Reagan's Blowback in Central Asia

[kalian]

http://www.antiwar.com/ips/naqvi.php?articleid=2817

KARACHI - Conservative opinion holds the Great Communicator Ronald Reagan, who died this month at 93, to be a great U.S. president. His greatness largely comprises his ability to convince his country's people, or a majority of them, that he stood for freedom and democracy and that communism was the worst of evils.

He certainly was a scourge for communism. He is credited with having brought the East-West Cold War to an end by winning the war in Afghanistan that eventually led to the downfall of communism within the Soviets.

But a lot of people in South Asia bitterly criticize the legacies that Reagan's policies left in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The state of Afghanistan has actually been destroyed, and the blame for it lies, to an indeterminate extent, on Reagan's thoughtless but enthusiastic support of the Afghan jihad throughout the 1980s. He fomented and abated the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan that is now threatening this country's stability.

What has happened to Iraq as a result of George W Bush's war is a replay of what Reagan did in Afghanistan. There is now scarcely any hope of keeping Iraq an integrated entity based on Bush's schemes and plans.

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One hell of a good editorial.