[Peace-discuss] FW: CIA Destroyed Afghanistan's First Progressive Government

[David Johnson]

This article is a little long, but it is an EXCELLENT  well documented
history of why were in the middle of all this bullshit in the Middle East
today.

 

David J.

 

 

CIA Destroyed Afghanistan’s First Progressive Government

Description: Blackwater Chief Executive Erik Prince holds a photograph of
the remains of a blown up vehicle in Iraq while testifying before the House
Oversight and Government Reform Committee on security contracting in Iraq
and Afghanistan on Capitol Hill in Washington

Educate! <https://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/>  Afghanistan
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/afghanistan/> , Imperialism
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/imperialism/> , Wars and Militarism
<https://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/>  
By Professor John Ryan, www.informationclearinghouse.info
<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40922.htm> 
February 9th, 2015

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Terrorists or “Freedom Fighters”? Recruited by the CIA

Blackwater Chief Executive Erik Prince holds a photograph of the remains of
a blown up vehicle in Iraq while testifying before the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee on security contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan
on Capitol Hill in Washington, October 2, 2007. Blackwater, under
investigation over deadly incidents in Iraq, defended its role on Tuesday,
but lawmakers took aim at the company’s actions in a Sept. 16 shooting in
which 11 Iraqis were killed. REUTERS/Larry Downing    (UNITED STATES)

The barbarous phenomenon we recently witnessed in France has roots that go
back to at least 1979 when the mujahedeen made their appearance in
Afghanistan. At that time their ire was directed at the leftist Taraki
government that had come into power in April of 1978. This government’s
ascension to power was a sudden and totally indigenous happening – with
equal surprise to both the USA and the USSR.

In April of 1978 the Afghan army deposed the country’s government because of
its oppressive measures, and then created a new government, headed by a
leftist, Nur Mohammad Taraki, who had been a writer, poet and professor of
journalism at the University of Kabul. Following this, for a brief period of
time, Afghanistan had a progressive secular government, with broad popular
support. As I pointed out in an earlier publication, this government “. . .
enacted progressive reforms and gave equal rights to women. It was in the
process of dragging the country into the 20th century, and as British
political scientist Fred Halliday stated in May 1979 (1), ‘probably more has
changed in the countryside over the last year than in two centuries since
the state was established.’”

The Taraki government’s first course of action was to declare non-alignment
in foreign affairs and to affirm a commitment to Islam within a secular
state. Among the much needed reforms, women were given equal rights, and
girls were to go to school and be in the same classroom as boys. Child
marriages and feudal dowry payments were banned. Labour unions were
legalized, and some 10,000 people were released from prisons. Within a short
time hundreds of schools and medical clinics were built in the countryside.

The landholding system hadn’t changed much since the feudal period; more
than three-quarters of the land was owned by landlords who composed only 3
percent of the rural population. Reforms began on September 1, 1978 by the
abolition all debts owed by farmers – landlords and moneylenders had charged
up to 45 percent interest. A program was being developed for major land
reform, and it was expected that all farm families (including landlords)
would be given the equivalent of equal amounts of land. (2)

What happened to this progressive government? In brief, it was undermined by
the CIA and the mujahedeen, which triggered a series of events that
destroyed the country – and ironically led to the disaster of September 11,
2001 in the USA and to the present chaos and tragedy in Afghanistan.

Even before the CIA got involved, as would be expected, the rich landlords
and mullahs objected to not only land reform but to all the reforms. Most of
the 250,000 mullahs were rich landlords who in their sermons told people
that only Allah could give them land, and that Allah would object to giving
women equal rights or having girls go to school. But the reforms were
popular, so these reactionary elements left for Pakistan, as “refugees.”
With assistance from Pakistan, they proceeded to conduct raids on the Afghan
countryside where they burned clinics and schools, and if they found
teachers teaching girls, they would kill the teachers, often disembowelling
them in the presence of the children – to instill fear and panic in the
population.

Although having no right to interfere in another country’s affairs, the USA
viewed the new government as being Marxist and was determined to subvert it.
At first unofficially, but officially after July 3, 1979 with President
Carter’s authorization, the CIA, along with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, began
to provide military aid and training to the Muslim extremists, who became
known as the mujahedeen and “freedom fighters.”

In addition, the CIA recruited Hafizullah Amin, an Afghan Ph.D. student in
the USA, and got him to act as a hard-line Marxist. He successfully worked
his way up in the Afghan government and in September of 1979 he carried out
a coup, and had Taraki killed. With Amin in charge, he jailed thousands of
people and undermined the army and discredited the government. To ward off
the thousands of well-armed mujahedeen invaders, many being foreign
mercenaries, Amin was forced by his government to invite some Soviet
troops.(3) Shortly afterwards, Amin was killed and was replaced as president
by Babrak Karmal, a former member of the Taraki government who had been in
exile in Czechoslovakia. Although still clouded by cold war politics and
uncertain history, Karmal “invited” the USSR to send in thousands of troops
to deal with the mujahedeen forces. What’s not widely known is that the USA
through the CIA had been actively involved in Afghan affairs for at least a
year, and it was in response to this that the Soviets arrived on the scene.

As I stated some years ago:

“The advent of Soviet troops on Afghan soil tragically set the stage for the
eventual destruction of the country. Zbigniew Brzezinski, president Carter’s
National Security Advisor, afterwards bragged that he had convinced Carter
to authorize the CIA to set a trap for the Russian bear and to give the USSR
the taste of a Vietnam war.(4) Brzezinski saw this as a golden opportunity
to fire up the zeal of the most reactionary Muslim fanatics — to have them
declare a jihad (holy war) on the atheist infidels who defiled Afghan soil —
and to not only expel them but to pursue them and “liberate” the
Muslim-majority areas of the USSR. And for the next 10 years, with an
expenditure of billions of dollars from the USA and Saudi Arabia, and with
the recruitment of thousands of non-Afghan Muslims into the jihad (including
Osama bin Laden), this army of religious zealots laid waste to the land and
people of Afghanistan.”

Sending in troops to Afghanistan was a colossal blunder on the part of the
USSR. If the Soviets had simply provided weapons for the Afghan government,
they may have survived the “barbarians at the gates” – because ordinary
Afghan people were not fanatics and most of them had supported the
government’s progressive reforms.

Being unable to entice enough Afghanis for this war, the CIA, Saudi Arabia
and Pakistan recruited about 35,000 Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic
countries to conduct the war against the Afghan government and the Soviet
forces. The CIA covertly trained and sponsored these foreign warriors, hence
the fundamentalism that emerged in Afghanistan is a CIA construct. Although
the mujahedeen were referred to as “freedom fighters,” they committed
horrific atrocities and were terrorists of the first order.

As reported in US media, a “favourite tactic” of the mujahedeen was “to
torture victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their noses, ears, and
genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another,” leading to “a
slow, very painful death.” The article describes Russian prisoners caged
like animals and “living lives of indescribable horror.” (5) Another
publication cites a journalist from the Far Eastern Economic Review
reporting that “one [Soviet] group was killed, skinned and hung up in a
butcher’s shop”. (6)

Despite these graphic reports, President Reagan continued to refer to the
mujahedeen as “freedom fighters” and in 1985 he invited a group of them to
Washington where he entertained them in the Whitehouse. Afterwards, while
introducing them to the media, he stated, “These gentlemen are the moral
equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” (7)

Surely Soviet soldiers were every bit as human as American soldiers – just
suppose it had been American soldiers who had been skinned alive.  Would
President Reagan in such an instance still refer to the mujahedeen as
“freedom fighters” . . . or might he have referred to them correctly as
terrorists, just as the Soviets had done? Indeed, how these actions are
portrayed depends on whose ox is gored.

The Soviets succumbed to their Vietnam and withdrew their troops in February
of 1989, but the war raged on, with continuing American military aid, but it
took until April of 1992 before the Afghan Marxist government was finally
defeated. Then for the next four years the mujahedeen destroyed much of
Kabul and killed some 50,000 people as they fought amongst themselves and
conducted looting and rape campaigns until the Taliban routed them and
captured Kabul in September of 1996. The Taliban, trained as fanatic Muslims
in Pakistan, “liberated” the country from the mujahedeen, but then
established an atrocious reactionary regime. Once in power the Taliban
brought in a reign of Islamist terror, especially on women. They imposed an
ultra-sectarian version of Islam, closely related to Wahhabism, the ruling
creed in Saudi Arabia.

The US “communist paranoia” and their policy to undermine the USSR was such
that they supported and recruited the most reactionary fanatic religious
zealots on the earth — and used them as a proxy army to fight communism and
the USSR — in the course of which Afghanistan and its people were destroyed.
But it didn’t end there. The mujahedeen metastasized and took on a life of
their own, spreading to various parts of the Muslim world. They went on to
fight the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, with the full knowledge and support of
the USA. But then, ironically, having defeated what they called Soviet
imperialism, these “freedom fighters” turned their sights on what they
perceive to be American imperialism, particularly its support for Israel and
its attacks on Muslim lands.

And so a creation of the USA’s own making turned on them – the progeny of
Reagan’s wonderful “freedom fighters” lashed out and America experienced
September 11, 2001. But what have the US government and most American people
learned from this? From their inflated opinion of themselves as the world’s
“exceptional” and “indispensible” nation, as President Obama arrogantly
keeps reminding the world, neither the American government nor its people
have ever connected the dots. Is there anything in their recent history that
could explain 9/11 to them? In a nutshell, it never occurs to them that if
the USA had left the progressive Afghan Taraki government alone, there would
have been no army of mujahedeen, no Soviet intervention, no war that
destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and hence no September 11 tragedy
in the USA.

Instead of reflecting on the possible causes of what occurred, and learning
from this, the USA immediately resorted to war, to be followed by a series
of additional wars, which brings to mind Marx’s sardonic comment in which he
corrected Hegel’s observation that history repeats itself, adding that it
does so “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

In response to the USA’s demand for Osama bin Laden, the Afghan Taliban
government offered to turn him over to an international tribunal, but they
wanted to see evidence linking him to 9/11.(8) The USA had no such evidence
and bin Laden denied having anything to do with 9/11.(9) To corroborate bin
Laden’s denial, the FBI has in its records that “. . . the FBI has no hard
evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.”(10) Right till the present time, the
FBI has never changed its position on this.

As became known later, the 9/11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany by an
Al-Qaeda cell so the 9/11 attack had nothing to do with Afghanistan. Despite
the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and that the USA
had no evidence linking Afghanistan or bin Laden to the 9/11 attack, the US
launched a war on Afghanistan, and of course without UN approval, so this
was an illegal war.

Even if the USA wanted to depose the Taliban government, there was no need
for a war. In rare unanimity, all the anti-Taliban Afghan groups pleaded
with the US government not to bomb or invade the country. (11) They pointed
out that to remove the Taliban government all that the USA had to do was to
force Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to stop funding the Taliban, and shortly
after the regime would collapse on its own. So the USA could have had its
regime change without destroying the country and killing hundreds of
thousands of Afghanis as well as thousands of its own troops, and having the
war continue from 2001 into 2015 . . . America’s longest war. If this is not
farce, what is it?

And the farce continued. Once in war mode, in 2003 the US launched another
illegal war, this time on Iraq, a war based on outright lies and deception –
a war crime of the first order. This war was even more tragic. It killed
over a million Iraqis, basically destroyed the country, and destroyed a
secular society, replacing it with on-going religious fratricide. In the
course of this war, the Afghan al-Qaeda moved into Iraq and served as a
model for young Iraqis to fight the American invaders. Although the American
forces conquered Iraq quickly, they were faced with unrelenting guerrilla
warfare, which eventually led to their departure in 2011. During these years
the Americans jailed thousands of young Iraqi men, and inadvertently turned
most of them into fervent jihadists. Prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Bucca
had an incendiary effect on the ongoing insurgency, but now these jihadists
weren’t called “freedom fighter” – they lost this endearing appellation in
Afghanistan when American soldiers replaced Soviet soldiers.

As if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t enough, in the spring of 2011
the US surreptitiously launched the beginnings of a further war, long in
planning, and this one was on Syria. Somehow “spontaneously” there was an
uprising of “freedom fighters” whose objective was to overthrow Syria’s
secular government, which displeased the USA. Right from the beginning it
was suspected that the USA was behind the uprising, since as early as 2007
General Wesley Clark stated in an interview that in 2001, a few weeks after
9/11, he was told by an American high ranking general about plans “to take
out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” Also in 2007,
Seymour Hersh, in a much cited article, stated that “the Saudi government,
with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken
the government of President Bashir Assad of Syria.”

The so-called “Free Syrian Army” was a creation of the US and NATO, and its
objective was to provoke the Syrian police and army and once there was a
deployment of tanks and armored vehicles this would supposedly justify
outside military intervention under NATO’s mandate of “responsibility to
protect” – with the objective of doing to Syria what they had done to Libya.
However, with Russia’s veto at the UN this didn’t work out as planned.

To resolve this setback, the CIA, together with Saudi Arabia and Qatar,
proceeded to do exactly what had been done in Afghanistan – hordes of
foreign Salafist Muslim “freedom fighters” were brought into Syria for the
express purpose of overthrowing its secular government. With unlimited funds
and American weapons, the first mercenaries were Iraqi al-Qaeda who,
ironically, came into existence in the course of fighting the American army
in Iraq.  They were then followed by dozens of al-Qaeda’s other groups,
notably al-Nusra, with its plans to change Syria’s multi-racial secular
society into a Sunni Islamic state.

Right from the beginning of the uprising in Syria, the US was telling the
world that “Assad had to go” and that they were intervening by helping
“moderates” in the Free Syrian Army to overthrow the Syrian “regime.”
However, to no one’s surprise, the ineffective “moderate” Free Syrian Army
was soon inundated with Salafist Muslim groups who proceeded to launch a
series of terrorist attacks throughout Syria. The Syrian government
correctly identified these attacks as being the work of terrorists, but this
was dismissed by the mainstream media as propaganda. The fact that the
country was beset by suicide bombings and the beheading of soldiers,
civilians, journalists, aid workers, and public officials was simply
ignored.

Despite these reports, the USA insisted it was only providing “assistance”
to those who identified themselves as being part of the Free Syrian Army. As
reported in June 2012 by the New York Times, “CIA officers are operating
secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition
fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government

The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades,
ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the
Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including
Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar,
the officials said.”

In addition, after the Gaddafi Libyan government was deposed in August 2011
by al-Qaeda forces, supported by NATO bombing, the CIA arranged for the
transfer of Libyan weapons to Syrian rebels. As reported in the UK Times and
by Seymour Hersh, a Libyan ship docked in Turkey with 400 tonnes of
armaments, including forty SAM-7 surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles,
rocket-propelled grenades, and other munitions. Then in early 2013 a further
major arms shipment, known as the Great Croatian Weapons Airlift, consisted
of 3,000 tonnes of military weaponry from Croatia, Britain and France,
coordinated by the CIA. This was flown out of Zagreb, Croatia, in 75
transport planes to Turkey for distribution to “worthy” Syrian mercenaries.
In a further report, the New York Times (March 24, 2013) stated that it was
Saudi Arabia that paid for these weapons and that there were actually 160
military cargo flights.

Despite all the efforts of the USA, NATO, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to support
the various groups that formed the Free Syrian Army, Syrian government
forces continued to rout and defeat them. Moreover, many of these ‘moderate’
forces were defecting and joining militant jihadist groups. Then in early
2014 an apparently unknown military force appeared on the scene, seemingly
from “out of nowhere” and began to make spectacular military gains. It had a
number of names, one being the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) but
then it became simply the Islamic State (IS) or Daesh in Arabic. It got
worldwide attention when in a matter of days it took over a quarter of Iraq,
including the second largest city, Mosul – caused the Iraqi army to flee and
disintegrate, and threatened to attack Baghdad. Shortly after, the beheading
of two American journalists baited the US to once again send forces to Iraq
and to begin a bombing campaign on ISIS forces in both Iraq and Syria.

Before its attack on Iraq, ISIS already had a strong base in Syria, and then
with tanks and artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul, ISIS now
controls almost a third of Syria. Hence at present it covers an area almost
the size of Britain, with a population of about six million. ISIS does not
recognize the borders of Syria and Iraq and considers the area under its
control to be the frontiers of a Caliphate state with a militant vision of
Islam. This is the direct result of the desert storm of Saudi cash that has
been spent on global Wahhabi proselytizing and indoctrination, resulting in
a reactionary medieval, toxic “religion” – that has nothing to do with
legitimate Islam.

At the beginning, the “Islamic State” was nothing more than an appendage of
al-Qaeda – with al-Qaeda itself being directly armed, funded, and backed by
stalwart US allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the full support Turkey.
And behind all this was the desire of the USA and NATO to undermine and
destroy the secular government of Syria. As Patrick Cockburn stated in a
recent perceptive article,

”The foster parents of Isis and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and
Syria are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey.” He cites the former
head of MI6 saying that ‘Such things do not happen spontaneously.’ Cockburn
states further that “It’s unlikely the Sunni community as a whole in Iraq
would have lined up behind Isis without the support Saudi Arabia . . . .
Turkey’s role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia’s
in aiding Isis and other jihadi groups. Its most important action has been
to keep open its 510-mile border with Syria. This gave Isis, al-Nusra and
other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and
weapons. . . . Turkish military intelligence may have been heavily involved
in aiding Isis when it was reconstituting itself in 2011.”

Following its policy of trying to have full spectrum dominance in the world,
the US has not hesitated to support terrorist groups when it was in their
interests, e.g., the creation of the mujahedeen and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
While they fought the Soviets they were “freedom fighters,” but then came
the blowback of 9/11 . . . and they instantly became terrorists, resulting
in America’s “War on Terror.” The illegal war of aggression on and military
occupation of Iraq resulted in the creation of a resistance movement – a new
variant of al-Qaeda, viewed of course as terrorists. Then came the “attack”
on the Assad government in Syria, launched by American, NATO, Saudi, Qatar
and Turkish campaigns. At first it was in the guise of indigenous “freedom
fighters”, the Free Syrian Army, but when they made little headway,
additional “freedom fighters” appeared, in the form of al-Qaeda, in all its
varieties, culminating in ISIS. These erstwhile terrorists now became allies
in the campaign to depose Syria’s Assad government. Although Syria viewed
them correctly as foreign terrorists, their claims were largely ignored . .
. until two American journalists were beheaded.

At about the same time that the American journalists were beheaded there was
fierce fighting going on in Syria and wherever Syrian soldiers were captured
they were summarily executed, with many being beheaded, all this being
meticulously filmed. A large number of websites show this but one in
particular, entitled “Syrianfight: Documenting War Crimes in Syria” shows
dozens of gruesome execution scenes, including the mass execution in August
2014 of 220 Syrian soldiers near the Tabqa airbase. Just imagine if 220
American soldiers had been executed and beheaded what an outcry there would
have been. Instead, the mainstream media concentrated solely on the two
beheaded journalists, which indeed was an outrage, but where was the outrage
for the hundreds of beheaded Syrian soldiers? Basically, nothing was said
about what ISIS was doing in Syria.

Although there was outrage in the USA about what ISIS had done to two
American citizens, there was practically no soul searching about the cause
of this religious extremism and the possibility that this was just another
case of blowback from what the USA had done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and
Syria.

Not surprisingly, the USA’s response was to announce a series of air strikes
to “degrade” the capability of ISIS, but there were also to be “no boots on
the ground” so actually the military defeat of ISIS was left unresolved –
perhaps purposefully. In reality, the sudden military power of ISIS left the
West and its regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – with a
quandary: their official policy is to depose Assad, but ISIS is now the only
effective military force in Syria so if the Syrian government is deposed, it
would be ISIS that would fill the vacuum. So, was the invasion of Iraq in
2003 and the assault on Syria in 2011 going to result in the creation of a
powerful jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria? Under such a fanatic
Wahhabi regime, what would happen to the multicultural and multi-religious
society of Syria?

In the face of this stark reality, as summed up by Patrick Cockburn:

“. . . the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by
descending into fantasy. They pretend they are fostering a ‘third force’ of
moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and Isis, though in private
Western diplomats admit this group doesn’t really exist outside a few
beleaguered pockets.”

Moreover, as soon as such forces are trained and equipped great numbers of
them proceed to join al-Nusra or ISIS, e.g., 3,000 of them this past
January. But is there method behind this obvious delusion? Is it really the
intent of the US and its allies to bumble along and let ISIS proceed to
defeat the Syrian army? And once this fanatic Sunni Wahhabi regime takes
over Syria, is the next stage to be an attack on Shiite Iran, the next
Muslim country to be destroyed? The boots on the ground in such a venture
would be those of ISIS.

To counter this Machiavellian possibility, there has recently been evidence
that perhaps at some level there is the realization that the permanent
establishment of a fanatic Caliphate state with a militant vision of Islam
is perhaps not such a good idea. What until recently has seemed to be a
matter beyond the realm of possibility, there now appears evidence the US
may be prepared to actually deal with President Assad of Syria. As reported
in the New York Times (Jan. 15 and Jan. 19, 2015) the UN envoy for the
crisis in Syria is trying to convince the Syrian government and ISIS to
“freeze” the fighting on the ground, in area by area, and then somehow try
to end the war. President Assad has been receptive to the idea, but there
has been no response from ISIS. Also, on Russia’s initiative, a meeting is
taking place in Moscow to prepare for a conference that will try to resolve
the Syria crisis. The good news is that the US has become supportive of both
courses of action.

Another sign of encouragement has been the publication in Foreign Affairs
(Jan 27, 2015) of a lengthy wide-ranging interview with President Assad.
This is important for both the members of the US government and the American
public in general. Assad has stated that he would be prepared to meet with
anyone but not with “a puppet of Qatar or Saudi Arabia or any Western
country, including the United States, paid from the outside. It should be
Syrian.” Also he stated that any resolution that comes from a conference
would have to “go back to the people through a referendum” before it would
be adopted. What could be more democratic than such a procedure? Through
such a course of action Syria could retain its secular status and evolve
into a true democratic state.

Hence despite the viciousness of the ongoing war in Syria, these events
offer a glimmer of hope that might end this foreign-inspired conflagration
that has left over 220,000 dead, a million wounded and millions more
displaced. But if it turns out that ISIS will refuse to end its attacks on
Syria, the rational thing for the US to do would be to stop its campaign to
overthrow the Syrian government and to then cooperate with Syria to defeat
the ISIS forces. With coordinated US and Syrian air strikes, the Syrian army
would provide the necessary “boots on the ground” to defeat Saudi Arabia’s
Wahhabi gift to this area. But is this simply beyond the realm of
possibility?

A short summary is in order. First, to what extent are the US and its allies
responsible for the creation of ISIS and its co-partner al-Qaeda as well as
its various spin-off groups? At the very beginning, we must recall that it
was the USA that created the mujahedeen and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to fight
the Soviets, and later got the blowback of 9/11. It was the US invasion of
Iraq that created al-Qaeda as a resistance movement. It was the USA that
fomented the uprising in Syria and when their Free Syrian Army was facing
defeat, to the rescue came Iraqi al-Qaeda, with unlimited financial support
and direction from the USA’s allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and tactical
assistance from Turkey. And it’s this al-Qaeda that metastasized into ISIS.
Also, the US has generated additional enemies through its drone campaign,
especially in Yemen and Pakistan.

But is this all there is to this story? An offshoot from it is the recent
attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo magazine that left 12 people dead,
including its editor and prominent cartoonists. It was apparently done by
men connected to al-Qaeda who had been outraged by the magazine’s derogatory
cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. The attack sparked a massive outcry,
with millions in France and across the world taking to the streets to
support freedom of the press behind the rallying cry of “Je suis Charlie,”
or “I am Charlie.”

It’s instructive to put this matter in historical context. In Nazi Germany,
there was an anti-Semitic newspaper called Der Stürmer, noted for its morbid
caricatures of Jews. Its editor, Julius Streicher, was put on trial at
Nürnberg and hanged because of his stories and cartoons about Jews. In 1999
during its bombing campaign on Serbia, NATO deliberately bombed a Radio/TV
station in Belgrade, killing 16 journalists. The US bombed the Al Jazeera
headquarters in Kabul in 2001 and in 2003 Al Jazeera was bombed in Baghdad,
killing journalists. In its attacks on Gaza, Israel has deliberately killed
a large number of journalists.

The issue of “freedom of the press” was hardly raised in the above instances
– certainly there were no mass street protests. In the case of Charlie
Hebdo, this was not a model of freedom of speech. In reality, Charlie
Hebdo’s political pornography of Muslims is hardly any different from the
way Jews were portrayed in Der Stürmer.

The US and its various allies have launched wars, death and destruction in
many Muslim countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Gaza, Yemen, Syria. To add
to this, Saudi Arabia has apparently spent more than $100 billion trying to
propagate its fanatical Wahhabism, a relatively small sect that is despised
in the Muslim world at large, but which has nevertheless tarnished the
Muslim image. And because of this, for some people in the West it’s somehow
become acceptable to degrade, demean, humiliate, mock and insult Muslims. It
was in this spirit that the cartoonists chose to mock Mohammad, under the
guise of freedom of expression. It’s noteworthy that Charlie Hebdo had once
fired a journalist because of one line he had written that was criticized by
a Zionist lobby, but when it comes to Muslims, it was open season on them.
In a judgment issued by US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
freedom of speech does not give one the right to “falsely shout fire in a
crowded theater.” Also there is a provision in the US constitution that
prohibits publishing “fighting words” which could result in violence. All
this was ignored by the editors and publishers of Charlie Hebdo. The penalty
should not have been death but they bear considerable responsibility for
what happened. Sadly, the West’s uncritical embrace of the Charlie Hebdo
caricatures was because the drawings were directed at and ridiculed Muslims.
There is no question that the “desperate and despised people” of today are
Muslims.

When ISIS beheaded two American journalists, there was outrage and
denunciation throughout the West, but when the same ISIS beheaded hundreds
of Syrian soldiers, and meticulously filmed these war crime, this was hardly
reported anywhere. In addition, almost from the very beginning of the Syrian
tragedy, al-Qaeda groups have been killing and torturing not only soldiers
but police, government workers and officials, journalists, Christian church
people, aid workers, women and children, as well as suicide bombings in
market places. All this was covered up in the mainstream media, and when the
Syrian government correctly denounced this as terrorism, this was ignored or
denounced as “Assad’s propaganda.”

So why weren’t these atrocities reported in the western media? If this was
reported it would have run counter to Washington’s proclaimed agenda that
“Assad has to go,” so the mainstream media followed the official line. There
is nothing new in this. History shows that the media supported every
Western-launched war, insurrection and coup – the wars on Vietnam,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and coups such as those on Iran, Guatemala,
Indonesia, Chile, and most recently in Ukraine.

And so when terrorist acts are carried out against “our enemies” they are
often viewed as the actions of “freedom fighters”, but when the same types
of acts are directed at “us” they are denounced as “terrorism.”  So it all
depends on whose ox is gored.

John Ryan, Ph.D., Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar,
University of Winnipeg.  jryan13 at mymts.net

Notes:

1.    Fred Halliday, “Revolution in Afghanistan,” New Left Review, No. 112,
pp. 3-44, 1978.

2.    I was in Afghanistan in November 1978 working on an agricultural
research project while on sabbatical leave and all these reforms and
government measures were explained to me at considerable length by the Dean
of Agriculture and some of the professors during a lengthy session at Kabul
University. Halliday (cited above) also reported on the land-redistribution
program.

3.    Washington Post, December 23, 1979, p.A8. Soviet troops had started
arriving in Afghanistan on December 8, to which the article states: “There
was no charge [by the State Department] that the Soviets had invaded
Afghanistan, since the troops apparently were invited.”

4.    “How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen”: Interview of Zbigniew
Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76
http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

5.    Washington Post, January 13, 1985.

6.    John Fullerton, The Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan, (London), 1984.

7.    Eqbal Ahmad, “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours,” (A Presentation at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, October 12,
1993)http://www.sangam.org/ANALYSIS/Ahmad.htm; Cullen Murphy, “The Gold
Standard: The quest for the Holy Grail of equivalence,”Atlantic Monthly,
January 2002 http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200201/murphy

8.    “Taliban repeats call for negotiations,” CNN.com, October 2, 2001,
includes comment: “Afghanistan’s ruling Taiban repeated its demand for
evidence before it would hand over suspected terrorist leader Osama bin
Ladin.”http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/10/02/ret.afghan.t
aliban/; Noam Chomsky, “The War on Afghanistan,” Znet, December 30, 2001
http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/targets/1230chomsky.htm

9.    “Bin Laden says he wasn’t behind attacks,” CNN.com, September 17,
2001.http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.binladen.denial/

10.                       Ed Haas, “FBI says, it has ‘No hard evidence
connecting Bin Laden to 9/11’,” Muckraker Report, June 6,
2006.http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html

11.                       Noam Chomsky, “The War on Afghanistan,” Znet,
December 30, 2001 http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/targets/1230chomsky.htm;
Barry Bearak, “Leaders of the Old Afghanistan Prepare for the New,” NYT,
October 25, 2001; John Thornhill and Farhan Bokhari, “Traditional leaders
call for peace jihad,” FT, October 25, 2001; “Afghan peace assembly call,”
FT, October 26, 2001; John Burns, “Afghan Gathering in Pakistan Backs Future
Role for King,” NYT, October 26, 2001; Indira Laskhmanan, “1,000 Afghan
leaders discuss a new regime, BG, October 25, 26, 2001.

 

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