This article from Russia seethes with irony and contains a good dose of what Germans call ‘shadenfreuder.’ This is a word that means ‘to take pleasure in the pain of others.’
As most people know – the United States recruited, paid and supplied Islamic mujaheddin to dislodge the Soviet Union from Afghanistan during the Carter and Reagan Administrations.
According to this analysis by Petr Goncharov and Dmitriy Kosirev of Russia’s Novosti News Service – the United States is now dealing with the consequences of what from Moscow’s point of view, has been a decades-long series of monumental policy mistakes on the part of the United States.
Goncharov and Kosirev write in part:
“The United States is reaping the fruits of its own policy, which, during the years of the Cold War was aimed at supporting the mujaheddin. … Imported from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, the mujaheddin brought with them Islamic extremism, which is now successfully confronting their investors – the United States.”
And in one of their more ironic paragraphs, Goncharov and Kosirev write:
“And by the way, now that we’re reevaluating our “Cold” past, this is a good time to ask, was there such a difference between today’s U.S./European program for settling Afghanistan and the program implemented in its time by the Soviet Union? As it turns out, there is no significant difference. The same goals, the same challenges: establishing Afghanistan as a modern democratic secular state, whose culture and social ideology would be based on Afghan tradition, including Islam. But the United States was so passionate in its desire to prevent the Soviet Union from controlling Central Asia that it was ready to sacrifice the peace and tranquility in Afghanistan – which is pretty much what happened.”
By Petr Goncharov and Dmitriy Kosirev
Translated By Yekaterina Blinova
May 8, 2009
Russian – Novosti – Original Article (Russian)
The meeting at the White House was impressive. The participants were: Barack Obama, president of the nation that calls the situation (a war, actually) in Afghanistan and Pakistan his number one foreign policy priority; Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai; and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. Each guest got twenty minutes to speak with Obama, and then there was a half-hour trilateral meeting with promises of aid and calls for unity.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US