Who Are We Training the Afghan Army to Kill? Us?

In March of 2006, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Canada, and during a press conference, was asked by our then foreign minister Peter Mackay: "Russia was in Afghanistan for a long time and with sad results. Do you have some advice for Canada?"

And though a translator was used, Lavrov understood and immediately responded with an emphatic NO!

I thought the question rather odd, given the history and wasn't sure if Mackay was trying to be a smart ass or was simply naive. Regardless, it was definitively a diplomatic faux pas.

Because the history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is somewhat different than the official version. It was in fact a deliberate attempt by the Americans to lure the Soviets into an unwinnable war.

The U.S. was still licking it's wounds after their disastrous Vietnam adventure, where they wasted enormous amounts of money and lives, only to go home in defeat. And the fear was that during this time, the Soviet Union had been able to build a stronger military, and what better way to destroy that, than by allowing others to do their dirty work.

I was recently turned on to the writings of Chalmers Johnson, who died this past week, and am reading his Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope.

He describes the chain of events, reminding us that the American training and arming of the Mujahedeen, of which Osama Bin Laden was a member, took place before, and not in response to, the invasion.

It should by now be generally accepted that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 was deliberately provoked by the United States. In his memoir published in 1996, the former CIA director Robert Gates made it clear that the American intelligence services began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas not after the Soviet invasion, but six months before it.

In an interview two years later with Le Nouvel Observateur, President Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski [shown with Bin Laden in photo above] proudly confirmed Gates's assertion. "According to the official version of history," Brzezinski said, "CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that's to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. (1)

When asked by Le Nouvel Observateur, whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied: "Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.' " (1)

And the Americans would continue to work behind the scenes, training and arming and killing.

And Ronald Reagan when president said of the created Taliban and other stateless armies:

"To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson—that there are things in this world worth defending. To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors." (2)

If Reagan was alive and functioning today, I wonder what his message would be. Would he still admire their "relentless struggle" against their oppressors?

Not likely. Their creation of both al Qaeda and the Taliban was dismissed as "blowback" by the CIA. In layman's terms: "OOPS!"

In critiquing the George Crile book and resulting film, Charlie Wilson's War, a grotesquely inaccurate, historically challenged, version of the events; Chalmers Johnson writes:

Neither a reader of Crile nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s .... Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the United States) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer Osama bin Laden, whom we helped by building up his al-Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. (3)

The U.S. trained them and armed them and then walked away, "leaving it [Afghanistan] to descend into one of the most horrific civil wars of modern times."

Which brings us to the latest decision to extend Canada's involvement in the U.S. led invasion of Afghanistan, another three years. It is being sold as "training". A non-combat mission.

Nonsense.

We will be engaged in an accelerated civil war without end.

And who will we be training? If the West is so afraid of Islamic fundamentalists, why are they determined to arm and educate those, who if not fundamentalists now, could very well be in the future.

What will our "blowback" be?

We should be working toward a peaceful solution, not creating more enemies.

It could be argued that when George Bush Sr. simply walked away from the mess his country helped to create, it triggered an internal disaster in Afghanistan. But this mess started because of imperialistic game playing.

I don't want to spend 500 million dollars a year training people to kill. The money would be better spent encouraging them to stop.

Sources:

1. Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope, By Chalmers Johnson, Metropolitan Books, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-9303-2, Pg. 12

2. Message on the Observance of Afghanistan Day, Ronald Reagan, From the Oval Office, March 21, 1983

3. Johnson, 2010, Pg. 88-89

Harper Government Says Our North is Being Threatened by a Ghost

"[Authoritarians] will benefit from historical crises that automatically drop increased power into a leader’s lap." Bob Altemeyer

Osama Bin Laden is dead. He has been dead for ten years.

Even Fox News reported on his demise.

When the first videotape of Bin Laden appeared the Bush administration called it a hoax. According to the Daily Telegraph on December 28, 2001:

The recording was dismissed by the Bush administration yesterday as sick propaganda possibly designed to mask the fact the al-Qa'eda leader was already dead.

Bush read Fox News.

And yet every time he got into trouble politically he produced a videotape of a robust ghost with renewed threats of an attack.

In 2004 when he was running against John Kerry , a new tape appeared and his poll numbers jumped 6 points. According to the late Walter Kronkite, on Larry King in 2004:

Consider this: if this was the real Osama, didn't his appearance prove that Bush has wasted two hundred billion dollars and a thousand American lives (plus 100,000 Iraqi lives) without making us any safer from Osama? If the 2004 tape were genuine, wouldn't it prove that Bush is a total failure in his own "war on terror"?

I guess the neocons didn't think it through, but Bush was re-elected, based on fear.

There is a group of American veterans trying to get their government to stop the charade, and Prof David Ray Griffin has written a book, presenting compelling evidence that the videotapes since Bin Laden's death in mid-December 2001, are fakes.

And Bin Laden went to his grave denying any involvement in 9/11. The only "proof" they have are those tapes.

Terrorism is real, but it is not confined to Islamic radicals. Tim McVeigh was not Muslim, nor was the Unabomber.

I don't know if Al-Qaeda actually exists. I don't know who was behind 9/11. I just know that a lot of people have died chasing a ghost.

And now Stephen Harper is trying to defend his enormous increases in military spending chasing the same bloody ghost. And this ghost is now threatening our North. He is a very busy ghost indeed.

The assessment also mentions that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network has identified Canada as a target on several occasions, though any analysis of those threats in the northern context have been struck from the report.

As Peace, Order and Good Government concludes:

Our tax dollars are being laundered through the DND to pay people to sell us on the need for increasing the defence and security budgets in order to meet every problem with a military solution. When articles like this fail to properly identify the sources they rely on, then journalism is just part of the marketing campaign.

No one is immune from Terror, including the North. But this is fear mongering.

Neoconservatism is as much a religion as a political theory. A religion based on myths. And their deity is Leo Strauss.

When Rick Salutin reminded us that Stephen Harper was a neocon and thus a Straussian, he was fired.

I don't know if Harper ever read Strauss, and in fact I rather doubt it. But you can still call yourself a Christian and never have read the Bible.

The late Irving Kristol, himself a Straussian and Bush insider, once stated* that he was deeply indebted to Leo Strauss for an understanding of the “noble lie.”

“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

Are we the children? What level of "truth" are we entitled to?

Footnotes:

*Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians Against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers, by Peter Minowitz