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

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 10^th 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

The Twilight Lords

The Question of “what has become of the America I knew and loved?”

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

A question asked by many shocked observers today both inside and outside of the United States is “what has become of the America I knew and loved?”

Beginning in the late 1930s as an overt propaganda campaign against fascist Germany and Imperial Japan, the world was treated to a Hollywood version of America as a democratic society that despite its flaws managed to maintain the egalitarian principles of its founding fathers and continued to press forward as a beacon of liberty, individualism and human rights.

As a romanticized ideal, the narrative of that America was of a “great melting pot” for all races where upward mobility, modernism and economic and religious freedom promised a better life for all those willing to make it work. And for millions it once did.

With a manufacturing and farm economy the envy of the world, a burgeoning middle-class and a huge military establishment garrisoning the world, the ideal was temporarily sustainable. But as the years wore on, the economy and political system constricted and the Pentagon grew to gargantuan proportions, the yawing schism between the real America and the illusory bygone America of Hollywood’s imagination began to take on a frightening dimension.

We have illustrated in our two multi-part series, 9/11, Psychological Warfare and the American Narrative and House of Mirrors that whatever America once appeared to be, at least since World War II and the beginning of the Cold War up to 9/11, it never was the country we thought it to be.

Although still theoretically governed by rules, democratic laws and financial regulations, the real America of today has come to be controlled by the private and personal agendas of a handful of people and the vast majority of the American public disapproves of it. Over the years, organizations such as the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group and the Club of Rome are known to have exerted a decisive role over government policies and mass media. We have been warned of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Rothschilds and their desires for political control of the world through financial manipulation. Yet, despite their monopolistic and anti-democratic efforts their power and their money continue to fuel popular allure. We have written of secret intelligence organizations such as Le Cercle, the Safari Club and the 61 which at the behest of international business cartels both legal and illegal have secretly undermined democratic elections, overthrown governments and generally subverted the will of the people for the benefit of a chosen few.

But who are these few, and what are their plans for our country and the world? Where are we headed and most of all, what principles are guiding what increasingly resembles an international governmental, financial and geopolitical shipwreck brought on by years of Laissez-faire fiscal abuse, corporate greed and political delusion?

Our personal understanding of the present dilemma starts with another shipwreck, this one off the coast of Ireland in the year 1577. That was the year a notorious English pirate and slave trader named Martin Frobisher smashed a schooner filled with what was thought to be gold bullion onto the isolated, rocky, western coast of Ireland at a place known as Smerwick. According to one account, Frobisher’s mission was intended to find the fabled Northwest Passage to China as part of a “Protestant adventure that would rival the Catholic quest as well as enrich the queen’s [Elizabeth I] treasury.” The “gold”—which was soon revealed to be nothing more than iron pyrites (fools gold)—spilled from the broken ship’s hull, littering the base of the cliffs.

An Irish rebel-captain by the name of James Fitzmaurice raised a fort at the summit of the cliffs and named it Fort Del Oro, (Fort of Gold) to mock Queen Elizabeth’s greed and her vain quest to challenge Rome for wealth and power. Fitzmaurice’s family, the Fitzgeralds had been in conflict with London over land and authority since initiating the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the twelfth century at the behest of their lord, Richard de Clare, otherwise known as Strongbow, the Earl of Pembroke.

Chafing under the rule of King Henry II of England, Strongbow pictured himself as the King of Ireland and his marriage to the daughter of Irish King Dermot MacMurrough was intended to seal the agreement. But fate and the driving ambitions of Henry II soon scuttled the plan and upon Strongbow’s death a short time later, the equally ambitious Fitzgeralds assumed his mission.

Known for their loyalty to a Catholic Rome, their embrace of Ireland’s Celtic culture and their fierce desire to establish their control over Ireland, the next four hundred years found the family drawn deeply into English as well as European politics with numerous Geraldines (the family name) interned in the Tower of London. The coming of the Reformation to England in the 16^th century turned four hundred years of border disputes and jurisdictional feuding into holy war. And in 1580, the Holy See in Rome sent an army of Italians and Spaniards to help the Geraldines under the authority drafted by the “Just War Doctrine,”to help in the fight against Queen Elizabeth’s Protestant forces.

Dubbed by author Richard Berleth as the “Twilight Lords” for their role as the last doomed, feudal barons of Ireland, the Fitzgeralds and their struggle to fight off the Elizabethans and the Renaissance Neoplatonism of men such as Edmund Spencer and Walter Raleigh offers a glimpse into more than just another stale moment in history. It offers a revelation into a secret esoteric struggle between the spiritual forces of London, Rome, Moscow, Washington and Berlin that exploded openly into war numerous times during the 20^th century and whose ominous final confrontation looms over today’s geopolitical arena like a sword of Damocles.

Allegorized by the Elizabethans as evil and representative of the darkness in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, the Fitzgeralds came to embody the “Other” in the English propaganda of the day, while Elizabeth as both the Faerie Queene and Britomart and her knights embodied only the most chaste and blessed in the tradition of the Arthurian Round Table.

Far from being only a war over ecclesiastical principles, this “holy war” fought between the Catholic Geraldines and their Protestant others was also a war against economic domination and colonization from London. From London’s perspective, the war was a just war because it was a struggle to the death against the Papal forces of the Counter Reformation, which were encircling it militarily and economically and rolling back Protestant reforms. In the end, the war depopulated the Irish countryside, shifted the balance of power from local landowners to mercantilists in London and instilled a lasting fear and anger between Protestants and Catholics. As an experiment in colonization, Ireland set the standards of behavior that marked the beginnings of Britain’s empire that live on as much today in the neighborhoods of Kabul, Kandahar and Peshawar as they do in Derry and Belfast. But it also marked a turning point in the Holy Roman Empire’s ability to control events through military force and a shift from the ecclesiastically sanctioned violence of “just war” to the secular/state sanctioned violence of “just war.”

When in 1980 Colin Gray and Keith Payne attempted to stretch that concept of just war to justify nuclear war-fighting by transforming immorality into morality, it came as a cruel awakening to us that despite the gulf of four hundred years little had changed in the need to bend reality to justify war.

But in the thirty years since, the savage carnival of endless war with its attendant think tanks and lobbyists has only made the darkness blacker. In fact, the spiritual inspiration that propels today’s Washington/London/Berlin/Paris alliance and its so called humanitarian interventions could be considered nothing less than diabolic in which – as stated in the opening chapter to this series – America has turned from the light into its very opposite as it seeks to emulate “the dark matter… the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.”

In battling the Elizabethans, the Fitzgeralds exhausted the very idea of Just War by plunging themselves and their hopeless cause into darkness. We can only hope as the U.S. continues to wander through the many facets of darkness contained within this House of Mirrors that someday soon, it will heed the lessons of history and find its way back to the clarity and sanity of the light.

Copyright © 2011 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved

Published on Sibel Edmonds Boiling Frogs Post

House of Mirrors Series

Part I Mystical Covert Agendas Part II Living the Fantasy

Part III Making the Irrational Rational Part IV The Twilight Lords

9/11, Psychological Warfare and the American Narrative Series

Part I A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State

Part II Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product

Part III A Clockwork Afghanistan  Part IV Willie Wonka and the Chocolate factory