Why is the Soviet occupation called an occupation, but the American one is not?
Author: Farid Younes, Professor Emeritus of Cultural Anthropology and Islamic Philosophy, California State University, Member of the Sangar Advisory Board
Conquests and wars are not a new phenomenon in the history of mankind. This has happened for various reasons throughout world history. In recent history, two cases occurred in the 20th century in the country of my birth.
Since 1979, many books have been written about the occupation of Afghanistan by the Red Army. As for the occupation of Afghanistan by the United States of America, so far, although almost twenty years have passed, less has been written. The reason is that among the Afghans there was no consensus on this occupation. All Afghans believe that Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviet Socialist Republic, but not all Afghans believe that Afghanistan was occupied by America.
Afghans, especially those who lived in Europe and the United States and migrated to Western countries due to Soviet occupation, take a different view. But they, directly and indirectly, supported the occupation of Afghanistan by the Americans. Some sewed American and Afghan flags to their shirts. Their trips to Afghanistan began. Afghan Americans, ie. who obtained US citizenship entered Afghanistan without a visa. Since they had dual citizenship, a large number of them worked for the US Department of Defense as translators, engineers, cultural consultants, etc. with a very significant annual salary of 250 thousand dollars, and did not consider this treason. They bought houses in America and even bought real estate in Turkey and Afghanistan. They fought for democracy and got jobs in the Karzai and Ghani administrations without defining democracy for Afghanistan or recognizing that their country was occupied.
Strangely enough, those who supported the American occupation of Afghanistan were more educated, secular, and little interested in religion, and in their own circles, since America considered religion to be separate from politics, they also considered religion to be separate from Afghan politics.
The cult of America in America has reached its peak in order to receive money from American companies and the government for their projects. People like this researcher who did not participate in competitions were considered crazy. Those who worked in the US Department of Defense and still work signed a contract not to criticize America. And to this day they do not dare to speak negatively against America.
During these forty years, children were born in America, and these children grew up with an American mentality, and they worked not only in large companies, but also in the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), and in the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), which is the internal secret police of the United States. Some of them were bilingual, that is, they knew Farsi and English or Pashto and English, they could at least speak if they could not write, as they say, “their bread was in butter”, and they received higher salaries. After the September 11 terrorist attack, the Afghan mosques were under the supervision of the FBI and the same Afghans. Because they wanted to know what the khatib was saying. Just as during the Soviet occupation people in Kabul were afraid of each other, in America, although freedom of speech is part of the law, among the Afghans, the same absolute trust was violated. A number of families have become Christians, especially as a result of the propaganda that Christians carry out for their religion and the Islamophobia that the Western press skillfully carries out against Islam among the youth of Afghanistan. Some girls, although few, have married non-Muslims. Parents also close in on themselves. Anti-Islamic propaganda of the Afghans themselves under the auspices of freedom of speech and freedom of thought. It so happened that families who emigrated from Afghanistan due to the pressure of atheism and disbelief became atheists themselves in the United States.
The occupation of Soviet Russia had more of an ideological aspect, and therefore ideology, from the point of view of political sociology, generates a regime that can be overthrown. When the Americans left, their ideology did not go away, and export democracy, which I called dishonorable ten years ago, was exported with a culture of lawlessness. Dr. Ali Shariati, a well-known sociologist of the 20th century, called democracy a system of lawlessness.
The system exported to Afghanistan lacked two things: morality and justice. Because these two principles do not exist in a democracy. At the Bonn Conference, the Afghans gave this rampant system a national and tribal spirit, which left Afghanistan in absolute stagnation.
