Huffpost journalist Michael Hughes blogs about Invisible History!
Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald outline the entire history of American conservative and Christian courtship of Islamist extremists in their book Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story. According to Gould and Fitzgerald, the pan-Islamic right emerged under British colonialism during the mid-1800s and was fostered by the U.K. as a tool to counter nationalism, modernism and the secular left after World War I. At the onset of the Cold War this ideological weapon was handed off to the United States who continued to nurture and to hone the movement’s terrorist wings into anti-communist assets.
It’s no huge secret that the C.I.A., via Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), funded and supported violent Islamic jihadist groups called the Mujahideen in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union, yet a number of Christian leaders in the U.S. found more in common with political Islam than the practical matter of defeating communism – there was a spiritual kinship as well. As Gould and Fitzgerald wrote about William Casey, the Director of the C.I.A. from 1981 to 1987:
Casey’s passion for the Afghan jihad has sometimes been described as messianic. An ultra-conservative Catholic, Casey saw little difference in the antimodernist beliefs of the Wahabbist House of Saud and the antimodernist, anti-enlightenment views of the newly installed Polish Pope, John Paul II.
Pope Pius X had branded modernism as heretical in his 1910 “Oath Against Modernism”, and although rescinded in 1967, many conservative Catholics still view modernism as diametrically opposed to the “true faith”. Casey being one of them, who maintained ties with the Vatican as a member of the Knights of Malta – an 11th century order established to guard Christians on their voyages to the Holy Land.
The group donned robes with fancy ribbons and called each other “Prince” and “High Eminence”, as Casey designed a holy war against the Soviets that would send Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Afghanistan hadn’t experienced destruction on such a level since the human atomic bomb known as Genghis Khan hit them in the 12th century.
How ironic then was General David Petraeus the other day when asked why the Afghan people should want the ISAF to stay in their country, the General responded: “They [Afghans] don’t want to turn the clock back several centuries to the kinds of practices the Taliban inflicted on them.” Yet the U.S. attempted to do just that for 40 years while in league with radical Muslims who tried their damndest to destroy any and all modern and pro-democratic movements within Afghanistan.
Reason being is that after World War II the United States had developed a Manichaean worldview that infected its foreign policy. Primarily driven by Red paranoia, it forced them to see the world in terms of black and white – as in things were either good or they were communist – which applied to both Democratic and Republican regimes.
U.S. foreign policymakers perceived movements such as secularism, socialism, nationalism and even progressive democratic reform as more akin to communism than America’s good old fashioned brand of imperial democracy.
What is somewhat shocking is how the U.S. fetish for Islamic radical thought was spawned decades before the emergence of the Mujahideen. During the 1950s the C.I.A. covertly recruited a core of pan-Islamic extremists to undermine Soviet and secular influence and retard the modernization of Afghan society, funding their activities through a front group called the Asia Foundation which focused on grooming radical Muslims amongst students at Kabul University.
Thus, moving forward on a course set by the British a century prior, the U.S. resisted Afghanistan’s advances towards a Western-style government and helped hinder democratic reforms including women’s rights and separation of church and state.
In the mid-1950s, the C.I.A. and the British MI6 had developed a close relationship with an Islamic extremist group called the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and forged a partnership with Saudi Arabia to defeat the secular and nationalist policies of Egyptian President Gamal Abddul Nasser. The C.I.A. enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to return from banishment and infect Afghan society with a radical version of Islam that began to supplant the traditional and more moderate indigenous form. According to Gould and Fitzgerald:
The radical Islam of the Muslim Brothers returning to Afghanistan from exile in the late 1960s and early 1970s shared none of the “celebratory, personalized and ecstatic” traits of Afghan Islam – nor did it offer itself as a political or economic reform movement. Instead, what reentered Afghanstan following its exile was a violent, antimodernist hybrid (described by French expert Olivier Roy as more akin to the extremist Catholic sect Opus Dei than anything native in Afghanistan) which at first challenged the weakened boundaries of the old patriarchy, then in triumph broke free from traditional limits on violence and clan rivalries.
While Afghanistan’s progressive King, Zahir Shah, tried to institute modern reform, how mind-boggling that the U.S. backed antimodernist fundamentalist Muslims whose goal was to overthrow the constitutional monarchy and establish an Islamic Caliphate.
Fast forward to the late 70s when a Pentecostal inhabited the White House while neoconservatives, led by hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, preyed on Carter’s ingrained end times theology. Brzezinski pushed forward the agenda of what became known as “Team B” – a cabal of neocons such as Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, Seymour Weiss, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle, Daniel O. Graham and Leo Cherne, who exaggerated Soviet nuclear and military capabilities to force U.S. leaders to take a hard line against communism.
Well, Carter sided with the hardliners and moved the U.S. from a Nixonian détente to a more confrontational stance against the godless Russians and approved Brzezinski’s plan to goad the Soviets into invading Afghanistan so that, as Brzezinski admittedly put it years later: “…we could give them their Vietnam”.
In 1980, Brzezinski secured an agreement from King Khalid of Saudi Arabia to match U.S. contributions to the Afghan effort dollar for dollar. American imperialists and Christian zealots partnered with the Saudis to directly and indirectly fund the spread of extremist Deobandi and Wahhabist teachings throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan to combat communist ideology. Then came the Reagan era when the Soviets became the Evil Empire and the funding of the Freedom Fighter development project was expanded under Bill Casey.
Mr. Casey soon ran the biggest covert operation in U.S. history as Washington poured in over $3 billion dollars to train some of the most brutal religious fanatics on earth. The U.S. program made heroes of the likes of Islamic fundamentalist and cold-blooded murderer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose group – Hezb-e Islami – is now a Taliban affiliate. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan overseen by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, including future Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Gould and Fitzgerald point out that the Team-B neocons and the Casey Christians had led an effort to create a “bogeyman” by building up the myth of Soviet nuclear superiority. But, ironically, their holy war means to that end produced one of another type:
“… instead of it being a nuclear missile stored in some deep silo in the heart of the Urals, the bogeyman would emerge in human form in the mountains of Afghanistan and the nearby tribal areas of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province.”
Michael Hughes writes similar articles as the Afghanistan Headlines Examiner and the Geopolitics Examiner for Examiner.com.
Talk of the Town LIVE!
Talk of the Town LIVE! October 29, 2009 Guests: Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould, and Jason Lewis All the news in Winchester and beyond, hosted by David Frenkel and Winchester Star editor Rory Schuler. Paul and Elizabeth’s interview starts 32:00 minutes in and goes until 60:00 minutes.
Naval Postgraduate School Professor Praises Fitzgerald and Gould
August 12th, 2010
“General Vance contacted me shortly after he was selected by Ottawa in early June to return to Afghanistan as Commander of Canadian Forces replacing Brig. Gen. Daniel Ménard who was relieved of command, and asked if I would be willing to take on this assignment through the completion of his deployment,” Johnson said before a week-long trip due to land him in Afghanistan Aug. 10. “There’s no question this is a critical time, and the Canadian effort is central to the success of U.S. and NATO efforts in the country.”
As Johnson finalized his trip preparations, President Obama affirmed the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and Congress voted an additional $33 billion in war funding for Afghanistan, where July’s casualties reached an all-time high. Johnson’s new advisory role also comes in the wake of the top U.S. military commander’s replacement; a massive leak of classified war documents; the Netherlands becoming the first NATO country to end its combat mission in the country; the president of Pakistan stating the international community is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people; and a mutilated Afghan girl on the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan.” Read more
Burqas and bikinis
Time magazine’s cover is the latest cynical attempt to oversimplify the reality of Afghan lives
by Priyamvada Gopal August 3, 2010
Reprising a legendary 1985 National Geographic cover, this week’s Time magazine cover girl is another beautiful young Afghan woman. But this time there is a gaping hole where her nose used to be before it was cut off under Taliban direction. A stark caption reads: “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan”. A careful editorial insists that the image is not shown “either in support of the US war effort or in opposition to it”. The stated intention is to counterbalance damaging the WikiLeaks revelations – 91,000 documents that, Time believes, cannot provide “emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land”.
Feminists have long argued that invoking the condition of women to justify occupation is a cynical ploy, and the Time cover already stands accused of it. Interestingly, the WikiLeaks documents reveal CIA advice to use the plight of Afghan women as “pressure points”, an emotive way to rally flagging public support for the war. Read more
Interview with Paul Jay-Real News Network: Part 1
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLOIQuVd13g
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould interview with Paul Jay Real News Network August 1, 2010
RealNews Interviews Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Part 2. 8.1.10
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgkrT49Gsl4
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould interview with Paul Jay Real News Network August 1, 2010
RealNews Interviews Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould 8.1.10
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQlLOdpERz4
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould interview with Paul Jay Real News Network August 1, 2010
The acid test for Washington’s beltway experts
Is WikiLeaks the antidote to the Washington K Street Kool-Aid?
By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald
Since the end of the cold war, the U.S. had been looking for an enemy to match the Soviet Union and came up empty handed until 9/11. Refocusing the efforts of the world’s largest and most expensive military empire on Al Qaeda would provide the incentive for a massive re-armament, just the way the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan had done two decades before. According to a Washington Post report within nine years of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, hunting Al Qaeda had become the raison d’être of the American national security bureaucracy employing 854,000 military personnel, civil servants and private contractors with more than 263 organizations transformed or created including the Office of Homeland Security. The sheer scope of the growth and the extensive privatization of intelligence and security was so profound that it represented “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight.”
But the report admitted that after nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the labyrinth of secret bureaucracy put in place after 9/11 was so massive and convoluted that its ability to perform its stated function to keep America safe was impossible to determine. Even worse, it was becoming clear that the bureaucratic monster had taken on a life of its own with the U.S. lost in a maze of its own creation, trapped in an expanding web of spies and counter spies that far surpassed the worst paranoia of its old nemesis, the Soviet Union. The logic train of the war on terror and its fundamental rooting in Afghanistan had finally become clear. The perpetual Taliban/Al Qaeda threat fueled a perpetual war that could never be won, justifying an endless string of restrictions on civil liberties and governmental transparency, which then prevented Americans from seeing how their money was spent. Locked out of this “alternative geography of the United States,” Americans have become helpless to stop their democracy and their economy from being lifted right out from under them.
Thanks to the revelations the word was finally out that whatever impact the “war on terror” had made on terror worldwide ( which many claimed it made only worse) it was above all, a spectacular boondoggle.
The shocking, Sunday July 25, WikiLeaks release of 92,000 documents by the New York Times Der Spiegel and The Guardian, was the acid test for Washington’s beltway experts to square themselves with the fatal collapse confronting them and who was to blame for it. According to the New York Times , “Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks.” The documents also revealed numerous embarrassing specifics that had either been downplayed or avoided entirely by the U.S. military in the 9 year old war including: that the Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against NATO aircraft; that the U.S. employs secret commando units to “capture/kill” insurgent commanders that have claimed notable successes but have at times also gone terribly wrong by killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment; that the military’s success with its Predator drones has been highly over-dramatized. Some crash or collide forcing Americans to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban could claim the drone’s weaponry. In addition, the reports reveal that retired ISI chief, Lt. General Hamid Gul, “has worked tirelessly to reactivate old networks, employing familiar allies like Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.” If anything was a guide to who’d been drinking the Washington K Street Kool-Aid, it could be measured by the degree of acceptance to the new information. According to the Boston Globe, Congressman James McGovern, a Worcester Mass. Democrat maintained, “that the documents show a far grimmer situation than members of Congress have been told about in classified briefings,..” Mass. Senator John Kerry initially declared that the documents raised “serious questions,” about policy. But under pressure from the White House, by Monday, Kerry was echoing the official line, defending Obama administration policy while insisting there was little new in the documents. The reasons for Kerry’s second thoughts were obvious. Matt Viser of the Boston Globe writes, “Kerry has what is seen as a special relationship with Pakistan; he has welcomed the country’s army chief to his house for dinner and accepted flowers from the country’s president. ‘There’s no question that Senator Kerry was instrumental in leading the initiative to triple our economic assistance to Pakistan,’ said Molly Kinder, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development, which tracks US aid to Pakistan.”
Left out of the release, the Washington Post hissed and fumed, editorializing dismissively that the 92,000 documents contained little of interest while citing counter terrorism expert Andrew Exum as comparing the importance of the documents to the discovery that “Liberace was gay.” Had the documents amassed an equal amount of evidence that Iran or Syria were working with Al Qaeda to carry out attacks on American troops in Afghanistan, the bombers would have been warming up on the flight decks by sundown. But when it came to Pakistan, there was only restraint. To the beltway insiders the actual revelations disclosed by the leaked documents were less important than the exposure of systemic failure they represented. The disclosures had taken the floor out from under the assumptions of the war on terror imposed following 9/11. But to the beltway it was business as usual and reality had little if anything to do with it.
Little wonder that the world’s population had lost faith in the American enterprise in Afghanistan. Even the Afghan people themselves had come to believe the United States wasn’t really there to fight the Taliban, but pretended to fight as an excuse for remaining in the region. The WikiLeaks reports are the raw data from American troops fighting in the field. But the reaction from official Washington was as if the U.S. had come to be ruled by a city of isolated mandarins from another planet, completely detached from the world they governed and dismissive of any efforts to bring them down to earth.
Timeline of Afghan History in the GlobalPost’s series, “Life, Death and the Taliban.”
View our timeline of Afghan History in the GlobalPost’s series, “Life, Death and the Taliban.”
America’s DNA Profile Has Been All Over Afghanistan Since 1973
By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald
In the two years since the publication of our book Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story we have had the chance to address dozens of forums and radio audiences around the United States about Afghanistan. It has been an illuminating exercise, not so much in terms of what Americans understand about the Afghanistan/Pakistan region (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. A morning-drive-time radio talk show host in Chicago wanted to know whether a nuclear bomb dropped on the Hindu Kush wouldn’t solve the problem. When we replied that using a nuclear weapon to kill a few thousand suspected terrorists would kill millions of innocent people, he responded abruptly before cutting us off: The Japanese got the message when we dropped it on them.
Most people are confused about the America they find themselves in, in the 21st century. They wonder where “their” America went. According to the popular mythology, the U.S. started the decade as the world’s lone hyper-power, beholden to none. It ends the first decade of the new millennium as a debt-hobbled-capitalist shell, beholden to a rising communist China and a host of oil-rich medieval Middle-East Sheikdoms. Americans are frustrated and resentful, denying any responsibility for the ongoing Afghan fiasco while expressing anger and often disbelief that our leadership has refused to learn the lessons of Vietnam and taken us on yet another mindless ride into a hopeless quagmire.
When we are asked why the U.S. is still in Afghanistan after a decade, we explain that America’s DNA profile has been all over that country since 1973. While no one was looking, the CIA’s secret mission became entangled with Pakistan’s support for Afghanistan’s small core of foreign-trained right wing Islamic extremists. Thanks to President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, this entanglement blossomed into a marriage following the 1978 Marxist coup and a full-blown commitment to holy war and the Islamization of Pakistan – long before the Soviet invasion of 1979.
The United States continued to support the right wing extremists all through the 1980s and then (in order to serve the interests of Pakistan’s military and Saudi/American oil conglomerates) the CIA helped Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) to establish the Taliban. The Taliban’s inability to totally conquer Afghanistan and their close relationship with the Arab extremists known as Al Qaeda challenged this American relationship. But it was the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Nairobi and the near sinking of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor in 2000 that strained U.S./Taliban relations to the breaking point.
We then explain that for very much the same reasons that the Soviet Union overreacted to extremist provocations on their southern border in December 1979, the United States invaded Afghanistan following the events of 9/11. The intention was to drive the Taliban out of power and root out, intercept, kill or capture Al Qaeda terrorists and their leader Osama bin Laden, the reputed 9/11 architect.
This information usually produces audible groans and looks of profound despair, followed by the question, why has none of this happened? That answer we now believe has been revealed.
In A June 24, New York Times article titled, Pakistan Is Said to Pursue a Foothold in Afghanistan,[1][1] the authors maintain that according to Afghan officials, Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani personally offered to broker a deal between Hamid Karzai and the Taliban leadership including Sirajuddin Haqqani’s terror network and his Al Qaeda allies. The report also maintained that Kayani and his spy chief, Lt. General Ahmad Shuja Pasha agreed with Afghan president Karzai that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan was doomed to fail “and that a postwar Afghanistan should incorporate the Haqqani network, a longtime Pakistani asset.”
Wiretaps long ago revealed General Kayani as an extremist sponsor playing a double game, who referred to the Haqqani network as a “strategic asset.” Both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh have publicly linked Pakistan’s ISI to terror activities. Reports of Pakistani complicity in the events of 9/11 linger unresolved. But does the Times’ revelation of an active Pakistani military collusion with Al Qaeda-conduit Haqqani and Washington’s admitted “nervousness” about it, mean that the U.S./Pakistani relationship has finally been pushed to the breaking point?
The United States has spent a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars chasing Osama bin Laden and his mysterious organization known as Al Qaeda around the world. It has given billions more to Pakistan’s military to fight Al Qaeda terrorism. The U.S. continues to trample standards of international law by executing suspected terrorists (including Americans) without trial and at the same time suspends civil liberties at home. Pakistan’s offer and Hamid Karzai’s receptiveness to it represents a checkmate move. Whether anyone in Washington can admit it or not, Kayani has exposed the “war on terror” and its Bill of Rights-busting USA Patriot Act, as a tragic deception. A recent study by the Institute for the Study of War’s Jeffrey Dressler picked up on the glaring incongruities of the rapidly devolving scenario.
“The Haqqanis rely on Al Qaeda for mass appeal, funding, resources and training, and in return provide Al Qaeda with shelter, protection and a means to strike foreign forces in Afghanistan and beyond. Any negotiated settlement with the Haqqanis threatens to undermine the raison d’etre for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan over the past decade.”
But if the raison d’etre for American involvement over the last ten years has made the Haqqanis and Al Qaeda even stronger than they were before, then perhaps the time has come to consider that the raison for the war on terror has been revealed as a double-cross.
A May 31st 2010 article in the London Sunday Times reports that $1½ billion dollars of Saudi Arabian money has flowed into Afghanistan from Haqqani and Al Qaeda controlled territory in North Waziristan over the past four years and the U.S. government knows it. In the 1980s the U.S. with Saudi Arabian backing went out of its way to finance and train the Haqqanis under the auspices of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. According to numerous sources, a good part of the ISI/Hekmatyar operation involved assassinating Afghan nationalists to ensure that a moderate coalition government in Kabul could never be achieved. According to declassified U.S. government documents from the early 1970s, the focus on controlling Afghanistan even then was viewed as centered on a “Chinese-Iranian-Pakistani-Arabian peninsula Axis with U.S. support.” Thanks to Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, there is little reason to think that the Taliban, Haqqani network and Al Qaeda are any less connected to their ultimate goals today than they were forty years ago
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