The #AfghanistanWar began 40 yrs ago when the US decided it could not tolerate the leftist, Soviet-allied Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. To bait a USSR invasion, the CIA began Operation Cyclone, which financed the Afghan “mujahideen,” a group of radical jihadist militants.
Many pundits believe the Soviets invaded Afghanistan first. In reality, Operation Cyclone predated the invasion by six months. The general goal, confirmed years later by Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to bait the USSR into its own Vietnam quagmire.
Operation Cyclone was top secret and wildly expensive, one of the CIA’s longest and costliest operations to date. It began in 1979 and cost $675,000. Funding soon ballooned to $20-30 million per year through the 80s during the Soviet occupation, rising to $690 million in 1987.
During Operation Cyclone the CIA facilitated the manufacture and delivery of billions of dollars (and thousands of tons) of munitions to the mujahideen. This influx of money, arms and training assisted greatly in the rise of other rebel groups, of note Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
To be clear, the “Afghan mujahideen” does not refer to a specific ethnic or regional paramilitary group. It consisted of various groups across many ethnic and ideological lines. The common thread was a commitment to fundamentalist Islam and, more importantly, anti-communism.
Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the US and Saudis continued financing mujahideen fighters during the Afghan Civil War. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban became major factions during this conflict, the latter taking over the government from 1996 till the US invasion in 2001.
You can draw your own conclusions of course. The purpose of the above is to provide some useful facts about the history of the #AfghanistanWar, context absent from the analysis of a corporate press united in its goal to maintain US occupation for multinational corporate gain.
The Soviet-Afghan War was horribly violent and the Soviets carry blame as well. This thread focuses on CIA actions because they are consistently omitted from mainstream media accounts despite their continuing to haunt the Afghan people long since the USSR vanished from the earth.
Politicians and mainstream media pundits are dogshit at a baseline intellectual level for never inquiring as to what led to the creation of Hamas in the first place.
Real debate on Israel/Palestine would require a press that attempted to offer a historically coherent, non-nationalist view of the region. Our press draws false equivalencies between, e.g., IDF violence and the Palestinian response, so as to impoverish quality debate on purpose.
This is not unique to coverage on Israel/Palestine. Our press runs daily cover for the US State Dept., privatized medicine, a corporate-bought election system, etc. Wherever honest popular debate might result in too radical of a conclusion, corporate media is there to temper it.
Established political/corporate powers have a vested interest in maintaining this fiction that the Democratic Party – an organized criminal syndicate of warmongers and technocratic capitalists – represents the "left," and therefore everyone who opposes it must be the "right."
The GOP and GOP-adjacent media networks (Fox in particular) play their part as well; by framing the Democratic Party as the "far left," viewers start to associate ecological preservation and redistributive economic policies with the stupid, destructive politics of neoliberalism.
What we are left with is a nation engaging in meaningless debate on false terms while the mechanisms of corporate capital continue funneling labor value upward and turn millionaires into billionaires and jungles into parking lots while dipshits argue on Facebook about Dr. Suess.
US military propaganda loses its grip on your mind the second you consider the last time you were threatened by a terrorist vs. the last time you were threatened by a health insurance corporation.
One of these threats (the health insurance corporation) is a daily reality in American lives, killing tens of thousands of us a year. Yet the government spends nothing going to war with BlueCross executives, and trillions maintaining endless warfare against “terrorism.”
The answer to people who pay attention to this stuff is obvious: military leaders and corporations created anti-US terrorism through their century of war crimes and now use it as a moral smokescreen to keep people from examining the violence we levy against innocent people.
Joe Biden's State Department just approved its first weapons deal, part of which will send $85 million worth of Raytheon missiles to the Chilean military, along with "supporting equipment, spares and training."
Last fall, the Chilean people voted overwhelmingly to rewrite the neoliberal capitalistic constitution of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the fascist dictator who reigned in Chile for 27 years following Nixon's CIA-backed coup of the democratically-elected Salvador Allende administration.
Raytheon is the primary contractor benefitting from the $85m weapons sale to Chile. Biden's Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, very recently sat on Raytheon's Board of Directors. Prior to his appointment, Austin pledged to "recuse himself" from any decisions involving Raytheon.
Capitalism is when a vaccine to a deadly pandemic exists but we can’t create or distribute enough of it because two pharmaceutical conglomerates refuse to lose out on shareholder profits by sharing the patent information.
My patience is too thin to deal with people who have been intellectually destroyed by pharmaceutical propaganda but I appreciate their efforts to generate sympathy for Pfizer in this most difficult of fiscal quarters.
It turns out that the economic model aggregated from man's most selfish impulses does not result in a society capable of handling crises navigable only through communal organization.
Guys I’ve looked into it and I’m beginning to think the CIA and the State Department aren’t exactly shooting straight when they provide intel on our “enemies.”
If a flurry of corporate news outlets immediately seem to be wanting you to feel the same malevolent way about a foreign country all at the same time, there is a reason, and that reason is never because they have your own interests at heart.
“It is firm & continuing policy that Salvador Allende be overthrown by a coup...It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely & securely so that the American hand be well hidden.”
—Cable to CIA operatives in Chile, from Kissinger’s “Track Two” group (Oct 1970)