Crossing Zero: The History of The Durand Line
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Two ‘mad scientists’ create sleep mask that lets people CONTROL their dreams
Afghanistan bedeviled by ‘Mystical Imperialism’
A review by Michael Hughes May 1, 2012 Examiner.com article
Gould and Fitzgerald’s books on Afghanistan, Invisible History and Crossing Zero, have won praise from the likes of Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone and Daniel Ellsberg. They were also the first Western journalists allowed back into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the early 1980s, when Paul discovered a story that wasn’t being reported in the mainstream press.
While conducting research for their books, Paul and Liz discovered a trove of esoteric history surrounding the West’s attraction to Afghanistan, dating back to the 1800s when the British set out to colonize the non-Christian world. During the lecture, Liz provided this brief explanation of an age-old esoteric ideology which continues to infect our current political and military leaders:
“Simply put, Mystical imperialism rationalizes the expansion of a nation’s authority, by conquest over other nations, by infusing a sense of the divine into the raw politics of empire building. Today’s practitioners of American Mystical Imperialism are a hardened core of ideological defense intellectuals and military officers who infuse their own esoteric and religious beliefs into Washington policymaking.”
Mystical imperialism can be traced back about 400 years to the British East India Company’s draconian pursuit of profits at any cost, as the Russians were demonized to protect the Raj’s interests in Central Asia and India. Somewhere along the line the British convinced themselves and the world that Russia was bent on controlling routes to the Persian Gulf – a neurosis that forced the British to do everything in its power to transform Afghanistan into a protective bulwark against Czarist Russia’s inevitable expansion.
This type of thinking was then embraced by the U.S. at the dawn of the Cold War. In the 1970s American policymakers and the media came to view the struggle in Afghanistan through a Manichean prism, and the Soviets were on the wrong side of this black and white world which saw the U.S. find common cause with violent Islamist fanatics, purportedly to ensure Afghanistan remained a Cold War “buffer zone.”
The blinding Cold War paradigm became like a religion, bemoaned by Senator William Fulbright as early as 1972: “Our ‘faith’ liberated us, like the believers of old, from the requirements of empirical thinking… Like medieval theologians, we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion.”
Even when the U.S. had an opportunity to detangle itself from Afghanistan it resisted. In fact, the U.S. aimed to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan in what later became known as the “Bear Trap”, designed by Zbigniew Brzezinski to give communist Russia its own Vietnam War.
An underreported historical fact is how the U.S. began funding terrorists in Pakistan before the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Years later Brzezinski admitted as much and saw the rise of the Taliban as an acceptable side effect of the CIA’s shadowy program because, in his mind, it led to the fall of communism.
The U.S. also embraced the British tactic of empowering backward elements within Afghan society who seemed intent on keeping Afghanistan in the dark ages, including reactionaries who continually sabotaged Kabul’s attempts at modernization. In the 1920s King Amanullah brought on a period of rapid liberalization which included a democratic constitution, universal suffrage and civil rights. In 1922 U.S. envoy Cornelius Van Engert reported that the Afghans were not savage fanatics, but highly cultivated people in the midst of a major effort to modernize.
In fact, near the end of a 40-year era of peace, King Zahir Shah’s “experiment in democracy” was thwarted in the 1970s when the superpowers began using Afghanistan as a geopolitical chessboard. As a result of foreign meddling, Afghanistan regressed in terms of security, prosperity, human rights, education and culture over the past four decades at an unprecedented pace.
Flash forward to today’s “AfPak” policy, which is also void of reason and underpinned by an outdated mythology, as the U.S. continues to operate based on flawed assumptions left over from the British colonial era. And like its predecessors, the U.S. now finds itself mired in the “graveyard of empires.” And just like it did during the Afghan war against the Soviets, the U.S. continues to rely on its wayward ally Pakistan, who in turn continues to support virulently anti-American jihadists.
What makes Liz and Paul’s story especially compelling is the synchronicity that exists between their personal lives, their dreams and the historical drama as it unfolds in Central Asia. Their story is retold in the novel The Voice, in which they make esoteric connections between Templar Knights, the mujahideen and the CIA.
Underlying what appears to be irrational foreign policy is a twisted spirituality, an American exceptionalism and crusading impulse the U.S. inherited from its British forebears. Perhaps Gould and Fitzgerald were meant to serve a higher purpose themselves as they try to decode a mystery that has caused the people of Afghanistan endless suffering. Perhaps they were meant to “shed some light” on dark unseen forces swirling at the center of one of America’s biggest foreign policy catastrophes.
Michael Hughes is a Washington D.C.-based journalist and foreign policy analyst who attends and covers daily press briefings at the U.S. State Department for Examiner.com. Michael has been published in a number of major media outlets including CNN and The Huffington Post, has been cited as an expert in Reuters and the Middle East Policy Journal, and has made several live appearances on RT News.
Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy
Afghanistan has always contained an esoteric element known to insiders. Now that “hidden” Afghan story is available to all who seek it. Our INN World Studio presentation of Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy was filmed by Zev Deans & Jacqueline Castel and is available here. It will open the world to an Afghanistan most have never seen.
The Voice, the esoteric side of our Afghan experience as a novel
Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story
Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire
“Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.” Marshall McLuhan March 1969
Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy
Afghanistan has always contained an esoteric element known to insiders. Now that “hidden” Afghan story is available to all who seek it. Our INN World Studio presentation of Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy was filmed by Zev Deans & Jacqueline Castel and is available here. It will open the world to an Afghanistan most have never seen.
The Voice, the esoteric side of our Afghan experience as a novel
Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story
Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire
“Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.” Marshall McLuhan March 1969
Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here The City Lights Booksellers & Publishers’ Blog
by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Ten years ago this fall we sat in the walled garden of a bullet-pocked Kabul villa on a brilliant sunlit afternoon, interviewing American reporters about what they thought the prospects were for a U.S. success in Afghanistan now that the “war” was over.
At that particular moment Afghans were open to American solutions and for the first time in decades, hopeful. Kabul was ruined but peaceful, but just below the surface was the unshakeable feeling that something was wrong. The young, thoughtful and concerned photo journalist Chris Hondros of Getty Images spoke of the fractured nature of Afghan society and doubted that the West could help the country overcome the deep divisions caused by twenty five years of war. He complained that his job had been made much tougher because an entire generation of Americans had never been informed of what they needed to know in order to comprehend why Afghanistan was so important. USA Today’s Berlin bureau chief Steve Komarow, who’d rotated back into Kabul after taking part in the brief American invasion, echoed the American confusion about what to do about a mission and a country no one seemed to really understand. “Nobody wants Afghanistan to revert to what it was, but on the other hand there’s a tension between that and being seen as a colonial power,” Komarow said. “The United States doesn’t want to own Afghanistan. It really wants the Afghans to work it out, however they want to work it out.”
Tension might still be the best of a slew of inadequate words to describe Washington’s schizophrenic relationship to Afghanistan. Tension between the Obama administration and a Republican Congress over the longest running war in American history and how to end it, tension between Washington and the government of Hamid Karzai, tension between President Obama and the wisdom of his own military commanders and tension over Pakistan’s perennial role as an alleged U.S. ally while continuing to use the Taliban as an advance guard for its military’s strategic ambitions in Central Asia. And tension between the reality of people’s lives and the invented reality of a war machine that has long lost any relevance to the real nature of American security.
U.S. objectives in Afghanistan from day one were never clear and in fact were mostly irreconcilable with the ground reality. American policymakers in the 1980s never thought through the consequences of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Peshawar seven Mujahideen groups, and in fact deferred to Pakistan’s ISI in halting any Afghan efforts at creating an exile nationalist government following the Soviet invasion. Pakistan’s strategy meshed perfectly with the extremist philosophy of the Saudi trained extremists who targeted Afghan nationalists and moderates along with Soviet soldiers and Afghan communists. For over two hundred years, Afghanistan’s identity had been centered on Pashtun nationalism. Annihilating Pashtun tribal leadership was key to Pakistan’s long term planning and beginning in the early 1970s ISI supported the rise of the Tajik Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamaat I Islami and the de-Pashtunized Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hesbe Islami, in order to replace it.
The anti-Soviet Jihad of the 1980s was a time in which the U.S., Pakistani and Saudi interests converged over Afghanistan but as U.S. attention waned following the end of the Cold War, the interests of these former partners began to diverge. The instability caused by that divergence was made apparent on 9/11, but instead of responding with workable solutions to complex ground realities inside Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East, the U.S. plowed ahead with a pre-cast ideological blueprint that was at once astonishingly inappropriate, profoundly unworkable and in the end self-defeating.
Did President George W. Bush’s neoconservative policymakers really expect to reconcile Afghanistan’s complex mix of tribes and ethnicities and heal the war’s wounds without the blessing of Afghanistan’s recognized Pashtun leader, King Zahir Shah? 75 percent of the delegates to the U.S. brokered Loya Jirga (tribal council) that created the new Afghan government petitioned to have the king nominated as head of state. Just weeks before being assassinated in 2001, Ahmed Shah Massoud had agreed to support the return of the king as the only way to establish a lasting peace. Did Washington really believe it could force brutal and corrupted warlords – men that Steve Komarow described as “charming killers” – onto a government as powerless as Hamid Karzai’s and expect them to establish a democracy? And did the Bush administration really believe it could blindly hand over responsibility and billions of dollars to Pakistan’s military establishment, march off to Iraq and then expect Pakistan to uphold America’s interests?
It is not hard to understand the growing sense of institutional desperation surrounding the latest events. Headlines that tell of U.S. soldiers urinating on Taliban corpses, Koran burnings, increasing incidents of Afghan soldiers attacking NATO and American trainers and the slaughter of Afghan men, women and children in their sleep, are evidence of disintegration, not a winning end game. But news reports that America’s own soldiers were ordered to disarm in the presence of their own Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta while on an official visit to Camp Leatherneck in Kandahar in mid-March indicate that Washington may not just be losing the war, but as in Vietnam, may also be losing the army that is fighting it.
Should this happen – and from reports on the morale of American troops who’ve been forced into repeated combat tours it appears that it is – the U.S. experience in Afghanistan may soon match the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and with a similar conclusion. For the last year the Pentagon has insisted that its strategy of handing off responsibility to a U.S./NATO funded Afghan National Army of 350,000 troops is going according to plan, that the U.S. intends to stay on only in an advisory capacity after 2014, and that all is well. Even if all was well, the idea that Afghanistan’s economy could ever provide the $6 billion annually necessary to support an army of that size is a complete fantasy as are mostly all the other assumptions underpinning such an army.
If, as Washington’s numerous critics of Afghan policy insist, Afghanistan can’t be expected to operate as a centralized European-style democracy, then why should anyone expect Afghanistan to produce a centralized European-style army? As the Soviets learned over their ten year occupation, Afghanistan’s decentralized tribal society doesn’t really do standing armies. According to the Center for Advanced Studies’ Chris Mason, the Afghan National Army really has something like 100,000 men on a good day and there are very few good days. More than 40 percent of what remains disappears every year, 75 percent is on drugs, and the rest is so riddled with Taliban infiltrators as to make the concept of an Afghan army meaningless. Add to that the fact that the U.S. has largely built an army of Northern Tajiks who use the U.S. to intimidate their traditional opponents, the Pashtuns and you have a formula for civil war when the U.S. leaves, with or without the Taliban.
Another critic of the official narrative is Lt. Colonel Daniel L. Davis. Reporting after a12 month second tour of Afghanistan which covered 9,000 miles and visits to troops in multiple provinces Davis maintains that there is virtually no reality backing the U.S. narrative. Davis wrote in the Armed Forces Journal in early February 2012, “In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described – and many, more I could mention – had been in the first year of the war, or even the third of fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out. Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war.”
Afghanistan played a major role in the 1980s as a first step in curing the so called Vietnam syndrome in the United States. But the American decision to use Afghanistan to give the Russians their own Vietnam syndrome (instead of reassessing the Cold War assumptions that had produced the devastating Vietnam quagmire in the first place) was a double edged sword.
In a remarkably self-effacing 1972 New Yorker article titled “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear,” Senator J. William Fulbright traced the origins of the devastation caused by Vietnam to the intellectual corruption of the Cold War. But his shock was in realizing that the actual thinking behind the Cold War and the Truman Doctrine was not based on facts or logic or even the metrics of modern warfare, but on a medieval ideological methodology that in effect defied reason.
“Our leaders became liberated from the normal rules of evidence and inference when it came to dealing with Communism… The effect of the anti-Communist ideology was to spare us the task of taking cognizance of the specific facts of specific situations. Our ‘faith’ liberated us, like the believers of old, from the requirements of empirical thinking… Like medieval theologians, we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion.”
The United States has had 90 years to formulate a working relationship with Afghanistan. It had numerous opportunities to help Afghanistan grow and modernize before Soviet Communism and Afghan nationalism made it a Cold War target, but it chose to defer to British and then Pakistani interests. Even after the Soviet defeat from which it benefited, the U.S. had the chance to intervene but chose instead to back away and leave its fate to others. On 9/11 Afghanistan’s fate became interlocked with America’s, but once again Washington chose a path which allowed Afghanistan to drift into chaos.
Senator Fulbright’s reflections are a tragic and largely forgotten commentary on the Cold War. But were he here today to witness the futile debates over policies that were always irreconcilable and the Vietnam-like quagmire they have caused in Afghanistan, he would be the first to recognize that the medieval theologians had been at it again, only this time around the fraud, the lie and the illusion had hardened into a permanent and perhaps terminal reality.
Copyright © 2012 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved
Crossing Zero, The Afghanistan War
KIRKUS REVIEWS The Voice
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
THE VOICE an esoteric novel about their Afghan experience
Join with Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald March 25th-26th
D I S C U S S I N G Afghanistan and their books:
Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story
Crossing Zero, the AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire
The Voice, the esoteric side to their Afghan experience
Afghanistan has always contained an esoteric element that is well known to insiders from the intelligence community. Now that “hidden” side of the Afghan story will be available to those who want to know. Join with Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould for a talk that will be like no other talk on Afghanistan you have ever heard!
INN World Report Building
Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 5:00 pm
56 Walker St.
NYC, NY 10013
and the
M i d – M a n h a t t a n L i b r a r y
Monday, March 26th, 2012 6:30 p.m. on the 6th floor
40th Street and 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0837
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