Skip to main content

Afghanistan in 1976 was alright

... and then Zbigniew Brzezinski messed it up.


Do you remember those days when cover after cover of Time and Newsweek and the whole establishment pack of the British press commended the equivalent of "the brave Taliban" and their fight against the Soviet backed regime.

Do you remember when the CIA under Zbigniew Brzezinski funded brave Islamic extremists" in their quest to bring fundamentalist Islam to the poor benighted Afghan women and girls who were living then in an increasingly secular and modern Afghanistan?

I rode through Afghanistan in 1976 and there was no war and the women did not wear Hijabs and Kabul was a nice city to be in.

The government behaved in asimilar way to the Indian government under Indira Ghandi during the Emergency. Afghanistan was trying to play legitimate regional Soviet interests off the long distance strategic opportunism of the US. Half the highway we drove over and that crossed the country was paved by the Soviets and half was paved by the US. You could see the join - the contrast between the different type of asphalt and the tarmac.

The bellicose US agent in the region was Pakistan and with its help, the US plan was, of course, to destabilise Afghanistan and India and then use any opportunity that arose to try to bring both countries into their sphere and out of the semi-neutrality they had experienced till then.

Anyone who lived in the region then knew that. To think otherwise just demonstrates an arrogant desire to disinform. The people who spoke out against the emergency were naive puppets.

Don't forget that Afghanistan bordered the Soviet Union. It didn't border California. The Soviets had a stake in its stability. The US, on the other hand, had a stake in its instability.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is still oh so cock-a-hoop about his successful destabilisation of Afghanistan and it has helped make him the guest of honour of every extreme right wing think tank from here to Stanford Palo Alto to Lithuania. The old devil still has the odd piece published in the Guardian and he has the chutzpah to re-present himself as an "enlightened liberal politician".

_________________________________

In this light it is interesting to read Brzezinski's responses in an interview given in Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
_________________________________

The actions of Hafizullah Amin  Amin provoked the Afghan people - as they were meant to - and the Soviets sent in the army to get rid of him. As an agent provocateur he professed support for the Soviets and in the name of "communism" committed the most provocative acts. Ask any politically literate Afghan about Amin and they will say he was a CIA agent.



Of course to this manipulated situation and to the ensuing war the British press shamefully went along with the CIA - US narrative. How easily the close and dependent relations of British journalists corrupt and how quickly their ability to report and comment objectively rots their writing.

How about a little historical memory in this farcical narrative of invasion and counter invasion?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Aerogramme from Lisa and Richard

To: Mr & Mrs J. Hall, Box 49 Eikenhof (TVL) Johannesburg Afrique du Sud. 28.3.76 Dear John and Nola, Today a week ago we were still in New Delhi with Eve and Tony and the boys and the whole thing looks like a dream. We arrived on the 28.2 in New Delhi and were happy to see the whole family fit and in good health. The boys have grown very much, Phil is just about the size of Tony and the twins are above average. We stayed untill the 22nd March, as our visa ran out and we did not want to go through all the ceremony of asking for an extension. It also got hotter and I don't know how I would have supported the heat. The extra week would also have passed, so we decided not to go to all the trouble with the authorities and leave on the 22nd. I cannot tell you how happy we have been to see such a lovely family, so happy and united. It is rare to experience sucha thing and we have both all the reasons to be proud of them (when I say goth I mean you and us ). There is su

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov