Russians in Afghanistan...

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading Warren Carroll's excellent The Rise and Fall of the Communist Revolution. Never a fan of Marx and his doctrines, Carroll paints the evils of Communism vividly, serving to dissuade all but the most fervent of true believers. But there is more to the book than historical recounting which might make the good Troutsky mad. His two chapters on the Russian war with Afghanistan are illuminating, given the US presence there.

An Afghan goes down fighting...

In a land where every man who could possibly afford (or steal) a firearm went armed, and prized weapons were handed down from grandfather to father to son, there were men who faced the Red Army in 1980 with Lee-Enfield rifles taken from the bodies of British soldiers Afghans had slain on the battlefield of Maiwand in 1880--and others who only had the flintlock muskets taken from Indian armies in the 1780'...

It was a medieval economy against a super-power, a war that the world said could not be won; but still they won it...

Speaking in 1985 before a group that included [Carroll], Zabihullah Mojadedi said, "A seriously disabled Afghan resistance fighter is one who can no longer move, see. or talk."

And so on and so forth. Islam means "submission" but those that submit in full to Allah seldom care to submit to the shackles of less noble leadership. The one seemingly unconquerable heresy with which the Church has been faced throughout the centuries has been Islam. I know of no solution to extirpate the fanatical militarism with which Islam is inexorably tied, but I can't help but regret that those who have sought to make the Iraqis and Afghanis submit to the American god of freedom are learning too late what many have learned before.

It's not as if the indefatigable nature of the Islamic fighter hasn't been well documented throughout history.