Thursday, August 16, 2007 : In a few weeks, the war in Afghanistan by one count will be six years old. By another, it has been going on for more than three decades. This war has made Afghanistan (especially its southeastern region, along with western Pakistan) the epicenter of global Islamist-jihadist terrorism.
The war during the 1980s, directed, funded and waged for geopolitical reasons through irregular fighters often proudly praised as "mujahideen," led to three significant influences: the propagation of irregular sub-conventional war through terrorism in the name of religion; a phenomenal spread and diffusion of military-specification sophisticated weapons to the jihadist groups; and important perceptions of the outcome of that war.
All these are dominant templates in the current war in Afghanistan, though in an enormously expanded scale that undermines security and stability in the Middle East and beyond. Perhaps the most difficult issue to deal with, having ramifications in terms of its impact on the ongoing war in Afghanistan (and Iraq), are the perceptions of victory and defeat. The Soviet Union pulled out after a decade in a fairly organized manner, leaving behind a well-entrenched Afghan regime with a capable military force that successfully defended its outposts for years. But across the world, especially among Muslim populations, the perception rapidly grew that the jihad waged by Afghan mujahideen had "defeated" a superpower and its surrogate regime in Afghanistan.
Radical jihadist terrorism erupted from the Balkans through Kashmir to the Philippines. An even more radical Taliban was created to unseat the mujahideen regime in Kabul. The 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York and other acts of Islamist terrorism were but some of the tragic consequences. Religious terrorism itself became an instrument of policy for many, promoted and propagated by an increasingly fundamentalist army in Pakistan that invoked holy scripture to legitimize terrorism after including "jihad" in its motto.
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