WAR FATIGUE
Will a military presence in Afghanistan exhaust America?
BY GEORGE HARRIS

George Harris is publisher of Liberty Watch: The Magazine. He is also a political activist and successful Southern Nevadan businessman. Reach Harris at gopgeorge@earthlink.net  Other stories by George Harris

I’ve been doing some heavy thinking lately, which my Liberty Watch posse will tell you, stirs fear in their hearts, since it typically means I’m about to suggest a last-minute change in the magazine’s format that puts them into mental tailspins. Not this time. In fact, now I’m the one who’s frightened. See, I’ve been spending the last few days reading and re-reading a paper published in a multi-disciplinary British journal called Review of International Studies.

Before you start laughing at the image of GOP George laboring over an obscure academic text, let it be known that the 1999 article, titled “The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union,” is clear, concise and easy to understand. Authors Rafael Reuveny and Assem Prakash posit a simple thesis, and back it up with enough historical context to convince the reader that the Russian’s own war in Afghanistan (which roughly lasted from 1979 to 1988) impacted Soviet politics to such a degree that it inevitably led to the collapse of their empire. 

The article leaves me to ponder a terrifying question: Will our country’s military presence in Afghanistan and the Middle East lead to the collapse of our own political system in the same way that the Soviets exhausted themselves in that part of the world?

Consider the article’s four main ideas: First, the Soviet war in Afghanistan changed the broad perception of using military force to intervene in foreign countries. What began as an exercise in “good neighborliness,” i.e. supporting a Marxist movement in Afghanistan, proved to be a concrete example of the pacifist idea that might doesn’t make right. 

Second, the Afghan war discredited the Red Army, proving that it was far from invincible and encouraging the non-Russian republics to demand independence from the Soviet Union. More significantly, the Red Army’s failures caused a rift between the government and the military.

Third, the war further heartened ethnic non-Russians to break away from the Soviet Union, since they viewed the conflict as “a Russian war fought by non-Russians against Afghans.”

Fourth, the war created veteran’s organizations that challenged the political power of the communist party.

In other words, the Afghan war literally tore the Soviet Union apart.

Of course, this wasn’t a bad development. The Soviet Union was an oppressive, authoritarian, godless government that trampled everything we Americans cherish — namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (There was a very real reason why President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”) 

But wars cut both ways. They can cause strife and upheaval in the best and worst of countries, and destroy superior and inferior political ideologies. Having grown up watching the evening news on TV and observing the Soviets fight themselves to death in Afghanistan, I can now see that America is doing the exact same thing — only we are also at war in Iraq and soon will likely be bombing Iran. The really tragic thing about it all is that, unlike the Soviet Union, America is a good and noble nation that will leave the world poorer should it collapse in the wake of foolish empire-building.

Now, I know that perceiving the war in Afghanistan as the main reason for Soviet collapse isn’t a mainstream theory. Most people will tell you it was the United States winning the Cold War that led to the evil empire’s ruin. Perhaps they’re right. Besides, I don’t want to take away anything from the Big Gipper’s role in defeating communism.

But think back to Vietnam and the divisions that occurred in America back then. In those days, many thought, rightly so, that America might undergo a huge transformation with even more socialist gains. It didn’t happen. Maybe the fact that it didn’t happen was due to Nixon’s ending of the Vietnam conflict. If that war had continued, perhaps today we’d all be taxed to an even greater extent, with socialized medicine having eradicated the best health-care system in the world.

Thinking doesn’t change anything, of course. With any luck, we’re merely witnessing an ebb in the tide of a long-term battle against jihadism. However, it looks more and more like it has become America’s turn to exhaust itself — financially and politically — in Afghanistan and beyond.