Karzai and company sell out Afghanistan

[BarakzaiAbdali]

IF osama trained men to attack the west or did 9/11, what respect did that show for afghanistan? he must have known there would be reprisals. IF he sat in abbatobad for years whilst afghanstan was being bombarded, how humble and respectful is that, of the tribal afghans?

Fair enough.

Point 1: In my opinion, treat the disease, not the symptom. Mr. Bin Ladin was driven out of Sudan by the US which, in the initial, had interfered in Saudi. He had, to the best of his ability, attempted to leave the Iraq-Saudi issue a purely internal Arab matter. However, the US had goals of establishing bases to protect its corrupt monarchy. This was an intervention predicated on the false specter of an Iraqi invasion after the US iself had green lighted Saddam's Kuwait venture. This of course was after the US had given Saddam the know how and wherewithall to kill thousands of Iranians after they threw out the puppet Pehlavhi. So the germ is Western interventionalism, the vehicle are the Muslim nation's own corrupt wataan foroshee denizens in the upper crusts.

Had the West not intervened in his homeland, where he attempted to attack the Saud regime first, and turned him into a fugitive, he would never have wound up on Afghanistan's front door.

Quiet simple really:

American Interventionalism = Disasterous Results

Point 2: Matching words with deeds: Contrary to the ways of Western politicians and the Afghan elite, the deceased Mr. Bin Ladin appeared to have a higher 1:1 correlation between matching words with deeds. For instance, one might say that Mr. Karzai ought not talk about the deceased being located in Abbottabad (and not Afghanistan proper) when he actually was confirmed to have fought directly in the Russian Afghan war as a combat Engineer (See. Michael Scheuer's interview with Yosri Fouda:

Last Word: Micheal Scheuer, former Head of CIA's Bin Laden Unit 1/5 - YouTube

So Mr. Karzai high tailed it out of there, as the Russian killing machine mowed down Afghans, and did nothing with his bare hands to aid or assist them. Neither did Mr. Wardak, Mr. Arsalaa, Mr. Kakar, Mr. Ghani or the whole lot of them.

It appears, unfortunately for US interests, that the Tribal Afghans did see this stark contrast:

http://english.aljazeera.net/video/a...315358960.html

[faye]

i take it you noted my IFs.

[faye]

We are talking about pre911 faye and also most afghans don't even know why Americans are in Afghanistan.
Think tank: 92% of Afghans never heard of 9/11 | The Raw Story

i was too. they had their eye on osama pre 9/11 because he was supposedly training warriors to attack the west. there were probably other reasons they wanted to invade afghanistan, i assume.

[gadoonwal]

Now it is clear that the US is not there to fight its so called war on terror but just to use pashtunland to spy on china,india,iran and others.
It is to control the main route of central asia to the asain market.
From the start the west played this dirty game against poor pashtuns for its own interests.
They are now falling to china,india,brazil etc.
the rule of speenposti/ on the wolrd is over.

[sahil112]

I was born in Afghanistan and leaved there til my tenth birthday. I still remember what Taliban did and what the situation was at that time. I have expirinced there Sharia Law and how they governd the country Taliba sold our country to arabs and Pakistani, only if you have leaved in the time of taliban you can say something about this matter other ways just shut your mouth.

i did and life was normal, i dont get where people get all these stupid claims from that taliban did this and taliban did that

as far as i rember when the taliban were around i would wake up in the morning to go to school come back in the afternoon and then just be goin out with cuzans and that into the park for bandar or catching birds with slingshots etc night time every1 would be out aswell having fun so yhh i dont see what they did that was so bad?

[Daruish]

Us won't stay you farsiwan **** not as their asss keeps getting whooped

until 2024 lol

U are a big fool farsiweaan boy

I want karzai and his farsiwaan pimps to sign it

Just watch. The rat is too scared to even sign it with his Dadfar farsiwaan pimp pushing him

Just keep watching

Daud Daud is dead, not alive
Wali is rotting

?? Smell the blood

Us has lost u fool,

How typical! You have nothing to offer then killing, terrorist, murder and savageness.... you Talibananas are good for nothing else. You set in west and glorify killing of human being, your contemptible coward.
If you Talibananas spent 3 percent of your time using your brains instead of demonizing the others you would not have been in this state.

If US burns entire village in response to the Taliban's fire. Then the Pashtun Taliban should find another way of fighting the US. Hell no village is burnt in Herat or Mazar or Takhar or Taliqan or Badakhshan or Bamiyan or Sare Pull etc etc.

You want to eat your cake and still have it too. You shamelessly hide behind women and children in a fight and then cry murder. Its your own fault. Its Taliban that murders the most Pashtuns and its Pashtuns that fights Pashtuns. Figure that out and you'll be ok.

[sahil112]

How typical! You have nothing to offer then killing, terrorist, murder and savageness.... you lot are good nothing else.
If you Talibananas spent 3 percent of your time using your brains instead of demonizing the others you would not have been in this state.

If US burns entire village in response to the Taliban's fire. Then the Pashtun Taliban should find another way of fighting the US. Hell no village is burnt in Herat or Mazar or Takhar or Taliqan or Badakhshan or Bamiyan or Sare Pull etc etc.

You Pashtuns want to eat your cake and still have it too. You shamelessly hide behind women and children in a fight and then cry murder. Its your own fault. Its Pashtuns that murders the most Pashtuns and its Pashtuns that fights Pashtuns. Figure that out and you'll be ok.

thats becouse most the peoiple that live there arent pashtuns but tajiks etc and every1 nows they are sellouts

[Daruish]

Spoken like a true slave!

I am not slave but realistic. You are blind.
I speak as a human being who prefers food and detests hunger, who prefers education and detests illiteracy, who prefers security and detests chaos. Not only majority of people want what I want but ALL OF HUMANITY want what I want except for few lackeys of ISI.

A simple response is in order:

1) What writ or guarantee or promise do you have from the Americans, who have, per the available historical record, never left a land that was pacified by their army? Iraq? Give me a break, Maliki has yet to ask them to officially leave. And when I say leave, I mean in all capacities (trainers, special forces, mercenaries, etc). You, a blind man, are attempting to sell a broke down car to those that can see with clear eyes.

Grantee is the enormous improvement in education, building main and sub roads, agriculture, human right, industry, power(Electricity), communication. Mining and exporting of production (dry and fresh fruits, rugs...).Capacity building and best usage of instruments, banking development, women rights and so on since fall of Talibananas. Retards like you automatically peg this admission as a slave or some sort of love towards West. That said, we are being ruled by others today and we have been so for the last 200 years. Hence the Pashtun pride becomes a false pride. And the only way out of this age old occupation is through an Afghanistan that has solid institutions. But its you retards who, delusionally thinking that they are free, stand against construction of anything positive for Afghanistan. Let the America stay, available historical record show people do much better, German, Japan, Italy and rest. The alternative is indirect rule as the case with Abdul Rahman, Taliban and past 200 years of Afghanistan history.

2) It is obvious your goals have nothing at all to do with Afghan autonomy.

What Afghan autonomy?When were you free for past 200 years? You were broken in half and divided. And then your divided lot got further divided into ikhwanis, commies, talibs, nationalists, ghilzai and so on and so forth. And you call this freedom? Afghanistan has been under foreign occupation one way or the other since Zaman Shah. It was after Zaman Shah that Afghanistan could not afford the costs accrued by its government. Hence it had to turn to Brits, or US or Arabs to finance itself. Hence your division by the Brits, Russia, and US. The current realities of Afghanistan where mothers and babies sleep hungry at nights, and men strapping bombs to their heads or bicycles have long passed the signposts of dignity, honor and freedom you coward Afghan-American Talibanana supporters talk about.

Let me give you a clear and clean example: Dr. Faizullah Kakar... deputy Health minister:
This guy is in charge of rebuilding Afghanistan's shattered medical insfrastructure? What a joke. The guy releases press statements every few days about how Afghans shouldnt eat fatty foods (really Dr. Saib, are you this oblivious to the ground level situation? when their bellys cannot get any food?)... or about pollution levels. Contrast that when America's NIH leadership under the likes of technologist physician and radiologist leader Elias Zerhouni. Its a sick sick joke, and ironically, he has no medical training.

Yet our family KNOWS his family and KNOWS how he got this job.

1000 times improvement than Talibanana area.
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/respons...tan/index.html

http://www.afghan-web.com/health/health_sector.html

3) Terrorists and hoodlums? Created by who? By the Afghan people? Or by the same interventionalism in other lands (Saudi) that brought the mess to Afghanistan's doorstep in the first place. The same drug dealer you want to buy your fix from is the same one that polluted other neighborhoods and instigated this global conflageration in the first place.

US invaded Afghanistan because of people like you-Taliban. Remember when the ISI weapons and Saudi money was flowing in the terms Pashtun and Taliban had become synonymous? Remember how terrorists from all over the world was unleashed all over non Pashtun Afghans? Remember how the only construction in Afghanistan was the construction of monkey bars? Do you remember? Well Sonny Boy, you sow what you reap. Taliban was the reason. Taliban are the reason. You want the violence stopped? Go after the Talibs! Yesterday you justified bringing in the terrorists with Islam or Jihad and now you are getting kicked in the face for it. Today you indirectly justify the Talibs by continuously going after the Americans- tomorrow's kick in your face would be far harsher by doing what you are doing today--- justifying the Taliban.
And please dont tell me that you condemn them. Because I have yet to see you open threads right after Taliban kill innocent people or condemn them or have a Talib free picture of Afghanistan

4) Maintenance of freedom indefinitely? Really? How? By following the example of the neighboring istans? Do you mean the hegemony in Tajikistan or Uzbekistan? Those bastions of independent thought and massive success (sarcasm). Let me tell you a story... about a country whose people also bought into myths that an empire, with a completely unrelated ethnic and religious history, would improve their nation for free for them. They even joined that nations army, and fought and died, in far off lands like Sudan, to perish under the banner of Union Jack in a fight against Hitler in a war that had nothing to do with them... all because to be a commissioned British officer (though you could never sit with the white guy in the mess hall) was the supreme worldly gain. That nation also had its oligarchy with its Karzais and its Ghanis and Ameen Arsalas who wanted to preserve their feudalism... It was created in 1947 and its leaders have taken corruption to pinnacles unheard of before.

So in the end, you want to create a slave state next to another one. Ironic is it not?

5) Ask any and all subjugated people about what their outcome has been. Go to Tecumseh's grave and ask his spirit why he fought the Americans so ardently, to the death. I am sure it will point to the status of his destroyed Red Man brethren. Then take a look as Japan and the bases at Okinawa, and the destruction of a culture completely.

How were the resistence struggles, as bloody as they were, done by the Vietcong any different?

In fact, this reporting by the New York Times should strike an eerie chord and make you rethink which side of history you want to fall on:
-------------------------------------------------------------
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote:
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

http://last-straw.net/us-encouraged-by-vote/

Vietnam did not have a Pakistan or an ISI or the Taliban as neighbors. Vietnam was not a multi-ethnic country as Afghanistan is. Comparing Vietnam to Afghanistan is like comparing Apples and Monkeys.
Furthermore, Vietnam's geo-strategic value was FAR FAR LESS then than that of Afghanistan today where it not only joins South Asia to Central Asia but China to Middle East. In the face of current socio-economic stagnation in industrial societies, the stakes are far higher today and in Afghanistan than Vietnam in 70s. In absence of AMerica far more vicious groups will devour Afghanistan- Iran- Saudi- Pakistan- Russia. You can not have your cake and eat it too, while setting at your ass in west with your family.
Iran/Pakistan or America...choose wisely.

[ScimitarXEdge]

your Western 'research' (i.e propaganda against the Afghan people ) versus GOE who is directly from there. I will take GOE's facts over your sources.

so even though he can't back up anything he says with confirmation except stories...his statements are "facts"

but the stuff I say which I can corroborate ...even from sources YOU YOURSELF endorse (i.e. Taliban members) are "propaganda against the Afghan people".

You sir are dumb as bricks.

[randolph85]

this is not about the taliban. as opposing occupation is not an endorsement of the taliban regime. on the same note, supporting the jihad against the russians was was not an endorsement of zahir shah/dauds regimes. its about the here and now.

u are under the impression that servitude is the only option for a developed afghanistan. when has that ever worked in afgs history? u have been saying afghanistan has not been free for 200 years. so if we have been ruled by foreigners for 200 years, then where is our developed afghanistan that u now think will blossom under the foot of foreign armies in the future? u have sold ur dignity for false promises and half assed results.

the sellout is strong with this one. bending over, getting bucked, and hoping the foreign masters will sew up ur ass so itll heal into an even better ass than before they bucked u.

[ScimitarXEdge]

I love how Randolph very succinctly dispatches the House Servant Dariush

and It's pathetic how Dariush assumes Anti Imperialists are Pro Taliban.

what a moron.

[ScimitarXEdge]

god this is pathetic


Dariush is using sources from 5 years ago ....like things don't change for the worse dramatically since then

Kabul, 26 April 2007 - Infant mortality rates in Afghanistan declined from an estimated 165 per 1,000 live births in 2001 to about 135 per 1,000 in 2006, according to preliminary findings of Johns Hopkins University (JHU) household survey. This means that 40,000 fewer infants are dying each year compared to during Taliban rule.

now this is from 2011

http://www.indexmundi.com/afghanistan/infant_mortality_rate.html

Infant mortality rate: total: 149.2 deaths/1,000 live births
male: 152.75 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 145.47 deaths/1,000 live births (2011 est.)

yeah Imperialism has really helped afghanistan.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I am not slave but realistic. You are blind.
I speak as a human being who prefers food and detests hunger, who prefers education and detests illiteracy, who prefers security and detests chaos. Not only majority of people want what I want but ALL OF HUMANITY want what I want except for few lackeys of ISI.

Ahhhh the typical farsiwaan canard... to vye for independence is suddenly
ISI dependence. Perhaps farsibaan should be called mentally slowebaan for the reason that you contradict your own original post. You admit here that you want to be serviced (or that you want to service America) and that you cannot, without the guiding hand, accomplish any of these feats. Moreover, your original arguement centered on this carrot being waved in front of us, claiming that one day the Americans would up and leave... now you switch the goal posts and admit they likely never will. Thank you for proving my points, its more enjoyable for me that way. Yeah yeah yeah, go ahead and spring another ISI comment on me... see if it jars me... wont in the least. As I have said before, if you want to make the love of independence and striving against all comers (as we Pashtuns have and as your beloved Mossoud did not do) then by all means, call me ISI and son of Mr. Jinnah and whatever absurdities you generate.

Grantee is the enormous improvement in education, building main and sub roads, agriculture, human right, industry, power(Electricity), communication. Mining and exporting of production (dry and fresh fruits, rugs...).Capacity building and best usage of instruments, banking development, women rights and so on since fall of Talibananas. Retards like you automatically peg this admission as a slave or some sort of love towards West. That said, we are being ruled by others today and we have been so for the last 200 years. Hence the Pashtun pride becomes a false pride. And the only way out of this age old occupation is through an Afghanistan that has solid institutions. But its you retards who, delusionally thinking that they are free, stand against construction of anything positive for Afghanistan. Let the America stay, available historical record show people do much better, German, Japan, Italy and rest. The alternative is indirect rule as the case with Abdul Rahman, Taliban and past 200 years of Afghanistan history.

Italy, Germany etc are their own (The Americans) ilk. They derive from there so what would it matter to them to rule and benefit their older brethren. The rise of an Islamic power by their own hand, that threatens interests such as Israel and their Saudi monarchy will never happen. Keep dreaming (you admit as much with your above commentary). Regarding Japan, lets face it buddy, you farsiwaan are not to the level of the Japanese. They were an empire that conquered China and were, at baseline, technologically advanced. So America had a quality product to work with. What do you have? You cannot even spell gaurantee and yet you, like the Indian you are, believe that American Gulab sweets are going to rain down on you? Deal with the article I posted showing that you manage what is given to you ineptly. You dont deserve such technological advancements because you have proven you cannot sustain them. As I said, the Russians supposedly would go on and develop "institutions" for your brethren across the Amu Darya

What Afghan autonomy?When were you free for past 200 years? You were broken in half and divided. And then your divided lot got further divided into ikhwanis, commies, talibs, nationalists, ghilzai and so on and so forth. And you call this freedom? Afghanistan has been under foreign occupation one way or the other since Zaman Shah. It was after Zaman Shah that Afghanistan could not afford the costs accrued by its government. Hence it had to turn to Brits, or US or Arabs to finance itself. Hence your division by the Brits, Russia, and US. The current realities of Afghanistan where mothers and babies sleep hungry at nights, and men strapping bombs to their heads or bicycles have long passed the signposts of dignity, honor and freedom you coward Afghan-American Talibanana supporters talk about.

Thanks to your boy the Panjshiri prince inviting the Russians in from the back end. Even then, we still cleaned up your mess and made sure you remained free. Even now you should bow, kiss our feet, and recognize who made sure your last name doesnt have the suffix ov as you longed for.

1000 times improvement than Talibanana area.
http://www.jhsph.edu/refugee/respons...tan/index.html

http://www.afghan-web.com/health/health_sector.html

If appointing, via nepotism, a PhD of epidemiology to supposedly bring Afghanistan's medical system into the 21st century is your idea of progress, while across the border the Rehman Medical Institute is built by your opponents, Aga Khan churns out future American physicians of south asian origin by the multitudes, then you more then evidence how incapable you are of benefiting of anyone's largesse.

US invaded Afghanistan because of people like you-Taliban. Remember when the ISI weapons and Saudi money was flowing in the terms Pashtun and Taliban had become synonymous? Remember how terrorists from all over the world was unleashed all over non Pashtun Afghans? Remember how the only construction in Afghanistan was the construction of monkey bars? Do you remember? Well Sonny Boy, you sow what you reap. Taliban was the reason. Taliban are the reason. You want the violence stopped? Go after the Talibs! Yesterday you justified bringing in the terrorists with Islam or Jihad and now you are getting kicked in the face for it. Today you indirectly justify the Talibs by continuously going after the Americans- tomorrow's kick in your face would be far harsher by doing what you are doing today--- justifying the Taliban.
And please dont tell me that you condemn them. Because I have yet to see you open threads right after Taliban kill innocent people or condemn them or have a Talib free picture of Afghanistan

Review the history I noted to Faye... the monkey bars came your way because of American action in the region that was completely avoidable. Explain to the Iranians why they ought to have accepted Shah Pehlavi simply to suit the sell outs and slaves amongst them such as yourself. Their revolt (and rightfully so I might add) against hegemony did not take into consideration these sorts of American gulab sweets that their own slaves promised them. So even if you deny Vietnams strategic importance (which is absurd as it allowed direct sight into China and proximity to America's asian interests), Iran is certainly a strategic jewel. It is another modern example of how complete independence of American bases can and will be accomplished and can be followed by progress. The Iranian nation toiled for 4 decades under the yolk.

Vietnam did not have a Pakistan or an ISI or the Taliban as neighbors. Vietnam was not a multi-ethnic country as Afghanistan is. Comparing Vietnam to Afghanistan is like comparing Apples and Monkeys.
Furthermore, Vietnam's geo-strategic value was FAR FAR LESS then than that of Afghanistan today where it not only joins South Asia to Central Asia but China to Middle East. In the face of current socio-economic stagnation in industrial societies, the stakes are far higher today and in Afghanistan than Vietnam in 70s. In absence of AMerica far more vicious groups will devour Afghanistan- Iran- Saudi- Pakistan- Russia. You can not have your cake and eat it too, while setting at your ass in west with your family.
Iran/Pakistan or America...choose wisely.

Wrong, the Vietcong received arms from multiple powers to execute a war of independence. Nonetheless, it was a war that involved the rural Vietnemese pitted against the Karzai of Vietnam and his cronies (Diem). Very similar to the attempt to tie the ISI to all and any independence movements, Diem and his supporters attempted the same for the Vietcong. The rural masses knew their own people best and opted for the side that continues to beneft them. Now, Vietnam is a trading partner with America and it crafts the terms.

Regarding sitting in the West, great canard that you and the ANPers try to throw out there, yet you have a hard as heck time tying that around the neck of the white Protestant Americans such as Kucinich, Paul, Raimando, Cole, and Scheuer who whole heartedly agree that this intervention is neither in the interests of the Afghan people or in the interests of America. Therefore, it does not stick my farsi speaking friend, best to go back to Tajikaam where they might appreciate the rhetoric a bit more.

Regarding devouring... keep spewing out nonsense. You equate a financial and ideological intervention, through some absurd algorithm only known to your own brain, with actual occupation. It really makes you sound like you have no ground level knowledge of the situation.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

How typical! You have nothing to offer then killing, terrorist, murder and savageness.... you Talibananas are good for nothing else. You set in west and glorify killing of human being, your contemptible coward.
If you Talibananas spent 3 percent of your time using your brains instead of demonizing the others you would not have been in this state.

If US burns entire village in response to the Taliban's fire. Then the Pashtun Taliban should find another way of fighting the US. Hell no village is burnt in Herat or Mazar or Takhar or Taliqan or Badakhshan or Bamiyan or Sare Pull etc etc.

You want to eat your cake and still have it too. You shamelessly hide behind women and children in a fight and then cry murder. Its your own fault. Its Taliban that murders the most Pashtuns and its Pashtuns that fights Pashtuns. Figure that out and you'll be ok.

Wow, do you write Petreus's briefings? No wonder they do so poorly, even here in the US. Ever heard of asymmetric warfare? Its not a justifican, its a fact of matter. Read about the suicide bombers in Cuba (a great audio visual effect of this is given in the Godfather part 2 where one blows himself up in Havana right in front of Michael Corleone). Do you know what Corleone says to his comrade? He says something to the extent that the Americans and their puppet Batiste will be ejected. The point was that the people were willing to utilize their own selves against the immense onslaught of a greater power.

I cannot believe that your intelligence level is so intune with that of a subservient individual that you undertake the absurdity of blaming a group of defensive fighters (Vietcong, Tamils, Chinese revolutionaries in the British era) for utilizing asymmetric techniques that appear to blossom in the setting of such brazen and unjust occupation events. As an added example take a look at the brutality the IRA had to respond to in the era of British occupation of Ireland.

Interestingly enough, the majority of the Pashtun civilians know exactly how to pin the tail on the proverbial donkey and where to attach the blame. Time and time again they recognize that wherever a NATO footprint appears, deaths go up in a direct 1:1 correlation. Luckily they are not swallowing your propaganda the way that the Pashtuns swallowed Musharrafs propaganda across the border. They know that their brotheres are fighting a war to eject an occupier and a religious struggle of sorts.

Here is a great essay by Dr. Barkawi discussing the concept that you ought to familarize yourself with (the powerful taking the rights of the powerless and then experiencing blow back):
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth...424785830.html

Asymmetric warfare is the result of conflict between the powerful and the powerless, reinforcing a cycle of violence.

In an earlier moment of resistance against the Western world order, the Hong Kong Chinese opened a front in the bakeries. They nearly wiped out the entire European community on the island by kneading arsenic into their bread. But the bakers were too generous with the arsenic, which caused the Europeans to vomit before the poison could take effect.

The British were trying to open up Chinese markets for the sale of Indian opium. It took them two wars to do so in the mid-nineteenth century and the "terrorist bakers" provided part of the excuse to get the second war started. The prime minister, Lord Palmerston, railed against those who would kill British subjects by "murder, assassination, and poison".

The irony that he was practising narco-colonialism on a grand scale by force of arms, addicting Chinese in order to balance payments, perhaps never occurred to him.

When those who are weak in conventional military terms seek to fight the strong, they often do so through unconventional tactics and ruses. To do otherwise is to be stupid and risk being mown down by superior firepower. Yet tactics like poisoning families as they break bread expose the weak to charges of barbarity.

These tactics fuel the desire for righteous revenge in the West, for "justice" as those US citizens celebrating bin Laden's death called it. Palmerston made his remarks at an election rally, where he also spoke of insolent barbarians. Such desires have a way of licensing their own forms of savagery and reprisal.

A blinkered vision of warfare

This cycle in the war of the weak against the strong is an old one. The strong can afford traditions of warfare which prize decisive combat between military forces. They are genuinely shocked and horrified when their opponents find ways to shoot them in the back or massacre their loved ones. Yet the strong somehow do not see the great suffering they inflict, whether through violence or the kinds of mass slow death that capitalism specialises in for those enmeshed in its lower rungs.

As Victor Davis Hanson comments, "we in the West call the few casualties we suffer from terrorism and surprise 'cowardly', the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault 'fair'."

The great problem for those leading revolts in the era of European empire was that their local resources, no matter how cleverly deployed, rarely could match the global power of the West. A troop convoy on the way to fight Palmerston's war of choice in China was diverted to crush the 1857 rebellion in India.

Guerrilla warfare could beguile and tie down Western armies, but ordinarily it could not achieve decisive results. One of bin Laden's predecessors in resistance, Omar Mukhtar of what is now Eastern Libya, repeatedly flummoxed Italian forces with his lightning raids and local support in a fight that lasted twenty years from 1911.

The Italians responded with one of the great tools of counterinsurgency: concentration camps. They transferred and locked up around 100,000 people from Mukhtar's home region, draining the sea around the guerrilla fish in the Maoist idiom.

Invented by the British to deprive Boer guerrillas of their civilian support, the concentration camp would morph into the strategic hamlet in Malaya and Vietnam and the concrete barrier in Iraq, all designed to separate insurgents from those who succour them.

Mukhtar had but the resources of one mountainous area with which to oppose the modern state of Italy. How could a local people counter the weight of the strong and their world order?

End of empire

It was the Second World War which finished off the European empires, draining their resources while Japanese victories punctured forever the myth of white superiority. For those who tried to hang on to colonies, Mao, Fanon, Ho Chi Minh and others had evolved answers.

In various ways, they developed political strategies that could be served by guerrilla tactics. Military operations became armed propaganda exercises, aimed at local and faraway populations. They turned to the idea of the nation to mobilise the masses, requiring the West to devote large numbers of troops to obscure, hot places.

Back in the West, a combination of media and democratic politics made those wars politically unsustainable over time, leading to the axiom that guerrillas only had to avoid defeat to win. Western armies were very rarely defeated in the field, but eventually were forced to withdraw by their own politicians and publics.

But victories in taking over countries only reproduced the problem of the local and the global in new form. Another of bin Laden's predecessors, Muhammad Ahmad, the Mahdi of the Sudan, had managed to wrest control of the Sudan from Britain's Egyptian clients in 1885. No matter, the country could be left isolated for fifteen years before it was convenient to organise an expeditionary force to retake it.

The struggle for liberation

The nation-state can serve as a kind of large concentration camp, walling off from one another peoples with shared interests in resisting the West. Revolutionary leaders in places like Egypt, Cuba and Vietnam took state power amid a hostile world. They could be subject to sanctions, embargoes, and covert attack while they struggled with their own internecine conflicts, inflicted disastrous economic policies on their populations, and became corrupt.

Eventually they faced a choice between withering on the vine or re-entering the capitalist world order on unfavourable terms.
This was the stalemate between the local and the global that bin Laden sought to bust open with his spectacular attacks on the US. With the greatest armed propaganda operation in world history he sought to generate a revolt that did not respect sovereign borders.
Westerners mocked his idea of the Caliphate as a seventh-century throwback. They did not appreciate what a creative response it was to the division of the world into nation-states, which could so easily be turned into clients of the West and partitioned off from one another. As an al-Qaeda website once noted with contempt, "A 'Karzai' regime exists officially in all the Muslim countries."

But bin Laden lacked a politics with which to capitalise on his armed success. His brand of Islam divided rather than unified even those who shared the faith, and had no appeal for those outside it no matter how much they suffered from Western power. After all, who wants to fight a revolution only to live in something like the Taliban's Afghanistan?
In the late 1980s, El Salvadoran guerrillas struggling against a US-supported client regime considered using their immigrant population in Washington DC for terrorist attacks on the city's subway. Despite their desire for revenge, they cool-headedly rejected the idea out of fears that it would simply call forth a more direct and violent reprisal from the Americans.

In essence, 9/11 was like a brilliant guerrilla raid that exhilarates young fighters and gives them the taste of a victory they can never achieve. Its immediate effect is to call forth legions of imperial storm troopers on missions of reprisal, missions that wreck the rebellion and inflict suffering on those it sought to liberate.


Like bad schoolboys, bin Laden's followers never quite learned the lesson. They repeated smaller scale terrorist attacks that sowed division and generated reprisal. About the only people receptive to their propaganda were other groups of would-be young terrorists. They were enough to keep the conflict going

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and the reprisals coming

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but never sufficient or minded to build anything serious politically.

In the long arc of the decline of empires and great powers, the main consequence of 9/11 and the wars that followed is to hasten the decline of the US. Precious resources needed to regenerate the US have been spent on wars of reprisal as well as the fantastically corrupt arrangements for economic reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having allowed business to feed so well at the public trough for a decade, US politicians now deny their own people desperately needed funds for healthcare, education, and modernisation.

Guerrilla raids and imperial reprisals both achieve little but further human suffering. Nonetheless there may come a day not too far off, in the violent world of competing powers to come, that we may long for the world order built by the Anglo-Americans and for the grand ideals of many of those who resisted them.

Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer, Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. He specialises in the study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South in historical and contemporary perspective. He is author of Globalisation and War, as well as many scholarly articles.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

[unknownprince]

I remember that Corleone scene from Havannah, and when then informs the Jewish mobster that he is not interested in the place because it will fall to the rebels.

This Dariush is a very worried person.

The fact is it matters not to the Pashtun (the founders of Afghanistan) what karzai signs or does-it doesn't matter that this pro-war farsiwaan click are backing the US.

The facts speak. The Taliban control the majority of Afghanistan.

Karzai's entrenchment and willingly open slavery to the US hone in on the point they have made all along.

Words at the end of the day mean nothing. Action is everything.

True Afghans are overthrowing another empire. If Dariush was so content, why is he coming here to make believe ?

I sense fear, and a justified one.

He can keep living in a delusion, but he just has to look at our history.

There is reason Pashtuns are proud, and its because it is the only group in the world that destroys empires.

2024? LOL

LOL 2014