan from ever joining the Shanghai Cooperative Organization.

fairly dangerous entertainment

The above video is interesting in it clearly gives a non bias standing on how Fox News is as it is today.

Now I couldn't really care less about the American media, and there is nothing I like better than people who criticize Obama for the fact he is fighting an endless war in Afghanistan with no clear objective and breaking various electoral promises, but even I can't stomach the outright lies designed to spark an angry crowd with ever mounting hatred in their hearts.

The real issue at the moment regarding Obama above all is the war in Afghanistan which has seen increasing troop numbers there, the real question the media should be pressing to the president is why the US is in Afghanistan and what the clear objective ought to be.

However a homicidal war Bush started in 2001 is hardly news to them, and once the white Christian American boys are killing brown Muslim "Jihadists' I'm sure they'll turn a blind eye to it!

The exact kind of lies Fox use against Obama (socialist, fascist etc.) were used to scrutiny John F. Kennedy, an example being the below flier, several of which were posted around Dallas Texas before Kennedy's faithful last visit!



Regardless of the title 'Fox News' the network has been classed as entertainment and the fact they have a constitutional right to report lies they do just that, instead of promoting an interesting or otherwise insightful point of view it creates its own reality regardless of the truth picking parts of culture or public figures to attack or scrutiny while ignoring the various 'men and women behind the curtain' that are running the real America into the ground.



I personally don't have any idea how anyone with a heart regardless of a political view/ideology can actually take blubbering Bill O'Reilly's half baked interviews or that loud mouth fat-face asshole Glenn Beck's stupid conceived bullshit seriously.

why did Obama get the Nobel Peace Prize?

So Obama won the Nobel Peace prize, my first thought was why, and luckily some news source asked that same question:



But still why?
Why give the peace prize to Obama, the world we live in at the moment is pretty messed up and Obama had the possibility of a Polish Missile Crisis open for over six months after continued Russian threats, not only that but funneling more troops into Afghanistan thus continuing Bush's first war and then saying "you gotta look at the history."



That is something that someone as ignorant as Bush would have said, but Obama has put himself forward as being a man who knows what he is talking about and at peace with himself, not an on edge psychopathic mass murderer who is sending tens of thousands of Americans to a desert country that has already buried several other conquering armies, sure he is trying to eradicate nuclear weapons but its not as if Russian president Dmitry Medvedev doesn't want that to be a reality.

the 'Stinger' threat

In the 1980's when the Soviets had a large military force in Afghanistan the CIA armed the Mujahideen with FIM-92 Stinger missiles. These missiles are portable easy to carry and can be fired from the shoulder at low flying warplanes and helicopters.

These weapons were used but not very much appreciated by the Mujahideen who are reported as saying they weren't half as good as they were made out to be.

When the Soviets pulled out the US made desperate attempts to try and buy back all of the Stingers still in the hands of the rebels, apparently several hundred were left in the rebels handed since the war with the Soviet Union ended in 1988, they were described as easy to use as a point and shoot camera by an intelligence officer and were being handed out to the rebels like candy during their fight against the Soviets.

Thirteen years afterwords the United States and Britain launched a war into Afghanistan, there was a fear at the beginning of this war that the Taliban would use some of these weapons primarily during the initial aircraft sorties which consisted of 25 F/A-18 Hornets launched from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.



However no such attack even happened and no missiles were even fired at coalition aircraft (that we know of), so are these Stingers and other such loose MANPADS a real threat to civil aviation?

An SA-7 portable SAM like the Stinger (although not half as good) hit the left wing of a DHL Airbus A300 cargo plane taking off from Baghdad which resulted in a fire and complete loss of hydraulic flight control systems.
However the plane luckily managed to land safely.

Other such attacks have downed several coalition helicopters in Iraq but no major aircraft, and it is unknown whether these portable SAM's originated from Afghanistan (more than likely most if not all were carried out with regular RPG's or SA-7's).



However what did grab my attention a few weeks ago was when in New York City a group of Americans had acquired a Stinger missile and said they would shoot down a commercial airliner, however they were arrested by the FBI and the Stinger was found to be inoperable.

So the Stinger threat that is often cited as an improbable threat, an examaple of how easy it is to create scary scenarios out of whole cloth, but what could be a threat would be Iranian made MANPADS.



It was often rumored that some of these such Stingers were neither smuggled or simply given to Iran, and that Iran could simply reverse engineering the technology to make their own variant, while I'm not aware of such Stinger variants the Iranians do make their own MANPADS named Misagh-1 and 2. The Misagh-1 is an all-aspect passive infrared homing system. It is a variant of the Chinese QW-1 Vanguard missile system, the Misagh-2 is an upgraded version with an infrared seeker, an effective range of 5000 meters, a maximum altitude of 3500 meters and a maximum velocity of Mach 2.

These weapons would be very dangerous in the hands of terrorists and would do more than sting helicopters and larger airliners when they are taking off and landing!

While no such weapons have been used by the Iraqi insurgency as of writing it is a possibility and much more credible and dangerous than the Stinger threat that has been looming under commercial aircraft for the past 20 years!

when the real adversary is the people

I have wrote before about the unwinnable war in Afghanistan and how Obama's policy of throwing more "combat" troops at the problem means he is obviously not looking at past mistakes in the exact same kind of conflict, but the truth is all he is doing is securing vital US interests in Afghanistan namely the pipeline from the Caspian Sea, there are no bad guys anymore, the Taliban has virtually no hope of defeating the coalition in a way the rebels in the 1980's defeated and drew back the Soviets and are instead wrecking as much havoc as they can in Pakistan, but not getting very much success in defeating anyone.



What the coalition and NATO forces in Afghanistan are really fighting (when they are fighting) is the people, which is whatmost of the soldiers fighting and ready to give their lives don't realize!

The Taliban are still active (not strong) and opium trade is at an all time high, (horrible pun) the attack on the village of Azizabad last year killed some 91 people including scores of women and children, in the documentary Afghanistan's Dirty War (YouTube link) several civilians state that the coalition force in Afghanistan have killed more civilians than the Soviets did during their war there in the 1980's.

Nobody likes foreign military occupation, nobody likes foreign soldiers, tanks and fighter jets on their land, a total military defeat of an adversary means nothing anymore, with a bit of will the people of a country rise up no matter what fighting for what they believe in on their land, two more examples here would be the War in South Lebanon which lasted from 1982 to 2000 and the First War in Chechnya which lasted from 1994 to 1995.

I will begin with the latter the war in First War in Chechnya which saw a poor Russia on the verge on economic collapse using military intervention to ensure the security of mountainous area of Chechnya, this begun with a heavy air bombing of it's biggest city Grozny which saw 27,000 people killed, the largest bombing of a civilian area since Dresden in the Second World War.

By the time ground forces of the Russian Army tried to seize Grozny it was met with heavy and horrible street fighting in a true dirty war.



Chechen guerrilla fighters (several of which were teenagers) armed with basic "garbage guns" mainly the Borz which was a very low cost sub machine gun made in very large numbers.

In the heavy engagements in Grozny several convoys (including ones with tanks) were taken out usually the first vehicle and the last vehicle damaged by precise fire (usually from high buildings where tank turrets could not angle up to) thus trapping other vehicles in the middle as sitting ducks in the narrow war torn streets of Grozny.



That war ended in 1996 due to virtually no support from the Russian public and even from several military officers and generals who mutinied before and throughout the war, a second war begun in Chechnya in 1999 which is lasting to this day, however Chechnya today is a federal subject of Russia.

The 1982 invasion of Southern Lebanon by the Israeli military saw them having total dominance over that land in their bid to eliminate PLO forces there, what it resulted in was the formation of Hezbollah not long afterwords which eventually ended forcing all Israeli forces out of Lebanon during an 18 year conflict, Hezbollah are considered heroes in Southern Lebanon and help their supporters or members aid after military engagements with Israel and work close with 'the people'.



Which is why the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in 2006 was really an attack directly on the people, justifications for hitting civil places was because the "terrorists" hence Hezbollah were using them as human shields for their rocket bases, which is why attacks with cluster bombs (which could handicap innocent people in the best case scenario) dropped from F-16's killed so many people, but the truth was at best they were indiscriminate attacks against those various collections of Hezbollah members and civilians were really just to scare the people of Lebanon and break their will therefore weakening Hezbollah but also resulting in the deaths of nearly 2,000 people!


I'm sure bombing Beirut Airport halted tourists
who wanted to see that truly beautiful country!

Sounds like general terrorism to me!

Bottom Line: In retrospect it's very hard or nearly impossible to break the will of a proud nation of people or a nation of people with common beliefs or therefore defeat them without simply wiping them out!

a policy of throwing resources at the problem

I the past 60 years since World War II ended America hasn't really prevailed in any war where they had a landslide victory even though they had an abundance of well more advanced arms than any of their adversaries, I will cite Americas wars since the war in Korea in the 1950's:

Korean War (1950-1953)

Victorious early on in the war the American forces managed to defeat the stretched out defending Koreans bringing the war up north until the Chinese (with no air support) with tanks and artillery overrun the American forces forcing them back to the 38th Parallel were Korea is divided with until this day.

Vietnam War (1964-1975)

After more bombs being dropped on North Vietnam than Western Europe in all of World War II, this causing a lot of damage didn't destroy the Vietnamese forces and when the Americans went into the jungle they ended up fighting an enemy that was everywhere and at the same time nowhere!

As the years progressed more died and Nixon bombed the north so hard that the bombs started overflowing into neighboring Cambodia!



The long and dirty war which saw over 58,000 Americans dead;
By 1975 the north were coming down hard on the south, Operation Frequent Wind was launched in Saigon evacuating the last of the Americans and a few hundred Vietnamese in a giant airlift before the communist north took the south of Vietnam, they had failed in their initiative which was originally set out over ten years earlier!

Operation Urgent Fury (1983)

The US invasion of the tiny island state of Grenada in the Caribbean because it was obviously a threat, the invasion consisted of 7,300 soldiers with heavy air support a against 1,500 Grenadian regulars and 722 Cuban military engineers, they achieved a quick victory, however some 19 American soldiers were killed and 116 wounded!

Operation Just Cause (1989)



George HW. Bush obviously had a "just cause" for launching Operation Just Cause the invasion of the third world state of Panama to oust the dictator Noriega, 205 US troops were killed while up to 4,000 Panamanian civilians were estimated to have been killed.

They achieved this with total air superiority of course and by using a land connection to its bases in the Canal zone!

Operation Desert Storm (1991)

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 the US responded with Operation Desert Shield launching a spectacular amount of air and naval power into the Gulf Theater, around 500,000 troops were also sent, below is a clip from the time showing what tactics were used;



Basically fire power over manpower, what this resulted in was the US bombing the Iraqis in Kuwait, hunting them out of their and then bombing them on the highway on their way home, they continued the war into Iraq bombing all of the major cities and destroying the nations military bringing it back economically to the stone age.

Economic sanctions afterwords starved tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians!

Well done America, you achieved a TV war and got to test your military in a fireworks show the size of a limited Vietnam!

War in Afghanistan (2001)



After 9/11 the US having total air superiority over Afghanistan proceeded to look for targets bombing caves and other suspected Taliban strong points, allied with a 19th century like cavalry the Northern Alliance they gave it air support while it took Kabul in late 2001.

The war has been on and off since then with the Taliban like the Viet Cong popping up everywhere and nowhere.

Currently Obama has launched Operation Tip of the Sword, the largest marine operation since Vietnam, I wonder if the same lessons learned from the Viet Cong will apply to the Taliban?

Iraq War (2003-present)



Thankfully the Iraq War seems to be drawing to a close, a 250,000 strong army covered by the air managed to cripple the Saddam regime, Iraq had its back broken in 1991 and wasn't able to recover since then because of the economic sanctions, yet insurgents did kill a costly amount of American soldiers since then.

Some 4,000 American troops were killed since George W. Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared 'Mission Accomplished'.


So basically we have established that America likes having the big guns on a battle and can defeat standing armies with it but when it boils down to conventional warfare against insurgents the American beast can get clogged down and dirty wars prove to be Americas fault since Vietnam, but they've seem to have adopted a policy since Vietnam of simply throwing more money and resources at a war, the Iraq War proved this to work eventually but after much cost in valuable dollars and more importantly lives!

P.S. Today marks the death of 93 year old former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, he served under President Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson, I would recommend watching the Fog of War documentary about him!