Month: June 2011

When Americans needed to know accurately the complex history of Afghanistan, traced back over 10,000 years, why were we given exactly the opposite in incorrect, simplistic, pro US Cold War images in Dan Rather’s TV reports and the film, Charlie Wilson’s War? What should the US government have told citizens before 9/11, but instead, kept secret? How can President Obama create a new policy without repeating past mistakes of Britain, the USSR and the Bush Administration that builds lasting good will toward the US?

Widely considered America’s leading journalists interpreting Afghanistan, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, were the first US television crew granted visas to enter Afghanistan in the spring of 1981. They arrived in the heated Cold War era, but the people they found did not fit the preconceived, stereotyped Cold War bias desired by their employer, CBS. In 1983, they produced a landmark PBS documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds. In the 80s and 90s, they continued writing about Afghanistan: a script with Oliver Stone, reports for ABC’s Nightline and a book about human rights and women, Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future.