http://communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/reality/archive/2010/08/03/cia-and-isi-nurtured-mujahideen-and-taliban.aspxPaul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story published by City Lights. I interviewed them about the roots of the conflict and the long standing cooperation of Pakistan's ISI and the CIA in encouraging and arming the Mujahedeen.
JAY: When I interviewed Brzezinski-and if people reading this want to go, later, and watch my Brzezinski interview-his major point was we may have helped facilitate the Russians moving in to Afghanistan, but the resistance was spontaneous, and they really would have invaded anyway, so all we did is sort of speed up the process-and by doing that he means arming the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan so that it became such a threat to this pro-Russian Afghan government that the Russians had to come in. What do you make of that? That's really, I think, their basic story.
FITZGERALD: Well, you know, there are other sources of information besides Mr. Brzezinski. He's trying to downplay his own personal involvement in it. And there are others. I mean, Robert Gates is an example. Our current secretary of defense wrote in his own book, <i>From the Shadows</i>, that the United States was actually actively trying to instigate an involvement of the Soviets from 1978, 1979 on.
JAY: They actually use the phrase that we'll give the Soviets their own Vietnam.
FITZGERALD: Their own Vietnam. And he-actually, he talks extensively about the various issues that were going on inside the Pentagon and the CIA about what would be the benefit of having the Soviets invade Afghanistan. In fact, he gives that question out, or that question goes out to one of his people, and the guy comes back about a month later, and he said there's no downside to this at all. He said, we get to look great in the-the Americans get to look great in the Islamic world; we get to badmouth the Soviets wherever they are; we can use this as a propaganda heyday. And actually, too, if you look into the archives-you can get these archives, too; the Wilson Center is an example-you can look at what Brezhnev and Kosygin and the various people in the Politburo were talking about, from 1978 up until the Soviet invasion, and they're scratching their heads, saying, we can't figure this thing out at all. At one point, one of these people says it reads like a detective novel, what's going on in Afghanistan. Now, you had, of course, Hafizullah Amin, the man who eventually was overthrown by the Soviets, was definitely perceived by the Russians as being an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. The US's own ambassador, Adolph Dubs, was so convinced that Hafizullah Amin was a Central Intelligence Agent that he actually went to his own agency chief at the embassy, station chief at the embassy, and demanded information as to whether he was. Of course his chief said no, he's not working for us. But they put out the perception with propaganda, got the KGB and the GRU
to believe that Amin was in fact a CIA agent. And as things got worse, as the Shah's-as the conditions in Iran, as an example, worsened, the Soviets really began to believe that the United States was going to invade Iran and then push into Afghanistan, and Hafizullah Amin was going to be the means by which they were going to do that. So that was their thinking. They got rattled. They voted I think it was five times against invading Afghanistan. And then finally they said, look it, the generals came forward-Paul Warnke told us this; the man who negotiated the SALT II treaty told us personally-he said the Russians, the military leadership, came to the Politburo and said, look it, you know, we're not getting anywhere with the United States; SALT isn't going to be ratified by the Congress; the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that was signed by President Carter is not going to be ratified. He said, we can't go anywhere; we've got nothing to lose by going into Afghanistan.
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