Kabul or Beirut?

Even as the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq morphs into a bigger, bloodier version of Israel's West Bank morass, Afghanistan threatens to recreate--on a larger scale--the ill-fated Lebanon mission of 1982-1984.

"NATO troops garrisoning Kabul are duplicating the role of U.S. Marines sent to Beirut in 1982," warned Canadian foreign affairs analyst Eric Margolis in the August 17th Toronto Sun. "Washington billed the Marines as 'peacekeepers' in Lebanon's bloody civil war. In reality, the Marines were sent to prop up the Israeli-dominated Christian Phalangist regime in its war against Syrian-backed Muslim groups. When 240 Marines were killed by a truck bomb, Americans were outraged their 'peacekeepers' had become a target. Americans--and the Marines--simply did not understand that they had been dropped in the middle of a civil war as full-fledged combatants."

Remarkably similar conditions prevail in Afghanistan today, insists Margolis. "The sole mission of NATO's Kabul garrison is propping up the U.S.-installed Afghan regime of Mohammed Karzai, an amiable but powerless figurehead and an old Central Intelligence Agency asset," he writes. (Note that Karzai is also on chummy terms with Iran's revolutionary regime.)

Real power in Afghanistan, continues Margolis, "is held by the Northern Alliance, which is armed, financed and largely directed by the Russian security services. The Northern Alliance's three main components are Panjshiris of the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, a covert Soviet ally during the 1980s war, the old Afghan Communist Party, now led by former secret police general Mohammed Fahim, and the Uzbek militia of war criminal Gen. Rashid Dostam." Elsewhere the country is run by a collection of petty warlords, many of whom are on the U.S. payroll. And the Soviet-organized Northern Alliance has resumed its role as the leading producer of the world's heroin--a role that was interrupted after the Taliban evicted them from power in the mid-1990s.

"Some 9,000 U.S. troops are stack in a low-grade guerrilla war in Afghanistan costing $500 million U.S. monthly," concludes Margolis. "The security situation in Afghanistan now ironically resembles late 1982: A Soviet-installed puppet regime in Kabul, propped up by the Red Army and combat-shy government troops, with scattered but growing armed resistance to the foreign occupation."