<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body style="margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px;" topmargin="0"
marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" leftmargin="0" bgcolor="white">
<div class="moz-forward-container"><br>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<!--[if !mso]><!-->
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
<!--<![endif]-->
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,
initial-scale=1.0">
<title></title>
<style type="text/css">table {
border-spacing: 0;
font-family: sans-serif;
color: #333333;
}img {
border: 0;
}div[style*="margin: 16px 0"] { /*Android compatibility*/
margin:0 !important;
}p {
Margin: 0;
}a{ /*remove underlines in Windows Mail*/
text-decoration: none;
}.one-column .contents {
text-align: left;
}.one-column p {
font-size: 14px;
Margin-bottom: 10px;
}</style>
<!--[if (gte mso 9)|(IE)]>
<style type="text/css">
table {border-collapse: collapse;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<table class="body"
style="width:100%;table-layout:fixed;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;background-color:
#ffffff;" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
border="0" bgcolor="#ffffff" align="center">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="display: none; font-size: 0px; line-height: 0;
height: 0px;" class=""> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="vertical-align: top;padding: 0;" class=""
valign="top">
<div class="webkit"
style="max-width:600px;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;margin-right:auto;margin-left:auto;overflow:
visible;"><!--[if (gte mso 9)|(IE)]>
<table width="600" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" style="border-spacing:0;font-family:sans-serif;color:#404040;background-color:white;">
<tr>
<td style="padding-top:0;padding-bottom:0;padding-right:0;padding-left:0;">
<![endif]-->
<table class="outer"
style="border-spacing:0;font-family:sans-serif;color:#333333;Margin:
0 auto;width: 100%;max-width: 600px;background-color:
white;" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"
align="center">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="display: none; font-size: 0px;
line-height: 0; height: 0px;" class=""> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="view-online" style="text-align:
center;padding: 10px;line-height:
17px;font-size: 12px;background-color:
#ffffff;font-family: 'Open Sans', Arial,
sans-serif;" valign="top" align="center">Can't
see this email? <a alias="view-online"
href="https://go.ind.media/webmail/546932/897860730/d1c6570494297e513cc339daf0c94965a1b1e3629b9efa526109d1bd14adeb49"
style="text-decoration: none;color: #499BE0;"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">Read
Online</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="title" style="border-left: 1px solid
#f2f2f2;border-right: 1px solid #f2f2f2;padding:
30px;line-height: 35px;background-color:
#ffffff;font-size:
30px;color:#404040;font-family: 'Times', 'Times
New Roman',serif;" valign="top"><a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ng-its-playing-the-great-game-/l45c55/897860730?h=FpB2OHuAmIY9uX_4FgReN4JkG3rG5yxykQHSNNpidOg"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"><b>Catastrophe
in Afghanistan: U.S. Wrecks Another Country
Thinking It’s Playing the ‘Great Game’</b></a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="content" pardot-data=""
style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(242, 242,
242); border-right: 1px solid rgb(242, 242,
242); padding: 0px 30px 30px; line-height: 22px;
background: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: 18px;
color: rgb(64, 64, 64); font-family: Times,
"Times New Roman", serif;"
valign="top">
<b>By John Pilger</b>
<div>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
In 1978, a liberation movement led by the
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad
Daoud, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was
an immensely popular revolution that took the
British and Americans by surprise.<br>
<br>
Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the <i>New
York Times</i>, were surprised to find that
“nearly every Afghan they interviewed said
[they were] delighted with the coup.” The <i>Wall
Street Journal</i> reported that “150,000
persons… marched to honor the new flag… the
participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”<br>
<br>
The <i>Washington Post</i> 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.<br>
<br>
Under the monarchy, life expectancy was 35;
one in three children died in infancy. Ninety
percent of the population was illiterate. The
new government introduced free medical care. A
mass literacy campaign was launched.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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:
<blockquote>“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.”</blockquote>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a
group of tribal and religious zealots known as
the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, <i>Washington
Post</i> 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:
<blockquote>“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.”</blockquote>
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.<br>
<br>
The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism
in Central Asia and destabilize and eventually
destroy the Soviet Union.<br>
<br>
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, <i>despite whatever
setbacks this might mean for future social
and economic reforms in Afghanistan</i>.”<br>
<br>
Read again the words above I have italicized.
It is not often that such cynical intent is
spelled out as clearly. The United States was
saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan
government and the rights of Afghan women
could go to hell.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the
mujahedin were dominated by warlords who
controlled the heroin trade and terrorized
rural women. The Taliban were an
ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore
black and punished banditry, rape and murder
but banished women from public life.<br>
<br>
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. …”<br>
<br>
In 1996, the enlightened PDPA government was
overrun. The president, Mohammad Najibullah,
had gone to the United Nations to appeal for
help. On his return, he was hanged from a
streetlight.<br>
<br>
“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.”<br>
<br>
The viceroy of India was referring in
particular to Afghanistan. A century later,
Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly
different words.<br>
<br>
“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 reorder this
world around us.”<br>
<br>
On Afghanistan, he added this: “We will not
walk away [but ensure] some way out of the
poverty that is your miserable existence.”<br>
<br>
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…”<br>
<br>
Almost every word was false. Their
declarations of concern were cruel illusions
for an imperial savagery “we” in the West
rarely recognize as such.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a
clear blue sky and dropped an Mk 82 500-pound
bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house.
Orifa was away at the time. When she returned,
she gathered the body parts.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In
the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to
distance 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.<br>
<br>
In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been
invited to the United States 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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.<br>
<br>
“Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”<br>
<br>
When we watch the current scenes of panic at
Kabul’s main international 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?<br>
<br>
<em>
<b>John Pilger</b> is an award-winning
journalist, filmmaker, and author. Read his
full biography on his website <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2943ah2u/l45c57/897860730?h=FpB2OHuAmIY9uX_4FgReN4JkG3rG5yxykQHSNNpidOg"
moz-do-not-send="true">here</a>, and
follow him on Twitter: <a
href="https://go.ind.media/e/546932/JohnPilger/l45c59/897860730?h=FpB2OHuAmIY9uX_4FgReN4JkG3rG5yxykQHSNNpidOg"
moz-do-not-send="true">@JohnPilger</a>.</em></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<!-- Spacing START --><!-- Spacing END --></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<img alt="" src="https://go.ind.media/r/546932/1/897860730/open/1"
moz-do-not-send="true">
<style data-ignore-inlining="">div.OutlookMessageHeader {background-image:url('https://tb10ij92.emltrk.com/v2/tb10ij92?f&d=[UNIQUE]')}table.moz-email-headers-table {background-image:url('https://tb10ij92.emltrk.com/v2/tb10ij92?f&d=[UNIQUE]')}blockquote #_t {background-image:url('https://tb10ij92.emltrk.com/v2/tb10ij92?f&d=[UNIQUE]')}#MailContainerBody #_t {background-image:url('https://tb10ij92.emltrk.com/v2/tb10ij92?f&d=[UNIQUE]')}</style>
<img src="https://tb10ij92.emltrk.com/v2/tb10ij92?d=[UNIQUE]"
alt="" moz-do-not-send="true" width="1" height="1" border="0">
</div>
</body>
</html>