Lessons from the Past... And Our Ever-Dawning Future (Page 1 of 1)

As we ponder dropping bombs — on Iranians, maybe Syrians — I hope someone steeped in power will take time to remember the many ways we’ve heaped misery on ourselves and others in recent history through policies that backfired against bloody and unpredictable enemies.

Maybe you knew:

We helped create the Taliban.
We helped give rise to Osama bin Laden.
We enabled Pakistan to grab hold of nuclear weapons.

Radical as it sounds, it’s something with which we should come to terms: We made much of our own misery.

For those who believe our intentions were good, fair enough. It’s not America’s decency I’m challenging; rather, it’s our wisdom.

Beginning in the 1970s, our policies in Afghanistan set in motion events that have brought us and others unspeakable harm and likely will do so for generations unless America drastically rethinks foreign policy.

Even in a rapidly accelerating world, we might learn a thing or three about how we came to the present pass in the Middle East:  We’re bogged down in Iraq, Afghanistan and threatening all kinds of dire acts against Iran and others, while Pakistan seethes and elements there threaten to gain control of nukes and spread them around the world.

We're not talking ancient history, so never mind the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which carved up the Middle East to suit Western interests after World War I. Never mind the CIA’s involvement in overthrowing the Iranian government in 1953.

Sadly, I’m talking about more recent history.

According to a book by Robert Gates before he became secretary of defense, we deliberately drew the Soviets into Afghanistan in the 1970s — by supporting ambushes, bombings and other violent acts — in a strategy to “give them their Vietnam.” Such activity is outlined in From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. I’ve cited the book in other commentaries. Many experts will tell you the Soviet Union was on its last legs and that our proxy war in Afghanistan was unnecessary. Yet necessary or not, that policy has cost more than a million lives and counting.

Read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright if you don’t believe me. No ideologue, Wright has critics among former President Bill Clinton supporters. Still, his book gives an epic account of the road to Sept. 11, based on hundreds of interviews with spies, terrorists, relief workers, historians and others. Several things become clear from that book.

• The CIA and other American shadow groups in the 1980s supported the ethnic groups that kicked the Soviets out of Afghanistan, providing Stinger missiles and much else to make their victory possible.

• Bin Laden, his ally Ayman al-Zawahiri, some Afghani ethnic groups and Jihadists from across the Muslim world used Pakistan as a staging ground for the war against the Soviets, with the approval of the Reagan / Bush administration.

• Their successes attracted bored and disaffected Muslims from all across the Middle East to join the Jihad, greatly exaggerating the power and fame of vicious Sunni fundamentalists like Zawahiri and bin Laden, who had nearly zero support among any Arab governments at the time.

• Some warlords were so bloody and violent during the civil war and in the aftermath of their victory in Afghanistan that America encouraged the Taliban to take over.

• The Taliban turned out to be worse, if possible, than the rulers they replaced.

• After the civil war in Afghanistan, armed and battle-seasoned Muslims who’d flocked to Afghanistan and Pakistan to help in the Jihad returned to Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and other countries, creating fundamentalist movements and terror cells there.

• Bin Laden later made common cause with the Taliban and established terrorist training camps for his new followers.

• Al-Qaeda was born.

• Cells sprang up or were planted in Germany, France, England and, eventually, America.

• One result was Sept. 11.

We may pay an even greater price yet for our shortsighted actions. According to a long, well-sourced story in the Oct. 13 edition of The Guardian (UK), we made a devil’s bargain with an unstable country. In exchange for Pakistan’s help in our Machiavellian scheme to give the Soviets “their Vietnam,” we gave Pakistan nuclear weapons and the means to use them. When a whistle-blower tried to intervene, he was quickly swift-boated in the parlance of our times.

“The CIA’s expert on Pakistan’s nuclear secrets,” according to The Guardian, was one Rich Barlow. “He prepared briefs for [Vice President] Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at the Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office,” the paper reported. “But when he uncovered a political scandal — a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb — he found himself a marked man… He was thrown out and disgraced when he blew the whistle on a U.S. cover-up of Pakistani nuclear technology… ”

It’s as if a secret government seized control and committed foreign policy disasters about which most Americans scarcely knew. They brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands and might bring death to millions more as the unintended consequences of our policies in Afghanistan play themselves out.

Yes, it’s fair enough to say hindsight is 20/20. The trick is to use such clarity of vision to look back and then apply lessons learned to an ever-dawning future. That’s called foresight.

Is there any out there?

I wonder.

* The views expressed in Commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Knoxville Voice.