[I've included the URL but you have to be a subscriber to download the whole article. If anyone who isn't a subscriber would like to read it, contact it offlist and I'll be glad to send it to you. It's a wonderful explanation of the standard question: how could we possibly be so stupid in Iraq? The answer: *we've always been this stupid.* We did everything we did in Afghanistan because we hated Russians and understood nothing else. It was that simple. And we did what we did in Iraq because we hated Saddam.] They say milions of other things, but that's mainly to convince other people. The worldview of the people in charge is childishly simple: hurt your enemies and you'll be stronger and you can hurt them more.]
[Any way, below is an excerpted short summary of American policy vis a vis the Muj. But the whole article is worth reading. It's full of juicy bits and you'll be surprised how it's still possible to get roused.]
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/print/john04_.html
London Review of Books Vol. 26 No. 20 dated 21 October 2004
Abolish the CIA! Chalmers Johnson
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 by Steve Coll, Penguin, 695 pp, US $29.95
<snip>
The motives of the White House and the CIA were shaped by the Cold War: a determination to kill as many Soviet soldiers as possible, and the desire to restore some aura of rugged machismo and credibility that US leaders feared they had lost when the Shah was overthrown. The CIA had no intricate strategy for the war it was unleashing in Afghanistan. Howard Hart, the agency's representative in the Pakistani capital, told Coll that he understood his orders as: 'You're a young man; here's your bag of money, go raise hell. Don't fuck it up, just go out there and kill Soviets.'
These orders came from a most peculiar American. William Casey, the CIA's director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called 'Maryknoll', on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to anti-Communists in Poland and Central America, sometimes in violation of American law. He believed fervently that by increasing the Catholic Church's reach and power he could contain Communism's advance, or reverse it. From Casey's convictions grew the most important US foreign policies of the 1980s -- support for an international anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan and sponsorship of state terrorism in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Casey knew next to nothing about Islamic fundamentalism or the grievances of Middle Eastern nations against Western imperialism. He saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the counter-strategy of covert action to thwart Soviet imperialism. He believed that the USSR was trying to strike at the US in Central America and in the oil-producing states of the Middle East. He supported Islam as a counter to the Soviet Union's atheism, and Coll suggests that he sometimes conflated lay Catholic organisations such as Opus Dei with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian extremist organisation, of which Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, was a passionate member. The Muslim Brotherhood's branch in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e-Islami, was strongly backed by the Pakistani army, and Coll writes that Casey, more than any other American, was responsible for welding the alliance of the CIA, Saudi intelligence and the army of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan's military dictator from 1977 to 1988. On the suggestion of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Casey went so far as to print thousands of copies of the Koran, which he shipped to the Afghan frontier for distribution in Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan. He also fomented, without presidential authority, Muslim attacks inside the USSR and always held that the CIA's clandestine officers were too timid. He preferred the type represented by his friend Oliver North.
Over time, Casey's position hardened into CIA dogma, which its agents, protected by secrecy from ever having their ignorance exposed, enforced in every way they could. The agency resolutely refused to help choose winners and losers among the Afghan jihad's guerrilla leaders. The result, according to Coll, was that 'Zia-ul-Haq's political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA's own.' In the era after Casey, some scholars, journalists and members of Congress questioned the agency's lavish support of the Pakistan-backed Islamist general Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, especially after he refused to shake hands with Reagan because he was an infidel. But Milton Bearden, the Islamabad station chief from 1986 to 1989, and Frank Anderson, chief of the Afghan task force at Langley, vehemently defended Hekmatyar on the grounds that 'he fielded the most effective anti-Soviet fighters.'
Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar's successor, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban. When Edmund McWilliams, the State Department's special envoy to the Afghan resistance in 1988-89, wrote that 'American authority and billions of dollars in taxpayer funding had been hijacked at the war's end by a ruthless anti-American cabal of Islamists and Pakistani intelligence officers determined to impose their will on Afghanistan,' Bearden denounced him and planted stories in the embassy that he might be homosexual or an alcoholic. Meanwhile, Afghanistan descended into one of the most horrific civil wars of the 20th century. The CIA never fully corrected its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics until after bin Laden bombed the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on 7 August 1998.
[and even then:]
<snip>
[A]fter the embassy bombings in East Africa, the CIA and the White House awoke to the Islamist threat, but they defined it almost exclusively in terms of Osama bin Laden's leadership of al-Qaida and failed to see the larger context. They did not target the Taliban, Pakistani military intelligence or the funds flowing to the Taliban and al-Qaida from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
<snip>
The whole article is worth reading, both for itself (it's a outrage and a pleasure) and to place the stupidity of Iraq in context. It's not that we're stupider. It's that our stupidity has more scope. The adults have never been in charge of operations like this. It's just that in the past they had to be small enough to be covert.
Michael