Lessons From Commies

The Herald Tribune has a piece today about what NATO’s doing wrong in Afghanistan, and it turns out that its most ham-handed tactics — air raids, curfews, making sections of Kabul off-limits to locals — are no different from the Russians’ mistakes in the 1980s. Not only is NATO not making friends; it’s imitating aspects of the Evil Empire it had been founded to resist. And what is the point of NATO, so many years after the Cold War, if it’s just another big dumb bureaucracy with weapons?

I asked Edmund McWilliams, who was in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in the late 1980s, about this. He confirmed that life under the doomed Soviet occupation wasn’t much different than it is today. There was a nightly curfew back then, when the KGB worked out of the same headquarters that the CIA uses now. The Communist president, Mohammad Najibullah, used to shut down air traffic for hours whenever he flew anywhere, just like Karzai does now. The Kabul sky teemed with armored helicopters and Mig fighters.

The “controversy” over Obama’s flag pin, believe it or not, falls into the same category. Who seriously thinks a lapel pin makes a person patriotic?

You know where else wearing a flag pin is a big deal? North Korea. Everyone seemed to be wearing one there. I was in a tour group and we were told that anyone not wearing their pin when they should had to write a self-recrimination letter to apologize.

     posted 15 May 2008 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. Everyone should fly into Seoul to understand that the cold war is alive and well. Just a side note.

    e

    — e    May 17, 08:54 pm    #