NP: Al Qaeda/Allen Dulles

[ish mailian]

Thomas,

If you've not read it, get hold of Steve Coll's _Ghost Wars_
The sad and pathetic fumbling and paranoid to Mad Magazine, Spy vs Spy
stupidity of the Soviets and the CIA is described in the fist few chapters.

On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 6:40 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> The war did not "inevitably follow" US support of any group or leader or
> revolt or whatever. Like other complex conflicts it has many causes. The
> major cause was Soviet ignorance of the people it tried to control and
> subjugate, and of Islam generally, and Iran, the revolution in Iran.
>
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 6:25 PM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> How do others read this paragraph?
>> I read it as total bullshit.
>> It hints, because there is no basis to argue the case, that the CIA
>> support of Afghan rebels, during the Carter Presidency, is responsible for
>> the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan, and the deaths, one million, of that
>> war.
>>
>> Please. Very slick, but only a fool could believe this shit.
>>
>> In fact, the CIA had been backing Afghan Islamists well before the
>> Russians invaded the country in December 1979. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy
>> Carter’s national-security adviser, later boasted to *Le Nouvel
>> Observateur* that the president had “signed the first directive for
>> secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul” six months
>> *prior* to the invasion. “And that very day,” Brzezinski recalled, “I
>> wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my
>> opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.” The
>> war that inevitably followed killed a million Afghans.
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Thomas Eckhardt <
>> thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:
>>
>>> FYI:
>>>
>>> http://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/a-special-relationship/
>>>
>>> http://www.ctka.net/2015/TalbotDulles.html
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>>
>>
>>
>
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