In July 1979, President Carter began secretly funding, arming and training the fundamentalist hill tribes attacking a modern women emancipating government in Kabul,
Carter's advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, famously bragged to the French press, January 1998, of having suckered the Soviets into intervening in Afghanistan to support the Socialist Kabul government. The Russians moved into Afghanistan in December to support that government six months AFTER the CIA, along with Saudi and Pakistani secret services began supporting fundamentalists who were especially against the education of girls.
This was the first support of Islamic terror - secret, Carter authorized, covert funding of terrorists who were executing teachers of girls.
Active enlistment was fostered in Islamic countries almost everywhere, internationalizing an Islamic fundamentalist army that would force the Soviets to begin to pull out in 1988.
There followed a period in which various war lords that had been backed by the U.S. created a havoc of war and chaos, where social safety, especially that of women, was totally compromised. In this hopelessness was born the Taliban to bring strict Islamic law into lawless and frightful conditions of internecine warfare.
The U.S. policy vaguely supported the Taliban, any deep interest being lost once the Soviets had been driven out. It negotiated some pipe line deals, counting on the Taliban to maintain order.
Afghanistan has suffered an enormous amount of death and destruction. The average citizen in the street in America is not aware that it all began with President Jimmy Carter's now documented decision, a covert homicidal crime against a small agricultural nation and a new government trying to bring Afghanistan into the modern world. The fascinated audience of the U.S. mass-media cartel knows only of second part of the story, that of the U.S. successfully helping heroic Afghan fighters beat the Soviet bad guys.
The rest of the story is better know by the American public - Bin Laden's bombings, described by him as Islamic reactions to U.S. presence and foreign policies in Islamic countries, a seemingly unprovoked 9/ll, and the Bush invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, even though it was Saudi nationals who suicided themselves at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But how many remember or ever knew how it all began?
In his book From the Shadows, Bush and Obama's secretary of war, Robert Gates, only mentions in passing that Carter injected the CIA into Afghan history a half year before the Soviets felt obligated to respond.
President Jimmy Carter? Nobel Peace Prize holder? Kind negotiator for difficult confrontations? Who wants to believe what he ordered the CIA to do on July 3, 1979?
Here is the way Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's Presidential Advisor, who is now President Obama's advisor, and already Obama's foreign affairs expert during his campaign, put it to Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, 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.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
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