Orwell said:
Not bloody likely. From the article:
"I was in Afghanistan as the last Russians left in 1988, departing from their heavily guarded garrisons and quite fearful of being attacked on the way out. By then, the Soviets had managed to do just about everything wrong, having killed more than a million Afghans and turned millions more into refugees. The Soviets had become the enemies of Islam. That they spent billions to modernize Afghanistan and win over Afghans -- soldiers were still tossing candy to kids as they pulled out of Kabul -- meant nothing in the end."
There's been a net return of refugees TO Iraq since our invasion, not an outflow of refugees. If that ever changes, it will be an indication that things are indeed going wrong. As long as that isn't happening, it's a pretty good indication that our occupation isn't anything like the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
"The United States starts its occupation in a much stronger position. The Soviets, after all, were supporting a widely disliked communist Afghan government, while the Americans are offering democracy and reconstruction, which many Iraqis say they want. But
both began their occupations convinced that the local population broadly supported them [/B]or, in the case of the Soviets[/B], that the locals would be cowed into submission." (emphasis mine)
This reminds me of an old joke:
Q: What do elephants and grapes have in common?
A: They're both purple. Except for the elephant.
Not a particluarly funny joke, but that's essentially the argument the author is making in this paragraph. The US and the Soviets were similar in that both expected support from the population. Except the soviets thought that they could force it from the population by oppression. That's more than a little bit of difference, that difference is probably more important than the superficial similarity.
"While it's easy to feel that events are spinning out of control in Iraq, that hasn't really happened in Afghanistan. Granted, there is a guerrilla insurrection underway -- against the American forces and the Karzai government -- but it is having less success in disrupting development and inflicting military casualties. Afghanistan is one and a half times larger than Iraq and has several million more people, but it is more stable with 15,000 American and international troops than Iraq is with more than 140,000 American and 12,000 British soldiers. I think this is because the former Taliban militants have little support among the general population, and can't move easily outside of some eastern border areas and other remote places.
A key reason for this is that the American presence there is not seen as a single-country occupation, but rather as part of an international effort with NATO troops, scores of international organizations at work and
a central U.N. role in rebuilding the nation. A guerrilla war against the United Nations,
the recent Baghdad bombing notwithstanding, simply has inherently less logic and steam than one against the United States or the Soviet Union." (emphasis mine)
The author is smoking crack on this point. How can he say with a straight face that the bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, which killed their top man and forced their withdrawl, somehow doesn't show that insurgent violence against the UN makes sense? From the author's perspective, that attack had "inherently less logic and steam than one against the United States". And yet it happened anyways. The author tries pretending it doesn't matter, but it does, and it basically disproves his point. The attack against the UN had MORE logic than the attack against the US, because that single attack forced the UN to withdraw, but attacks against US forces haven't accomplished anything of the sort. So the author is living in a fantasyland concerning what motivates the insurgents, how they operate, what they are willing to do, and the consequences of their actions. The evidence is there, staring him in the face, and he refuses to recognize it. And we're supposed to take his conclusions seriously?
Did you read this article closely before you posted?
Oh, and BTW, the article is more than a year and a half old. Things haven't been static in the intervening period.
