|
What the CIA Did (and Didn’t Do) in Soviet-Occupied Afghanistan
[NewLinesMag] A few weeks ago, I started reading a new book. It was published last year and became popular in a short amount of time. “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World,” written by American journalist Vincent Bevins, focuses on the Indonesian mass killings of 1965 and 1966. It describes, harrowingly, how roughly a million people were killed in an effort to destroy the country’s political left in the shadow of the Cold War. According to Bevins and many others, the method was approved and adapted by the United States, which used it in large parts of the world to crush left-wing resistance and dissent in favor of right-wing Contras and fascist dictatorships, especially in Latin America.I read the book with no specific intention, yet in the back of my mind were the vague expectations I’d gained through numerous interactions with a particular crowd of Western leftists who unabashedly considered themselves progressive and, above all, anti-imperialists. The stated anti-imperialism naturally focuses solely and inexorably on the perceived evils wrought by U.S. foreign policy. It analyzes all post-Second World War developments through an ideological prism that, perhaps ironically, resembles the same Cold War rhetoric that the camp intends to criticize. To be clear, although Bevins faced some criticism before publication, his work was extraordinary and his research on Indonesia exceptional. There is no doubt that the mass killings that occurred in the country were not just horrifying and brutal but also often overlooked and suppressed by many Western observers. However, it becomes problematic and sometimes even deeply hypocritical when Bevins, like many others, stencils these events in a certain way, pulling certain analogies and transposing them over an array of countries somehow caught in the Cold (tug of) War. What emerges, as a result, is a picture with a defined “bad” guy — the U.S. — and a “good” guy — the Soviet Union — which ignores that the Soviet Union, rather than a progressive and socialist utopia, was itself an empire that oppressed millions of people at home and beyond its borders. When it comes to the Cold War, it’s almost impossible to not talk about Afghanistan. Bevins mentions it only twice, despite portraying himself as an expert on all affairs pertinent to the Cold War. In one line, Bevins writes, “In Afghanistan, Soviet troops had been trying to prop up a communist ally for nine years, Moscow’s forces retreated, the CIA-backed Islamist fundamentalists set up a fanatical theocracy, and the West stopped paying attention.” Bevins is not alone with this tired and fallacious analysis of a decade long occupation that Afghans endured at the boots of Soviet forces. Such statements are widespread among large parts of the Western political left, probably especially in the U.S., but also among the mainstream and the far right. Recently, the CIA shared a tweet about the use of its famous Stinger missiles, stating: “The Stinger missiles supplied by the U.S. gave Afghan guerrillas, generally known as the mujahideen, the ability to destroy dreaded Mi-24D helicopter gunships deployed by the Soviets to enforce their control over Afghanistan.” The tweet caused a backlash among left-leaning ideologues, in many cases reporters, writers, or academics, who responded with the usual flawed tropes. Perhaps unbeknownst to them and unconsciously, the tropes are, rather dryly, often underpinned with the same Islamophobic and racist roots that they themselves are sworn to be opposed to, paired with conspiracy theories. Often, it becomes obvious that many of these commentators lack even the basic knowledge of events that have plagued Afghanistan over the last four decades. Furthermore, their pretension at analyzing certain events through an ideological prism is often a cover to hide their unfamiliarity with the complexity of the topics at hand. The end product is usually a grand, Western-centric tale, once again with neatly defined lines between good and bad, evil and righteous. To put it plainly, it is not real analysis. Thus, the ideologically based analysis suggests that the CIA funded the mujahideen, synonymous with al Qaeda, and thereby made 9/11 possible. The Afghan freedom fighters who resisted the Soviets are uniformly either Taliban or al Qaeda, two labels used interchangeably, ignoring not just the distinction between the two groups but also the fact that the Taliban were founded in the mid-1990s, half a decade after the Soviets withdrew. These freedom fighters were typically cast as scary, heavily bearded Orientals, equal to the Nicaraguan Contras. The Kabul-based, Soviet-installed Communist dictatorship was portrayed as actually nothing more than a legitimate, progressive government that was toppled by the evil imperialists. Indeed, things were more complex. Much more at the link Posted by: badanov 2021-04-27 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=600519 |