Page 1 of 2 BOOK REVIEW
Behind the Afghan propaganda Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and
Elizabeth Gould
Reviewed by Anthony Fenton
Nearly 30 years after their first foray into the land-locked buffer state,
married couple and journalist-historians Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
could not have chosen a more appropriate time to publish their comprehensive Invisible
History: Afghanistan's Untold Story.
Having taken a back seat to Iraq since the drumbeat for war began in the autumn
of 2002, the ongoing escalation of the United States-North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) counter-insurgency war and occupation have made "AfPak" the
center of
sustained US media attention for the first time since "shock and awe"
temporarily drove the Taliban underground in October 2001.
A chronically disinformed US public should leap at the chance to familiarize
themselves with an honest overview of their country's historically scandalous
involvement in the region.
Despite Afghanistan's recent return to the spotlight, few among the public
realize the full extent of the US's historical meddling in Afghanistan. Sadly,
many Americans will believe the version of events that were popularized by
George Crile's book-turned-Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson's War: The
Extraordinary Story of how the Wildest man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent
Changed the History of Our Times (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
Crile's account presents an ahistorical blend of fact and fantasy as it
romanticizes the largest covert operation in US history during the
US-Pakistan-Saudi Arabian-financed and armed proxy war against the Soviet Union
from 1979-1989. It is this collective propaganda-imbued blindspot that
Fitzgerald and Gould attempt to reveal and counter. As Gould stated in an
interview with Asia Times Online, Charlie Wilson's War "is a complete flip flop
of the reality".
As such, one of the concerns that Gould and Fitzgerald are seeking to address
is the problem that "there are still people in administration positions, in
journalistic positions, in academic positions who still believe the
fundamentals of Charlie Wilson's War". As Fitzgerald added, "every line cook
and bottle washer in and around Washington is now an expert on Afghanistan",
reflecting a popular discourse that is "far detached from reality".
As the first Western journalists to gain entry into post-Soviet invasion
Afghanistan with CBS News in 1981, Fitzgerald and Gould learned that the
reality on the ground was "far from the simplistic portrait of black and white,
good against evil, portrayed by the American media". (p 13) When their story
aired on anchorman Dan Rather's show on their return, key parts of it that ran
counter to the official Washington narrative were left on the cutting room
floor. Rather himself would later be accused of airing fake footage of
US-backed "freedom fighters" for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes. (p 247-48)
Fitzgerald and Gould returned to Afghanistan in 1983, along with Roger Fisher,
the founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, which was created through his
involvement in negotiations surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979.
Fisher's key finding on meeting with Afghan and Soviet leaders was that, far
from wishing to expand beyond Afghanistan's borders as purported by the Ronald
Reagan administration, the Soviets "wanted out ... in no uncertain terms". (p
188)
The problem was that the US would have none of it. As Gould explained to AToI:
There
was absolutely no interest on the part of Congress or the mainstream media to
really get that out into the public space. As Roger stated on Nightline,
"clearly I don't know for sure whether they are going to actually get out but
we have to try." This is certainly what anyone with common sense would have
thought. And what did we discover but no, there was absolutely no interest in
getting them out. The reason being that the actual insurgency that was coming
from Pakistan, that was being financed by the United States and by the Saudis;
this was exactly the reason that the Soviets were staying in Afghanistan.
Having gone to great lengths to draw them into Afghanistan in the first place
(beginning as early as 1973, see below), the US wanted the Soviets to stay so
that their mujahideen proxies could deliver a mortal blow to the "Evil Empire".
As an example of the typical approach of the US media toward the secret war,
when Fisher returned to the US to report his findings on ABC's Nightline
with Ted Koppel, he was sand-bagged by another guest, "Soviet dissident"
Vladimir Bukovsky, who parroted the Reagan administration's fabled line that
the Soviets were "moving toward the Persian Gulf". (p 189) Koppel made it clear
that any reality-based account such as Fisher's, then, had to be "concealed for
the benefits of propaganda".
It would take more than 15 years for Fitzgerald and Gould's analysis to be
corroborated by the slow trickle of document declassification and the
publication of the memoirs of key political and intelligence actors. With a
heavy dose of footnotes (over 1,100), Fitzgerald and Gould rely on a mixture of
interviews (some conducted during a subsequent trip to the country in 2002),
primary source documents, prior historical accounts, and (Chomskyan)
"impeccable sources" to flesh out their narrative, which spans three periods:
antiquity to the 1960s, the height of the Cold War period up to September 11,
2001, and the period since, up to mid-July of 2008.
The first section lays the groundwork for understanding the 21st century
context by tracking the development of Afghanistan as a strategic buffer state,
locked between imperial powers. The most fateful development for modern
Afghanistan was Britain's creation of the Durand Line in November 1893. This
line continues to separate the Pashtun people, who are in the center of the
insurgency and counter-insurgency that is being waged today. (p 281)
Fitzgerald and Gould argue that "no border division in the history of colonial
conquest could match the ongoing consequences posed" (p 51) by this unilateral
demarcation of Britain's western boundaries. As such, any external power that
has dealt with Afghanistan since the demarcation can be measured by their
countenance toward Pashtun demands for self-determination. Although through a loya
jirga (tribal grand council) Afghans themselves "authorized the Afghan
government to abrogate all of Afghanistan's treaties with Great Britain
regarding the trans-Durand-Pashtuns" in 1948, by 1953 the US under president
Dwight D Eisenhower and vice president Richard Nixon had "informed the Afghans
that they had no justifiable claim to Pashtunistan". (p 92)
With Pakistan, the British and the rising US empire disposed against Pashtun
self-determination, it was only natural that the Afghans would lean toward the
Soviets, who expressed sympathy with the Pashtun cause. As the Cold War
deepened and the Afghans drew closer to the Soviets, US interest in the country
increased proportionately. Afghanistan would soon become a battleground on
which the fantasies of Washington's Cold War policy planners would be played
out.
Fitzgerald and Gould trace the origins of the post-World War II national
security state to National Security Directive 68 (NSC 68) of 1950, which was
premised on the "containment" of the Soviets who were said to be bent on "world
domination". Accordingly, the policies that flowed from NSC 68 were designed
"to foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system", and,
conveniently, in order to pursue such policies, the US military needed to be
able to project force globally, requiring the entrenchment of a vast
military-industrial complex. In turn, justification for NSC 68 was provided by
a core of "defense intellectuals" who became "the new seneschals of America's
emerging national security and foreign policy intelligentsia". (p 88-90)
Fitzgerald and Gould emphasize the historical role of the "imperial brain
trust" and covert war methods of the US during the Cold War, including, most
prominently, that of propaganda and mysticism. Chapter 5, "A Background to Cold
War Policy", is the longest, most heavily foot-noted, and, arguably, the most
important. They also give important space to the role of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), and CIA-front organizations such as the Asia
Foundation (which today still works extensively in and around Afghanistan).
"Large numbers of American intellectuals participated in [Asia] Foundation
programs, and they - usually unwittingly - contributed to popularizing of CIA
ideas about the Far East. Designed ... as an overseas propaganda operation, the
Asia Foundation also was regularly guilty of propagandizing the American people
with agency views on Asia." (p 97)
The important propaganda role of CIA-linked, Orwellian-named organizations such
as Freedom House, the International Rescue Committee and the Committee for a
Free Afghanistan are contextualized, the latter being "an odd assortment of
extreme anti-communist right Republican and liberal Democrat". (p 175-79)
Together, they "represented the cream of the right-wing, neo-conservative ...
defense-intellectual class, controlling public opinion of the Afghan war". (p
190).
Invisible History also shows how covert US meddling began as early as
1973 under president Nixon, following the ouster of King Zahir Shah by Mohammad
Daoud. The US had not even extricated itself from its own Vietnam War when such
plans were afoot as part of the "Chinese-Iranian-Pakistani-Arabian peninsula
Axis" to give the Soviets theirs. (p 123-4)
By fostering the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan beginning in the
period leading to the Soviet intervention, the US helped "set in motion a
series of events that would eventually demolish the country's embryonic
infrastructure and political aspirations ... " (p 126) According to a former US
political officer in Afghanistan, the conscious intent was "to set back the
clock socially on a wide front". All told, this served the interests of both
the US's cynical Cold War policies, paralleling US support for fascist regimes
and insurgencies in Latin America, as well as the "forward policy" of Pakistan,
which included plans "to conquer South Central Asia". (p 308)
Under pressure from the covert hand of external intelligence agencies and their
proxies in the mid-1970's, Afghanistan shifted rightward under Daoud, who was
overthrown in April 1978, after which the country again drew closer to the
Soviets. Although the 1978 coup "was a product of Afghanistan's complex
internal dynamics, not the sinister product of the Kremlin's geostrategic
planning", nevertheless, "by Cold War definition, the coup automatically became
a self-fulfilling prophecy, easily fitting the mantle 'Soviet inspired'." (p
123-4) This was "consistent" with the narrative provided by NSC 68 and the
group of Cold War intellectuals and policy planners who would become known as
"Team B".
The origins of Team B, traced in another important chapter (p 139-157), are
rooted in Nixon's "secretive brain trust", and in former CIA director George H
W Bush's opening "an outside door to a small, right-wing corps of like-minded
defense intellectuals". Setting about to destroy detente and restore the US's
post-Vietnam War "military mythology", Team B was "drawn together by their
anti-communism and mutual affiliations" with the military-industrial complex,
as they began fostering a false narrative that said "the Soviets were preparing
for a 'third world war' and were nakedly expansionist".
The January 16, 1979, overthrow of the US allied Shah of Iran and the February
14 kidnapping and murder of the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubs, were
keystone events that "would permanently turn the tide of detente and arms
control, and shift the balance of authority toward [Jimmy Carter's national
security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski and Team B, while making Afghanistan a
permanent base for holy war”. (p 160) By the time the Soviets entered
Afghanistan - at the request of the Afghan government at the time - the pieces
were in place to lock them into a protracted counter-insurgency war that they
had no desire to wage.
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Despite Afghanistan's recent return to the spotlight, few among the public
realize the full extent of the US's historical meddling in Afghanistan. Sadly,
many Americans will believe the version of events that were popularized by
George Crile's book-turned-Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson's War: The
Extraordinary Story of how the Wildest man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent
Changed the History of Our Times (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
