Dave Eberhart
Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2001

The regime in Afghanistan has raised the specter of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force members in Somalia. During a fierce Mogadishu firefight in Oct. 1993, intense enemy fire pinned down elite U.S. forces for 17 hours. Eighteen Americans were killed and 84 wounded in the engagement.

The infamous post-battle image was of a Westerner’s dead body being dragged through the streets by a celebrating mob.

"We are eagerly awaiting the American troops to land on our soil, where we will deal with them in our own way,” warned Jalaluddin Haqqani, a senior Taliban commander and veteran resistance fighter during the Soviet occupation (1979-89). Haggani made the remarks last week in an interview with the Pakistani newspaper, The News.

Americans 'Having Their Heads Cut Off'

"Sometime during this war I expect that we will see videos of U.S. prisoners having their heads cut off. Our enemies will do this not only to demonstrate their ‘strength’ to their followers, but also to cause us to overreact, to seek wholescale revenge against civilian populations and to turn this into the worldwide religious war that they desperately want,” says West Pointer (Class of ‘86) and humanitarian Richard Kidd.

Not one to mince words, Kidd was one of the last American citizens to experience Afghanistan - up close and personal. Beginning in 1993, he was providing relief and assistance to refugees along the Tajikistan (Afghanistan’s northern neighbor) border. "I still have extensive contacts in the area and among the Afghan community,” he said.

"Our opponents will not abide by the Geneva conventions,” added Kidd. "There will be no prisoners unless there is a chance that they can be ransomed or made part of a local prisoner exchange.”

According to Kidd, during Afghanistan’s war with the Soviets, videotapes were made of communist prisoners having their throats slit. He also described a brisk trade in prisoners - grist in the making of grisly souvenir videos for outside fighters to take home with them.

This bizarre practice has spread to the Philippines, Bosnia and Chechnya, said Kidd, where similar videos are being filmed today and can be found on the World Wide Web. "We can expect our soldiers to be treated the same way.”

In 1998 and 1999 Kidd was the deputy program manager for the United Nations' mine action program in Afghanistan. This program is still the largest civilian employer in the country, with more than 5,000 people clearing mines, explained Kidd.

"As a [mine clearer] I was ironically engaged in a ‘Holy War’ decreed by the Taliban against the evil of landmines. By a special proclamation of Mullah Omar, all those who might have died in this effort were considered to be martyrs - even an ‘infidel’ such as myself.”

Kidd emphasized that U.S. forces "have to take steps not to play to their strengths, which would be to unite the entire population against us by increasing their suffering or killing innocents, to get bogged down trying to hold terrain, or to get into a battle of attrition chasing up and down mountain valleys.”

Since the American-led bombing campaign began Oct. 7, observers reported that the Taliban has spread much of its 40,000-man force around urban residential areas, making potentially difficult the task of ferreting out the enemy with minimal collateral damage to noncombatants.

Roots of Lawless Warfare

Author and historian Hassan Kakar in his book "The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979—1982," attempted to trace the roots of the enemy’s lawless approach to waging war:

"U.S. aid to the mujahideen [so-called ‘freedom fighters’ that confronted the Soviets] went through the CIA. The CIA passed it on to its counterpart in Pakistan, the ISI. The ISI passed it on to the political parties of exiles in Peshawr, from whom, in turn, it finally made its way, often much-reduced, to commanders inside Afghanistan.

"The ISI, as a matter of deliberate policy, favored the most extreme Islamist organizations it could lay hands on ... not because it thought these groups could form a stable government in Afghanistan, but precisely because it hoped they could not.”

According to Kakar, the net effect was to neutralize other political groups, whether traditionalist or nationalist, and to destroy the authority of traditional power-holders, replacing them with fanatics ignorant of the Islam they claimed to be imposing.

Between the practices of the mujahideen and the Soviets’ ruthless countering tactic of depopulating remote villages, a third of the country became refugees, mostly in Pakistan and Iran, said Kakar.

Millions more became refugees within the country, swelling the population of Kabul, he said. A million people were killed, either in fighting or by starvation. By the end of the Soviet occupation, Afghanistan began a free-fall into chaos. The Kabul regime could not sustain itself and collapsed in the face of the mujahideen, who established an Islamist government in Kabul.

Some 3 million Afghans, said Kakar, lived in the refugee camps in Pakistan where the only culture available to them were harsh and backward forms of Islam promulgated by the ISI and Saudi Arabia. It was from among those who had grown up in these camps that the Taliban were recruited, and this group provided the manpower for the conquest of the country.

According to Kidd, Afghanistan is exhausted and desperately wants something like peace. "They know very little of the world at large and have no access to information or knowledge that would counter what they are being told by the Taliban. They have nothing left - nothing, that is, except for their pride.”

Traditionally, said Kidd, the Afghan order of battle is feudal, with fighters owing allegiance to a "commander” and this person owing allegiance upward and so on. Often such allegiance is secured by payment.

According to Amnesty International, during the fighting with the Soviet occupiers, more than 400,000 children were killed, and thousands more died of reasons related to war.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Middle East

Russia

War on Terrorism

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