Dear President Jimmy Carter:
By way of identification, am an archival research historian, musician, and a member of Veterans For Peace, All Souls Peace Task Force and Riverside Global Justice and Peace Ministries in New York City.
Being that the name Jimmy Carter is synonymous with seeking peace, justice with kindness, am encouraged to communicate a sincere if audacious plea, hopefully not taken as presumptuous or intrusive.
Would President Carter help President Obama, as people are saying, "earn his Nobel Prize" in Afghanistan, as of course President Carter earned his in Palestine?
Who better than yourself, dear Mr. President, could help the Obama administration weather the pressure from the war industry to continue to bring death and destruction to the Afghan people in the name of fighting al Qaeda. Those who interest themselves in following the events carefully know that precious little disabling mayhem is reaching al Qaeda, as it is mainly directed at the still in part governing Taliban and tribal leaders not wishing to cooperate with the well intentioned American and European occupiers of their land.
Where is American gratitude toward Afghans, Taliban included, for their sacrifices made while doing their part to bring U.S. victory in the "Cold War?'
President Carter knows that media manufactured consent to war is completely unimpeded by what corrective information is available on the Internet and even that which is published by U.S. government agencies.
Presidential Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1998, bragged of having brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union by having convinced you to have the CIA covertly fund, arm and train conservative Islamic fundamentalist hill tribes warring against a new Socialist government in Kabul in mid-1979. Brzezinski boasted that he had accurately predicted this would most probably be answered by Soviet intervention and cause the USSR's own debilitating Vietnam-like syndrome. His interview with the French weekly Nouvel Observateur has long been available on the Internet verbatim. Sadly, journalist Robert Fist writes of this revolutionary Kabul government of having still been very popular in 1979. It was Afghanistan's fate to be for thirty-four years, and counting, a victim of the 'Cold War.'
Though Robert Gate's corroboration of this in his memoirs, "From the Shadows" is also noted on the Internet, neither of these admissions have helped the anti-war movement seeking to show the Taliban in a non U.S.-threatening light, as it was seen by the Reagan administration, namely, a largely devout Pushtun nationalist organization dedicated to bringing good government, social order and citizen protection.
And if Taliban be condemned for its strict version of Islam, it should not be by Americans, whose government in order to oppose deadly Soviet intervention, for years, unfortunately, wound up supporting similar severe tribal fundamentalist attitudes at a time when a socialist, women emancipating government, in an already somewhat cosmopolitan Kabul, was in power.
Given everyone's great appreciation for President Carter's humane efforts in favor of rectification on so very many issues of foreign policy, could it not be felt incumbent upon him to consider helping Obama terminate the war in Afghanistan by being so bold as to catch the headlines and effect an educated reminder of the terrible fate that the Afghan population suffered as a pawn in the Cold War.
Could you possibly see to briefing America on the beginning of what quickly led to eight years of Afghans fighting the Soviets, and then led to 9/11, and finally a second invasion and eight year occupation war inside their nation for the perception that bin Laden (who also fought the Russians) was managing a world wide war on the U.S. principally from within Afghanistan.
Your decision of June-July, 1979, was taken in the context of the Cold War, and the public has long accepted covert activity during the Cold War as understandable. However, for an incomplete understanding of history, the public has been made to support war in Afghanistan.
Major media has already rationalized and excused Nobel Prize winner Henry Kissinger's role in the overthrow of Allende by Pinochet; President Einsenhower's ordered overthrow of governments in Guatemala, Congo and Iran; Robert Kennedy's post nuclear confrontation CIA "Operation Mongoose" of sabotage and attempted assassination; President Reagan's illegal funding and facilitating the murderous operations of the Contras, the funding of Svamimbi's civil war in Angola; JFK's unleashing the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs prepared under Eisenhower, just to name a few of the sad decisions taken during the Cold War now forgiven as necessary during their time.
All the above declassified covert CIA operations, have not affected the great public affection for past U.S. presidents.
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