Bill Moyers and Charles Rangel have called upon America�s leaders to reinstate the military draft. The call reflects a moral imperative that the burden of actual fighting in America�s foreign wars be shared more equally across the American class structure. African Americans, over-represented among the American poor, are over-recruited into the armed forces by the �poverty draft.� In the so-called �post-civil-rights� moment disparate impact in dying for one�s country on the axes of class and race should not be tolerated. This is the African American stake in the American war in Afghanistan policy debate. I call it the American war because the United States is the prime mover in Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (�ISAF�), and United Nations efforts there.

Former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski is credited with the idea of the �Afghan Trap.� By this he meant an unwinnable �Vietnam War� for the now former Soviet Union that then was under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev. In summer 1979, the Carter administration started giving logistical support to Afghan resistance to a Soviet-allied Afghan government to increase the likelihood of a Soviet military invasion. In December 1979 the Soviet invasion and occupation followed. In February, 1989, after over 14,000 military personnel died, the Soviet Union withdrew.

Reagan era U.S. cold warriors saw the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989 as an opportunity to beat the �Reds� by �liberating� Afghanistan. In the Soviet period, they contracted Pakistan�s intelligence services to provide military, logistical, and to pass through financial support to the Afghan resistance. Among the foreign Islamic fighter groups against Soviet communism, one sponsored by former Saudi national Osama bin Laden also gave ideological support and later became Al Qaeda. The local and foreign fighters learned well how to conduct an internationally supported, locally-based armed insurgency against the occupation.

Mullah Mohamed Omar, an Arabic-speaking Pashtun who later became a religious teacher, was among those who fought in this proxy war against the Soviet Union. He is presently considered the most effective of the insurgency�s leaders. Today�s resistance fighters probably receive operational training primarily from Soviet period Afghan mujahideen veterans.

Following the Soviet Union�s withdrawal in 1989 and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. disinvested from both Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the fight anti-Soviet foreign aid built up the regional radical Islamist movement. Osama bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989 but was expelled in 1991 for anti-government activities. He objected to American troops being stationed in his country after Iraq�s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He moved to Sudan where he began developing operations against the U.S. presence in the region.

In Afghanistan in 1992, three years after the Soviet withdrawal, the formerly Soviet-backed Najibullah government fell as the country plunged into civil war. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the former U.S. allies in the anticommunist crusade, and later the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Iran, until 2001 supported various armed factions in Afghanistan.

Mullah Omar in 1994 apparently started a new military effort with some fifty armed religious students. The Afghan Taliban grew as they fought in the civil war against the regional warlords until 1996, when they took over Kabul and the central government, and thereafter. Omar�s religious conservative Islamists established a male supremacist, religious law based regime. In summer 2000 the Taliban banned opium poppy cultivation. By February 2001 U.N. observers declared the religious militia had wiped out opium production in a country that once was and today is once again the world�s largest producer.

The prior Soviet era connection with transnational Islamic fighters led Mullah Omar�s government to provide safe haven for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda when in 1996 it was driven out of the Sudan. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan planned and began executing further foreign operations including the September 11, 2001 attacks. On August 6 this year John Brennan, Senior White House Advisor for Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism, said: �Al Qaeda has proven to be adaptive and highly resilient and remains the most serious terrorist threat we face as a Nation.�

In October 2001 the United States invaded Afghanistan but failed to follow through to destroy the Al Qaeda organization. This led directly to Afghan war policy conundrums that the Obama administration today faces. Afghans, particularly the Pashtuns, thirty years and under have known only warfare and have limited employment options. The Afghan refugee crisis doubtless reflects how few now can even imagine a peaceful and prosperous Afghan nation.

Complicating the situation is an uncertain and nuclear-armed ally, Pakistan, and the Pakistan government�s long-term welfare dependency on U.S. foreign and military aid. Pakistan itself now faces a Pakistani Taliban insurgency as it seizes the northern areas it allowed Afghan fighters to use as a base for some of their Afghan combat operations. If the United States experienced blowback in the 1998 Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings and on September 11, 2001, Pakistan now faces blowback for its own state sponsorship of terrorism as an instrument of its foreign policy.

Afghan resistance has recently resurged, under three primary fighting groups that are funded by foreign donations and drug trade revenue. America�s adversaries in Afghanistan are led by an Afghan leadership principally based in Pakistan. Among these is Mullah Omar�s organization in the Quetta Shura Taliban in southern Pakistan. Afghan combat operations however decline in winter reflecting a seasonal fighting cycle.

For unemployed Afghan youth from within the country or from the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, the armed struggle may be the only available paid employment outside the drug trade. The net effect of this and America�s poverty draft is that America�s underprivileged youth of all colors end up fighting the Afghan refugee poor.

Commander Osama bin Laden, while he initially denied it, and his Al Qaeda leadership team conceptualized the spectacular (it was a global spectacle) World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Their purpose was to draw the United States � their version of the �Evil Empire� � into a new �Afghan Trap.� While some doubt the story, it is the global elite consensus view. Bin Laden, while never formally Zbigniew Brzezinski�s student, thus understood and learned well the master�s Afghan Trap concept. Bin Laden hoped for and intended a new Vietnam War for the United States. In this sense, then, he is Brzezinski�s star pupil.

The present U.S. strategy and troop levels debate represents reaction to the Afghan Trap. The U.S. assessment seems to embrace both more troops and a counterinsurgency approach that requires building linguistic and cultural competence among U.S., British, and ISAF forces operating in Afghanistan. The intent is not only to provide physical security to the Afghan people, but to use the soldiers to build capacity both for Afghanistan�s economic development and for transparent local, regional, and national governance. This is a clear rejection of the Bush administration�s �no nation-building� stance. It also responds to what was long an open secret and is now public, the Karzai government�s corruption by the expanded narcotics trade that itself contributes to Afghan popular disillusionment and ultimately resistance.

Afghan nation-building by foreigners is a bit contradictory. Moreover, at a time when the U.S. government is already deficit spending its way out of recession, it will be expensive. There is a proposal to build up the Afghan National Security Force � the army, air force, and police � to some 400,000 strong. Optimum for financing this, and simultaneously eliminating the drug corruption problem, could be international decriminalization of opium and marijuana production and consumption. Afghanistan could tax the production to generate much-needed revenue for its governmental operations. Overdeveloped nations could use a harm reduction approach to consumption and provide suitable markets. This is arguably a conservative restoration approach. Global opium and marijuana legalization would merely return us to the mid-nineteenth century regime of free trade. For the U.S., the benefits of such free trade now clearly outweigh the costs.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, John Hayakawa T�r�k, is a critical race theorist and card-carrying member of the USA Green Party, who lives in Oakland, California. He is a Fellow, World Association of International Studies, Stanford University. Click here to contact John T�r�k.

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