Category: Press
America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest:4458 words
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
“For the first time in my very long life… we are, and I don’t want to sound alarmist but I am alarmed, closer to the actual possibility of war with Russia than we have ever been since the Cuban missile crisis. That’s how bad it’s been.” Stephen Cohen on the Tom Hartman show April 2, 2015
Retired Russia historian Stephen Cohen along with a small handful of academics, journalists and former government officials (who believed the Cold War had ended and would never return) point their fingers at the Western Neocon establishment for America’s latest outbreak of what can only be referred to as late stage imperial dementia. Neocons Robert Kagan and wife Victoria Nuland have certainly done their share of the heavy lifting to make Ukraine the staging ground for what increasingly appears to be a NATO blitzkrieg on Moscow. As columnist William Pfaff wrote in one of his final articles (April 1, 2015 Putin and the Neo-Conservatives) “The energy behind the coup in Ukraine and the proposals to deploy Western arms and re-launch the crisis is generally and I think correctly, recognized as the work of the neoconservative alliance in Washington to which President Obama seems to have sub-leased his European policy.” But whatever the determination of the neocon plot to forge ahead with a further destabilization of Russia’s borders, they are only the barking dogs of the master imperialist whose grand design has been slowly creeping over the globe since he stepped into the Oval office as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
Love him or hate him, Zbigniew Brzezinski stands apart as the inspiration for the Ukraine crisis. His 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives lays out the blueprint for how American primacists should feel towards drawing Ukraine away from Russia. (p. 46) “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” He writes. “Without Ukraine, Russia… would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south.”
Brzezinski also makes clear; should the U.S. mishandle the diplomacy and Moscow regains control over Ukraine, “Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.” He attributes Russia’s hold over Eurasia and its revived expansionist aims to their own closely held mystical beliefs in “Russian orthodoxy and a special mystical ‘Russian idea.’” (p. 110) As proof he cites numerous Russian thinkers who have “embraced Eurasianism’s mystical emphasis on the special spiritual and missionary role of the Russian people…” (p. 111).
For Brzezinski, “the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia,” but when it comes to mysticism, it might be said that Brzezinski’s impact on the American foreign policy establishment – if not mystical itself – may have infused such a heavy dose of Eurasianism into American policy that it is now proving fatal to the very global primacy Brzezinski himself has fought a lifetime to attain.
Brzezinski’s obsession derives from British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder’s 1904 definition of the Central-Eastern nations of Europe as the “Heartland” or “Pivot Area”, whose geographic position made them “the vital springboards for the attainment of continental domination.” (Grand Chessboard p. 38) Looking forward a hundred years, Brzezinski advances Mackinder’s theories on Eurasian geopolitics from regional to global, with control over the entire Eurasian continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific as central to America’s global primacy. Whether anyone realizes it today or not, the Obama administration’s current campaign against Russia in Ukraine is of Mackinder’s design brought forward by Brzezinski.
To a seasoned expert like Stephen Cohen, the Obama administration’s indictment of Russia for the Ukraine crisis is groundless. “There is a narrative in this country that this entire crisis was created by Putin and Russia, that he sought to take over Ukraine or destabilize Ukraine and that’s just his first step toward taking back Eastern Europe. It’s complete malarkey. It doesn’t correspond to the facts and above all it has no logic.” But a look back forty years reveals that a lot of Cold War thinking wasn’t exactly fact-based either and it may now be instructive to look for answers to Washington’s current dose of illogic in the covert origins of the U.S. supported 1970s war for Afghanistan.
As the first Americans to gain access to Kabul after the Soviet invasion for an American TV crew in 1981 we got a closeup look at the American narrative supporting President Carter’s “greatest threat to peace since the second world war” and it simply didn’t hold up. What had been presented within days of the December 1979 invasion as an open and shut case of Soviet expansion toward the Persian Gulf by Harvard Professor and Team B Project leader Richard Pipes on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour could just as easily have been defined as a defensive action well within the Soviets’ legitimate sphere of influence. Three years earlier, Pipes’ Team B Strategic Objectives Panel on the CIA’s estimate of the Soviet threat had been accused of subverting the very process of making national security estimates by inventing threats where they didn’t exist and intentionally skewing its findings along ideological lines. Now that ideology was being presented as fact by America’s Public Broadcasting System.
In 1983 we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC’s Nightline. Our aim was to establish once and for all the credibility of the American claims. We discovered first hand from high level Soviet officials that they wanted desperately to abandon the war but the Reagan administration simply refused to take their requests seriously. From the moment they entered office, the Reagan administration had taken a conflicting position, demanding on the one hand that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action with the intention of holding them there. This hypocritical campaign, though lacking in a foundation of facts and dripping in right wing ideology, was embraced by the entire Washington political spectrum and left willfully-unexamined by America’s mainstream media.
The final blow to Roger Fisher’s efforts came when he offered the New York Times a detailed article describing his belief that a negotiated settlement could be quickly achieved. The Times’ editor responded that Roger could write the article but it wouldn’t necessarily be published.
At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in Lysebu Norway in 1995, a high level group of former U.S., European and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the U.S. had resigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why did the U.S. choose an ideologically biased position when there were any number of verifiable fact-based explanations for why the Soviets had invaded?
To the veteran CIA Director Stansfield Turner and the former Soviet Chief of Ground Forces General Valentin Varennikov, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one very specific individual who ironically wasn’t present.
(Lysebu p. 216) “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole.” Turner said. “This is an important part of the equation, it seems to me. None of us can escape our individual backgrounds; but in this case, the fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important.”
Turner was chastised by Dr. Marshall Schulman, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State from 1977-1981 for his lack of political correctness, but Shulman’s efforts to divert attention from Turner’s comment only brought further attention to the ethical hole Brzezinski had punched into U.S. policy by infusing his old world ethnic hatred of Russia, into U.S.-Soviet relations.
U.S. officials were not supposed to hold racist beliefs in public or private let alone bring them into the policy-making-process. According to the accepted doctrine of the day Robert McNamara dropped bombs on Germans and Japanese and later the Vietnamese because he was a mathematical rationalist making war, not because he was a racist who despised Germans, Japanese or Vietnamese. But for Brzezinski, plotting against Russia is a family pastime and for those who’d worked with him in the Carter White House his behavior was anathema to what a professional policy-maker should aspire to.
The late Paul Warnke, Carter’s negotiator for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) put Brzezinski’s racial bias this way in an interview we conducted with him in 1993. “It was almost an ethnic thing with Zbig, basically that inbred Polish attitude toward the Russians. And that of course was what frustrated the Carter Administration. [Secretary of State] Vance felt very much the way that I did. Brzezinski felt the opposite. And Carter couldn’t decide which one of them he was going to follow. So it adds up to a recipe for indecision.”
Warnke went on to say that he believed the Soviets would never have invaded Afghanistan in the first place if Carter had not fallen victim to Brzezinski’s hostile attitude toward détente and his undermining of SALT II.
To the Soviet General Valentin Varennikov, Brzezinski’s determination to vilify Russia was a forgone conclusion. (Lysebu p. 168) “Brzezinski was the one who was able to use that step—the introduction of troops into Afghanistan—to the most political benefit, and in the interest of the United States. When some people wanted to play it down in 1980, he resisted them, and said he wanted the Soviet Union to get pulled in and then pay dearly for what happened.”
What these men were saying in a roundabout way in 1995 was that Brzezinski had taken full advantage of the Soviet’s miscalculation and jumped on the opportunity when they became trapped. But it wasn’t until 1998 and the notorious Nouvel Observateur interview that Brzezinski openly boasted that he had provoked the whole incident by getting Carter to authorize a Presidential finding to suck them in six months before the Soviets even considered invading.
Once Brzezinski had the Soviets where he wanted, he then used their occupation to win the Chinese military over to his side. Warren I. Cohen and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker write in Zbig: The Strategy and Statecraft of Zbigniew Brzezinski (p. 96) “In May of 1980, Brzezinski met the head of Beijing’s Military Commission in Washington and explained that the Soviet Union was pursuing a two-pronged offensive strategy: through Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf and through Cambodia to the Strait of Malacca. However questionable the analysis, the Chinese liked it, adopted it as their own, and Deng repeated it to Brzezinski when he visited Beijing in 1981.”
Yet, despite Brzezinski’s 1998 admission that he’d intentionally sucked the Soviets into Afghanistan to give them their own Vietnam, many academics and experts refused to believe that he could or would have abused his authority by stooping to such tactics. One man in particular, Dr. Charles Cogan, Chief of the Near East South Asia Division at the Directorate of Operations at the CIA from 1979-1984 defended Brzezinski’s honor to us publicly before an audience upon the publication of our book in 2009 Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story. Cogan came out publicly to insist that Brzezinski’s Nouvel Observateur interview simply couldn’t be right. Cogan changed his tune however when he subsequently encountered Brzezinski in person. He explained to us in a recent interview what had happened.
“I had an exchange with him. This was at the funeral ceremony or reception for Sam Huntington. Brzezinski was there, I’d never met him before and I went up to him and introduced myself and I said I agree with everything you’re doing and saying except for one thing. You gave an interview to the Nouvelle Observateur some years back saying that we sucked the Soviets into Afghanistan. I said I’ve never heard or accepted that idea and he insisted that this was correct. And I still… that was obviously the way he felt about it. But I didn’t get any whiff of that when I was Chief Near East South Asia at the time of the Afghan war against the Soviets.”
The 1995 Lysebu conference concluded that a few senior Soviets on the politburo had made a huge miscalculation by sending in 75,000 troops with the expectation of stabilizing a friendly government and then getting out within 60 days. Thanks to Brzezinski’s covert support for the Mujahideen inaugurated years before, they had quickly become stuck in a Vietnam style quagmire, but despite abundant evidence of their efforts to avoid a militarily engagement and their desire to pack up and go home once they did engage, both the left and right of American politics embraced Brzezinski’s false narrative that the Soviets were embarking on a world conquest.
By training and financing Islamic radicals in Pakistan and China, the U.S. was playing with fire by risking a Soviet invasion of both Pakistan and Iran, not to mention being drawn into a Sino-Soviet war. But for Brzezinski and his mentor Paul Nitze and his neoconservative allies like Richard Pipes, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a gamble that shifted the Washington power balance toward an unrelenting hard line against the Soviet Union and it worked. Once the exaggerations and lies about Soviet intentions became accepted as a means to that end, they found a home in America’s imagination and never left.
To the American right, Afghanistan was an opportunity to avenge the debacle of Vietnam, renew America’s military strength, engage militarily in the Middle East, and tighten its grip on American politics. For the pro-détente moderate-left, the invasion of Afghanistan was a disillusioning disenfranchisement, which they never really understood and from which they never recovered. However, for the global chess player Brzezinski, Afghanistan offered a myriad of possibilities to put his strategic theories to the test while winding back the Soviet Union’s dominion over its neighboring nations, especially his homeland, Poland.
As President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Brzezinski brought to the White House an activist foreign policy in line with untested ethnic theories developed while working as a professor at Harvard and Columbia in the 1950s and 60s. After taking over as the President’s national security advisor Brzezinski immediately assembled a Nationalities Working Group (NWG) under the assumption that the Soviet Union’s “non-Russian nationalities” would rebel if given the opportunity and support. According to former CIA director Robert Gates’s memoir, From The Shadows (p. 142) Brzezinski turned to “covert actions aimed at the Soviet internal scene as early as March 1977.Throughout that year and the next, CIA was asked to step up activities targeted inside the USSR.”
By using covert action, Brzezinski could secretly create the conditions he needed to provoke a Soviet defensive response which he would then use as evidence for his claims of unrelenting Soviet expansion. According to Gary Sick’s testimony at Lysebu (p. 150) “It is fairly clear to me that their [the Soviets] thinking was primarily oriented toward the domestic situation in Afghanistan. They were trying to salvage a bad situation-trying to rectify it, in terms of Russian interests. But the effects were totally different. The effects were overwhelmingly international. It affected the relationship with the United States at every level. I regard it as a fundamental watershed. All kinds of things that we had simply talked or thought about until that time suddenly became real. It was a tremendous watershed in our entire approach toward that region, and has remained so ever since.”
The Soviet invasion of December 1979 gave Brzezinski control of American foreign policy from that moment on while a defeated Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and a generation of like-minded realists left government soon after. The Brzezinski-drafted Carter Doctrine put the U.S. directly into the Middle East with the Rapid Deployment Force, China became engaged as a U.S. military ally and détente with the Soviet Union was dead. The Reagan administration would soon advance on this agenda with a massive military buildup as well as expanded covert actions inside the Soviet Union by the Nationalities Working Group—now under the direction of Team B’s Professor Richard Pipes who believed that Soviet Moslems could be induced to “explode into genocidal fury.” (Richard Pipes, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America’s Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 185.
Not content with the American moderates’ pragmatic Cold War acceptance of coexistence with the Soviet state, the Polish born Brzezinski represented the ascendency of a radical new breed of xenophobic Eastern and Central European intellectual bent on holding Soviet/American policy hostage to their pre-World War II world view. According to Brzezinski biographer Patrick Vaughan, Brzezinski rejected the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union itself, calling it “a cauldron of conquered nationalities brutally consolidated over centuries of Russian expansion.” (Zbig p. 128) Accordingly, “With the Polish pope in the Vatican a more vibrant and autonomous Poland could shake Soviet control over Lithuania and the Ukraine, where Polish religious and historical ties were firm and deeply rooted.” (Zbig p. 128)
Brzezinski’s methodology for Eastern Europe was simple. 1. Choose a country with close historical ties to Russia. 2. Destabilize it along racial or religious lines. 3. Subvert its government with bribery, lies and intrigue and then… 4. Spin the ensuing chaos as a struggle for individual freedom by a captured people against an alien philosophy; (communism) or if that failed, ethnic Russian expansionism. He told Zbig interviewer Charles Gati, “We engage them. We deal with the regimes. We penetrate the societies. We begin to exploit the fissures between the Central Europeans and the Russians. We eventually break up the Soviet Union from within.” (Zbig pp. 232-233).
Regardless of whether Brzezinski can be given the credit for breaking up the Soviet Union, his current status as the almost mystical “wise-elder” of American foreign policy should be viewed with extreme caution given the means by which he achieved it. At the 1995 Lysebu conference numerous scholars pondered Brzezinski’s decision-making process before, during and after the Soviet invasion. Dr. Carol Saivetz of Harvard University testified (Lysebu pp. 252-253), “Whether or not Zbig was from Poland or from someplace else, he had a world view, and he tended to interpret events as they unfolded in light of it. To some extent, his fears became self-fulfilling prophecies… Afghanistan came at the end of a period in which everybody saw exactly what he or she wanted to see… Nobody looked at Afghanistan and what was happening there all by itself.”
Dr. David Welch of Toronto University questioned the entire process by which the U.S. made judgments about Soviet motives (Lysebu p. 256). “The scholarly community was also charged with the task of trying to understand the Soviet Union in the absence of hard information about how people were actually making decisions in Moscow. They used a dubious deductive apparatus to do that… The very powerful effect of so-called ‘rational deterrence theory’ on American foreign policy led to decisions that provoked as often as they deterred.”
The 1995 Lysebu conference on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan revealed that “self-fulfilling prophecies,” “a dubious deductive apparatus,” and “decisions that provoked as often as they deterred” provided the operating system for more than a decade of Cold War policy under Presidents Carter and Reagan. Yet, within two years of the conference it could be said this very same operating system, established by Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter administration, was leading the U.S. back into the same fundamental errors of judgement, only this time to an even deeper and dangerous level of confrontation with Russia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s early support for expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and Ukraine expressed in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard (pp. 84, 121) was opposed by Paul Nitze, the father of the Cold War as well as a crop of 46 senior foreign policy advisors who referred to it in a letter to President Clinton as “a policy error of historic proportions.” Fellow Pole, Team B leader and virulent proponent of Brzezinski’s Nationalities Working Group, Richard Pipes signed the letter opposing expansion on the grounds that it would provide humiliated Russian nationalists exactly the excuse they needed to justify restoring the Kremlin’s empire. Even George F. Kennan, author of the Cold War policy of “containment” warned in a separate letter to the New York Times in February 1997 that NATO expansion into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era… have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy… restore the atmosphere of cold war to East-West relations… and impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”
Yet, despite an inability to even explain exactly what military threat a NATO expansion was designed to counter, in 1999 the Clinton administration, urged on by what Time Magazine described in 1997 as “Ethnic lobbying groups such as the Polish American Congress” began the process of implementing the plan.
By 2009 the new post–Cold War NATO included 12 former Warsaw Pact countries plus Eastern Germany with future plans to add both Georgia and Ukraine – despite the certainty that Moscow would view the moves in exactly the way the wise-elders had warned against.
U.S. policy since that time has operated in a delusion of triumphalism that both provokes international incidents and then capitalizes on the chaos. A destabilizing strategy of crippling financial sanctions against Russia, the American military’s training of the Ukrainian National Guard, U.S. troops parading armored vehicles within 300 yards of Russia’s border and warlike statements by NATO leaders can only mean the U.S. is deeply committed to Brzezinski’s strategy of seizing the “Pivot Area” and holding it. To paraphrase Brzezinski’s formula, the U.S. has engaged Ukraine, dealt with its pro-Russian regime, and penetrated its society by exploiting the religious and political fissures between its ethnic Russian and Ukrainian citizens. Over an extended period, it eventually succeeded in breaking up Ukraine from within and is moving now to its ultimate target-Russia itself through destabilization and the demonization of its leader Vladimir Putin.
If America’s post 9/11 misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan hadn’t demonstrated beyond doubt that the U.S. government’s system for making foreign policy decisions is broken, the current crisis in Ukraine should demonstrate that it is broken beyond repair. Those who remain of yesterday’s wise-elders decry the sheer folly emanating from Washington’s foreign policy circles which has already made an economic shambles of Ukraine, led to a new Cold War and may very well lead to a real war between the United States and Russia. Stephen Cohen, Ambassador Jack Matlock, Paul Craig Roberts, Noam Chomsky and Henry Kissinger to name a few, bemoan the fact that the once highly praised and experienced members of America’s foreign policy establishment are now left out in the cold. Yet, given their capitulation to Brzezinski’s ethnic world-view following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, it should come as no surprise that their opinions in the foreign policy marketplace would hold no currency now.
With the exception of a handful of experts, the 1995 Lysebu conference concluded that the whole period leading up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan “was a big disaster,” resulting from a series of miscalculations, misunderstandings and miscommunications. Brzezinski himself wrote in his 1983 memoir Power and Principle that he generally believed the same (p. 432). “Had we been tougher sooner, had we drawn the line more clearly, had we engaged in the kind of consultation that I had so many times advocated, maybe the Soviets would not have engaged in this act of miscalculation… What was done had to be done, but it would have been better if the Soviets had been deterred first through a better understanding of our determination.” But evidence that has been unearthed since and admissions by Brzezinski himself reveal his “determination” was never to deter the Soviets at all but to encourage them to invade.
In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard (p. 122) Brzezinski made clear his desire to eventually bring Ukraine into NATO while admitting that such a move “could be a turning point for Russia itself.” Given the recent events surrounding the overthrow of Ukraine’s Russia-friendly President Victor Yanukovich, he has since backed away from the proposal. However, this should not be viewed as a moderation of his ideas.
Today it’s Zbigniew’s son Ian who carries forward on the Brzezinski family’s vendetta against the Kremlin. As a member of the Atlantic Council, Ian Brzezinski dwells in that special place established by his father during the Carter years that finds Moscow at the root of America’s problems regardless of the facts. In language painfully reminiscent of two World Wars he recently outlined the war in eastern Ukraine to the Senate Armed Services Committee as the “Eastern Front” as if the Third World War had already begun. He then offered a wide range of recommendations that went so far as to take the authority to make war on Russia out of President Obama’s hands and give it to NATO’s top commander, General Phillip Breedlove; a man accused by the German government of exaggerating the Russian threat by spreading “dangerous propaganda”.
In a September 3, 2014 interview in the Huffington World Post, Zbigniew Brzezinski referred to the Russian leadership under Vladimir Putin as irrational, emotional, erratic, and dangerous.
It might be said of Brzezinski himself that a grand strategy to surround nuclear-armed Russia with hostile European armies and roaming bands of inflamed Muslims bent on genocide might itself be considered irrational. The World Trade Towers were bombed not once but twice by fanatics financed, trained and motivated by Brzezinski’s war on Russia in Afghanistan. From its origins in 1977 as a covert program to destabilize the Soviet Union through ethnic violence and radical Islam in Soviet Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya, a straight line can be drawn to the Taliban, 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Syrian war on Bashar al-Assad and especially to Ukraine from theories, practices and policies implemented by Brzezinski prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Both Napoleon and Adolph Hitler, an avid practitioner of Mackinder’s geopolitics, sought to conquer the “Pivot Area” now famous to geo-politicians as “The Heartland.” Those endeavors brought devastation to Russia and ruin to Europe but in the end did nothing but enliven Russia to its own mystical destiny.
The time has come for the American public to be let in on what U.S. foreign policy has become and to decide whether the Brzezinski family’s personal obsession with fulfilling Mackinder’s directive for conquering the heartland of Russia at any cost, should be America’s goal as well.
Copyright © 2015 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. For more information visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk. They can be reached at gould.fitzgerald@verizon.net.
Host Coy Barefoot of “Inside Charlottesville” interviews Paul & Liz for TheGroundTruth
Jay Dyer of Jay’s Analysis interviews Gould & Fitzgerald
Jay Dyer w/Gould & Fitzgerald: Mystical Imperialism, Afghanistan & Beyond
Veteran researchers, historians, writers and geopolitical analysts Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould joined me to discuss their scholarly works, notably Invisible History: The Untold Story of Afghanistan, Crossing Zero and The Voice. In this interview, we dive into mystical imperialism, the Great Game, black ops in Afghanistan, the role of geopolitical strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Mujahideen, the Cold War and the Rand Corporation, Soviet espionage and British Intelligence, spy games, the history of Templarism, Roman Catholicism, BCCI and the drug trade, and much, much more!
Click here for the 2 hour interview
KIRKUS REVIEWS The Voice
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
THE VOICE an esoteric novel about their Afghan experience
Book Review: Crossing Zero by Gould & Fitzgerald
Elizabeth Gould, Paul Fitzgerald – Crossing Zero: Afghanistan and Pakistan: the Ultimate Disaster?
Elizabeth Gould, Paul Fitzgerald – Crossing Zero: Afghanistan and Pakistan: the Ultimate Disaster?
Written: Nov 09 ’11 on Epinions.com by vicfar
Cons:At times too brief and concise
The Bottom Line: A well-written anti-imperialist look at the failures of US occupation in Afghanistan
The 200-page book, just released, is a brilliant indictment of the insane US military occupation of Afghanistan. It also casts grave doubts on the rationale for continuing American interventionism and makes a strong case for retrenchment.
The book is very concise, and the obligatory historical introduction is kept to a minimum: it begins in 1577 with the earliest British colonial adventures in the region, and is especially critical of the disastrous policies following British retreat and the creation of seriously flawed borders.
But the Great Game of Central Asia has become recently important in view of the natural resources the region contains, and after WWII it has drawn the attention of the remaining superpowers. In a strategic effort to bring the USSR to its knees, the US and its secret services have engineered and built an extensive web of paramilitary groups, stoking religious fundamentalism and terrorism. The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other groups,- the authors remind us are all creature of the Cold War. Now the fundamentalist forces unleashed by the US are wreaking havoc across the whole territory, and threaten the spread of political chaos all the way from Iraq to India.
At the outset, the authors trace the rise of the Taliban movement. At the origin is the massive funding, recruiting and training by the CIA and the ISI, the Pakistani secret service, acting in concert against the USSR. The book then details the early years of the Bush involvement, when Iraq was the more prized target, and the recent Obama strategy toward counterinsurgency, with a modest troop surge, the extension of the war into Pakistan and the growing assassination program, which cannot but remind the reader of the bloody Operation Phoenix in Vietnam.
The case presented against the military strategies created by the Pentagon is overwhelming: the US could not control the country even with 500,000 troops (just as the Russians could not), and large sections of it are in the hands of tribal leaders, with whom the US is desperately trying to make a deal. Much of the focus is on the covert support of the Talibans by the ISI and by the Pakistan government, all of it through the massive injections of US funds into Pakistan. Indeed, the US taxpayer is financing its troops and also the resistance movements to US occupation.
Of course, the game Pakistan is playing is understood in Washington, hence the recent forays across the border and the assassination program. The US, however, still has no viable strategy, continues to fund Pakistan, which funds the Talibans as part of its own strategic games against India, and is negotiating with the worst terrorists, hoping for a strategic retreat. Needless to say, a coalition government composed of warlords and terrorists is unlikely to return Afghanistan to a peaceful existence, and especially to to the secular administration which, like in Iraq, existed before the CIA fanned the flames of Islamic radicalism.
The central part of the book (Obamas Vietnam) examines the parallels between the two military disasters and confirms that Americans are using again a failed strategy, consisting of bombing, systematic assassination and inability to understand the reality under which they operate. Later, the book examines the variety of factions the constitute the anti-American resistance and succeeds in impressing upon the reader two major facts: the resistance landscape is unbelievably complex, and the US military does not have a clue about it.
The US continues to believe that bringing death from the skies and targeted assassinations can lead to victory, without trying to understand the socio-political reality they are trying to influence and mold into a stable democracy. To what extent is this strategy dictated by powerful lobbies who stand to gain fortunes by selling Washington useless but lethal hi-tech gadgets? Does Washington really believe that the drone assassination program is a viable alternative in state-building to the establishment of civil authority and political justice? In what amounts to a transfer of funds from the US tax-payer (or the foreign lender) to the booming defense industry, the US military may have found the Holy Grail: an interminable war, in the style of Orwells 1984, complete with a disinformation campaign by the compliant, corporate press, and accompanied by conservative think tanks whose members enjoy the profits of the war machine, while claiming the US is trying to defend freedom and democracies, two values the US has squelched more than any other country in the world since the beginning of the Cold War.
The book ends with a set of sensible recommendations, like establishing ties with the population, understanding their customs and culture all recommendations sure to fall on deaf years. As an example, the authors cite a complaint by president Karzai about the US stepped-up counterinsurgency program consisting of bursting into peoples homes at night to arrest suspects. Karzai remarked that it generates hate against the US and, indirectly, Karzai himself, because it violates the sanctity of Afghan homes. General Petraeus responded, dismayed, that he was astonished and disappointed by the statement, which was making Karzais position untenable.
Finally, in its epilogue, the authors trace a line of continuity spanning from early post-WWII US interventions up to Obamas war regime today. In spite of the seemingly increased insanity of the war operations, the authors claim to see a logical sequence of events, framed in the lunatic language of American exceptionalism and a boundless inability to acknowledge global overstretch. In this perspective, the US is unable to change course, because it is controlled by a single doctrine and cannot readapt its myths and beliefs to a changing reality. America is destroying, throughout the world, what is claiming to protect.
Hence the suggestion that a complete retreat (very unlikely) would do more good than harm. This brutal but fair conclusion quotes an article in the leftist British newspaper The Guardian, which reminds its readers that the US cannot offer the world its model, because the model has failed:
The US…has nothing substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed. In the affluent West itself modernity is now about dismantling the welfare system, increasing inequality and subsidizing corporate profits
this bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer to Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah imitators. In other words, if the US really must engage in nation building, it ought to start with the most bankrupt nation of them all: itself.
I found this short book highly informative, well structured and devastating in its conclusions. If you believe the substance of its claims, the world is in the hands of a group of mad men (Pentagon, White House, US secret services) who administer death and misery throughout a vast region, without a realistic objective and mired in a war without possible end. It is the stuff of nighmares. I hope the authors are wrong but I feel they are absolutely correct in their analysis.
Recommended: Yes
An indigenous peace process for unifying Afghanistan
Afghanistan has suffered through over 30 years of incessant war which has led to the annihilation of its secular tribal structure, transforming it into one of the most violent and poverty-stricken places on earth. Saving this war-torn country will take more than simply “thinking outside the box” – it requires throwing the entire box away, as was done to create the audacious reconciliation process that we wrote with New World Strategies Coalition. Click here to read: An indigenous peace process for unifying a shattered nation
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Gould&Fitzgerald on talknationradio.com
talknationradio.com
Ground Truths about the U.S. Operation in Afghanistan; Experts on Afghanistan Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald
Listen to the interview here TRT: 29:00
Talk Nation Radio for September 15, 2011
Ground Truths about the U.S. Operation in Afghanistan Experts on Afghanistan Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald join us. They are authors of the book, Crossing Zero, The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire.
We are once again at a turning point for Afghanistan as Kabul falls prey to yet another violent power struggle.
We also discuss the latest report by Gould & Fitzgerald titled, 9/11, Psychological Warfare & the American Narrative. (Continuing series on www.BoilingFrogspost.com Although we spoke with them before the US Embassy in Kabul came under fire, Paul Fitzgerald coincidentally bringing up events there in 1979 that heralded a new US policy of supporting Afghan warlords and power brokers in a fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, this perpetuating the US Cold War era.
Produced by Dori Smith, Storrs, CT
Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here Or at Radio4all.net and Archive.org
As Americans marked the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, a suicide bomber blew up a truck at a NATO combat outpost in Afghanistan. The base serves US Special Forces, and the Army reported 89 soldiers wounded. Two Afghan civilians were killed including a three-year-old child. In the next 48 hours, Kabul exploded with a series of bombings and ground attacks as gunmen said to be linked to the Taliban’s Haqqani, with suspected Al-Qaeda ties, appear responsible for breaking through to top security zones around NATO and the US Embassy. (See 9/11 in Kabul here on Al Jazeera English). Will Kabul once again be victimized by a power struggle between forces that have battled again and again using money and resources from various occupying forces? Will the ground war become more of an air war? And more costly for civilians? Many questions as the election cycle begins, and the transition for competing war lords also begins.
Nieman Watchdog interviews Gould&Fitzgerald
Missing from 9/11 anniversary coverage: crucial context and history
COMMENTARY | September 16, 2011 By neglecting to mention the key U.S. role in supporting militant jihadists in their war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the press missed an opportunity to raise questions about blowback — and about whether our actions in Afghanistan today will once again produce negative future consequences.
er |
Part of a Nieman Watchdog series, ‘Reporting the Endgame’
By John Hanrahan
The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as other mainstream print and broadcast media, devoted lots of ink and airtime to stories commemorating the September 11, 2001, attacks on America. We looked over the Times’ and Post’s accounts carefully with the thought that they probably were as good as any the press had to offer. What we found was that they were almost totally lacking in context and a sense of history that go to the root of this nation’s interminable war in Afghanistan.
The Times published a 40-page special section (titled “The Reckoning”) on the 9/11 attacks, while The Post concentrated on nine individuals’ stories in a 16-page special section (“Nine Lives Ten Years Later: Recovering from the Attack on Washington”). In that outpouring of thousands of words, both newspapers failed to address some of the basic who-what-when-where-why-and-how (and context) tenets of journalism: Nowhere in those 56 pages is there a hint of the possible motives for the 9/11 attacks, or any mention of why the United States within a month after 9/11 went to war in Afghanistan and then 18 months later invaded Iraq – and why we are still there.
Neither newspaper had even a mention of the secret, multi-billion-dollar U.S. support for the Islamic mujahideen’s successful war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, an event with direct links to 9/11 and its aftermath. This clandestine backing for the rebels intensified after the Soviets invaded that country in December 1979 to support the pro-Soviet Marxist regime that had come to power in a coup but faced attack from anti-communist rebels. Likewise, there was nothing about how the Central Intelligence Agency provided those Islamic fighters with jihad-filled propaganda against the Soviets, training, and weapons – most importantly, in 1986, some 2,000-2,500 hand-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.
This history has implications for the war the United States is waging in Afghanistan today. Many Americans would be surprised to learn that some of the same “freedom fighters” to whom the Central Intelligence Agency provided billions of dollars worth of Stinger missiles and other weapons in the 1980s are the same “terrorists” who today are fighting U.S. forces – such as we saw in the Sept. 13th attack on the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, purportedly carried out by the Haqqani Network, one of the CIA’s favored clients in the 1980s.
This might cause some Americans to wonder: If we couldn’t know the consequences of our actions in cozying up to extremists back in the 1980s, then how can we presume today to determine what is best for Afghanistan’s future? The Obama administration, our military leaders and our ambassador assure us of dubious “progress” in Afghanistan, but we should learn the “blowback” lessons from those earlier days and bear in mind that our actions there today – night raids, drone attacks, support for a corrupt government, internment without charges of a couple thousand Afghans in Bagram prison, etc. – can again produce negative future consequences for both the beleaguered Afghan people and the United States.
Through our seemingly endless and increasingly clandestine military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc., we are on course to experience blowback-without-end.
The two newspapers failed to discuss how this covert assistance – “Charlie Wilson’s War”– helped create the conditions that the popular 2007 movie about the Texas congressman’s exploits and secret appropriations in support of the rebels doesn’t mention: Namely, that the U.S.-aided mujahideen’s ouster of the Soviets in 1989 ultimately led to civil war and the ultra-orthodox Islamic Taliban coming to power in 1996, an event that also enabled anti-Soviet fighter Osama bin Laden and his fledgling al Qaeda to set up a base from which to plan the 9/11 attacks.
“The U.S. covert war in Afghanistan [in the 1980s] was the largest CIA effort since Vietnam, perhaps even bigger,” Afghanistan experts and journalistic husband-and-wife-team Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould told Nieman Watchdog recently. This jarring history is seldom cited in current-day press accounts as a factor in creating the very morass in which the United States finds itself today. Even before the Soviet invasion, Fitzgerald and Gould noted, “The U.S. used psychological warfare techniques to spook the Soviets on their southern border, backed warlords and drug dealers like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from the early 1970s on, and turned their backs on the largest heroin smuggling operation in history.”
Fitzgerald and Gould, in two recent authoritative books (Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, and Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire), shed light on how the current U.S. war in Afghanistan had its historical origins in the secret plans and actions of Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski in the final two years of the Carter administration, and how the Reagan administration and CIA Director William Casey expanded these actions to give the Soviets their own, earlier version of quagmire in Vietnam.
After all western reporters were expelled by the Afghan government and the Soviets in early 1980, Fitzgerald and Gould said, the major U.S. news outlets provided limited coverage of the war and the U.S.’s clandestine role in it. When the news media did focus on it, they generally bought into the “official narrative” that the war was “a Ramboesque struggle of holy warriors against the evil empire” and presented stories in a manner “to encourage war and to downplay peaceful settlement.”
Given the skimpy and skewed press coverage at the time and in more recent years, one could wager that most Americans, especially those who were not adults during the 1980s, are completely unaware that this is our country’s second war in Afghanistan in the last three decades or, looked at another way, a continuation of that devastated country’s 30-plus-year-war.
The Washington Post’s special section on 9/11 was even more narrowly focused than the Times’s special section. The Times at least made a stab at articles that went beyond the moving profiles of victims, victims’ families and survivors of 9/11 that both newspapers presented in abundance. For example, the Times had articles on the Arab Spring and on “Civil Liberties Today” (which – as did a soothing Post editorial the same day – pushed the dubious line that, really, government abuses of civil liberties aren’t so bad today compared to the World War I “Red scare” and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798). On the plus side was Scott Shane’s piece, “Al Qaeda’s Outsize Shadow,” which discussed the U.S. overreaction to terrorism over the last 10 years and which pointed out, in putting the issue in perspective, that between 1970 and 1978, “72 people died in terrorist attacks on American soil – five times the number to die in jihadist attacks since 9/11.”
Before it slips completely down the memory hole that our history with Afghanistan didn’t suddenly begin on that tragic September 11th a decade ago, let’s recall a few of the seamier aspects of how the United States in the 1980s used Afghanistan as a Cold War pawn in a proxy war against the Soviets.
Last year, Fitzgerald and Gould, along with Khalil Nouri and Michael Hughes, published a report (“Restoring Afghanistan’s Tribal Balance”) for the New World Strategies Coalition. The NWSC calls itself “a think-tank founded by Afghan expatriates who possess deep tribal connections,” working in partnership with other leading Afghan scholars, experts and non-governmental organizations. The October 2010 report described the U.S. covert support of the mujahideen thusly:
“…during the ‘jihad’ against the Soviets, the Judeo-Christian West teamed up with violent Islamic radicals of the worst sort, against the Soviets, because they shared a common hatred for the godless communists. The same people American leaders once called ‘freedom fighters’ throughout the 80’s are now [in the current war] violent extremist jihadist terrorists who commit immoral acts and heinous human rights violations that all Americans should find deplorable. Of course, before 9/11 when these ‘terrorists’ were fighting against the Soviets, they were ‘our terrorists’ and such human rights violations and war crimes hardly ever made the press. Today, people aren’t really supposed to remember nor point out this interesting historical irony, especially within the media.”
“It is now no secret that the CIA, via Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), funded and supported violent Islamic jihadists called the mujahideen in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, providing them with billions to procure weapons and recruit and train more jihadists,” the NWSC report continued. After the defeated Soviets completed their withdrawal in early 1990, “these mujahideen ‘freedom fighters’ became the very warlords that divided and terrified Afghanistan as it spiraled into civil war, moral decay and chaos, which led to conditions ripe for the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.”
As the late academic Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and other best-selling books on American militarism, wrote about Afghanistan in Dismantling the Empire: “Brutal, incompetent, secret operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, frequently manipulated by the military intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, caused the catastrophic devastation of this poor country.”
With rare exceptions, throughout the 1980s, according to Gould and Fitzgerald, “Without any serious reflection on the consequences of funding and training extremists for the purpose of defeating the Soviet Union, the American media not only missed the deeper story, but ignored numerous instances where the Afghan story had been corrupted for political purposes.”
The aforementioned warlord and drug dealer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar offers a perfect example of a lack of timely press vigilance and the unanticipated result of the U.S. backing for the mujahideen in the 1980s. Alfred McCoy, author of “The Politics of Heroin,” wrote that Hekmatyar – despite his reputation for being violently anti-American, for throwing acid at women who went unveiled during his student days and later for murdering rival resistance leaders – was “the leading recipient of U.S. arms shipments,” funneled through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during the covert war against the Soviets. During that period in which he netted the lion’s share of an estimated $3 billion worth of U.S. weapons largesse (as well as the bulk of the Saudi intelligence services’ billions in support for the rebels), Hekmatyar received only “positive reports” in the American press despite “his heroin dealing and human rights abuses.”
In fact, Hekmatyar, as Fitzgerald and Gould wrote in Invisible History, was viewed “as a hero to congressman Charlie Wilson,” the architect of the secret U.S. funding for the mujahideen, who shrugged off any criticisms of Hekmatyar as somehow motivated by tribal jealousies. Although the press had not examined Hekmatyar’s reputation throughout the 1980s war, the New York Times reported on “the sinister nature of Mr. Hekmatyar“in 1990, a year after the Soviet withdrawal.” The Washington Post weighed in with a bigger story on Hekmatyar’s operation of “a chain of heroin laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI,” as McCoy put it.
In the civil war after the Soviets left and northern forces had captured Kabul, Hekmatyar’s artillery forces reportedly bombarded the capital, killing some 50,000 people. Although he was initially supported by the ISI against the northern forces, the Pakistani intelligence agency later turned its support to the Taliban, which took over Kabul in September 1996 even as fighting with the Northern Alliance continued for the next five years.
McCoy, the J.R.W. Small professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted the CIA’s “indirect complicity” in Hekmatyar’s and other mujahideen drug operations rather than “direct culpability,” writing: “In most cases, the CIA’s role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking … [t]he CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”
In the mid-1970s, before the Soviet invasion and the CIA’s covert war, the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands “had zero heroin production,” McCoy wrote in March 2010. But the war served as “the catalyst that transformed the …[area] into the world’s largest heroin producing region” as Afghan guerrillas began collecting a poppy tax from farmers and brought the opium across the border to sell to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs “operating under the ISI’s protection.”
Between 1981 and 1990, he wrote, this mujahideen-fueled opium boom saw production grow from 250 tons to 2,000 tons, and as early as 1981 Afghanistan and Pakistan were reportedly providing 60 per cent of the heroin that entered the United States. The “benign neglect” policy by the CIA “helped make Afghanistan today the world’s number one narco-state,” with a depleted farming sector where once existed a “diverse agricultural ecosystem – with herding, orchards and over 60 food crops.”
Additionally, when the United States ended its support for the Mujahideen in in 1992, it left behind “a thoroughly ravaged country with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords prepared to fight among themselves for control of the capital.”
In the current war, Hekmatyar continues to lead a major insurgent group, Hizb-e-Islami, that controls areas in the north and east of Afghanistan. According to Fitzgerald and Gould, it was the events of 9/11 that “finally turned the American military against Hekmayatar,” and he became “one of the first targets of American missile attacks” when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in late 2001. But the United States may not be done yet with Hekmatyar as a possible future partner. As Gould and Fitzgerald wrote in Crossing Zero, his Hesb-i-Islami supported Hamid Karzai in the August 2009 Afghan presidential election. Four months earlier, they noted, the late Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, “was reported to have met with a Hekmatyar emissary in the hope of luring him into a relationship with the Afghan government.” The authors characterized this as part of a “campaign to rehabilitate Hekmatyar as an Afghan messiah…despite his demonic reputation.”
As a key component of the anti-Soviet effort, the CIA provided some 2,000-2,500 Stinger missiles to the Afghan rebels. The missiles, wrote Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, “proved to be deadly for Russian aircraft” and “tipped the balance in favor of the mujahideen.” As Steve Coll wrote in Ghost Wars, many of these missiles during he 1980s “had gone to commanders associated with anti-American radical Islamist leaders. A few missiles had already been acquired by Iran.”
Fearing lethal blowback from weapons left behind when the United States ceased support for the mujahideen, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the early 1990s authorized a secret program to spend tens of millions of dollars “to buy back as many Stingers as it could from anyone who possessed them…. In 1996 the CIA estimated that about six hundred Stingers were still at large,” Coll wrote in his book. Coll, a former Washington Post managing editor who previously was a South Asia correspondent, is now president of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy institute, and is a contributor to The New Yorker.
Brzezinski, in the days following the December 1979 Soviet invasion, outlined what Coll described in his book as “a CIA-led American campaign in Afghanistan whose broad outlines would stand for a decade to come.” In a memorandum to President Carter, Brzezinski called for a secret policy of providing U.S. arms, money and technical advice to the mujahideen. The memo said the United States government “must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels,” and for this give Pakistan “more guarantees…more arms aid, and, alas a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our [nuclear] nonproliferation policy.”
Here was the seed for more blowback: In the current Afghanistan/Pakistan war the United States remains convinced that elements of the ISI continue to assist Afghan rebels against invaders – only now it is the United States, not the Soviet Union, that is targeted. And previous CIA support for extremists seems to haunt U.S. forces daily in Afghanistan.
For example, Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, charged that the coordinated Sept. 13th attacks on the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul were carried out by the Haqqani Network – led for years by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin Haqqani – which benefited from CIA support in the 1980s war. The Haqqani Network is said to be aligned with the Taliban, Pakistan’s ISI and al Qaeda, while operating independently. The Haqqanis have been blamed for some of the worst insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, including the July 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed 41 people and an October 2009 car-bomb attack outside the Indian embassy that killed 17 and wounded more than 60. Its leadership is reportedly in the Pakistan tribal areas of Waziristan, where they are alleged to have the protection of the ISI, which has “a fixation on Pakistan’s primary enemy – India,” as Fitzgerald and Gould wrote. For what it’s worth, the ISI in July 2008 vehemently denied it had ties to the Haqqani Network and other insurgents.
Haqqani, according to Steve Coll, was highly regarded by the CIA and ISI, who “came to rely on Haqqani for testing and experimentation with new weapons systems and tactics.” In fact, wrote Coll, “Haqqani was so favored with supplies that he was in a position to broker them and to help equip volunteers gathering in his region.” CIA officers in Islamabdad “regarded him as a proven commander who could put a lot of men under arms at short notice.” He had “the CIA’s full support.”
And to get back to Brzezinski’s memo and the proliferation issue: The Pakistanis, under the not-so-watchful U.S. eye, managed to develop nuclear weapons that U.S. officials today say they are concerned may fall into terrorists’ hands – and that they cite as a main reason why we need to keep up military pressures against insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One can only think back again to the 1980s when William Casey, Reagan’s CIA director, expanded support for the mujahideen and their reckless, occasional guerrilla raids into adjoining Muslim republics in the Soviet Union, thus creating what Fitzgerald and Gould called a “growing and dangerous institutional surreality of supporting extremist Muslim killers – so long as the Soviets were being targeted.”
And then there is the matter of the U.S. promoting “jihad” in those Cold War days. Consider an eye-opening and little-remembered Washington Post story that appeared six months after 9/11 – headlined “From U.S., the ABC’s of Jihad” – that provides some startling insights into those inflammatory U.S.-aided propaganda efforts against the Soviet occupiers. The efforts were designed to promote a holy war of the same ferocity the United States is facing today as the Taliban seeks to drive out the latest collection of foreign occupiers. It is in situations like this when you realize how true the cliches are – “law of unintended consequences,” “reap what you sow,” “make your own bed,” “chickens coming home to roost,” etc.
As reporters Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway reported in March 2002: “In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.”
The article reported that the books “were filled with talks of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and [land]mines,” and later were even used by the Taliban when they came to power in 1996 during the bitter civil war – “though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.” The textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) grant, which eventually totaled $51 million, to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. According to the article, USAID officials “acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders.”
If future conscientious high-school students were assigned to write a term paper about the war in Afghanistan and what 9/11 was all about, they wouldn’t have a clue if they turned to the Times or Post’s recent weekend sections. They might then take a look at the New York Times on-line “World” section where they could find a 3,000-word, encyclopedia-style description of Afghanistan’s recent history. The Times, after all, is still recognized as the nation’s most authoritative newspaper — even after its false and disastrous coverage of the run-up to the war in Iraq, in which it regularly parroted the Bush/Cheney administration line and earned the uncoveted appellation of “stenographers to the government.”
A teacher would be well-advised, though, to tell the students to proceed carefully in relying on this particular Times account, because the newspaper has once again presented a sanitized version of U.S. relations with Afghanistan over the last 30 years. It’s what gets left out of this Times account that is especially troubling: It contains only passing references to the United States’ involvement in the country’s 1980s war on the side of the mujahideen, phrased thusly: “The turmoil and extremism that have dominated its history since then can be traced to the 1979 invasion by the Soviet Union and the reaction both by Afghans and by their allies in the United States and Pakistan.” And in the only fact pertaining to what the United States did there, the account notes that after 1986 the Soviet Air Force was “rendered largely useless by advanced Stinger antiaircraft missiles supplied by the United States to the rebels.” All right, class: Beyond the provision of Stinger missiles, just what was this U.S. “reaction”? What was the United States doing in Afghanistan in the 1980s? And how does that relate to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings a decade ago? The Times account hardly suffices to answer these questions.
To read this particular Times mini-history – which, after all, is that newspaper’s official summary version of what has been happening in Afghanistan for the last 30-plus years – you would not learn that the CIA back then worked hand-in-glove with Islamic extremists, many of whom subsequently became affiliated with the Taliban and other insurgent groups. Regarding this Times account, Fitzgerald and Gould commented to us: “An apt description of …[this] summary is willful ignorance.”
One can only speculate why much of the mainstream press, even at this late date, doesn’t want to deal with our 1980s history and the “why” of the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps it is because of a misplaced concern that it would suggest some sort of insensitivity to the victims and would provide legitimacy to what Osama bin Laden and other extremists have articulated as their motives for their attacks on U.S. targets – such as the 1990 sanctions imposed on Iraq that reportedly resulted in widespread poverty and malnutrition and the death of half-a-million children; the presence of U.S. military in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites; and injustices to the Palestinians and support of Israel by the United States. (The United States in 2003 did pull out most of its troops from Saudi Arabia, leaving behind only trainers.) But news isn’t supposed to make us comfortable, and we’re long past the point when former President Bush’s explanation – “They hate our freedoms” – will fly. Reporters explaining terrorists’ motives is not the same thing as agreeing with those motives or their actions. It’s called journalism.
History and context matter. They are vital to the public’s understanding of how past events influence current events, and offer lessons to enable us to make wiser decisions in the future and avoid the pitfalls and disasters of the past. Yet much of the ethnocentric U.S. news media almost always see history since 9/11 only through the prism of our own horrific, but limited, suffering – and not the suffering, displacement and death we have caused to hundreds of thousands of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere in our global war on terrorism. Such an attitude was again on display in much of the mainstream media’s 10th anniversary coverage of 9/11. Is it too much to expect that in retrospectives of this nature the press at least make an effort to try to explain the stated motives for the attacks – and what Afghanistan had to do with them? In striving for history and context, we should pay heed to George Orwell’s chilling narrative in “1984”: “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Gould and Fitzgerald also pointed out to Nieman Watchdog in a recent interview that, contrary to the impression prevalent today, Afghanistan had been a peaceful and stable country for some 40 years and had been moving in a more progressive fashion until it got swept up in the 1970s Cold War maneuverings of the United States and the Soviet Union. As the NWSC report noted, during that 40-year period Afghanistan “had been self-sufficient in food production, a vivid illustration of what life was like when Afghans were in control of their own fate.” Women had won the right to vote in the 1920s.
Now, “after more than 30 years of incessant war,” Afghanistan is “one of the most violent, corrupt and poverty-stricken places on earth.” The historical contrast is between an Afghanistan that had been free from outside interventions to a country “occupied and manipulated by foreign powers that have marginalized, weakened and corrupted centuries-old indigenous institutions and value systems.”
Gould told Nieman Watchdog that most of the major news media “have turned the whole practice of journalism inside out” by identifying with the political and military leaders and “turning into cheerleaders,” rather than serving as the watchdogs over government. By not framing an issue properly – by distorting or omitting facts – the press helps create a “false narrative” that distorts the policy debate and allows ill-conceived and dangerous government decisions to go unexamined until it is too late.
Fitzgerald and Gould also had sharp words for the “triumphalist narrative” of the 2007 movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” which, for many of those who viewed it, will become the official version of that earlier proxy war in Afghanistan. The movie presents flamboyant womanizer and heavy-drinking Wilson’s successful efforts to covertly fund the mujahideen against the Soviets, but fails to deal with the “blowback” issue of “our freedom fighters” morphing into “our terrorist enemies.”
The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper gave the film a “C” for entertainment value, and a “D” for historical accuracy. The reviewer noted: “The original draft of the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, is said to have been harder-hitting and to have ended by explicitly linking American support for the mujahideen to 9/11. Reportedly, Tom Hanks found this too “political”. Instead of 9/11, then, Charlie Wilson’s War ends with Wilson failing to persuade Congress to invest positively in Afghanistan…”
Wilson, who died in 2010, said in a 2001 interview that he was proud of his efforts in Afghanistan to oust the Soviets, but was also concerned about blowback. “I always, always, whenever a [U.S.] plane goes down, I always fear it is one of our missiles,” he said, adding, regarding weapons falling into the wrong hands in wartime: “I feel guilty about it…I really do.” But, he added: “Those things happen…How are you going to defeat the Red Army without a gun? You can’t blame the Marines for teaching Lee Harvey Oswald how to shoot.”
John Hanrahan is a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI, and other news organizations. He is now on special assignment for Nieman Watchdog. E-mail: hanrahan@niemanwatchdog.org |
Expert Witness Radio Show Interview with Gould and Fitzgerald
Expert Witness Radio Show 8/23/11 WBAI 99.5 FM Radio, NYC
ELIZABETH GOULD and PAUL FITZGERALD are special guests on Expert Witness Radio Show . Listen to this fascinating interview right here.