Who is Behind all the Talk to the Taliban Talk?

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

With all the Talk to the Taliban Talk going on everywhere it was refreshing to find an op-ed in the February 17th Boston Globe by US Representative Stephen F. Lynch that hit the nail on the head. Titled , The price of appeasing the Taliban , it framed the true nature of the scam being perpetrated on the Afghan people. Even though the latest poll of Afghans reveals that only a puny 6% want the Taliban back, it seems nobody from the Obama administration is talking to the Afghan people except Representative Lynch.

Here are some of Representative Lynch’s facts :
“The Taliban is a violent and oppressive regime that has given support to Al Qaeda and employed brutality against the general population, especially against women. The Taliban has massacred ethnic minority civilians and used rape as a tool of intimidation. It has burned hundreds of schools to prevent the education of girls. It has stormed schools that teach girls and has beheaded teachers as horrified children watched.”

“The Taliban enforces a strict doctrine that, in part, prohibits women from venturing outside the home except under specific and narrow circumstances and has so terrorized the population in parts of southern Afghanistan that you can drive for miles through crowded village streets and seldom see a woman or girl. Women who violate the Taliban rules have been publicly whipped with car antennas and ferociously beaten/”.

“And if there is any lingering doubt about “outlawing” the Taliban, consider this: in an absurd attempt to gain the support of the local Afghan population the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, recently announced that its members will, for now, “cease the practice of cutting off the lips, noses and ears of detainees.”

‘I recently met with female members of the Afghan parliament who were angry Karzai had proposed the Taliban appeasement plan in London without getting the input of women in parliament. They said they fear for the women of Afghanistan, their basic rights of free speech, freedom of travel, freedom of association and voting rights. These women said that they respect the United States, not merely for its economic success or its military power, but for “upholding individual rights for all of its citizens.” This, they said, “is the intoxicating idea of America.”

As a member of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Relations, Representative Lynch has stated the facts about the Taliban with a clarity that now must be incorporated into the Afghan policy.

This scam against the Afghan people has gone on long enough. Whoever is behind all the Talk to the Taliban Talk should hide in shame and let the adults takeover!

Copyright © Gould & Fitzgerald 2010 All rights reserved

The Huffington Post   

In Afghanistan: Embracing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Is No Method At All  

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Colonel Kurtz: Did they say why [Captain] Willard, why they want to terminate my command?

Captain Willard: They told me, that you had gone totally insane and uh, that your methods were unsound.

Colonel Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Captain Willard: I don’t see any method at all, Sir.

Apocalypse Now

One thing that remains consistent over the last 30 years in observing America’s participation in Afghanistan is that mistakes and errors of judgment, no matter how egregious or self-defeating, never seem to get corrected. In fact, in its effort to rationalize a growing culture of war-making from Vietnam to Afghanistan, America has come around to embracing the insanity of the fictional Colonel Kurtz. read more…

 “Like Great Britain before it, Washington’s interactions with Afghanistan exhibited an ignorance of Afghanistan’s historical desire for non-alignment. This ignorance was combined with an insistence that any expression of that desire proved that Moscow was influencing Kabul’s politics. Fitzgerald and Gould write that this was not an accident. In fact, it was the logical outcome of a 1950 national security directive known as NSC 68.”

“The direct result of this directive was the creation of a permanent war economy and the creation of a national security state. In practice, some of what this meant was that national liberation struggles and national desires for non-alignment were perceived to be Soviet-inspired and therefore part of the enemy camp.”

The Arrogance of Empire, Detailed

by Ron Jacobs  / January 16th, 2010 

In the first week of 2010, five US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. The last week of 2009 saw the deaths of eight CIA agents there. Several more Afghan civilians were killed during this period, including the apparent executions of several young boys by persons either in the US military or working with them. In addition, insurgent forces targeted a Karzai government in official in eastern Khost and launched rockets at the site of a future US consulate in Herat. It was reported on January 6, 2010 that the Obama administration was sending 1,000 more US civilian experts to the country to help in so-called reconstruction projects. This news was greeted with skepticism from Afghans both in and out of the government. The Afghan ambassador to the United Nations noted that few Afghans trusted these so-called reconstruction endeavors and that the US might do better if they hired Afghans to do the rebuilding instead of shipping in US citizens to “create parallel structures that would ruin (the Afghan government’s) efforts.” The ambassador must be quite aware that the history of US reconstruction in either Afghanistan or Iraqis is a legacy of corruption, poor construction, and failed endeavors that benefited no one but the foreign companies that garnered the contracts. Read more…

Shadow War

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Posted: January 12, 2010   News that suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, (the man who targeted the forward CIA operating base Chapman) was a trusted informant, should prompt more than just a reassessment of President Obama’s AfPak war. The shocking infiltration of a key CIA operating facility indicates that either America’s former partners in its covert war against the Soviet Union are so well schooled in American methods and practices that they have become all but invisible, or, that in their desperation, America’s best operatives are failing to follow precautions. Just when the administration was hoping to build on a solid foundation of reliable intelligence, it must now question not only the intelligence it has received, but also the fundamental assumptions on which the intelligence has been operating from the start.

We heard the rumblings of apprehension from local Afghans when we visited Kabul in the fall of 2002. What exactly was the United States doing by hurting those who wanted to build a stable Afghanistan and re-empower those who had already torn it to shreds? In a conscious effort not to lose Afghanistan the way Vietnam had been lost, the U.S. was going back to the same fractious warlords it had empowered during the 1980s without ever questioning whether they had been backing the right people to begin with.

At the time, insurgent leaders, whose ideology was as alien to Afghanistan as any foreign colonial power, made it clear that the U.S. was only an ally of convenience and that once the Soviet Union was defeated the tide of radicalism would be turned loose on the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, America’s largest beneficiary, made his disdain clear when he refused to visit President Reagan at the White House on a 1985 trip to the United Nations in New York. All through the 1990s South Asia expert Selig Harrison made it clear to the CIA that they were creating a “monster” in the Taliban. Yet this, and an ocean of clear and unambiguous information was overlooked, discredited or just plain ignored.

Now the U.S. must look back at all the information this “trusted informant” from Al Qaeda’s Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army) provided and determine what is real and what is “shadow.” But there is nothing in the CIA’s history to indicate that any internal examination can correct the mistakes that encouraged small bands of religious extremists to grow into a powerful insurgency or for that matter to define exactly which enemy is the most dangerous.

Did other reliable informants bordering Helmand province intentionally target Baluch nationalists for Predator drone assassinations, knowing that they would turn the long- suffering Baluch population against the United States? According to Amnesty International, Pakistan’s war on Baluch and Sindhi nationalists has claimed more than 900 activists who have disappeared without a trace, exceeding the massive human rights violations perpetrated by Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s. Have reliable informants also singled out moderate Afghans and Pakistanis for elimination while protecting Afghan Taliban who prey on American units in the long contested Pakistani border region? Under the best of circumstances intelligence gathering is a tricky business, requiring expert skills, experience and knowledge of the indigenous culture. But good intelligence also requires the wisdom to know who your enemy is and the war you are fighting, and by all indications, that remains the black hole of American efforts.

In a report released by the Center for a New American Security on Monday January 4,
NATO’s highest intelligence officer, U.S. Major General Michael T. Flynn, writes that “our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade. This problem or its consequences exist at every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy, and pivotal information is not making it to those who need it.”

Either unable or unwilling to adapt to a post-cold war, multi-polar world, and after eight years of failure in Afghanistan, the Obama administration now wants the Afghan and Pakistani people to believe that the United States is on their side. But until the American intelligence bureaucracy catches up to the President’s rhetoric, Al Qaeda’s army will continue to operate effectively from the shadows while the U.S. will continue to stumble along in the dark.

© Copyright 2010 Gould & Fitzgerald. All rights reserved

Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan  Part One  By Joan Brunwasser

OpEdNews  January 9, 2010 

Please tell our readers a bit about your background and what made you the right ones for the job.

Big things were happening in 1978, with new approaches to old problems as the Carter administration vowed to eliminate the threat of nuclear war and reevaluated detente with the Soviet Union. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT was a major vehicle for these changes and by 1979 we had focused on its impact by interviewing the central figures. By the end of 1979, we had finished a documentary called the Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, analyzing the effects of defense spending on the US economy. Having experienced a decade of improving relations with the Soviet Union our documentary was received with great interest. (Read Part One: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan )

Part Two: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan By Joan Brunwasser

OpEdNews  January 10, 2010 

Welcome back for the conclusion of my interview with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. In the first half, you dissected how we got to this point. The next question for you two is, can we break out of this military mindset?
The U.S. is currently in a tenuous financial arrangement with the rest of the world and especially Russia and China. How long the United States can continue to act as a hegemonic power in Central Asia with the intention of controlling pipeline routes against Chinese and Russian interests is a delicate and growing issue. Without careful and ingenious diplomacy, the United States could soon find itself as the odd man out. No amount of military thinking or spending will resolve the problem the United States faces. If the United States can’t adjust to this new post cold war reality, then the U.S. will go the way of the Soviet Union. (Read Part Two: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan )

Charlie Wilson’s War is a Fantasy!

By Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

boilingfrogspost Tuesday, 22. December 2009

The Rallying Cry for an Arms Buildup & to End Public Debate about American Foreign Policy on Afghanistan

As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We’ve seen this pattern from the media again and again. It was particularly disturbing to read Ken Herman’s December 18 interview, Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan, in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN filled with CIA disinformation. The secret campaign was activated before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to sell the American people on financing the coming Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union

Let’s separate the child-like fantasy that has been resurrected over and over again from the true nature of Charlie Wilson and his war effort. From the interview:

“…the former East Texas congressman – immortalized in a book and a movie about his exploits that helped the Afghans drive out the Soviet Union.“

FACT: Covert funding for the mujahideen began long before the Soviet invasion, not after. This covert aid was intended to lure the Soviets into the Afghan trap and hold them there, not drive them out, as claimed by Charlie Wilson. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s national security adviser, have admitted in print (Gates, in his 1997 book, From the Shadows; Brzezinski, 1998 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the U.S. had been secretly undermining its own diplomatic efforts in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan.

The American press failed to report these revelations from high-ranking government officials as news, back then. More recently, Brzezinski’s remarks were addressed in an interview  with Samira Goetschel for her film, Our Own Private Bin Laden.  She asked:

“In your 1998 interview with the French Magazine Le Nouvel Observateur you said that you knowingly increased the probability of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.“

Brzezinski responded:

“The point very simply was this. We knew the Soviets were already conducting operations in Afghanistan. We knew there was opposition in Afghanistan to the progressive effort which had been made by the Soviets to take over. And we felt therefore it made a lot of sense to support those that were resisting. And we decided to do that. Of course this probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do…“

FACT: As we document in our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” the record contradicts Brzezinski’s assumption that the Soviets would have invaded had it not been for his intentional provocation to lure the Soviet’s into the “Afghan trap.”

FACT: It is well documented that Charlie Wilson’s war prolonged Afghanistan’s agony for another six years, provided a secure multibillion-dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism, and set the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. It’s bad enough that a Hollywood film continues to project the propaganda campaign that kept Americans in the dark about America’s role in helping terrorism grow in Afghanistan. At this late date, it is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the Congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan. 

FACT: America’s mistake in Afghanistan was not “the endgame” problem depicted by “Charlie Wilson’s War.” The problem was in the conceptual framework created by America’s Cold War policy makers in the first place that made Afghanistan the bleeding ground it remains to this day.

FACT: Charlie Wilson’s War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end­ public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. The world was remade with the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, a Communist empire destroyed and the West’s pre-eminence assured. But the price in human suffering in Afghanistan and the impact on our democratic freedoms has yet to be understood.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

 President’s speech struck a new milestone for Washingtonian denial

 The President’s speech is history now. Al Qaeda is still the objective and General Stanley McChrystal will get 30,000 more troops and 18 months to make his counterinsurgency plan work. In a country the size of Afghanistan, even ten times that number wouldn’t matter. What does matter is that little has changed in Washington and it appears that Washington cannot change.  It’s too bad that the interests of the United States and those of the Afghan and Pakistani people are apparently mutually exclusive. Before this all began in the 1970’s and the U.S. support for extremist Islam began, Afghanistan did have a government. It was decentralized, but it was a government and it did function alongside a secular tribal structure that had been moving toward modernization for a century.

The Afghans came to the U.S. in the late 40’s and early 50’s asking for help. They needed some basic infrastructure development. They needed a cement factory, paved roads. They needed a hospital and some city buses. The didn’t get them. They at least expected that their external security would be protected by the Americans the way it had been by the British Empire. It wasn’t. During the Eisenhower administration the U.S. made it clear to the Afghans, often in insulting and demeaning ways that Pakistan would be America’s ally and that Afghanistan would have to fend for itself. Washington liked Pakistan’s plucky military brass. They liked their style, their uniforms and their British accents. Read more  Posted at  boilingfrogspost

What are We Fighting for in Afghanistan?

“It was the opportunity for the president of the United States to deliver his most important address yet. America was entering a new era after failing to defeat an implacable foe in a far off and forbidding land. His speech was filled with Sturm und Drang, delivered to the finest young men and women the country had to offer and the highest defense and intelligence officials in the land at the world’s most prestigious military academy. It should have been a sacred moment in American history.”

-Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Counterpunch Dec 3, 2009

Rethinking Afghanistan

“We are regularly bombarded by news reports and political analysis that reflect certain underlying assumptions about Afghanistan. These assumptions range from claims that Afghanistan was always a backward state ruled by warlords, to assertions that the country was never really a nation at all, and proclamations that Afghanistan is unfit for Western-style democracy and that it is dangerously naïve to think otherwise.

Those who knew Afghanistan prior to America’s current military engagement understand that these assumptions are wrong, yet they form the basis of a mythology that underlies the growing US military commitment and the shape of American policy toward the Afghan government.”

-Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Middle East Institute special edition of Viewpoints Dec 2, 2009

The Huffington Post

 November 17, 2009

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

How we discovered Verizon’s Spamdetector could be twisted into a disguise for censorship!

We had just emailed the link to our interview discussing the ‘real’ history of Afghanistan on Sibel Edmond’s boilingfrogspost.  As soon as it was emailed a Verizon response spit back immediately with a notice declaring the email we had just sent was spam. When the culprit turned out to be to be our friend Sibel’s website  we called Verizon to clear up the problem. This was clearly not spam and should be easily reinstated, we thought. While a very chatty employee attempted and failed to fix our problem, we innocently asked how can we get this address back in business. That is when the real fun began. According to the laws of Verizon Central, once you’ve been labeled spam, there is only one course of action and it goes like this:
1. Verizon uses an unnamed third party who decides what is spam.
2. This unnamed third party also reviews complaints like ours.
3. We were told to send the “offending” email to spamdetector.update@verizon.net.
4. The unnamed third party would make a secret decision within 24 hours.
5. If the unnamed third party decides it is spam, regardless of our complaint we will not hear back.
That’s it. There is no recourse to challenge the decision. There isn’t even a confirmation that the email we sent to this third party was received at all. Of course, after 24 hours we still couldn’t send out an email containing the link.

Then it dawned on us, the Verizon employee’s automoton behavior was reminiscent of a 2004 Hollywood comedy titled, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galexy. The film’s plot involves a race of Vogons who run the Vogon homeworld planet just the way Verizon Central is run.
“Vogons are employed as the galactic government’s bureaucrats.. Vogons are not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucrat
When the human heroes in the story try to extricate themselves from the stupidity of the Vogon perpectual bureucratic machine, the unfortunate victims are repeatedly told in a monotonous tone, “Resistance is Useless.” The Vogons never stop to think. There is a simple reason, they can’t. Just like Vogons, if the Verizon employees actually thought about what they were saying to us, they could not keep pushing out such nonsense. The illogic of the whole process doesn’t stop them from pushing it out, regardless. If Verizon Central says it’s the law, it’s the law and “Resistance is useless”!
It’s no surprise that many other Verizon customers have been effected by this Orwellian abuse of authority. In fact we discovered that a lawsuit was settled in 2006 on this very issue. Here are the results.
Settlements and Verdicts
Verizon
A class action lawsuit was filed against the telecommunications company for allegedly blocking legitimate incoming emails to certain Verizon.net subscribers. The class includes all business and residential customers of Verizon FiOS, DSL, and dial-up Internet services in the United States at any time from October 1, 2004 to May 31, 2005, who had use of one or more email accounts on the Verizon.net email platform. Verizon adjusted its spam filters to aggressively block messages from domains in Europe and Asia. Instead of simply routing suspected spam into a separate folder, Verizon bounced messages back to the sender without notifying the intended recipient. Verizon has announced a tentative settlement that would award customers $3.50 for each month between October 1, 2004 and May 31, 2005 that he or she was a customer of Verizon Internet Service. The maximum one can receive is $28. (Apr-05-06) [ARS TECHNICA]

[SETTLEMENT INFORMATION] File Claim before August 9, 2006: [OFFICIAL CLAIM FORM]

That was in 2006 and it doesn’t seem that Verizon Central has changed its policy in any noticeable way, regardless of whopping $28/ customer cost. Now we’re wondering how Verizon got the idea in the first place that they had a right to secretly make decisions regarding what can flow through emails without accountability..
What is even more disturbing is realizing that Verizon’s anti-spam campaign could easily be twisted to disguise censorship, a kind of “No Fly” list for emails. Just like the No Fly list, once you’ve made the list you won’t know why and you may never be removed.