He's had little to say about MANPADS since that incident in Benghazi nearly ten years ago.| Submit your comments on this article |
| Afghanistan |
| What the CIA Did (and Didn’t Do) in Soviet-Occupied Afghanistan |
| 2021-04-27 |
| [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 |
| #8 Oh, bollocks. The USSR was dumping thousands of weapons throughout the Third World and they hardly mention how that killed |
| Posted by: magpie 2021-04-27 12:55 |
| #7 thousands of Americans Number of fatalities among Western coalition soldiers involved in the execution of Operation Enduring Freedom from 2001 to 2020 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2021-04-27 10:57 |
| #6 Nine US generals send '36-star memo' begging spy chiefs to declassify intelligence showing 'pernicious conduct' by Russia and China |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2021-04-27 10:53 |
| #5 The world, and especially thousands of Americans would have not have been been unthankful for a communist Afghanistan, sans the mullahs. Just saying. |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2021-04-27 10:48 |
| #4 A genocide that never was: explaining the myth of anti-Chinese massacres in Indonesia, 1965–66 Robert Cribb & Charles A. Coppel Pages 447-465 | Published online: 17 Dec 2009. |
| Posted by: b 2021-04-27 08:26 |
| #3 Indonesia involved natives vs Chinese back then. You can tell the difference. Think of the Chinese as whitey in a police free zone in Minneapolis when the locals got rolling. Then again, the people who cast everything as racists in our society can't see racism in other societies. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2021-04-27 07:35 |
| #2 He's had little to say about MANPADS since that incident in Benghazi nearly ten years ago. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2021-04-27 06:51 |
| #1 I'm with Glenn on this one: Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept said the The Jakarta Method "provides one of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories yet of this agency and the way it has shaped the actual, rather than the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world" and documents not only how CIA-sponsored mass killings in Indonesia served as a model for "clandestine CIA interference campaigns" in myriad other countries throughout Asia and Latin America to destroy the non-Aligned Movement, but also how "the chilling success of that morally grotesque campaign led to its being barely discussed in U.S. discourse." Wiki link found here. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2021-04-27 06:19 |