Watch our interview on GRITtv with Laura Flanders  from June 25, 2009.

     

“Invisible History”  shows us that we now have an opportunity to transform ourselves through an honest confrontation with our past: a confrontation that would lead us to reorient our national policies around the tabernacle of our professed moral values. If we choose to ignore this opportunity, and once again turn a blind eye to history and its lessons, then we may find ourselves in grave danger, not just from the threat of terrorist attacks, but from falling victim to the same folly that has toppled empires throughout history. 

Afghanistan’s Untold Story

Sunday 31 May 2009
by Ryan Croken, t r u t h o u t  Book Review

Originally from BeltwayBlips.  The Web’s most popular political news, videos, and blogs.   

NEWSHOGGERS Politics, Foreign Affairs, Opinion and the News Less Travelled Served up Daily 

May 30, 2009

Weekend Book Review – Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story

By Ron Beasley

  “I repeat,  Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story is a must read for anyone trying to understand AF/PAK policy.  I have not even scratched the surface of what you will find in this book.”

 

Behind the Afghan propaganda page  page 1 of 2 pages
Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Reviewed by Anthony Fenton

Nearly 30 years after their first foray into the land-locked buffer state, married couple and journalist-historians Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould could not have chosen a more appropriate time to publish their comprehensive Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story.

Having taken a back seat to Iraq since the drumbeat for war began in the autumn of 2002, the ongoing escalation of the United States-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) counter-insurgency war and occupation have made “AfPak” the center of  sustained US media attention for the first time since “shock and awe” temporarily drove the Taliban underground in October 2001.

A chronically disinformed US public should leap at the chance to familiarize themselves with an honest overview of their country’s historically scandalous involvement in the region. 

Despite Afghanistan’s recent return to the spotlight, few among the public realize the full extent of the US’s historical meddling in Afghanistan. Sadly, many Americans will believe the version of events that were popularized by George Crile’s book-turned-Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of how the Wildest man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times (New York: Grove Press, 2003).

Crile’s account presents an ahistorical blend of fact and fantasy as it romanticizes the largest covert operation in US history during the US-Pakistan-Saudi Arabian-financed and armed proxy war against the Soviet Union from 1979-1989. It is this collective propaganda-imbued blindspot that Fitzgerald and Gould attempt to reveal and counter. As Gould stated in an interview with Asia Times Online, Charlie Wilson’s War “is a complete flip flop of the reality”.

As such, one of the concerns that Gould and Fitzgerald are seeking to address is the problem that “there are still people in administration positions, in journalistic positions, in academic positions who still believe the fundamentals of Charlie Wilson’s War”. As Fitzgerald added, “every line cook and bottle washer in and around Washington is now an expert on Afghanistan”, reflecting a popular discourse that is “far detached from reality”.

Thinking Like an Afghan

By PAUL FITZGERALD and ELIZABETH GOULD

For years now, Washington’s political class has been locked in a hand-wringing debate over what to do about Afghanistan. Should the U.S. continue to plan for an extended military engagement? Can “moderate” Taliban somehow be peeled away from fanatical Taliban? Should the U.S. give up on democracy and focus on killing Al Qaeda terrorists with Predator drone assassination attacks, regardless of civilian casualties, public outrage or their legal ambiguity?
 
Although packed with foreign policy experts, the current debate remains largely grounded on what policy best serves Washington’s needs, but in terms of what’s best for Afghans, the answer to all of the above questions is no.
 
For most of the last 70 years nobody in Washington cared much about Afghanistan.  Generations of Washington diplomats found no resources to value or strategy to gain by befriending it. Kabul’s early requests for military assistance in controlling its wild eastern frontier with Pakistan were first ignored and then outright rejected, leaving Afghanistan to seek aid  from the Soviet Union. Conservative 1980’s Washington found the country endlessly useful as a cold war platform for declarations on freedom and self-determination, but then turned it over to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to determine its fate once the Red Army had left.
 
Today, every beltway pundit and media talking-head wants to help president Bema finally get Afghanistan right. But if getting Afghanistan right in 2009 boils down to abandoning everything that the U.S. and the west have invested over the last 7 years, then what do they have to lose by abandoning their old misperceptions?
 
Understanding how to forge a workable strategy  for Afghanistan may be far simpler than anyone to date has considered, if only those with the power to do so in Washington can finally shed their obsolete cold war thinking and start thinking like the Afghans who fought to establish and maintain an independent Afghan nation.
 
Thinking like an Afghan
 
From antiquity, Afghan identity has been rooted in the lands surrounding the Hindu Kush bordering the Indus river. Afghan independence began as an uprising led by a mystical Sufi philosopher Bayezid Ansari against Mughal rule in the 16th century.  Beginning  in 1747, an Afghan dynasty ruled from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea and from Central Asia to Delhi and continued to rule Afghanistan until 1978.
 
Afghan rulers defeated British armies on three separate occasions while masterfully playing Britain’s interests off against imperial Russia’s southward march.  Afghanistan’s late 19th century nation builder, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan faced impossible odds at  keeping Afghanistan independent. Yet, he fought his severest battles against his own relations, his own subjects and his own Pashtun people and he succeeded.
 
For the decade of the 1920’s, despite severe opposition from rural landowners and powerful Mullahs and destabilization from British India, Amir Amanullah Khan moved the country forward through progressive rule while bringing an unprecedented level of rights to women. And while Iran and India were occupied by allied forces during World War II, Afghanistan’s Royal Prime Minister, Hashim Khan maintained Afghanistan’s independence by staying out of the war and adhering to a strict neutrality.
 
Following the creation of  the state of Pakistan, Washington’s cold war objectives and Pakistan’s ambitions formed a single mindset. But that mindset now works against both the United States and Afghanistan as Pakistan’s military intelligence works unceasingly to undermine the efforts of Afghan moderates to establish a viable democratic state.
 
According to a recent Asia Foundation poll, 78 percent of Afghans continue to prefer democracy over any other form of government and despite its shortcomings, 68 percent said they were satisfied with the way democracy was working. An ABC/BBC/ARD National survey of Afghanistan in February found that  58 percent of the population saw the Taliban as the biggest danger while only 4 percent of Afghans support a Taliban government. Yet Washington appears immune from this reality.
 
If President Obama wishes to bring stability to Afghanistan and the region he must learn to see Afghanistan through Afghan eyes, help the Afghans defend their communities from Taliban terror, and give them the help they need to reestablish a genuine civil society.
 
In doing so, he may not only solve Afghanistan’s problems, but begin the renewal of Washington as well.
 

 Afghanistan, a New Beginning  Z Net  April 6, 2009 By Paul Fitzgerald  and Elizabeth Gould
Source: Informed Comment Paul Fitzgerald’s ZSpacePage   

April 2, 2009 Informed Comment.

This statement was made by Charles Cogan, chief of the Near East-South Asia Division in the Operations Directorate of the CIA from 1979 to 1984 following our presentation of the facts we had presented regarding the true reasons for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan December 27, 1979. 

“I think your account of the Russian motivation at the time of the invasion and afterwards strikes me as being quite authentic. Prime minister Kosygin didn’t vote for the intervention. He had his doubts and he was absent from the meeting.” — Charles Cogan at the Cambridge Forum, February 4, 2009. Cogan was Chief of the Near East-South Asia Division in the Operations Directorate of the CIA from 1979 to 1984. He is now at the Kennedy School.
 

 

You can watch our interview at Back Pages Books, Waltham, MA  hosted by Alex Green on Book TV on CSpan2

The New American Cold War

By Stephen F. Cohen  The Nation    June 21, 2006

US policy has fostered the belief that the American cold war was never really aimed at Soviet Communism but always at Russia, a suspicion given credence by Post and Times columnists who characterize Russia even after Communism as an inherently “autocratic state” with “brutish instincts.”

Read the full article

The Man Who Shouldn’t be King (of Afghanistan)

By PAUL FITZERGALD and ELIZABETH GOULD

It was hoped that t he election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States would bring a change of course to the beleaguered US effort in Afghanistan. But word that representatives of the Taliban and the infamous Afghan drug trafficker and extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might be on the president’s list of possible solutions, looms as a clear sign that the United States is about to step into a trap of its own making.

Employing Afghanistan’s drug-dealing warlords is nothing new for Washington. The U.S. elevated Pakistan’s drug-warlords to beltway cult status vis a vis Charlie Wilson’s War during the Soviet occupation and insisted on including them in the new Afghan government in 2002.  Numerous observers claim that Washington had a hand in the Taliban’s creation as well, standing by as they rolled over Afghanistan in league with Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s Intelligence Service (ISI) in the late 1990’s.

But should Gulbuddin Hekmatyar be allowed to make a political comeback, the new administration may find that partnering with the devil himself might be a better choice than with Afghanistan’s longest running and most notorious holy warrior.

According to a Washington Post report, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami organization is gaining support in every province in Afghanistan. This news followed a Times of London report in which the British ambassador to Afghanistan Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles reportedly stated that the best hope for Afghanistan was to install “an acceptable dictator.”  

Should the Pashtun Hekmatyar emerge as Cowper-Coles’s suitably acceptable dictator, an increasingly desperate and financially impaired U.S. could be faced with a defacto extremist victory. Or could it be that within the serpentine meanderings of Washington’s foreign policy aristocracy, a Taliban/Hekmatyar ruled Afghanistan may have been the plan all along?

America’s multitude of policy mistakes in Afghanistan have mystified many from the beginning. In a February 2, 2009 Times of London Online article, the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown accepted responsibility for the Afghan fiasco admitting that “We are trying to win in Afghanistan with one twenty-fifth the troops and one fiftieth of the aid per head in Bosnia… [T]he real problem is not President Karzai, it’s us.” Yet, much of the ongoing discussion continues to lay blame on beleaguered Afghans while continuing to soft-peddle the Pakistani military’s central role in Afghanistan’s instability.

Throughout the Cold War Pakistan did everything in its power to destabilize a succession of Afghan governments while dismissing Afghanistan’s legitimate grievances regarding its arbitrary 19th century boundary known as the Durand line. Yet Britain’s former secretary of state for defense, Malcolm Rifkind wrote in The Independent  in June of 2007 that the United States and Britain should pressure Afghan President Hamid Karzai to accept the Durand line. And should he not, what are the chances that an acceptable dictatorship of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might accommodate British and Pakistani demands?

Thanks to Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson and his influential friend Joanne Herring, Hekmatyar received the bulk of U.S. and Saudi money during the 1980’s, despite dire warnings from some of Afghanistan’s most revered religious families that he was a  “monster.” According to  Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tim Weiner even CIA and State Department officials referred to him as “‘scary,’ ‘vicious,’ ‘a fascist,’ ‘definite dictatorship material.'”

The post-9/11 American and NATO war against the Taliban was widely viewed at the time as a long overdue opportunity to correct the policy mistakes in Afghanistan embodied by the Taliban but beginning with Hekmatyar. But instead of helping Afghans rebuild their nation by providing the necessary security, the war has been turned against the Afghan people.

Today, as Pakistani Taliban, Arab Al Qaeda and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hesb-e Islami fighters once again swarm over the countryside, the western alliance that pledged itself to establishing an Afghan democracy scrambles madly to negotiate its way out of its commitment. 

But in choosing his next step, President Obama should be warned that the record of decision making for American Presidents on Afghanistan is abysmal. Although those decisions presented the Soviet Union with its final test and brought it to its knees, it also planted dreams of conquest in the minds of America’s leaders that have led the United States to find itself caught in its own trap.