By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
In 1977 Afghanistan was transforming itself into an enlightened, modern and democratic society. Eyewitness accounts from the 1960s and 1970s document rapid changes embraced by Afghan men and women, across a broad spectrum of society. Despite its poverty, Afghanistan had been independent in its foreign policy and self-sufficient in many areas, including food production, in a vivid illustration of what life is like when Afghans control their own state. It was also the year that Zbigniew Brzezinski stepped into the role as National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski quickly inaugurated a plan to lure the Soviet Union into an invasion of Afghanistan, a plan that was fulfilled on December 27, 1979. The blowback from Brzezinski's scheme, even after almost 40 years, has delivered another dagger into the heart of America's soul as well as the LGBT and Muslim global community.
In 1983 our press team returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher, for ABC's Nightline. Our aim was to establish the credibility of American claims. We discovered, from high-level Soviet officials, that the Kremlin wanted desperately to abandon the war, but the Reagan administration was dragging its feet. From the moment he entered office, Reagan and his administration demanded that the Soviets withdraw their forces, at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert actions that prevented them from leaving. Though lacking in facts and dripping in right wing ideology, this hypocritical foreign-policy campaign was embraced by the entire American political spectrum and continues to be willfully-unexamined by America's mainstream media.
At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in 1995, a high-level group of former US and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the US had assigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why did the US choose an ideologically-biased position when there were any number of verifiable fact-based explanations for why the Soviets invaded? To former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one specific individual. "Brzezinski's name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole." Turner said. "[T]he fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important."
What Turner was suggesting in 1995 was that Brzezinski's well-known Russophobia led him to take advantage of a Soviet miscalculation. But it wasn't until the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview that Brzezinski boasted that he had provoked the invasion, by getting Carter to authorize a presidential finding to intentionally suck the Soviets in, six months before Moscow considered invading. Yet, despite Brzezinski's admission, Washington's entire political spectrum continued to embrace his original false narrative, that the Soviets were embarked on world conquest.
From its origins in 1977 as a covert program to destabilize the Soviet Union, through ethnic violence and radical Islam in Afghanistan, Soviet Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya, a line can be drawn to the Orlando massacre shooter. The theories, practices and policies implemented by Brzezinski, prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, have found their logical evolutionary step, and the violence continues.
If it hadn't been for Brzezinski's scheme, Omar Mateen, the man believed to be solely responsible for the June 14 massacre, most likely would have been born in Afghanistan 29 years ago, instead of the United States. We will never know what kind of man Mateen might have become had he been born and raised in the home of his ancestors. One thing is sure; the time has come for Americans to question whether the legacy of Brzezinski's obsession with conquering the world at any cost should continue to be an American dream as well.
Copyright 2016 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 and The Voice. For more information visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk. gould.fitz