A history of failed press coverage of Afghanistan

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Source: Niemanwatchdog.org

For decades, the American news media by and large have been simplistic and misleading in reporting U.S. relations toward Afghanistan, write Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (City Lights Books, www.citylights.com). From 1981 on, they say, the press has kept vital information away from the American people.                              ###

For almost 30 years – ever since we got a close-in view of it – American press coverage of Afghanistan has been simplistic, misleading, unexamining, accepting and echoing government propaganda, and just plain wrong. There have been exceptions…but not many. Beginning in 1981, we have experienced a process that has kept vital information away from the American people.

Following the expulsion of 1,135 western journalists one month after the Soviet invasion in 1979, we were the first to gain access to Afghanistan through diplomatic channels at the United Nations. Contracted to CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, our opportunity to see inside a Soviet-occupied Afghanistan revealed a complex story, and the footage we returned with didn’t conform to an evil empire image that, in our judgment, CBS reporting had been nurturing. Four weeks after our return, a story about our trip was aired, cross-cut with Soviet propaganda – that is, footage done by the Soviets – that in no way represented our experience. But as an anti-Soviet piece, it was masterful.

Then in 1983, under contract to ABC Nightline, we invited Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, to return with us to assess the chances of getting the Soviets to leave Afghanistan. Roger told us that the Kremlin’s chief Afghan specialist said, point blank, “Give us six months to save face and we’ll leave the Afghans to solve their own problems.” This information was rejected as news by ABC World News Tonight. Then the Soviet request – as explained by Roger on Nightline – was framed in such a way by host Ted Koppel, that it dispelled any notion that there was a chance of a Soviet withdrawal.

As the decade of the 80s wore on, the Soviet occupation left the realm of journalism – there was almost no coverage – and became transformed into a Ramboesque struggle of holy warriors against the evil empire. Then in 1989 when the Soviets finally did withdraw, the Afghan story disappeared from the media’s radar completely. The cold war had ended and the mythology dictated that the U.S. had “won” it. The Afghan people were left to deal with the blowback from the mujahideen fighters who had been supported by the largest publicly known U.S. covert operation since Vietnam. Over the next few years that process would give rise to the Taliban and morph into the threat the U.S. faces today.

Without any serious reflection on the consequences of funding and training extremists for the purpose of defeating the Soviet Union, the American media not only missed the deeper story, but ignored numerous instances where the Afghan story had been corrupted for political purposes.

Articles in the New York Post by Janet Wilson in late 1989 and a Columbia Jounalism Review article by Mary Williams Walsh in early 1990 charged that CBS newscasts repeatedly aired fake battle footage and false news accounts. The accusations had no effect and caused no serious questioning by the media. It wasn’t until 9/11 that Afghanistan got back on the media’s radar. The crisis that had left 2 million dead, 6 million refugees, and a population of Afghan women in abject conditions finally came into view. (See this Amnesty International report.) But even today, the media continue to resist the deeper analysis necessary to bring about the kind of thinking required by America’s current intervention in Afghanistan.

Before, during and after the Soviet invasion the press largely accepted, without investigation, the view that a Muslim Holy War against communism was taking place. So much for independent reporting. Even when both Robert Gates, America’s current Secretary of Defense, and Zbigniew Brzezinski President Carter’s national security adviser, admitted in print (Gates, in his 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 see it as news. (Gates was a special assistant to Brzezinski in 1979 at the time of the invasion; he held high intelligence positions in the CIA in the early 80s and in 1986 was named deputy director of the CIA.)

Brzezinski’s Nouvel Observateur remarks are addressed in a 2005 interview he did 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…”

As we document in our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” the record contradicts Brzezinski’s assumption that the Soviets would have invaded.

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 and aggressive press coverage has yet to be understood. Our personal experience with the media was an excellent example of how the Afghanistan story was framed to encourage war and to downplay peaceful settlement. Like the cold war itself, it is a framework that still haunts Afghanistan. Perhaps it has now come to haunt the United States even more.

Dark Omens for the U.S. in the Gathering Afghan Storm

 by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Now officially in its ninth year since the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. should have little reason to recount, in Chalmers Johnson’s words, the Sorrows of Empire. By now everyone on the planet knows by heart the tragic tale. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan without a clear understanding of its goals and after eight years remains as torn as ever over defining them. It was hoped that the incoming Obama administration and its new AfPak strategy would finally end the drift toward quagmire, but that hope is fading fast. Last week, AfPak architect Bruce Riedel revealed in the Financial Times that “Pretty much six months has since gone by without a rigorous implementation of what was agreed to and that has only made a bad situation worse.”

As Washington’s paralysis deepens and Afghanistan slips further into chaos, the U.S. faces a crisis of credibility. Can Washington shift its focus to nation-building and help the Afghan people restore their ravaged nation to health? Or should the U.S. continue to pursue what seems at this point an opium dream; hunting an elusive Al Qaeda, who are “believed” to be hiding in Pakistan? Last week one major player on the world scene made their opinion known, but nobody in the U.S. was listening.

Amidst the deafening internal debate in Washington, a startling event occurred. On Monday September 28, in the Chinese government owned English language newspaper China Daily, an article titled, “Afghan peace needs a map,” by Li Qinggong, deputy secretary-general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies, stated flatly that the time had come for the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan: Read more 

A hidden denial in the Afghan election

U.S. missteps in Afghanistan stretch back to the Bush administration’s decision to court the warlords.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Published on Globalpost: September 29, 2009 12:05 ET

“Packed with reflective detail, Invisible History is a key read for people in Canada wishing to glean more insight about Afghanistan”

Hour.ca  August 27th, 2009

Roots of war
Stefan Christoff

In  Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story  journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould outline striking historical accounts of an ancient nation, its borders shaped through colonial wars and conflicts between empires. Their style is reflective yet factual, delving into Afghanistan’s key role in central conflicts that have defined global politics in the past century, from the Cold War to the “war

Anderson Cooper 360 blog on Afghanistan’s untold story

Afghanistan’s untold story: Stability, tourists, miniskirts

August 20, 2009 By John Blake CNN  

“Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires, but it’s more of a crossroad of cultures,” Fitzgerald said.

The cultural richness is what Shorish-Shamley remembers from her childhood. Though she was a Muslim, she remembered attending Jewish holiday celebrations. Hindus, Sikhs, Shiites and Sunnis lived easily with one another, she says.

“My mother’s best friends were Jewish,” she said. “My mother had a set of cups and dishes that were kosher that she kept for her friends when they came over for dinner.”

As recently as the 1970s, Afghan women could be seen wearing miniskirts in Kabul.

View our timeline of Afghan History in the GlobalPost’s series, “Life, Death and the Taliban.”

 
         13 August 2009
Norman Solomon: When the Dead Have No Say

Official Washington is buzzing about “metrics.” Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?

Don’t ask the dead.

Days ago, under the headline “White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success,” a New York Times story made a splash. “As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.”

Don’t ask the dead. They don’t count.

The way the Russian invasion of Georgia was framed by the American media is from the same script that Zbigniew Brzezinski and the American media used to frame the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The American media got it all wrong back in 1979 and it’s still getting it all wrong in 2009.  Just like the British empire, Brzezinski’s obsession has always been to contain Russia in its own neighborhood and Brzezinski is still pushing the same  worn out 19th century British colonial strategy turned 20th century “Cold War” stratgy of containment against Russia in the 21st century!       

The Nation  August 12, 2009

Myth, Meth and the Georgian Invasion  Beat the Devil By Alexander Cockburn 

A year ago, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent Georgian troops into South Ossetia on a murderous rampage, with civilian casualties put by Irina Gagloeva, the spokeswoman of South Ossetia, at 1,492. Much lower numbers have been offered by Western sources. Georgian soldiers butchered their victims with great brutality. Kirill Benediktov, in his online book on the invasion, reports that these soldiers were equipped–so subsequent searches of bodies and prisoners of war disclosed–not only with NATO-supplied food packages but with sachets of methamphetamine and combat stress pills based on MDMA, aka the active ingredient of Ecstasy. The meth amps up soldiers to kill without mercy, and the MDMA derivative frees them of subsequent debilitating flashbacks and recurring nightmares. Official use of methamphetamine and official testing of MDMA in the US armed forces have been discussed in news stories.

There was never any serious doubt that Saakashvili, with covert US encouragement and military training and kindred assistance, started the war. In June of this year, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel ran a piece, seemingly based on a reading of a draft report by Heidi Tagliavini, who heads the European Union’s fact-finding commission on the Georgian war. Despite the subsequent stentorian denials of a much-embarrassed Tagliavini, Der Spiegel’s editors stood by their story: “The facts assembled on Tagliavini’s desk refute Saakashvili’s claim that his country became the innocent victim of ‘Russian aggression’ that day.”

The Huffington Post Chalmers Johnson Posted: July 30, 2009 11:00 AM  

Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire

And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.