Then and now: in 1980, Afghan resistance fighters stalked Soviet invaders in Kunar

The tragic loss of nine U.S. soldiers, the largest single-day death toll for international forces in the bloodiest year of fighting since the capture of Kabul from the Taliban in 2001, has further exposed the fraudulent public relations tactics of the American-led international military initiative in Afghanistan.

Rather than tackling the chronic failings of the Bush administration’s Afghan policies, and devising new strategies for success, America’s allies have tried to paper over the bloodshed with assurances that progress is being made.

This, despite the obvious worsening of conditions on the two weakest flanks of the West’s war effort: the implosion of the corruption-plagued Karzai regime in Kabul; and the brazen aggressiveness of the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership, projected from their safe havens in Pakistan.

Last week’s G8 conference in Japan revealed appalling evidence of the delusion and deception that envelopes the rich nations’ leaders club. The privileged politicians put their platinum predilections on display by savoring a lavish eight-course dinner – the centrepiece of a three-day summit that cost $600 million to stage.

Only a few hours earlier, a suicide bomber had devastated the Indian Embassy in Kabul, inflicting the highest casualty toll in a single attack of its kind in the capital: 41 dead and 200 wounded. (Afghanistan’s first suicide bombing took place in Kabul in September, 2002.)

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper uttered a few words before the news media, but there was no mention of Afghanistan in the G8 leaders’ final statement on political issues, and only a few sentences in their overview on terrorism. Tellingly, Harper has failed to act on the most urgent recommendations of his government’s independent review on Canada’s mission to Afghanistan, according to the review’s chairman, John Manley.

All of which is enough to leave seasoned Afghan observers with a sickening sense of déjà vu.

Take a look at the image at the top of this report. I took the picture in the spring of 1980. A young Afghan mujahideen guerrilla is looking down from the south east side of the Kunar River, onto the provincial capital of Asadabad.

That’s where the Pech River reaches north from its junction with the Kunar towards the location, now, of the U.S. base attacked by the Taliban with such deadly effect yesterday.

At the mujahed’s back, and behind my camera, is a steep slope that crests at the Afghan-Pakistan border, specifically with Pakistan’s Mohmand and Bajaur tribal agencies.

Like the Taliban group that killed the American troops, Bajaur was the staging ground for the mujahideen I accompanied in Kunar 28 years ago. Same trails, same mountains, same staging points and many of the same targets. (Please see On The Record for some of the history of Pakistan’s interference in Afghanistan.)

And yet for seven years the Bush administration and its allies have pretended not to know of the Taliban’s command and control assets in Pakistan, or the existence, in the lawless borderlands, of al Qaeda’s hideouts. The White House has poured billions of U.S. tax dollars into Pakistan President Musharraf’s military coffers, supposedly to defang the Taliban leadership.

The result reveals another case of blowback. Nine more young Americans are dead, and 30 million Afghans endure a 31st consecutive year of bloody warfare, sponsored by foreigners, and executed by brutalized home-grown guerrillas.

Yet all we learned last week was how to say “Let them eat cake” in Japanese…