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Not Vietnam

The map of Afghanistan is about to become familiar to Americans. I hope Americans will also learn that four million Afghans were facing starvation even before September 11; that after three years of drought, most farmers have eaten or sold their livestock to survive; that 300 people starve to death each week; that 80,000 Afghans were stranded without shelter on the Pakistan border and 10,000 on the Tajikistan border even before the current desperate rush for the western border with Iran.

Even under such dire conditions, we are likely to find that Afghans are a tough and fiercely independent people. The British learned, after two Anglo-Afghan wars in the 19th century, that Afghanistan is not a land that can be conquered. They lost 20,000 British soldiers in the first war alone. The Soviet Union learned the same lesson a century later, when a decade [1979-1989] of war to hold up a brief, unpopular communist regime proved so costly, bloody, and indecisive that they finally withdrew—and in the same year collapsed. It was called “the USSR’s Vietnam.”

Because it was still the Cold War, the United States trained and armed the Afghan freedom-fighters. That included Osama bin Laden, a bitter expatriate Arab getting radicalized in the desolate uplands of Afghan resistance. After Soviet withdrawal, 30,000 persons died as the mujahedin fell into bloody civil war along tribal lines, Pathans warlords against Hazara, Tajik, and Uzbek warlords. Meanwhile, in the refugee camps of Peshawar, a young generation of students [talib] in conservative Muslim madrasas [seminaries] were being revolutionized with the Koran and AK-47s. In 1996, with Pakistani support, these young revolutionaries seized Kabul, banned all non-Islamic media [television, radio, CDs, videos], and imposed a rigid moral code on all Afghans, above all on women.

Afghans are now steeling themselves for the next phase of their bloody history as they wait to see whether the Taliban will turn over bin Ladin or tough it out against the United States.

We’ve already had our Vietnam. What will Afghanistan be to us?

Carolyn Heinz, Department of Anthropology