Truthout: Cheney's Bagram Ghosts

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Cheney's Bagram Ghosts
By Roger Morris
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Friday 02 March 2007

"I heard a loud boom," Vice President Dick Cheney remembered of the suicide bomb at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, where he stopped over this week. Said to be aimed at Cheney himself, the attack left him untouched while killing twenty-one Afghan workers and two Americans - still more casualties in Afghanistan's thirty-year, million-and-a-half-dead civil war.

In that setting, one hopes Cheney heard symbolically more than a "boom." Bagram thunders with relevant ghosts, many of them American.

In the fourth century B.C., it was a fort in one of the first of many ill-fated attempts to subdue the Afghans. Even Alexander's campaign-hardened Macedonians were shocked when the local insurgents left battlefield dead to devouring wild dogs. For ancient Afghans it was religious practice, but for invaders a telling mark of a people capable at once of tender poetry and chivalrous hospitality along with the most ferocious, indomitable resistance to conquest.

Bagram was a mocking ruin as Britain came and went in the nineteenth century to parry imperial Russia in the Great Game. The English killed, tortured, bribed and subverted the Afghans, and in the end, like Alexander's legions, left their bones to bleach at Gandamak and on the stony plain of Maiwand west of Kandahar. They left, too, the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan from the subcontinent. Cut for colonial convenience through the heart of Pashtun tribal lands, the fateful boundary with its separatist ambitions and fears still makes Pakistan the furtive nemesis of Afghan stability, and the inconsolable frontier now a sanctuary for the resurgent Taliban.

The Cold War brought Bagram back to life in the mid-1950s as an air base of the old Afghan royal regime. Having begged in vain for US help - Washington at the time thought the Hindu Kush of no strategic value and preferred as clients the crisp military dictators in Pakistan - the Afghans turned to Russia to modernize their antique armed forces. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030207J.shtml