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.

 Posted: July 27, 2009 11:31 AM

Invisible History, Afghanistan Untold Story is no conspiracy theory!

Kenneth J. Cooper’s Boston Globe review of our book, Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story, titled Conspiracy-laden look at messy Afghan history is a painful example of the magical thinking perpetrated by the media that has trapped the U.S. intelligentsia since the end of the Vietnam war. It is the kind of thinking that has maintained a fantasy land of bubble economics, Star Wars military budgets and cognitive suicide for over 30 years. It is the kind of thinking that left the U.S. unaware of and unable to deal effectively with the real threat represented by 9/11…