The US Proxies Who Haunt Washington

Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.: "The US proxies who haunt Washington
By Jason Motlagh

WASHINGTON - After four months of bloody gun battles shook the streets of the Somali capital Mogadishu, jihadist militias loyal to a union of Islamic courts preside over a tense calm and a routed alliance of US-backed warlords is on the run.

Now that the dust has cleared, however, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is under fire for its clandestine support of secular fighters in a thorny conflict critics say it has failed to grasp, and inadvertently fueled. Worse still, it appears to have chosen the losing side.

But as the United States' messy history of using proxy forces in Africa and elsewhere shows, short-term victories in such dubious dealings assure little.

The most successful campaign to date, the CIA-sponsored
Afghan war against the Soviets, has in fact also been the most destructive: a Faustian pact with Islamist militants that helped end the Cold War while cultivating the 'terror' in the global 'war on terror' that will consume the foreseeable future.... "