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Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice,a novel.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul's television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, they found themselves in the midst of a controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in 1981, brought them into the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the people inside Soviet-occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast on the evening news.
Following their news story for the CBS Evening News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 they returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher. Arriving in Kabul that spring they were told that the Russians wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. But the story that President Carter called, "the greatest threat to peace since the second World War" had already been written by America's pundits was not about to change the script.
As the first American journalists to get behind the official propaganda on the war, they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the US defined itself under the veil of superpower confrontation. But as they pursued the reasons behind the propaganda, they were drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions.
It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when they were working on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that they began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay crucial documents were declassified. Over the next decade they trailed a labyrinth of clues to find a likeness in Washington's official policy towards Afghanistan - in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark - whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It was a likeness that grows more visible as America's involvement deepens.
By 1998, as the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines, they started collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. They contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project. In 2002 they filmed Wali's first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The film they produced about Wali's journey home, The Woman in Exile Returns, gave audiences the chance to discover the message of one of Afghanistan's most articulate voices and her hopes for her people.
In the years since 9/11 much has happened to bring their story into sharp focus. Their experience at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism could become a model for restoring a healthy and vibrant dialogue to American democracy. Ultimately, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American emp
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 A Medieval Nightmare Finds a Home in the American Way of Making War (1 comments)
In a 1972 New Yorker article Senator J. William Fulbright traced the origins of the devastation caused by Vietnam to the intellectual corruption of the Cold War. But his shock was in realizing that the actual thinking behind the Cold War and the Truman Doctrine was not based on facts or logic or even the metrics of modern warfare, but on a medieval ideological methodology that in effect defied reason.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 A Love Fest In The Hindu Kush (1 comments)
During the 8 years of the Bush administration's "war on terror," Pakistan pretended to be an ally and the U.S. pretended to believe them. Now the U.S. pays for its Cold War policy-blindness and Bush-era delusion with the blood of its soldiers and diplomats as well as its tax dollars to service a hopelessly failed policy and a Pakistani military that acts more like an enemy than an ally.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011 America's Financial Armageddon and Afghanistan (1 comments)
Left off the front pages during the recent obsession with the debt crisis, Afghanistan has lurched back onto the scene in ways that are reminiscent of the Soviet collapse of two decades ago. After ten years of war, it seems Washington not only continues to lack a comprehensive understanding of Afghanistan, but it lacks an understanding of its own role in creating both the economic and political catastrophe it now faces.
Thursday, July 14, 2011 The biggest Jaw-Dropping Journalism Scandal of all? (1 comments)
Without any serious reflection by the media on the consequences of funding and training extremists for the purpose of defeating the Soviet Union, the American media not only missed the deeper story, but ignored where the Afghan story had been corrupted for political purposes.
Saturday, May 28, 2011 Crossing Bones at Zero Line (1 comments)
Obama has embraced the largely discredited 1992 program for America's global dominance known as the Defense Planning Guidance crafted under another Bonesman, President George Herbert Walker Bush. It was assumed that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States would rethink the need for war. Instead, the '92 Defense Planning Guidance set the stage for a whole new era of confrontation.
Sunday, May 15, 2011 Mission Accomplished? (1 comments)
For now Washington will bask in the warm glow of triumphalism, just the way it did following the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Monday, October 25, 2010 What the Afghans Want (1 comments)
Reconciliation itself isn't the problem. Giving reconciled criminals a legitimate place in the Afghan government who are paid by foreign interests, are directed by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and have never been held to account for their crimes against the Afghan people is the problem.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010 Thinking outside the box? No! Throw the Box Away! (1 comments)
Breaking this chain of institutional thinking is essential to solving the Afghan problem. But most suggestions to "think outside the box" aren't really intended to create new thinking as much as they are to try and maintain the same old thinking with a different approach. What is needed now is a wholly different way of thinking and a whole new group to do it.
Saturday, September 25, 2010 Decrypting the Shadow behind Hamid Karzai (1 comments)
To both Ruttig and Rohrabacher, Khalilzad's ultimate crime like the U.S. manipulation of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in Vietnam was that his corruption of the Karzai regime had created so much internal chaos that no amount of outside effort could undo it. Yet the idea that chaos, as a form of extreme social engineering, may have actually been the plan cannot be ignored.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010 Is WikiLeaks the antidote to the Washington K Street Kool-Aid (2 comments)
Had the documents amassed an equal amount of evidence that Iran or Syria were working with Al Qaeda to carry out attacks on American troops in Afghanistan, the bombers would have been warming up on the flight decks by sundown. But when it came to Pakistan, there was only restraint.
Friday, July 16, 2010 America's DNA profile has been all over Afghanistan since 1973 (1 comments)
The CIA's secret mission became entangled with Pakistan's support for Afghanistan's small core of foreign-trained right wing Islamic extremists. Thanks to President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, this entanglement blossomed into a marriage following the 1978 Marxist coup and a full-blown commitment to holy war and the Islamization of Pakistan - long before the Soviet invasion of 1979.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 Afghanistan, the Saudi Arabia of lithium? (2 comments)
But the most revealing quote in the Pentagon report wasn't so much that Afghanistan did indeed contain a vast wealth of minerals or even that the U.S. had carelessly overlooked a vast source of wealth for an impoverished nation. No. The key to understanding the report was framed by the reference that "Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium,'" and Saudi Arabia is where the real story behind the headlines begins.
Sunday, June 6, 2010 Thinking the Unthinkable in the Aftermath of Kandahar
The Battle for Kandahar & The "Perceptions" of American Victory
What can the world expect of American policy in the aftermath of what promises to be an even larger opium-inspired tea party in Kandahar? And what happens if the U.S. achieves a military victory, but fails to address the gaping political vacuum necessary to keep the Taliban from returning?
Monday, May 17, 2010 The Ill-Logic of the U.S. Predator Drone Campaign (1 comments)
"Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people's houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn't it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war."
Thursday, May 6, 2010 Crossing Zero, The Vanishing Point for the American Empire (5 comments)
A funny thing happened to the United States when the Obama administration decided to cross Zero line and bring the Afghan war into Pakistan. Instead of resolution, after nearly two years into the administration's AfPak strategy, it would seem the gap between reality and the Washington beltway has only widened.
Thursday, April 15, 2010 AfghanWarlord Threatens Boston-Area Experts on Afghanistan with Legal Action
"How is it possible that the Obama administration can allow the representative of a world-class terrorist to threaten an American journalist in America with impunity? This illustrates the contempt this warlord has for America's democratic process.
Friday, April 2, 2010 Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Messiah of Darkness (2 comments)
The history of turning warlords like Hekmatyar to the good has consistently proven to be nothing but bad for the Afghan people
Monday, March 22, 2010 Warlords were Brought into the Afghan Government by the Bush Administration in 2001 (1 comments)
According to a March 16 Reuters article by Peter Graff Afghanistan's government "has enacted into law a blanket pardon for war crimes and human rights abuse carried out before 2001." But "this law passed with a two-thirds majority." "Parliament is made up largely of lawmakers from former armed groups, some accused by rights groups and ordinary Afghans of war crimes."
