[lbo-talk] query: Arundhati Roy

[Wendy Lyon]

On 3/7/06, Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> My comment -- see below -- was flippant.  Of course, there is the
> question of what year you're talking about. If you're talking about
> the USSR fighting the Islamic extremists in 1988, maybe you're right
> that Osama and the like were anti-American. But the initial Soviet
> invasion (1978?) was more like the US invasion of Vietnam, to defend a
> beleaguered client state that didn't have much positive contact with
> its people.

I'm reading Robert Fisk's "The Great War For Civilisation" and just
finished the section that recounts his experiences in Afghanistan in
the early years of the Soviet occupation.  At one point, following an
incident that seems to have taken place around 1979, he notes that
"for all the government's brutality and its reliance on foreign
invaders, its functionaries had been trying to create a secular, equal
society... It was not the government that was burning the schools and
killing the teachers."