by Carlhole » Wed 24 Oct 2007, 04:01:07
"The Gates Inheritance: The World That Bob Made" by Roger Morris
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'G')ates' memoir dutifully notes the ensuing stream of bland speculations by the CIA's Soviet analysts about what the Soviets might next do in their tortured relationship with a faltering, needy, yet independent Afghan communist regime. But he spares us the covert actions the CIA carried out, amid a stream of memos Brzezinski and he sent Carter about the Soviet "threat" in South Asia - an intervention kept secret from their hated rival, secretary of state Vance and the rest of government.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')y summer 1978, the old insurgent training camps in Pakistan were open again and thronged with Islamic radicals. They were eager to fight a regime pushing land reform and education for women, while establishing a secular police state. By the autumn of 1978, more than a year before Soviet combat troops set foot in Afghanistan, a civil war, armed and planned by the US, Pakistan, Iran and China, and soon to be actively supported, at Washington's prodding, by the Saudis and Egyptians, had begun to rage in the same wild mountains of eastern Afghanistan where US forces would seek Osama bin Laden a little more than 23 years later.
In April 1979, with arms and agitators paid for by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the shah fell in January, ending SAVAK's role), a radical Islamic uprising in Herat, western Afghanistan, led to the slaughter of thousands on both sides, including more than 200 Russian military and civilian advisers and their families. Even so, the Soviets stoutly refused to intervene militarily. They even made their refusal absolutely plain to Washington by pointedly conducting telephone conversations with the Afghan leadership for the Americans to intercept. But Gates, Brzezinski and Carter were having none of it in what had become a deliberate plot to "suck" the Russians into Afghanistan. The old Great Game was now in cynical full swing. In the sort of mad plan not even Rudyard Kipling could have imagined, they plotted personally to "give the Soviets their Vietnam", as Brzezinski was fond of saying.
The ceaseless machinations and bloody civil strife culminated, of course, in the December 1979 Soviet invasion. The Politburo had resisted it for more than a year and hesitated even at the eleventh hour. It is, by any measure, one of the more dramatic, and chilling, stories in the annals of world politics. By now, Brzezinski and Gates had in essence created a new foreign policy for the United States and put it into action in secret with few co-authors and no parallel.
By the time they and their co-conspirators are through, a course will have been set that will take the Afghans into a nightmare universe in which one and a half million of them will die, millions more will become homeless (in what the United Nations will call "migratory genocide"), and, for more than a quarter-century, their country will be a continuing catastrophe beyond any other in the history of nation-states. In part, it is his own work that Gates now faces as secretary of defense.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Asia Times', '[')i]Roger Morris is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who served in the US Foreign Service and on the senior staff of the National Security Council under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Before resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, he was one of only three officials comprising Henry Kissinger's special projects staff conducting the initial highly secret "back-channel" negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in 1969-70. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952, and the best-selling Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America as well as, most recently, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (co-authored with historian Sally Denton).
His Shadows of the Eagle, a history of US covert intervention in the Middle East and South Asia since the 1940s, will be published by Knopf early in 2008. His studies and commentary on US politics and foreign policy appear regularly on the website of the Green Institute, where he is senior fellow.