The Lower House of Parliament approved a resolution on Wednesday condemning the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the start of an era that gave birth to the never-ending extremism and terrorism in this region, when the history witnessed the fate of Afghanistan going into a black hole of extremism.
What we have learned from the decade of misery in the presence of Soviet troops in Afghanistan is that unless we are concerned about true sovereignty of Afghanistan in its real sense, and domestic context, our unending misery will not change. With the arrival of Soviet forces, Mujahideen resistance spread across the country.
Those were the days when a unified nation from south to north fought against Soviet Union, but even that zealous resistance was to a considerable extend product of another foreign influence against a foreign invasion.
People were fighting without a vision of what will happen next after they defeat the aggressors, or get defeated by them? While fighting as unified as a solid rock against Soviet Union, the Mujahideen factions had no idea they were going to fight a brutal civil war after their withdrawal.
They did not know the war they had started would go on and on with a never-ending enigma. More than 100,000 Soviet troops fought in Afghanistan for more than 10 years. And finally it proved Soviet's Vietnam, which was stated by Brzezinski, the then Advisor of the US President Carter.
The pool of bloodshed in Afghanistan caused collapse of the Soviet Union. In the ten years of resistance more than one million Afghans were killed, over five million fled the country taking refuge in Pakistan, Iran and rest of the world. Total casualties of Soviet Forces reached 14,453.
But the resistance was pumped with a fundamentalist Jihadi zeal by foreign powers. It was that days when the Arab fighters of Osama Bin Ladin, who would later establish Al-Qaeda, came to Afghanistan for 'Jihad'. Those foreign powers who had manipulated the ultra-radical ideology to produce a fierce resistance in Afghanistan had no idea how it would backfire with rise of global terrorism threatening world security. The ideology of "Jihad" was propagated in way that a reverse-stratagem was never thought about.
Thus, Soviet withdrawal did not put an end to the injected ideology of "Jihad" that has grown to a dragon in today, burning this entire region. One of our neighbors who played manufacturer's role in exporting the ideology of extremism is now deep into it themselves.
The international community forgot the people of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal. Mujahideen indulged into factional wars that led to a civil war and later Taliban era, Al-Qaeda, 9/11 and then another decade of instability in Afghanistan.
Today we see signs of the same episode-in-making. The US and NATO want to exit without completely finishing the job in Afghanistan.