Brzezinski brags, blows cover
U.S. intervened in Afghanistan first
By Leslie Feinberg
Why did the United States government spend
billions of dollars financing the overthrow of a progressive
regime in Afghanistan?
For years the official line has been that the CIA began
funding the counter-revolution in 1980 only because the Soviet
Union had sent its troops into Afghanistan on Dec. 24,
1979.
A war ensued. It reduced much of Afghanistan to rubble.
Finally, the progressives were overwhelmed, the president was
mutilated and hanged on a public street in the capital city of
Kabul, and right-wing fundamentalists financed by the CIA took
over.
The consequences for the population, especially women, have
been horrendous.
Now Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's
national security advisor, has admitted that covert U.S.
intervention began long before the USSR sent in its troops to
help the Afghani Revolution.
Brzezinski told the French weekly Nouvel Observateur that
the CIA began bankrolling counter-revolutionary forces in
mid-1979. "We did not push the Russians into intervening, but
we knowingly increased the probability that they would," said
Brzezinski, as quoted by the French Press Agency on Jan. 14,
1998.
"That secret operation was an excellent idea. The effect was
to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."
Two diametrically opposed
interventions
Some in the movement at that time put an equal sign between
the United States and the Soviet Union, calling them both
"super-powers." But the USSR sent in troops to try and save a
revolution. The United States intervened to crush it.
What was the Afghani Revolution of 1978 all about?
Afghanistan had been stagnating under feudalism for
centuries. The first thing the revolution did was cancel the
staggering debts of impoverished agricultural laborers, tenants
and small landowners. It then began to train teachers for new
public schools and nurseries.
The revolution set up literacy classes for the 90 percent of
the population who couldn't read or write-especially women.
It abolished selling women into marriage. In the cities
where the new government was strong, young women could tear off
the veil, travel freely in public, go to school and get a
job.
But the U.S. capitalist class wanted to turn Afghanistan
into a geopolitical pawn against China and the Soviet
Union.
The CIA recruited the ousted feudal warlords for a "holy
war" against the revolution. Washington pumped billions of
dollars into this mercenary army.
The CIA-backed "freedom fighters" were allowed to earn extra
money by growing and selling opium for the drug trade.
Reactionary bands in the countryside began killing volunteer
teachers and women who wouldn't wear the veil. Eventually, more
than 2 million Afghanis died in the war. Millions more were
displaced as refugees.
Victory for feudal reaction-
and modern imperialism
One of the counter-revolutionary factions funded by the CIA
was the Taliban, now in power in most of Afghanistan. From the
moment the victorious Taliban marched into the capital city of
Kabul in 1996, its rotten social character was apparent.
Political opponents were lynched without trial. Women and
girls were barred from employment and education.
Those without male relatives to bring in money face either
starvation or prostitution. Today females can only leave their
homes when escorted by a male relative. They are under virtual
"house arrest," according to a recent release from the National
Organization for Women here.
Schools and hospitals built by the revolution lie in ruins.
Poor people accused of stealing food have their hands hacked
off.
This is nothing less than a return to feudal slavery. But it
was engineered by the most modern capitalist power. And it is
being celebrated by the executives of the U.S. energy company
Unocal Corp.
Together with Delta Oil Co. of Saudi Arabia, Unocal is
investing billions of dollars in a gas and oil pipeline that
crosses Afghanistan on its way from Turkmenistan to
Pakistan.
U.S. imperialism's cynical role in crushing the Afghani
Revolution in order to advance its own sordid interests has
only further alienated the millions of oppressed people from
northern Africa to the Middle East and central Asia. Even some
of those who worked for the CIA in this operation have since
turned against it.
The CIA still brags of its Afghanistan "operation." Yet the
head of that operation from 1986 to 1989, Milt Bearden, had to
admit in an opinion column in the March 2 New York Times that
Washington is far too isolated today to mount a similar effort
against Iraq.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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