Can anyone help back this up? The reporter's name is David Bacon, a writer for San Francisco Bay Guardian and S.F. Examiner -- it sounds way plausible but I haven't heard this versh before. Presumably some of mark s's blue writing leads to some corroboration but I am pretending to be too busy to check.
In the 1970s a moderately reformist government came to power in Afghanistan, a leftwing populist movement seeking to democratize Afghan society. It mounted literacy campaigns, and built schools and clinics in rural areas. It sought to end restrictions on women in education and employment, and discouraged the use of the purdah. It talked, although often little more than that, about land reform.
That was enough to earn it the enmity of traditional elements of Afghan society, who began organizing armed attacks on government officials, literacy workers, and people associated with the values the government promoted.
Perhaps in another era, those internal conflicts might have been resolved among Afghans themselves. The forces of rightwing religious extremism might not have come out the better for it.
But Afghanistan's common border and friendly relationship with the Soviet Union made it an attractive target for Cold War
destabilization. British and US intelligence agencies funneled money to those groups opposing the government through the Pakistani intelligence service.
When real civil conflict broke out, the Afghan government appealed for Soviet military help, and the war was on. From that point forward, the US spent more money building training camps for the fundamentalist forces, and supplying them guns and missiles, than it spent in the contra war in Nicaragua and the counterinsurgency in El Salvador combined.
Intelligence services dreamed of extending that war into Soviet Central Asia itself, and after the Soviets' fall, the conflict did in fact spread north.
Those who wanted a secular Afghanistan and social progress and justice for its citizens, were murdered or driven into exile or silence.
Meanwhile, military leaders, bent on using Soviet troops to pursue their side of the civil war, replaced reformers.
― Tracer Hand, Monday, 24 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)
well i checked out those Nation articles and they just restate the
CNN line: US involvement was initiated with "the primary aim of
defeating the Soviet Union". but the article i quoted above reverses
this chronology - the Soviets were called in only because CIA-
financed fundamentalists were attacking a progressive-ish Afghan
government who were presumably not going to be as friendly to U.S.
oil interests as greedy warlords would be.
"it's like a
movie": the evil scientists breeding schools of supersmart killer
sharks -- you're like, duh, of course they're going to turn on you.
― Tracer Hand, Monday, 24 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)
the article i quoted above reverses
this chronology - the Soviets were called in only because CIA-
financed fundamentalists were attacking a progressive-ish Afghan
government who were presumably not going to be as friendly to U.S.
oil interests as greedy warlords would be.
I dunno the exact details re Afghanistan but it's common knowledge that this is exactly how the British/CIA-engineered coup in 1953 in Iran happened: the ELECTED prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh (who was educated in Switzerland and was Time's man of the year in 1951) wanted to nationalize the then British controlled oil industry. The CIA engineered a phony coup that brought the new Shah to power, who led a puppet government until the 1979 religious revolution. Therefore the Ayatollah Khomeni, the Martin Luther of modern Islamic fundamentalism, is pretty much a consequence of western meddling as well.
― Kris, Monday, 24 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)
Tracer's chronology is right except the CIA didn't just work through Pakistan, and the social reforms continued while the russian troops moved in. In fact, those troops were mobilized on the basis of fighting to defend the social reforms. Also -- the social reform which started the Mujahadeen going? Lowering (not even eliminating) the bride price.
― Sterling Clover, Monday, 24 September 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)