In which case, it is successful.
Every year there are more cases in which this approach backfires. The most glaring and famous failure was in Afghanistan, where some of the groups taught (and supplied) to fight the Soviet Army later became stridently anti-Western. In that environment, Al Qaeda flourished and established the camps where perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were trained. Yet instead of learning from its mistakes, the United States keeps making them.
WaPo
And I keep telling you, at some point you have to come to the realization that this is not a mistake. It is a plan. It keeps the war coffers full and the defense industry flush and in turn contributing to the campaign coffers of Congress.
According to interviews with members of militant groups, such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s Al Nusra Front (which is aligned with al Qaeda), that is exactly what happened with some of the fighters in Libya and even with factions of the Free Syrian Army.
[...]
“We had, in the early stages, information that radical groups had used the vacuum of the Arab Spring, and that some of the people the US and their allies had trained to fight for ‘democracy’ in Libya and Syria had a jihadist agenda — already or later, [when they] joined al Nusra or the Islamic State,” a senior Arab intelligence official said in a recent interview.
He said that often his US counterparts would say things like, “We know you are right, but our president in Washington and his advisers don’t believe that.”
Yes. They do believe that. They are not stupid.
No comments:
Post a Comment