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“Packed with reflective detail, Invisible History is a key read for people in Canada wishing to glean more insight about Afghanistan”

Hour.ca  August 27th, 2009

Roots of war
Stefan Christoff

In  Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story  journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould outline striking historical accounts of an ancient nation, its borders shaped through colonial wars and conflicts between empires. Their style is reflective yet factual, delving into Afghanistan’s key role in central conflicts that have defined global politics in the past century, from the Cold War to the “war

Anderson Cooper 360 blog on Afghanistan’s untold story

Afghanistan’s untold story: Stability, tourists, miniskirts

August 20, 2009 By John Blake CNN  

“Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires, but it’s more of a crossroad of cultures,” Fitzgerald said.

The cultural richness is what Shorish-Shamley remembers from her childhood. Though she was a Muslim, she remembered attending Jewish holiday celebrations. Hindus, Sikhs, Shiites and Sunnis lived easily with one another, she says.

“My mother’s best friends were Jewish,” she said. “My mother had a set of cups and dishes that were kosher that she kept for her friends when they came over for dinner.”

As recently as the 1970s, Afghan women could be seen wearing miniskirts in Kabul.

View our timeline of Afghan History in the GlobalPost’s series, “Life, Death and the Taliban.”

 
         13 August 2009
Norman Solomon: When the Dead Have No Say

Official Washington is buzzing about “metrics.” Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?

Don’t ask the dead.

Days ago, under the headline “White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success,” a New York Times story made a splash. “As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.”

Don’t ask the dead. They don’t count.

The way the Russian invasion of Georgia was framed by the American media is from the same script that Zbigniew Brzezinski and the American media used to frame the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The American media got it all wrong back in 1979 and it’s still getting it all wrong in 2009.  Just like the British empire, Brzezinski’s obsession has always been to contain Russia in its own neighborhood and Brzezinski is still pushing the same  worn out 19th century British colonial strategy turned 20th century “Cold War” stratgy of containment against Russia in the 21st century!       

The Nation  August 12, 2009

Myth, Meth and the Georgian Invasion  Beat the Devil By Alexander Cockburn 

A year ago, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent Georgian troops into South Ossetia on a murderous rampage, with civilian casualties put by Irina Gagloeva, the spokeswoman of South Ossetia, at 1,492. Much lower numbers have been offered by Western sources. Georgian soldiers butchered their victims with great brutality. Kirill Benediktov, in his online book on the invasion, reports that these soldiers were equipped–so subsequent searches of bodies and prisoners of war disclosed–not only with NATO-supplied food packages but with sachets of methamphetamine and combat stress pills based on MDMA, aka the active ingredient of Ecstasy. The meth amps up soldiers to kill without mercy, and the MDMA derivative frees them of subsequent debilitating flashbacks and recurring nightmares. Official use of methamphetamine and official testing of MDMA in the US armed forces have been discussed in news stories.

There was never any serious doubt that Saakashvili, with covert US encouragement and military training and kindred assistance, started the war. In June of this year, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel ran a piece, seemingly based on a reading of a draft report by Heidi Tagliavini, who heads the European Union’s fact-finding commission on the Georgian war. Despite the subsequent stentorian denials of a much-embarrassed Tagliavini, Der Spiegel’s editors stood by their story: “The facts assembled on Tagliavini’s desk refute Saakashvili’s claim that his country became the innocent victim of ‘Russian aggression’ that day.”

The Huffington Post Chalmers Johnson Posted: July 30, 2009 11:00 AM  

Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire

And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

 Posted: July 27, 2009 11:31 AM

Invisible History, Afghanistan Untold Story is no conspiracy theory!

Kenneth J. Cooper’s Boston Globe review of our book, Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story, titled Conspiracy-laden look at messy Afghan history is a painful example of the magical thinking perpetrated by the media that has trapped the U.S. intelligentsia since the end of the Vietnam war. It is the kind of thinking that has maintained a fantasy land of bubble economics, Star Wars military budgets and cognitive suicide for over 30 years. It is the kind of thinking that left the U.S. unaware of and unable to deal effectively with the real threat represented by 9/11…

 Obama policy in Afghanistan on a knife edge

“In their recent book, Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Paul FitzGerald and Elizabeth Gould, two US journalists with a long involvement there, trace how it has re-emerged after being parked with a compliant Pakistani regime during the Iraq war.

As they write: “The Bush administration diverted the necessary resources and attention away from where al-Qaeda was, into Iraq where al-Qaeda wasn’t. The administration then continued for seven years to underfinance the Afghan war, perform a hurricane Katrina-like Afghan reconstruction charade while hiring Afghan warlords and Pakistani Gen Pervez Musharraf to do the job for it.”

Asked last year whether this complicated US entanglement with the region was worth it, the geopolitical theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who set it up in 1978-9 as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, replied with a definite yes. The larger prize, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, was a direct consequence of its difficulties in Afghanistan, which gave Ronald Reagan the excuse to ratchet up military expenditure in the 1980s. Speaking at meetings throughout the US, FitzGerald and Gould report a bewilderment about why the extra troops are being sent there now. They believe the Obama administration is buying time to save face, redefine its commitment and reorganise its priorities. “Whether it realises it or not, Washington has placed itself in a fight for its life in Afghanistan, just the way the Soviets did. Both its political and its military credibility are on the line and neither can tolerate another failure.

“Obama’s 17,000 troopers will make little difference without a reorganisation of Washington’s priorities away from its unyielding support for a dysfunctional Pakistani military.” get the full article

17,000 TROOPS? WHAT’S REALLY BEHIND THE THINKING

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

In the six months since the publication of our book, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, we’ve had the opportunity to address dozens of forums about Afghanistan. It has been a revealing exercise, not so much in terms of what Americans understand about Afghanistan (which unfortunately isn’t very much) but by the way it reveals how Americans are struggling to catch up with a world that seems to have left them behind.

One well informed brave soul who admitted to being involved in politics since Adlai Stevenson’s day, went so far as to admit last February at the Cambridge forum, “I realize tonight how totally ignorant I am of the Afghan history, of the role of our country there. Nothing you told me tonight surprised me except how ignorant I was of all of this…” 

The very next soul at the microphone, former cold war practitioner and region chief for South Asia and the Near East for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, Charles Cogan took the opportunity to dispel some of that ignorance, “In the interest of full disclosure,” by admitting that our analysis of “the Soviet invasion and afterwards,” was “quite authentic.” full story  

An Open Letter Rachel Maddow about Afghanistan

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

It was when Dan Rather told Rachel Maddow on her January 27th show, “We are not seeking to colonize Afghanistan. The Soviets made no bones about it. They were coming in to take over the country. They wanted to run the country. They wanted to be there 100 or 1,000 years from now. That is not the case with what we‘re trying to do,..” we held our breath. There has been a controversy over the authenticity of Rather’s coverage of Afghanistan going back to 1980. Now in 2009 Rather was building on the his own Cold War disinformation campaign from the 1980’s and taking it to an absurd new level. We had hoped that Maddow was up to the challenge. Unfortunately, she allowed Rather’s disinformation to go unchallenged. We assumed that Maddow must not have known that Rather’s views of Soviet motives in Afghanistan and the American role were propaganda from another era. We assumed that Maddow, along with most Americans, must not have known that Rather’s reports on Afghanistan were tainted and have been challenged by many journalists.

So in response we sent a letter to Rachel Maddow regarding her January 27th interview with Dan Rather on Afghanistan summarized here.