Comparing
U.S. and Russian/Soviet Aggression during the Cold War - (PART 2)
by Gary
Leupp
NATO
expanded in 1952, enlisting the now-pacified Greece and its
historical rival, Turkey. In 1955 it brought the Federal Republic of
Germany into the fold. Only then—in May 1956, seven years after the
formation of NATO—did the Soviets establish, in response, their own
defensive military alliance. The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation,
and Mutual Assistance (Warsaw Pact) included a mere eight nations (to
NATO’s 15): the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany,
Hungary, Poland, Romania and Albania.
Warsaw Pact
forces were deployed only once during the Cold War, to crush the
reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. (They were not used during
the suppression of the “Hungarian Revolution” of 1956, occurring
five months after the founding of the alliance. That operation was
performed by Soviet troops and loyalist Hungarian forces.) The
Czechoslovakian intervention occasioned Albania’s withdrawal from
the pact, while Romania protested it and refused to contribute
troops. Thus practically speaking, the Warsaw Pact was down to six
members to NATO’s 15. The western alliance expanded to 16 when
Spain joined in 1982.
Between 1945
and 1991 (when the Warsaw Pact and the USSR both dissolved
themselves), the U.S. had engaged in three major wars (in Korea,
Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf); invaded Grenada and Panama; and
intervened militarily in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon,
Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Haiti and other countries.
During that
same period, the Soviets invaded eastern European nations twice
(Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968), basically to maintain
the status quo. Elsewhere, there was a brief border conflict with
China in 1969 that killed around 150 soldiers on both sides. And the
Soviets of course invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to shore up the secular
regime faced with Islamist opposition. That’s about it. Actually,
if you compare it to the U.S. record, a pretty paltry record of
aggression for a superpower.
That
Islamist opposition in Afghanistan, as we know, morphed into the
Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the group founded in Iraq by one-time bin
Laden rival Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that’s now called ISIL or the
Islamic State. Referred to—almost affectionately—by the U.S.
press in the 1980s as the “Mujahadeen” (“those engaged in
jihad”), these religious militants were lionized at the time as
anti-communist holy warriors by Jimmy Carter’s National Security
Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Brzezinski
told the president six months before the Soviets sent in troops that
by backing the jihadis the U.S. could “induce a Soviet military
intervention.” The U.S., he declared, had “the
opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War” and
could now “bleed” the Soviets as they had bled the U.S. in
Vietnam.
(Linger for
a moment on the morality here. The Soviets had helped the Vietnamese
fight an unpopular, U.S.-backed regime and confront the horrors of
the U.S. assault on their country. Now—to get back, as Brzezinski
out it—the U.S. could help extreme Islamists whose minds are in the
Middle Ages to “induce” Soviet intervention, so as to kill
conscript Soviet boys and prevent the advent of modernity.)
The
anti-Soviet jihadis were welcomed to the White House by President
Ronald Reagan during a visit in 1985. Reagan, perhaps already showing
the signs of Alzheimer’s disease, trumpeted them as “the moral
equivaent of America’s founding fathers.” This is when the
great bulk of U.S. (CIA) aid to the Mujahadeen was going into the
coffers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a vicious warlord now aligned with
the Taliban. One of many former U.S. assets (Saddam Hussein included)
who had a falling-out with the boss, he was the target of at least
one failed CIA drone strike in 2002.
Thus the
Soviets’ one and only protracted military conflict during the Cold
War, lasting from December 1979 to February 1989 and costing some
14,000 Soviet lives, was a conflict with what U.S. pundits have taken
to calling “Islamist terrorism.”
The Soviets
were surely not facing anticommunists pining for “freedom” as
this might be conceptualized in some modern ideology. The enemy
included tribal leaders and clerics who objected to any changes in
the status of girls and women, in particular their dress, and
submission to patriarchal authority in such matters as marriage.
The would-be
Soviet-backed revolutionaries faced religious fanatics ignorant about
women’s medical needs, hostile to the very idea of public clinics,
and opposed to women’s education, (In fact the Soviets were able to
raise the literacy rate for women during the 1980s—a feat not
matched by the new occupiers since 2001—but this was mainly due to
the fact that they maintained control over Kabul, where women could
not only get schooling but walk around without a headscarf.)
Those days
ended when the Soviet-installed regime of Mohammad Najibullah was
toppled by Northern Alliance forces in April 1992. Things only
became worse. Civil war between the Pastun Hekmatyar and his Tajik
rivals immediately broke out and Hekmatyar’s forces brutally
bombarded the capital—something that hadn’t happened during the
worst days of the Soviet period.
As civil war
deepened, the Taliban emerged, presenting itself as a morally
upright, Sharia-based leadership. Acquiring a large social base, it
took Kabul in September 1996. Among its first acts was to seize
Najibullah, who had taken refuge in the UN compound in the city three
years earlier, castrate him, and hang him publicly, denying him a
proper Muslim burial.
Just as
the neocons were crowing about the triumph of capitalism over
communism, and the supposed “end of history,” the Frankenstein’s
monster of Islamism reared up its ugly head. There were no tears
shed in western capitals for Najibullah. But the Taliban were viewed
with concern and distaste and the UN seat remained with the former
Northern Alliance regime controlling just 10% of the country.
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