Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Stephanie -- his diary entry triggered recollection of that Zbig -- not sure how many ever saw that, let alone fully took stock of it -- the diary entry makes clear that we/our proxies were already active there well over a year before the 7/3/79 'first' Carter directive mentioned by Zbig -- and thanks for all of those photos and descriptions of Afghanistan before . . .

oh Jimmy, I think I can safely say on behalf of folks from all across the spectrum, we hardly knew ye -- to think that wingnuts to this day attack Carter for not having sent U.S. forces to fight the Soviets ('all he could find the courage to do was to boycott the 1980 Russian Olympics, what a commie-pinko wuss') -- talk about unclear on the (on its own terms 'successful' neoliberal) concept -- the point was to make them bleed, not us -- and, fuck the Afghans, that's exactly what happened

quite a contrast with the present -- courtesy of the neocons, we bleed, and bin Laden/the 'real' al Qaeda (whatever in fact is the real story with them) not only for the most part don't bleed, but indeed by reaping the very whirlwind we have unleashed in Iraq and evidently soon will in Iran, by which we now bleed, they grow stronger -- go figure -- . . .

from http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/travel/21kabul.html :

In the 1970s, tens of thousands of visitors poured into Kabul each year, when the Afghan capital rivaled Kathmandu as the favored Central Asian haunt for young backpackers who bunked down in cheap hotels and congregated on fabled Chicken Street to smoke hashish and while away the hours in coffee and carpet shops.

from http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSP208882 :

The empire of Babur, the 16th century founder of the Mughal dynasty, stretched from Samarkand to central India, but he died pining for Kabul and insisting on being buried in the place he called paradise on earth.

His open-air tomb on a hillside in what is now the capital of Afghanistan is set in an oasis of greenery. With the snow-fringed Hindu Kush ranges providing a majestic backdrop, the tomb is set amidst a garden of walnut, mulberry, apple and pomegranate trees as well as a small marble mosque, fountains and water channels.

But the views below are far from paradise. These days the tomb overlooks a war-ravaged city of about four million people, dusty and choked with garbage.

There is little piped water and roads are mostly unpaved. Bombed-out and bullet-pocked buildings are common, piles of plastic bottles litter the Kabul River, and street are jammed with cars that raise clouds of dust and exhaust fumes.

"It has the highest amount of faecal matter in the atmosphere in the world," said Pushpa Pathak, a senior adviser to the Kabul municipality. "Less than five percent of households have sewage systems.

"If you are awake at 4 a.m., you can hear the donkey carts taking shit out of the city."

This ancient method of cleaning dry toilets is crumbling because the farms that used the waste as fertiliser are getting further and further away due to the speed at which the city is expanding.

As late as the 1970s, Kabul was an enchanting little city, with gardens, trees, quaint bazaars, and magnificent mosques and palaces.

"It was the Switzerland of the east," says Pathak. "People used to honeymoon here."

Ten years of Soviet rule, the battles for liberation and then a devastating civil war brought ruin and destruction. International isolation during the rule of the Taliban and the war to oust them followed.

The first to go were the trees -- cut down for fuel or because successive warlords feared they could provide cover for enemies.

"No road leading out of Kabul has any trees today," says Pathak.

Intensive artillery bombardment of the city from adjoining hills marked the civil war, reducing many of its buildings to rubble. Anything that survived slipped into disrepair.

LAST SIX YEARS

Since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban in 2001 and President Hamid Karzai took over, there has been relative peace, but only marginal improvement in the city.

What was a population of about 700,000 in the 1970s has ballooned to four million, as refugees return and impoverished villagers flock to the city to seek security and employment.

Many built mud houses on the scrub-covered hills around Kabul, with no water, electricity or sewage.

Now, says Pathak, only 10 percent of households have piped water, only half the garbage in the city is picked up and about 50-60 km of roads in the city are in urgent need of repair. Electricity is intermittent even at the best of times.

note the jump in Kabul's population since the 1970s -- just as Iraq has something like 2 million 'internally displaced' refugees, it would appear that Kabul has absorbed a similar number of 'internally displaced' Afghans

of course, the Soviet Union was already inexorably declining toward collapse all by itself before Afghanistan, and neither Afghanistan nor Reagan's massive military spending were necessary to its ultimate collapse