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Banned
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Originally Posted by Jimellow
......While I would certainly agree that American media has a tendency to create and maintain an atmosphere of constant fear and panic, I found the closing portions of the article interesting, as the author described the inability of the Muslim leaders to succinctly address and report to the media, with the ultimate result being that their message is lost; thus making America's negative view of the Muslim world easier, due to it being one-sided as a result of poor "public relations" on the non-violent Muslim side......
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<b>Jimellow, American "media", as the following two quote boxes support, is only a conduit for an official policy in the US of terrorizing potential US voters:</b>
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http://robertdreyfuss.com/blog/2006/...ate_again.html
Posted by Robert Dreyfuss on October 12, 2006
Bush on the Caliphate, Again
Four times yesterday Bush talked about the evil “caliphate” that radicals want to create. Unlike in the past, though, he spoke about it as if it already existed, accusing his imagined enemy of trying to “extend the caliphate” and “spread their caliphate.” I wish some reporter had the guts to ask the president to explain what he means, to explain what he thinks a caliphate is, and how a rag-tag band of Al Qaeda types hiding in Pakistan can conquer the land from Spain to Indonesia, which is what Bush keeps warning about.
Here are the relevant excerpts (you can read the whole transcript <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/11/AR2006101100922.html">here</a>):
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<b>...and from Mr. Bush, 53 weeks before the preceding quotes:</b>
Quote:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0051006-3.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
October 6, 2005
President Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for Democracy
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.
......<b>Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam.</b>
This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus -- and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.
Many militants are part of global, borderless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, which spreads propaganda, and provides financing and technical assistance to local extremists, and conducts dramatic and brutal operations like September the 11th. Other militants are found in regional groups, often associated with al Qaeda -- paramilitary insurgencies and separatist movements in places like Somalia, and the Philippines, and Pakistan, and Chechnya, and Kashmir, and Algeria. Still others spring up in local cells, inspired by Islamic radicalism, but not centrally directed. Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives, fighting on scattered battlefields, share a similar ideology and vision for our world.......
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by kutulu
It's a lot easier to sell wars if there are a billion people that want to destroy us.
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kutulu, if the last "post byte" from you was true....how do you explain the Bush admin. "choice" of Zalmay Khalilzad... first as "Viceroy" of Kabul, then as American ambassador of Afghanistan, accused in media reports of pressuring other candidates to "yield" to US backed Karzai's candidacy as head of the new US installed Afghan government, and Khalilzad's transfer to Iraq...to relieve former Honduran "death squad" promoter, John Negroponte, of his short lived "tenure" as US ambassador in Iraq. Khalilzad then proceeded to "influence" (install) the power distribution in the new Iraqi government.
If you read on.....kutulu, is there any justification to use Khalilzad, as the official, US "face" in either Afghanistan or Iraq? Just because you've dismissed or were unaware of the documentation in this post, isn't it naive to think that the <i>"billion people that want to destroy us"</i>, are all, also unaware of the US historical "role" in "jihad"?
Quote:
http://www.tenc.net/analysis/zbi-zal.htm
.....* The media has now rewritten history, propagating the view that US officials were simply unaware of the Islamic fanaticism of the pro-US side in Afghanistan. Zalmay Khalilzad has voiced this "we didn't know" line himself. (I have unfortunately misplaced the quote in which he claims "I never knew how bad they were" but hopefully I'll find it again.)
As the AP dispatch below demonstrates, during the 1980s war the Western media misdescribed Islamic fundamentalists as "rebels." Thus the AP says:
"Afghan rebels, called the Mujahadeen [sic!], have been battling 100,000 Soviet troops..."
as if Mujahideen were a local name for these "rebels" rather than an Arabic word. 'Mu' means 'one who.' 'Jahid' equals 'Jihad' means 'struggle' or 'strive for' but in practice - and abundantly in the Muslim holy writings, alhadith, the narrations about the life of Muhammad - it means leaving home to fight for Islam. So a Mujahid is one fights for Islam. "Een" makes it plural. So Mujahideen are Islamic holy warriors. Muslim holy texts devote much attention to the special place in heaven reserved for slain Mujahideen. (See for example http://www.2600.com/news/mirrors/har...ihad/grade.htm )
It is inconceivable that any reporter covering the Afghan travesty was unaware that the US was promoting Islamic holy warriors. Prof. Khalilzad, who is from Afghanistan, of course knew exactly what sort of forces were being created by the CIA et al in his country. The job of Friends of Afghanistan was precisely to play down the Islamic holy warrior reality, and play up the phony 'victimized rebels fighting Soviet tyranny' baloney..........
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On the following thread:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...41#post2140041
<b>I've posted this information. My point here is that, kutulu...compared to the historical record of US manipulation....your "one liner" is simplistic and non-productive. After instilling "Jihad", in an entire generation of yourg muslims, to bolster the US goal of creating a religiously indoctrinated surrogate "army" to destabIlize the former Soviet Union, isn't Mr. Bush's rhetoric, and his "endorsement" of the American authored "jihad" school textbooks, coupled with his promotion of Zalmay Khalilzad to "administer" all of the US "conquered lands", even a bit much for you to support? How do you suspect the following would affect you thinking, if you were an educated Afghani or Iraqi, after you read the material in all of the quote boxes in this post? </b>
Quote:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...&postcount=111
Quote:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
According to this 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA's intervention in Afghanistan preceded the 1979 Soviet invasion. This decision of the Carter Administration in 1979 to intervene and destabilise Afghanistan is the root cause of Afghanistan's destruction as a nation.
M.C.
The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
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. <h3>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.</h3> 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.
(LAST PARAGRAPH:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/ma...erland&emc=rss )
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?
B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, <b>I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.</b> Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
<b>Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?</b>
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
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Quote:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/19990215/hiro/2
article | posted January 28, 1999 (February 15, 1999 issue)
The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'
Dilip Hiro
page 2 of 4 | PREV 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 NEXT
As for Saudi Arabia, the remaining member of the troika, it had long been a bulwark of anti-Communism, its rulers lavish in their funding of antileftist forces around the globe--be it in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal or Italy. The fact that the population of Afghanistan was 99 percent Muslim was an additional incentive to Riyadh.
The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance's financing, training and arming of the mujahedeen--recruited from among the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan--was coordinated and supervised by the CIA. The day-to-day management rested with Pakistan's ISI. All donations in weapons and cash to the campaign by various sources--chiefly Washington and Riyadh--were handled by the CIA. These amounted to about $40 billion, with the bulk coming from the United States and Saudi Arabia, which contributed equally.
The volunteers underwent military training and political education. Both were imparted by the ISI. <h3>In the political classes the mujahedeen were given a strong dose of nationalism and Islam.</h3> The fact that the Soviets were foreign and atheistic made them doubly despicable. The intention was to fire up militant Muslims to fight Soviet imperialism. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles in the later stages of the jihad, the mujahedeen made a hash of Soviet helicopter gunships, a critical tool of the USSR's counterinsurgency campaign.
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....so the US intoduced Jihad in Afghanistan, and the "blowback" from that ill conceived "psy-op" to destablizie the Soviet Union by luring it's military into Iraq, is a critical ingredient that influences "conservatives' in the US today, to "buy" the Bush admin's exective branch, power consolidation, marketed as a "GWOT". Thus, these neocon influenced folk, live in a "circle jerk" world "view" that is a closed loop. The "leadership" that they support, was extremely influential in creating and in accelerating, the "bogeyman" of islamic "jihad" that the "jerkers" now use to justify transference of the constitional rights of the governed....over to the US executive branch. <b>Thus....the 1979 "jihad" psy-op in Afghanistan, not only helped to destabalize the former Soviet Union.....it's blowback works today, to destabalize the US government as well !</b>
Quote:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGKAGG5H61.DTL
PR firm also retained Iraqi Sunni clerics
Pentagon contractor made deals with 3 or 4 to help in propaganda
- David S. Cloud, Jeff Gerth, New York Times
Monday, January 2, 2006
(01-02) 04:00 PDT Washington -- A Pentagon contractor that paid Iraqi newspapers to run positive articles written by U.S. soldiers also has been compensating Sunni religious scholars in Iraq in return for assistance with its propaganda work, according to current and former employees.
Lincoln Group, a Washington-based public relations firm, was told early in 2005 by the Pentagon to identify religious leaders who could help craft messages that would persuade Sunnis in violence-ridden Anbar province to participate in national elections and reject the insurgency, according to a former employee.
Since then, the company has retained three or four Sunni religious scholars to offer advice and write reports for military commanders on the content of propaganda campaigns, the former employee said. But documents and Lincoln executives say the firm's ties to religious leaders and dozens of other prominent Iraqis are aimed also at enabling it to exercise influence in Iraqi communities on behalf of clients, including the military.
"We do reach out to clerics. We meet with local government officials and with local businessmen," Paige Craig, a Lincoln executive vice president, said in an interview. "We need to have relationships that are broad enough and deep enough that we can touch all the various aspects of society."
He declined to discuss specific projects the company had with the military or commercial clients.
"We have on staff people who are experts in religious and cultural matters," Craig said. "We meet with a wide variety of people to get their input. Most of the people we meet with overseas don't want or need compensation; they want a dialogue."
Internal company financial records show that Lincoln spent about $144,000 on the program from May to September. It is unclear how much of this money, if any, went to the religious scholars, whose identities could not be learned. The amount is a tiny portion of the tens of million in contracts from the military that Lincoln has received for so-called "information operations," but the effort is especially sensitive.
<b>Sunni religious scholars are considered highly influential within the country's minority Sunni population, which forms the core of the insurgency.
The religious scholars underwent vetting before being brought into the program to ensure they were not involved in the insurgency, said the former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Lincoln's Pentagon contract prohibits workers from discussing their activities.</b>
Their identities have been kept secret to prevent insurgent reprisals, and they were never brought to Camp Victory, the U.S. base outside Baghdad where Lincoln employees work.
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, declined to comment.
After the disclosure in November that the military used Lincoln to place stories written by U.S. troops in Iraqi newspapers, the Pentagon ordered an investigation, led by Navy Rear Adm. Scott Van Buskirk. Army Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq, said that a preliminary assessment made shortly after the military's information operations campaign was disclosed concluded the Army was "operating within our authorities and the appropriate legal procedures."
Van Buskirk has finished his investigation, several Pentagon officials said, but it has not been made public.
Lincoln recently sought approval from the military to make Sunni religious leaders one of several "target audiences" of the propaganda effort in Iraq. A Lincoln plan titled "Divide and Prosper" presented in October to the Special Operations Command in Tampa, which oversees information operations, suggested that reaching religious leaders was vital for reducing Sunni support for the insurgency.
"Clerics exercise a great deal of influence over the people in their communities and often times it is the religious leaders who incite people to violence and to support the insurgent cause," the company said in the proposal, a copy of which was reviewed by the New York Times.
In some cases, "insurgent groups may provide Sunni leaders with financial compensation in return for that cleric's loyalty and support," <b>the proposal said, adding that religious leaders are motivated by a "a need to retain patronage" and a "desire to maintain religious and moral authority."</b>
Unlike in many other Middle East countries, sermons by Iraqi imams are not subject to government control, enabling them to speak "without fear of repercussions," the document said. <b>Overall, clerics "are a vital audience that will be very difficult to influence but if successful is likely to have a considerable impact on the wider community" the company said.</b>
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad
Violent Soviet-Era Textbooks Complicate Afghan Education Efforts
By Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, March 23, 2002; Page A01
In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code......
Many of the 4 million texts being trucked into Afghanistan, and millions more on the way, still feature Koranic verses and teach Muslim tenets.
<h3>The White House defends the religious content, saying that Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture</h3> and that the books "are fully in compliance with U.S. law and policy." Legal experts, however, question whether the books violate a constitutional ban on using tax dollars to promote religion.
Organizations accepting funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development must certify that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. The certification states that AID "will finance only programs that have a secular purpose. . . . AID-financed activities cannot result in religious indoctrination of the ultimate beneficiaries."
The issue of textbook content reflects growing concern among U.S. policymakers about school teachings in some Muslim countries in which Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism are on the rise. A number of government agencies are discussing what can be done to counter these trends.
<h3>President Bush and first lady Laura Bush have repeatedly spotlighted the Afghan textbooks in recent weeks. Last Saturday, Bush announced during his weekly radio address that the 10 million U.S.-supplied books being trucked to Afghan schools would teach "respect for human dignity, instead of indoctrinating students with fanaticism and bigotry."
The first lady stood alongside Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai on Jan. 29 to announce that AID would give the University of Nebraska at Omaha $6.5 million to provide textbooks and teacher training kits.</h3>
AID officials said in interviews that they left the Islamic materials intact because they feared Afghan educators would reject books lacking a strong dose of Muslim thought. The agency removed its logo and any mention of the U.S. government from the religious texts, AID spokeswoman Kathryn Stratos said.....
.... Some legal experts disagreed. A 1991 federal appeals court ruling against AID's former director established that taxpayers' funds may not pay for religious instruction overseas, said Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law expert at American University, who litigated the case for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Ayesha Khan, legal director of the nonprofit Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the White House has "not a legal leg to stand on" in distributing the books.
"Taxpayer dollars cannot be used to supply materials that are religious," she said.
Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. <b>The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. .....</b>
.... AID dropped funding of Afghan programs in 1994. <b>But the textbooks continued to circulate in various versions, even after the Taliban seized power in 1996.</b>
Officials said private humanitarian groups paid for continued reprintings during the Taliban years. Today, the books remain widely available in schools and shops, to the chagrin of international aid workers. ....
.....<h3> Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujaheddin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.</h3>
"We were quite shocked," said Doug Pritchard, who reviewed the primers in December while visiting Pakistan on behalf of a Canada-based Christian nonprofit group. "The constant image of Afghans being natural warriors is wrong. Warriors are created. If you want a different kind of society, you have to create it."
....In early January, UNICEF began printing new texts for many subjects but arranged to supply copies of the old, unrevised U.S. books for other subjects, including Islamic instruction.
Within days, the Afghan interim government announced that it would use the old AID-produced texts for its core school curriculum. UNICEF's new texts could be used only as supplements.
Earlier this year, the United States tapped into its $296 million aid package for rebuilding Afghanistan to reprint the old books, but decided to purge the violent references.
About 18 of the 200 titles the United States is republishing are primarily Islamic instructional books, which agency officials refer to as "civics" courses. Some books teach how to live according to the Koran, Brown said, and "how to be a good Muslim."
UNICEF is left with 500,000 copies of the old "militarized" books, a $200,000 investment that it has decided to destroy, according to U.N. officials.
On Feb. 4, Brown arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani border town in which the textbooks were to be printed, to oversee hasty revisions to the printing plates. Ten Afghan educators labored night and day, scrambling to replace rough drawings of weapons with sketches of pomegranates and oranges, Brown said.
"We turned it from a wartime curriculum to a peacetime curriculum," he said.
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Quote:
Anatomy of a Victory: CIA's Covert Afghan War; $2 Billion Program Reversed Tide for Rebels Series: CIA IN AFGHANISTAN Series Number: 1/2; [FINAL Edition]
Steve Coll. The Washington Post Washington, D.C.: Jul 19, 1992. pg. a.01
.... During the visit, Casey startled his Pakistani hosts by proposing that they take the Afghan war into enemy territory - into the Soviet Union itself. <h3>Casey wanted to ship subversive propaganda through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union's predominantly Muslim southern republics. The Pakistanis agreed, and the CIA soon supplied thousands of Korans</h3>, as well as books on Soviet atrocities in Uzbekistan and tracts on historical heroes of Uzbek nationalism, according to Pakistani and Western officials.
"We can do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union," Casey said, according to Mohammed Yousaf, a Pakistani general who attended the meeting.
Casey's visit was a prelude to a secret Reagan administration decision in March 1985, reflected in National Security Decision Directive 166, to sharply escalate U.S. covert action in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. Abandoning a policy of simple harassment of Soviet occupiers, the Reagan team decided secretly to let loose on the Afghan battlefield an array of U.S. high technology and military expertise in an effort to hit and demoralize Soviet commanders and soldiers. Casey saw it as a prime opportunity to strike at an overextended, potentially vulnerable Soviet empire.
Eight years after Casey's visit to Pakistan, the Soviet Union is no more. Afghanistan has fallen to the heavily armed, fraticidal mujaheddin rebels. The Afghans themselves did the fighting and dying - and ultimately won their war against the Soviets - and not all of them laud the CIA's role in their victory. But even some sharp critics of the CIA agree that in military terms, its secret 1985 escalation of covert support to the mujaheddin made a major difference in Afghanistan, the last battlefield of the long Cold War.
How the Reagan administration decided to go for victory in the Afghan war between 1984 and 1988 has been shrouded in secrecy and clouded by the sharply divergent political agendas of those involved. But with the triumph of the mujaheddin rebels over Afghanistan's leftist government in April and the demise of the Soviet Union, some intelligence officials involved have decided to reveal how the covert escalation was carried out.
The most prominent of these former intelligence officers is Yousaf, the Pakistani general who supervised the covert war between 1983 and 1987 and who last month published in Europe and Pakistan a detailed account of his role and that of the CIA, titled "The Bear Trap."
This article and another to follow are based on extensive interviews with Yousaf as well as with more than a dozen senior Western officials who confirmed Yousaf's disclosures and elaborated on them.
U.S. officials worried about what might happen if aspects of their stepped-up covert action were exposed - or if the program succeeded too well and provoked the Soviets to react in hot anger. The escalation that began in 1985 "was directed at killing Russian military officers," one Western official said. "That caused a lot of nervousness."
One source of jitters was that Pakistani intelligence officers - partly inspired by Casey - began independently to train Afghans and funnel CIA supplies for scattered strikes against military installations, factories and storage depots within Soviet territory.
The attacks later alarmed U.S. officials in Washington, who saw military raids on Soviet territory as "an incredible escalation," according to Graham Fuller, then a senior U.S. intelligence official who counseled against any such raids. Fearing a large-scale Soviet response and the fallout of such attacks on U.S.-Soviet diplomacy, the Reagan administration blocked the transfer to Pakistan of detailed satellite photographs of military targets inside the Soviet Union, other U.S. officials said.
<h3>To Yousaf, who managed the Koran-smuggling program and the guerrilla raids inside Soviet territory, the United States ultimately "chickened out" on the question of taking the secret Afghan war onto Soviet soil.</h3> Nonetheless, Yousaf recalled, Casey was "ruthless in his approach, and he had a built-in hatred for the Soviets."
An intelligence coup in 1984 and 1985 triggered the Reagan administration's decision to escalate the covert progam in Afghanistan, according to Western officials. The United States received highly specific, sensitive information about Kremlin politics and new Soviet war plans in Afghanistan. Already under pressure from Congress and conservative activists to expand its support to the mujaheddin, the Reagan administration moved in response to this intelligence to open up its high-technology arsenal to aid the Afghan rebels.,,,
,,,,Roots of the Rebellion
In 1980, not long after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan to prop up a sympathetic leftist government, President Jimmy Carter signed the first - and for many years the only - presidential "finding" on Afghanistan, the classified directive required by U.S. law to begin covert operations, according to several Western sources familiar with the Carter document.
The Carter finding sought to aid Afghan rebels in "harassment" of Soviet occupying forces in Afghanistan through secret supplies of light weapons and other assistance. The finding did not talk of driving Soviet forces out of Afghanistan or defeating them militarily, goals few considered possible at the time, these sources said.
The cornerstone of the program was that the United States, through the CIA, would provide funds, some weapons and general supervision of support for the mujaheddin rebels, but day-to-day operations and direct contact with the mujaheddin would be left to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. The hands-off U.S. role contrasted with CIA operations in Nicaragua and Angola.
Saudi Arabia agreed to match U.S. financial contributions to the mujaheddin and distributed funds directly to ISI. China sold weapons to the CIA and donated a smaller number directly to Pakistan, but the extent of China's role has been one of the secret war's most closely guarded secrets.
In all, the United States funneled more than $2 billion in guns and money to the mujaheddin during the 1980s, according to U.S. officials. It was the largest covert action program since World War II.....
,,,,,,Other CIA specialists and military officers supplied secure communications gear and trained Pakistani instructors on how to use it. <b>Experts on psychological warfare brought propaganda and books. Demolitions experts gave instructions on the explosives needed to destroy key targets such as bridges, tunnels and fuel depots. They also supplied chemical and electronic timing devices and remote control switches for delayed bombs and rockets that could be shot without a mujaheddin rebel present at the firing site.......</b>
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Last edited by host; 10-20-2006 at 11:32 AM..
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10-20-2006, 08:51 AM
