https://t.me/BeornAndTheShieldmaiden/1682
The Great Game of Smashing Nations
After the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the sadly now late, John Pilger wrote this assessment published in Consortium News - re-published on January 10th 2024.
Among other things, Pilger's article gives an important historical look back at the political and societal situation in Afghanistan before the Soviet military intervention at the request of the progressive democratic government, which was being overrun by the reactionary contra-revolutionary militias, funded, armed and controlled by the United States.
As always, Pilger cuts to the bone of the issues with well-documented and substantiated assessments, so, read his brilliant article. Below, we have extracted the historical parts often missing when Afghanistan is being discussed.
By John Pilger, August 24th 2021
Read the full article here
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. 90% 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.
For the U.S., 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.
On July 3rd 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.
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, eventually destroy, the Soviet Union.
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.
@BeornAndTheShieldmaiden
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/01/09/j ... nations-2/
There are decades where you fuck around and days where you find out
After the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the sadly now late, John Pilger wrote this assessment published in Consortium News - re-published on January 10th 2024.
