Mr. Moderate

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist by his own petard
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4

The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army in Afghanistan began on December 25, 1979. The final troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989. Due to the high cost and ultimate futility of this conflict for this Cold War superpower, the Soviet war in Afghanistan has often been referred to as the equivalent of the United States’ Vietnam War.
Wikipedia article on the Soviet War In Afghanistan.

As hundreds of Muslim “enemy combatants” remain held in the Gulag at Guantanamo, lost in all of the moral outrage mounted by the Republicans is the fact that during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States funded and provided arms to those very same Muslim “enemy combatants” (really, “terrorists”) for the purpose of defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan.

By the mid-1980s, the Afghan resistance movement, receptive to assistance from the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, China, and others, contributed to Moscow’s high military costs and strained international relations. The US viewed the conflict in Afghanistan as an integral Cold War struggle, and the CIA provided assistance to anti-Soviet forces through the Pakistani secret services, in a program called Operation Cyclone.
{snip}
The Mujahideen leaders paid great attention to sabotage operations. … The mujahideen surveyed firing positions that they normally located near villages within the range of Soviet artillery posts, putting the villagers in danger of death from Soviet retaliation. The mujahideen used mine warfare heavily. Often, they would enlist the services of the local inhabitants and even children.

They concentrated on knocking out bridges, closing major roads, destroying convoys, disrupting the electric power system and industrial production, and attacking police stations and Soviet military installations and air bases. They assassinated government officials and PDPA members. They laid siege to small rural outposts. In March 1982, a bomb exploded at the Ministry of Education, damaging several buildings. In the same month, a widespread power failure darkened Kabul when a pylon on the transmission line from the Naghlu power station was blown up. In June 1982 a column of about 1,000 young party members sent out to work in the Panjshir valley were ambushed within 20 miles of Kabul, with heavy loss of life. On 4 September 1985, insurgents shot down a domestic Bakhtar Airlines plane as it took off from Kandahar airport, killing all 52 people aboard.
Ibid.

In other words, the United States funded terrorism by “enemy combatants” who were no different than the very people who we captured and later sent to Guantanamo for semi-permanent incarceration.

This situation is a total outrage. The Bush administration simply changed the rules in the middle of the game. These very same people were, during the Soviet era, “freedom fighters” for Afghanistan. But after the 9/11 attacks, those very same people became “terrorists” and “enemy combatants” who were worthy of locking up and throwing the key away without any due process of law just because they dared to fight against the US Army invasion of Afghanistan. Did the USA really think that they would do otherwise? Of course not!

Does anybody else here smell a large stinking rat? Could it perhaps be the case that some (perhaps even “many”) of those people locked up in Cuba are there because of the tales they could tell about US help during the Soviet era? Are they really there because of the stink that would result due to the extreme double-standard employed by the Bush administration after the USA encouraged terrorism against the Soviets but then refused to accept even legitimate combat losses when the USA invaded Afghanistan?

I don’t know about you, but I certainly hope that the next President of the United States has the courage to admit, and apologize for, the war crimes committed at the behest of the United States against the Soviets. And then, after acknowledging that crime, some compassion ought to be granted to the vast bulk of people being held in the Guantanamo Gulag.