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| An Afghani war carpet |
“In early 2012, a few months after the outbreak of the
militarized Syrian revolution,” Jordanian-Palestinian political
analyst Yasser Zaatra says in a think
piece for Aljazeera portal, “I
wrote about Afghanistan becoming the template for Syria.
“I think time proved me right. But I hope the Syria
war won’t last as long as Afghanistan’s.”
Zaatra continues:
Syria-watcher Robert Fisk, who has been
Middle East correspondent of The Independent for 30 years, wrote lately about
the Syrian government army’s recent advances and expansion of territory. He wrote,
“This war – beware – may last another two, three or more years. Nobody will
win.”
This sort of pessimism could be meant to promote a
political solution, given that Fisk is not exactly a fan of the revolution. On
the contrary, his travels to Syria are by special arrangements with the regime
and he is usually embedded with its military units.
Obviously, historical experiences, including
revolutions, are never cloned. But parallels and close similarities always
exist – not only in details and the course of events, but in the outcome at
times.
The first analogy in the Afghanistan-Syria case is
that Iran’s entanglement in Syria mirrors the Soviet Union’s
embroilment in Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union was defending its international
status after a protracted cold war with the United States and the West, which
had earned it superpower status in a bipolar world.
The Soviet Union felt its defeat in Afghanistan would
wear down that status.
The outcome proved much worse than expected, having
ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union altogether.
Iran is in Syria defending her aggrandizement project,
which cost her an arm and a leg to get off the ground.
She feels losing Syria would cripple the project and
force her back to her former status – a nation-state confined to her borders
and a regional power comparable to Turkey.
The Soviet Union thought it was defending a major
design, deeming the implications of losing the battle won’t be short-lived but
the commencement of sequential retreats.
Iran is in the same frame of mind. Otherwise, Iranian
leaders wouldn’t be saying defending Damascus is like defending Tehran.
Tehran is not under threat so long as she remains
open to dialogue. What’s under time pressure is the aggrandizement venture she
has been fostering for the past 30 years.
For the Soviet Union, the rallying call for the
Afghan war was communism. It was the time when the Islamic revival was in its
early stages, had no issues with the West and felt threatened by the atheist
communist tide.
Like the communist threat of former times, the threat
of Shiism raised by Iran picking up the wrong end of the stick in Syria, made
hackles rise in Arab popular and Islamic circles.
They feel non-Arab Iran has exceeded her territorial
bounds and her expansionist and hegemony plans must be restrained.
To be more precise, hostility towards Iran today goes
deeper than resentment of the Soviet Union during its Afghan war – perhaps for Arab
proximity and emotional reasons.
Another conceivable reason is the role of the social
media in relaying news and exposing Syrian regime crimes.
Much as the majority of Arabs resented the Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan in the past, they now believe Iran has taken over Syria after it
had swallowed up Iraq and empowered its cat’s-paw Hezbollah to rule Lebanon.
True, Russia is also playing dirty in Syria –
supplying arms to the regime and deploying Russian advisors to oversee military
operations.
But Iran and Hezbollah dwarf Russia’s involvement in
Syria.
Iran, with Hezbollah in tow, is directly in command
of the Syria war, which Tehran is funding fully.
With time, Iran will sink deeper and deeper in the
Syria swamp. Unlike Russia, which shells out nothing, she will have to dish out
more and more cash as her economy declines because of Western sanctions that
are biting deeper than ever.
Had Iran not coughed up some $20 billion to date to
shore up the Damascus government, the Syrian regime would have collapsed
already.
Where fighters are concerned, there is a good flow of
mujahedeen streaming
into Syria – exactly as in Afghanistan’s case.
In both instances though the total of native fighters
is overwhelming.
The number of rebel groups in Afghanistan was high as
well, except that the Arab mujahedeen there did not have a political agenda
beyond giving the Afghans a helping hand.
Some mujahedeen in Syria are likely to chew over a
particular agenda, but they will find few takers -- unless they are Syrian
themselves, not foreign.
Moreover, most of the mujahedeen in Syria are Arab
nationals versed in Syrian society. They hail from one nation and share the
same ethnicity and language, let alone a common religion.
Much like Pakistan was the mujahedeen’s route to the
Afghan war in the 1980s, Turkey is their route today to Syria.
The identities of the mujahedeen’s backers haven’t
changed – save for one key distinction. Whereas in the case of Afghanistan the
United States and the West had an interest in confronting the Soviet Union,
they now have nothing to protect in Syria other than Israel’s safety and
wellbeing. This encapsulates America and the West’s stance on the Syria war.
There were ethnic and sectarian differences in
Afghanistan: Pashtuns,
Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazara Shiites. All had
external offshoots.
There is a comparable ethnic and sectarian diversity
in Syria, each with external links too: Shiites with those in Lebanon and Iraq;
Kurds with those in Iraq and Turkey; Alawites with those in Turkey; Christians
with those in Lebanon; and Sunnis with those throughout the region.
If Shiite Iran has adjunct Shiite minorities in more
than one Arab country, the Soviet Union had political add-ons in the form of
communist and socialist forces in more than one Arab country as well.
In other words, Iran in Syria emulates the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan.
The lack of political foresight turned the Afghan
stopover into an attrition war that eventually broke up a major empire.
Ditto for Iran in Syria.
