M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — The 1989 defeat of the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan was a tactical victory, but a strategic defeat for
the Western alliance. The induced success of the jihadis gave them a boost of
vainglory, leading to the expansion of their jihad to the West.
Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and
their al-Qaida organization are the unintended consequences of the 1979-87
strategy by former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and
former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency William Casey of
funding, training and equipping jihadists to fight a conventional force.
Those lessons are now coming in handy for
terrorists operating in the Afghan countryside, where NATO is floundering in a
manner similar to the 1983-84 travails of the Soviet battalions.
If it can be said that the economic and other
costs of the Afghan war helped push the Soviet Union to collapse, it can also
be argued by those determined to undermine the West that the immense financial
costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – along with the concomitant
speculative rise in commodity prices sparked by the conflicts – are responsible
for the apparent meltdown in Western economies witnessed in the latter half of
2008.
Iraq and Afghanistan are theaters separated
by conditions on the ground. In Iraq, the policy of occupation has led to an
essentially nationalist rebellion against the United States and the United
Kingdom – giving the religious Shiite parties an opportunity to secure the
political space left empty by the secular nationalists’ recourse to insurgency.
