http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/12/30/38345230.html
Voice of Russia
December 30, 2010
Better let the Genie stay in the bottle
Boris Volkhonsky
The British National Archives have declassified a scope of documents relating to the 1980s, the times of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.
The papers are too numerous for all to be mentioned, but what seems to be most interesting is the account how shortly after the Soviet Union started its military operation in Afghanistan, British, American, German and French politicians secretly agreed to render "discreet support for the Afghan guerrilla resistance".
It should be noted that the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were from the very beginning covertly funded by the CIA, and later some factions of the "resistance movement" went on to form the "public enemy No 1" of today, the notorious Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden himself was at the time one of the prominent figures among the Mujahideen, although little is known about his actual military successes.
The meeting disclosed in the declassified papers took place in Paris on January 15, 1980, less than three weeks after the Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. The participants included the British Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, the US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and government representatives from France and West Germany.
Among the measures agreed to by the western powers was the maintenance of "refugee" camps in Pakistan that served as bases for insurgents, and supply of certain equipment including surface-to-air missiles.
The training and supply of equipment went on till the Soviet troops' withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989. What resulted from this massive military support for the insurgents is all-too-well known. The Al-Qaeda militants, trained and equipped by the West, turned their arms against their former patrons. And now the West, most notably the US, is plunged into the worst war since World War II with no definite guarantee of ultimate victory.
This could be an isolated incident, but the West seems to keep on falling into the same trap over and over again.
When Chechen separatists demanded secession from Russia in the mid-1990s and Russia was compelled to take military measures, how much talk there was on the alleged "violations of human rights" and "disproportionate use of force" Thousands of Chechen "refugees" found a safe haven in Western Europe. And it was only much later that the West found out that a huge number of those "political refugees" it had welcomed open-heartedly were in fact ordinary criminals who continued their illegal activity in the West.
The same can be said about the Balkans. How much sympathy was shown towards the Kosovo separatists! It was the West, and namely the four countries that back in 1980 agreed to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, who were first to recognize Kosovo's unilaterally proclaimed independence in 2008. In less than three years the Council of Europe accused Kosovo Premier Hashim Thaci of being the head of a criminal ring involved in illegal trafficking of human organs back in the 1990s.
These are just a few of the many examples of when the West is eager to support some dubious public figures with only aim in mind – that is, to create a counter-balance, first against the Soviet Union and now Russia. But at the end of the day, the forces initially conceived as a counter-balance seem to backfire on their creators.
Now, the West is turning a blind eye to the crimes against humanity and open aggression against its neighbors committed by its new darling, the Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili. As for him personally, the West may feel safe – Saakashvili is quite happy with his status of a puppet in the West's hands which is the only guarantee for him to stay in power domestically. But this power is not to last long, and who knows what reactive force will eventually replace him in Georgia, and what targets it will choose in the future.
The lessons of the past are not to be forgotten, and the story of former allies turned primary enemies as was the case with Mujahideen who later formed Al-Qaeda is a good reminder.
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