0 $
2,500 $
5,000 $
500 $
NOVEMBER 2024

The Great Game of Smashing Countries

Support SouthFront

The Great Game of Smashing Countries

Click to see full-size image

Written by John Pilger; originally published on GlobalResearch

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 persons … marched to honour the new flag …the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

“Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked … We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday … it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning … these were the people the West supported.”

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs: “We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.”

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government.  This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history,Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

“Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it … Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.”

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.  

In August, 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  The US was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by war lords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me, “We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know ….”

In 1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The President, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898, “upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”

The Great Game of Smashing Countries

 “Photo Op”. Credit: Imperial War Museum/Peter Kennard & Cat Philips (2005)

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11. “The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

On Afghanistan, he added this:

“We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.”

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office:

“The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering … “

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distance themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a US oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the US and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

MORE ON THE TOPIC:

Support SouthFront

SouthFront

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
James

It never ceases to amaze me the level of scheming these rats have.

Dawn

Very good article.. Had to look who wrote it :) John Pilger – one of the few real journalists left on this world

Last edited 3 years ago by Dawn
Arch Bungle

The Russians are living rent-free in your head.

Arch Bungle

Other way round. The entire German gene pool is now thoroughly Russified:

“‘They raped every German female from eight to 80’

“Red Army soldiers don’t believe in ‘individual liaisons’ with German women,” wrote the playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary when serving as an officer of marine infantry in East Prussia. “Nine, ten, twelve men at a time – they rape them on a collective basis.”

The Soviet armies advancing into East Prussia in January 1945, in huge, long columns, were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts. The variety of character among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly, and there were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behaviour. “

Alberto Bohon.

on April 27, 1978 Hafizullah Amin, Babrak Karmal and Nur Muhamnad Taraki seized power in Afghanistan with the Saur revolution where Afghan President Sardar Mohammed Daoud Khan was deposed and asked for the help of the Soviet government of Leonid Brezhnev to intervene in Afghanistan through Brezhnev doctrine on December 27, 1979, in response to the US government intervention of Democrat Jimmy Carter who started Operation Cyclone on July 3, 1979 which financed the Mujahideen resistance groups in the struggle against the pro-Soviet Afghan socialist regime. The US CIA and UK MI6 helped train the militia resistance guerrillas with covert and separate actions with specialized tactics and strategies. The program supported Islamic groups, including groups with Jihadist ties, who were favored by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s regime in Pakistan. On January 20, 1981 US Republican President Ronald Reagan continued Operation Cyclone, the US funded around $695,000 in 1979, $30 million in 1980 and $630 million in 1987. Al Qaeda was founded by Osama Bin Laden and Abdallah Youssouf Moustafa Azzam on 11 August 1988 in Peshawar Pakistan, which was a fundamentalist Islamic Jihadist group supported by the government of Pakistan, USA and UK with Soviet troops stationed in Afghanistan with the beginning of the collapse of the USSR regime in Eastern Europe, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began withdrawing his troops from Afghanistan between 15 May 1988 and 15 February 1989. abandoning the Socialist Republic of Afghanistan to its own fate that lasted until 27 April 1992 with the victory of the Mujahideen resistance it captured Kabul overthrowing the Socialist government where he installed his pro-US government where the Islamic State of Afghanistan was declared. but with the infighting between the Mujahideen the group was split into several factions that fought for themselves and again started another civil war between 28 April 1992 – 27 November 1996 culminating in the victory of the Islamic Jihadist Taliban group (founded on 11 September 1994 by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef and Mohammed Omar) and with the al Qaeda support of Osama bin Laden, who established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. But a new civil war broke out between 27 September 1996 – 07 October 2001, between the new Afghan Taliban government against Northern Alliance resistance, but on 10 October 1996 Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani founded the Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (Northern Alliance) in the struggle against the Taliban government that resumed power after US President George W Bush started the invasion offensive on Afghanistan between October 7th and December 17th 2001, because of the September 11 2001 attacks perpetrated by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda against the US, where the new US-backed Northern Alliance government of Afghanistan formed the Karzai administration on July 13, 2002.

Kire

Facebook doesn’t allow shearing this, what a Orwellian world we live in(((

6
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x