Charlie Wilson’s War is a Fantasy!
Tuesday, 22. December 2009
As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We’ve seen this pattern from the media again and again. It was particularly disturbing to read Ken Herman’s December 18 interview, Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan, in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN filled with CIA disinformation. The secret campaign was activated before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to sell the American people on financing the coming Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union
Let’s separate the child-like fantasy that has been resurrected over and over again from the true nature of Charlie Wilson and his war effort. From the interview:
“…the former East Texas congressman — immortalized in a book and a movie about his exploits that helped the Afghans drive out the Soviet Union.”
FACT: Covert funding for the mujahideen began long before the Soviet invasion, not after. This covert aid was intended to lure the Soviets into the Afghan trap and hold them there, not drive them out, as claimed by Charlie Wilson. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s national security adviser, have admitted in print (Gates, in his 1997 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 report these revelations from high-ranking government officials as news, back then. More recently, Brzezinski’s remarks were addressed in an interview 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…”
FACT: As we document in our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” the record contradicts Brzezinski’s assumption that the Soviets would have invaded had it not been for his intentional provocation to lure the Soviet’s into the “Afghan trap.”
FACT: It is well documented that Charlie Wilson’s war prolonged Afghanistan’s agony for another six years, provided a secure multibillion-dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism, and set the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. It’s bad enough that a Hollywood film continues to project the propaganda campaign that kept Americans in the dark about America’s role in helping terrorism grow in Afghanistan. At this late date, it is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the Congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
FACT: America’s mistake in Afghanistan was not “the endgame” problem depicted by “Charlie Wilson’s War.” The problem was in the conceptual framework created by America’s Cold War policy makers in the first place that made Afghanistan the bleeding ground it remains to this day.
FACT: Charlie Wilson’s War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. 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 has yet to be understood.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media.
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SanderO Says:
Very interesting and thank you for the insight. The take away is that our involvement was part of some strategy or tactic in the cold war with the USSR and why are we there now?
Once view of course is that the MIC is a hammer and so everything looks like a nail and so their little troulemakers… the CIA et al simply prepare the battle fields around the would for the DOD and the MIC to do their thing… the generals get to play war, the MIC and the bankers gets to make money.
Why war?
We really don’t have any enemies who are eying our hills and valleys and cornfields and thinking how nice it would be to fly our flag over the capitol… now do we?
Bill Bergman Says:
Do the interests of the Ritchie brothers, and their father and friends, reach back that far as well? Your (F&G) material in Invisible History on those parties is pretty eye-opening. You note their father was a civil engineer. Was he working on energy-related projects?
Kingfisher Says:
“FACT: Covert funding for the mujahideen began long before the Soviet invasion, not after. This covert aid was intended to lure the Soviets into the Afghan trap and hold them there, not drive them out, as claimed by Charlie Wilson.”
True, the initial aid was to lure the Soviets in. Once the Soviets invaded the goal of the aid was to slowly bleed them, not actually defeat them. What Wilson & co did was push to change the goal to defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan and to provide the means to do so. Both statements would be correct.
“..it is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the Congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan.”
Wilson wanted to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan; why else would you push to introduce foreign weapons (stinger missiles) to the battlefield thereby destroying any plausible deniability of the covert operation and risk direct confrontation with the USSR, if not to actually win?
“FACT: Charlie Wilson’s War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. 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 has yet to be understood.”
True, but Afghanistan has historically been a buffer state and as such been geographically condemned to being a bleeding ground. Has been a bleeding ground since before America began, and likely will be a bleeding ground long after it ends.
Metem Says:
To continue the thought of Kinfisher’s last sentence “and therefore since some totally unrelated people used it as such before us, it’s totally not our fault that we’re doing it now.”
Metem Says:
Shit, I meant ‘Kingfisher’.
SanderO Says:
Another take away from so much of what we are reading on this web site and in particular in this article is how much information is managed and filtered.
This amounts to a completely uniformed public and a skewed debate.
If this because the reporting is not being done? Or that the editors and management are inserting ideology into the news and framing it? Probably so. How can this be changed?
We certainly are faced with the echo chamber effect where one story is completely based on another and no original reporting is done or drilling into the backstory. And what is more troubling is that the source for so much of the new is “official sources” and from annonymous officials who refuse to be named…. and who leak “information”.
This puts even an honest reporter in a tight place as he or she wants the scoop, but all they are doing is passing along “hearsay” with no accountability or independent corroboration.
We live in an age when news is not only managed, but part of a for profit enterprise. That alone means that stories are created to sell advertising or simply to ring the hit meter. Hence we have all the sensationalist pop culture nonsense which dominates the news, dumbing down the public and providing cover for wrong doers. The fifth estate is no longer doing its watchdog function.
So we have the conflation and synergy of two problems – controlled information from anonymous or simply authoritative sources which is to be taken as fact, and the need for news to make money for the press.
Net effect – criminals get away with murder.
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.
edit_mommies Says:
An entire generation outfitted with a struggle. The manner of their skin and clothes, equalizers for dependency. Silently affective inequalities drum out the looming threat of indulgence. Peace of mind is absorbed in conduct and completion of uniform tasks. The discipline of pharmacological ordering contrasts the postponement of technological excess. . . anywheristan?
Konstantin Says:
Somewhat off-topic.
Saw this in the Lew Rockwell blog titled ‘The Documentary Film Mother Lode’. It talks about a site that showcases free documentaries online called Top Documentary Films. website: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/watch-online
This particular one is somewhat interesting. Don’t know if everything is accurate but it has some interesting allegations like how the media is kept under control or manufactured.
It’s called ‘Behind The Big News: Propaganda and the CFR’
The acyual video is hosted on Google videos and you can download it via the ‘Download video’ link on the google page.
Here’s the link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6632255652046262625
Konstantin Says:
I wrote that comment before I saw the whole documentary so it’s not that I’m endorsing it. Just has some interesting parts like the scene about the report about a concentration camp in Bosnia.
Konstantin Says:
Seems it was made by the John Birch Society so … However I’ve seen another video about the Serbian concentration camp that implies it was a fake and there was no concentration camp.
Kingfisher Says:
“To continue the thought of Kinfisher’s last sentence “and therefore since some totally unrelated people used it as such before us, it’s totally not our fault that we’re doing it now.””
Plenty of blame to go around for Afghanistan’s bloody history, foreign and local. It would however be a very superficial read of history to view America’s role as anymore than on single chapter in a large anthology. History plays such a prevailing role in the region and we are but a cog in an enormous wheel over there; something usually lost on the arrogance of the neoconservatives or the guilt of the liberals.
SanderO Says:
There is no compelling reason for the US to be involved in Afghanistan other than economic exploitation. Afghanistan is not a threat to the USA or would any band of troublemakers now termed “terrorists”. That’s complete hooey and anyone who believes we have to spend trillions and wage this war is hopelessly naive.
War is usually about making money and this is no exception.
Who makes the money? All the corporations which produce the products of war… and a few bits go to the wages of the men and women who fight and die and work in the war factories.
mcthorogood Says:
@SanderO
Hence we have all the sensationalist pop culture nonsense which dominates the news, dumbing down the public and providing cover for wrong doers. The fifth estate is no longer doing its watchdog function.
I think that you mean the “Fourth Estate” which is the press. I couldn’t agree with you more.