The Dismemberment of USA, Enough Similarities

15 February was a historic day, a day which was as bright and sunny for the Afghans as it was dim and gloomy for the Russians. The news about depressed and dejected General Boris Vsevolodovich Gromov, Commander of Fortieth Army in Afghanistan, who, while walking back towards the Russian soil, halted for a while at the bridge of river Oxus, threw a concluding glance at the Afghan side and then crossed the bridge with his head down.

With him, being the final man to vacate Afghanistan, came the fall of the ‘Russian Empire’. The Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan proved to be a retreat for the Russians from the power arena thus stamping them as the losers of the Cold War, ultimately after a little less than a half century. In late seventies when Russians with budding arrogance marched into Afghanistan for reaching the warm waters ultimately, then in the heart of their hearts they didn’t know that the writing on the wall had already been engraved for them in the shape of the disastrous destruction of the USSR, the only super power who could dare to look into the eyes of the another super power the US. I am sure that they would have not even imagined to be relegated to such a lower level of respect and repute when they planned the hegemonic aggression as the Americans are doing in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, only to replace the USSR. This wrecking of Russia placed the Americans at the prime podium of power again to replace the Russians in the region (and perhaps to face the music).

Just like that an idea struck my mind, that surprisingly there are many similarities between the ex USSR and the USA. Never know you might have also observed it but I am taking the advantage to share it with my readers.

The first thing is their geographical entity. The USSR was born and expanded as a union of Soviet Republics formed within the terrain of the Russian Empire brought to an end by the Russian Revolution of 1917. The geographic boundaries of the Soviet Union speckled with time, but after the last major territorial annexations of the Baltic states and certain other territories during World War II, from 1945 until dissolution the boundaries approximately tallied to those of late Imperial Russia, with the notable exclusions of Poland and Finland.

On the other hand the United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and numerous territories. The USSR was founded as a union of four Soviet Socialist Republics, grew to contain 15 constituent or union republics by 1956 with the prominent ones like Russia, Armenia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan etc. The republics were part of a highly centralized federal union that was dominated by the Russian SFSR (Soviet Federation of Socialist Republic).

If one looks at the American federal constitutional republic, it seems like a jigsaw puzzle with 50 states as the pieces nicely fitted on the palate while the territories like American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands as the ‘spare pieces’. The other amazing semblance is the civil wars which both the super powers faced. The Russian Civil War lasted from 1918 to 1922. It began immediately after the Bolshevik takeover of Petrograd and was augmented very rapidly after Lenin’s dissolution of the Russian constituent assembly. The main war was between Communist forces known as the ‘Red Army’ and anti-Bolshevik forces known as the ‘White Army’. The Communists won after four years of intense fighting, and established the Soviet Union in 1922. Surprisingly the American Civil War also lasted for four years i.e. from 1861-1865 between the United States aka ‘Union’ and eleven southern slave states who formed the confederate states of America led by President Jefferson Davis who confronted the Union president Abraham Lincoln. The outcome of the war was the victory of the Union forces.

Another feature which forces them to share a common plunk is their notorious intelligence agencies. Their operational domain encompassed identical functions and powers. KGB is the Russian-language abbreviation for ‘Committee for State Security’. The KGB was the name for the Soviet Union’s secret police and intelligence agency from 1954 to 1991. In December 1995 the KGB was disbanded in Russia by the then Russian president Boris Yeltsin. On the American side, President Truman established the Central Intelligence Group in January 1946. Later, under the National Security Act of 1947 the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were established. Both the agencies have a shameful history of operating not only in each others domain but also world wide to topple the governments, assassinate the key political figures, launching coup d’états and activities like supporting the foreign dictators.

Should we not think that while pushing the Russia and the rest of the world ruthlessly and brutally into a corner, the US has inadvertently come to a point where once the Russians were while over riding everyone in the region with special mention of Afghanistan and Pakistan? Those who know Russians and their history very well, have a strong faith in the reality that Russia has not truly conceded the new Central Asian republics forever. No doubt that at the moment Russia is too weak and unstable to exert any serious influence on those governments, but who knows when the time takes an abrupt turn? If it could be in the US’s favour in the past why can’t it be in the Russians favour in the near future? If Americans don’t take much time in consigning their friends’ (Afghans) status to foe then who stops the sons of the soil from joining hands with their one time enemy Russia again? After all a couple of centuries ago Central Asia was an unwilling center of the tussle between Russia and Britain. They both tried to establish their supremacy over the mostly tribal and Islamic peoples of the steppes. Eventually, the Soviet Union annexed most of the area leaving Britons with control over Afghanistan only, but ultimately the Soviet Union tried to gobble that up too.

Unfortunately Afghanistan is proving to be the last straw that broke the camel’s back. The American camel after getting a hell of a beating in the Iraqi deserts is falling back to Afghanistan. Obama administration despite the serious advises is planning to pump-in roughly seventeen thousand troops into Afghanistan in January/ February 2010.

There are surprising similarities and gravely the events are happening in the same pattern. May be the result would be the same too? May be this time it would be American camel with a broken back? S Parvez

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on Sep 30 2009. Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry