Another gust of imperial blowback hits South Korea
I must admit that I hadn’t even realised that South Korean soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan, but now one of them has taken a bullet for war hero Dick Cheney. Here’s Hankyoreh’s report (in Korean) on the bombing at Bagram torture centre near Kabul and here’s something from the BBC that mentions that one US soldier and one South Korea soldier were killed by a suicide bomber who, according to the base commander “attacked the local population” (figure that one out).
Ah… what a cosmopolitan modern world we live in: a South Korean soldier is killed by an Islamist resistance fighter at a US-run airbase and torture centre built by the Russians.
Yes the COW (”Coalition of the Willing” - as childish a name for a military alliance as you will ever hear) is still in Afghanistan, despite NATO (which will probably collapse from becoming the US’ militarist UN stand-in; I mean, if you were a former Warsaw Pact state, would you want to join in on this?) What’s funny about the present occupation of Afghanistan is that it mirrors the Soviet one of the `80s: the Kremlin not only sent Russians, but also soldiers from the bordering Soviet republics, like Tajiks (who stopped wearing the red star on their hats, witnessed by journalist Robert Fisk), Kazakhs, and other Turkic Islamic people. The results are well known. Now we have this multinational force which has no driving patriotic “need” to be in Afghanistan. I’m guessing the malaise is already hitting hard. BTW, the South Koreans also served in South Vietnam (with the Australians!) so we could see this death in Afghanistan as following a rotten tradition of payback for our supporting Syngman Rhee in the 1950s.
Comment by Strelnikov — February 28, 2007 @ 6:15 am