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John Pilger: The Great Game of Smashing Nations
By John Pilger
September 06, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House"
- 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 Shah. 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 honor 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 program 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 35;
1-in-3 children died in infancy. Ninety percent 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 percent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 percent of its
teachers and 30 percent of its civil servants.
Backed by the West
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 July 3, 1979, unknown to the American people
and Congress, Carter authorized a $500 million “covert action”
program 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 destabilize and eventually destroy the Soviet
Union.
‘Larger Interests’
In August 1979, the U.S. 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 italicized. It
is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as
clearly. The U.S. 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.
The mujahedin were dominated by war lords
who controlled the heroin trade and terrorized rural women.
Later, in the early 1990s the Taliban would emerge, 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 1992, 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.
The Game
“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 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 recognize as such.
Orifa
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 an 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 15 notes: a total of $15.
“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 distant 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 U.S. oil company consortium.
In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited
to the U.S. 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?
John Pilger’s 2003
film,
Breaking the Silence,
about the “war on terror” is
available to view here.
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