The Carter regime, which hoped a war in Afghanistan would be the USSR’s Vietnam, began funding and arming the most right-wing fundamentalists, the ideological ancestors of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
Nor does the film mention that Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, was an enthusiastic promoter of the fundamentalists and that his CIA director, William Casey, is deserving of the title “founding father” of al Qaeda for his campaign of globally recruiting Islamic militants to come to Afghanistan to fight the anti-Communist cause. (Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski gloated in a 1998 interview that some “stirred-up Moslems” were a small price to pay for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War.”)
Far from being an unsung champion as film director Nichols would have it, Wilson was a pawn on the global chessboard—a bagman for those responsible for nearly two decades of civil war and the destruction of Afghan society.”
In a Los Angles Times review of the book, Chalmers Johnson—the well-known academic, one-time consultant to the CIA and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire—wrote a scathing review of both Crile’s book and the Nichols movie:
"Wilson’s activities in Afghanistan led directly to a chain of blowback that culminated in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and led to the United States’ current status as the most hated nation on Earth."
Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director [today Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs
Among those supporting the Afghans (in addition to the U.S.) was the rich, pious Saudi Arabian economist and civil engineer, Osama bin Laden, whom we helped by building up his al Qaeda base at Khost. When bin Laden and his colleagues decided to get even with us for having been used, he had the support of much of the Islamic world. This disaster was brought about by Wilson’s and the CIA’s incompetence as well as their subversion of all the normal channels of political oversight and democratic accountability within the U.S. government. Charlie Wilson’s war thus turned out to have been just another bloody skirmish in the expansion and consolidation of the American empire — and an imperial presidency. The victors were the military-industrial complex and our massive standing armies. The billion dollars’ worth of weapons Wilson secretly supplied to the guerrillas ended up being turned on ourselves."
Johnson adds that
“there is ample evidence that, when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels, governmental services, relations among ethnic groups, and quality of life—all were infinitely better under the Afghan communists than under the Taliban or the present government of President Hamid Karzai, which evidently controls little beyond the country’s capital, Kabul.”
In the book, page 14, George Crile makes it seem otherwise " Soviet invasion surprised and radicalized Carter, who suddenly saw the USSR as evil and Brezhnev as not rational. " Did Crile not know how hundreds of thousands reading the Internet know that Carter funded, armed and trained the hill tribes starting in June or July to sucker in the Soviets in December?
In the movie several CIA grouped characters and Charlie himself in the movie joke openly about how much they love to kill Russians. The movie featured such talk as admirable, portrayed as swashbuckling and manly. The CIA comes across as 'good,' like James Bond, cute and loveable, a bit roguish, but exciting, and definitely something to cheer for.
This article is the third written on the subject, each time motivated by something in the news and in addition has written to Jimmy Carter through his Carter Center.
Jimmy Carter enjoys prestige and respect for his work as a dedicated promoter of peaceful solutions. What an enormous contribution to peace Carter could make by enlightening us on the process of covert murderous intention during his presidency. If he would just 'fess up' about his now no longer secret orders funding, training and equipping the fundamentalist tribes of the mountains against the socialist (women liberating) government in Kabul, a full six months BEFORE the first units of the Soviet army entered Afghanistan. One would imagine that Carter himself would see the great value of an honest admission and welcome an opportunity to unburden himself of whatever feelings of anguish and self-recrimination he might be experiencing.
Peace loving Jimmy, please tell us candidly of the times when you weren’t for peace and the mitigating circumstances thereof. Help us understand that the roots of today's genocidal belligerencies go way back to a history of nefarious foreign policy.
May heaven grant that this in bad taste low level heartless ‘entertainment’ over the bodies of Afghans awakens a desire in Jimmy Carter’s soul to explain and hopefully condemn how this insidious use of CIA to instigate terror came to be. We are supposed to be entering an era of change.
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