Just never learn do we? I can remember this like yesterday

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/dec/18/afghanistans-other-war/

Afghanistan’s Other War

December 18, 1986

<snip>The Afghan resistance, however, is prepared for a fight to the finish. Both within the country and outside its borders, Afghans are raising their children in the spirit of jihad, arming them spiritually and emotionally for the drawn-out battle that lies ahead. It is with this spirit that the Soviets must contend, both on the battlefield and in their fight for the allegiance of the Afghan children.


The Soviets are waging a cruel war in Afghanistan, a war intended to terrorize civilians, to force them to flee or to cease supporting the resistance. Virtually every known crime of war is taking place there, and on a scale so vast it defies imagination. Children are among the most victimized. They are bombed in their schools, locked in their homes and burned alive, shot while fleeing to caves in the mountains or en route to refuge in Pakistan. They are spied upon and urged to inform against their families and friends. They have lost hands and eyes by picking up “toys” that have exploded in their faces.

The war has produced thousands of orphans, many of whom have seen their parents die. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan children have become refugees within their own country, driven from their homes and villages, and herded into cities where they live confused and impoverished lives. Millions more have made the arduous journey to Pakistan, where they live without purpose in squalid refugee camps. Some of the many children I interviewed during a recent visit seemed excessively fearful, shrinking away at the sight of a camera, for example, apparently suspecting it might be a gun. Others were dispirited or despondent. A refugee woman living in a make-shift tent said that her youngest child “is not normal.” “She cries a lot, she is always sick, since the bombing.” Asked how her children spend their days, she replied: “They just sit with me. Like in a jail. We just sit.”

Virtually all of Afghanistan’s young people, those within the country and those beyond the border, are victims of their experience of a vicious, prolonged war. They present a challenge to which both the Soviets and the Afghan resistance have risen, each side eager to win them to its cause.


The Soviets are at a disadvantage. They seek to impose a communist ideology that has gone bankrupt in their own country and is foreign to Afghan thinking, an ideology that most Afghans consider atheistic, evil, and decadent. Moreover, since only a small part of the country is under Soviet control, they can hope to influence only the children living in Kabul and a few other cities. But the Soviets have had long experience in subduing ethnic resistance in other countries, most pertinently in their own Central Asian republics. They believe that they are bringing progress and enlightenment to a poor and backward nation, and they have no scruples about the methods that they use.

[EFerrari]

1. How many invaders did Viet Nam send packing?

A lot of them. Not just us and the French.

[snagglepuss]

2. You won't believe this. But this article was reprinted in the Globe and Mail

and I have often thought about it. Until I had read it I knew next to nothing about Afganistan but the article struck me as prescient and have never forgotten it. How odd that you remember the same article. (Edit to add) I have often kicked myself that I hadn't clipped the article but now, thanks to you, I have it back in my clutches:)