I didn't need to rely on The New York Times to tell me what was going on in Afghanistan. As the first American journalist to risk the wrath of the Reagan administration's newly installed neoconservative foreign policy by bringing a news crew to Kabul in 1981, I was one of only a handful of Americans who knew the score. The United States was backing Muslim guerillas that were burning down schools, specifically for girls and killing local officials regardless of whether they were Communist or not. The Gelb article made clear that in collaboration with the Saudis, Egyptians, Chinese, Iranians and Pakistanis, the "bleeders" inside the Reagan administration were upping the ante in order to "draw more and more Soviet troops into Afghanistan," while at the same time claiming to pursue "a negotiated settlement to the war." It was not obvious from the Gelb article how the United States could be escalating a conflict in Afghanistan in 1983 while at the same time negotiating a settlement. Also missing from the article was any indication that the administration's policy was a fundamental contradiction.
That spring of 1983 we had invited Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project to return with us to Kabul to unwrap this riddle of why the UN negotiations were getting nowhere. Contracted to ABC Nightline, Roger met with the Kremlin's chief Afghan specialist who'd flown down from Moscow and told him point blank, "We want to get out. Give us six months to save face and we'll leave the Afghans to solve their own problems." Upon his return Roger expected his discovery would be greeted with relief. Instead he found that "negotiated settlement" was only a fig leaf for escalating the war. The mainstream media was just beginning to ramp up a propaganda campaign, which would become known as Charlie Wilson's War, to drive support for keeping the Soviets pinned down in their own Vietnam while bleeding Sima Wali's Afghanistan to death.
The American people expect the full story from their "free press" and the Constitution demands that the press serve the people and not the bureaucracy. The New York Times needs to get its mission straight lest it sacrifice its credibility to the very thing it claims to stand against. Left wing Afghan Communists cannot be magically transformed into right wing Pakistani Taliban. The United States is not the Soviet Union and The New York Times should stop behaving as if it is Pravda.
Copyright - 2017 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire andThe Voice . Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk
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