This article by Mohsin Hamid gives an excellent picture of the lack of concern in both the American policy apparatus and the American public to the tremendous damage that is done by American policies towards people and institutions who are NOT the target of these operations.
He is in a unique position to understand this, having spent his time from ages 6-9 in the US before moving back to Lahore, Pakistan, and then returning to the US for college.
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For another, growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s let me see firsthand the devastating effects that the best of U.S. intentions can have.
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But there is another major reason for anti-Americanism: the accreted residue of many years of U.S. foreign policies. These policies are unknown to most Americans.
They form only minor footnotes in U.S. history. But they are the chapter titles of the histories of other countries, where they have had enormous consequences.
America’s strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
He moved back to Pakistan just as the civil war that Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brezinski bought* was ramping up, and he saw the effects:
- “Kalashnikov assault rifles from those camps began to flood the streets of Lahore, setting in motion a crime wave that put an end to my days of pedaling unsupervised through the streets.”
- Zia began an ongoing attempt to Islamize Pakistan and thus make it a more fertile breeding ground for the anti-Soviet jihad.
- Public female dance performances were banned, female newscasters were told to cover their heads and laws undermining women’s rights were passed.
- Secular politicians, academics and journalists were intimidated, imprisoned and worse.
- The angry groups of bearded men who began enforcing their own morality codes became a fact of life.
- An explosion in cheap Heroine, and hence addiction and associated problems, as a result of it being Mujahideen’s primary revenue source for their activities.
He makes the very wise commnet, “Simply because America has — often for what seemed good reasons at the time — intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, forgotten those interventions.”
The Taliban and al Queida are a result of both our policies in the Afghan civil war, and then our ignoring the mess that we made.
*It’s clear that the Afghan civil war was a product of American to create it. While there was always banditry in Afghan countryside, Brezinski, with Carter’s approval paid money to, and armed those bandits, with the hope of creating, and embroiling the Soviets in, a Vietnam Style civil war.
It worked all too well, and given that this was about half a decade from the fall of Saigon, they both had to know the suffering and death that this would create.