Blowback, Inc.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 "was all a result of events that had been triggered and provoked by covert action by the United States."

So said Roger Morris, who is in a better position to know than I am. Doesn't mean it's correct, I suppose, but it fits the pattern of blundering yet vicious moves by our intelligence services.

I'd just like to get some truth...someday. Why were we taunting the Soviets into a conflict over there? Because of the "Cold War?" Is that too easy? It sounds incomplete to me. Why are we in Iraq now? Where the fuck is bin Laden? When are we going to toss Bush and his cabal aside and reclaim the true American values of personal freedom and real justice and the pursuit of happiness?

Turn the page, indeed! PLEASE!

Amy is interviewing Roger Morris about Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, who was at the CIA in 1979.

AMY GOODMAN: Roger Morris, you write it’s almost as if he has come full circle, going back to the US supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, actually luring the Soviet Union into Afghanistan to get it mired in its own Vietnam. Here you have Gates right through to today with the blowback with those very people trained by the United States now setting their sights on the United States, like Osama bin Laden.

ROGER MORRIS: It’s one of the great ironies. He faces, of course, the wreckage, the ruin, that’s been wrought by this administration, but he also faces much of the world that he was responsible for making. He was very instrumental with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Carter administration in the very earliest American covert interventions in Afghanistan, the creation of this atavistic fundamentalist force to fight the Soviets and to overturn a leftist regime in Kabul, which ironically we now know was in virtual revolt against the Soviets anyway. The invasion in December 1979 by the Soviet Union was provoked essentially by the United States. The Soviets were reluctant up to the very eleventh hour to do that. And the chaos that followed, a million-and-a-half Afghans dead, four million homeless and what the UN called migratory genocide, was all a result of events that had been triggered and provoked by covert action by the United States. And Gates was extremely instrumental.

AMY GOODMAN: Roger Morris, we’re going to have to leave it there. I thank you very much for being with us, award-winning historian, did the three-part series on Robert Gates and the CIA, published at www.tomdispatch.com.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/28/1434201