Poorly-armed Islamist forces fighting against military forces armed with superior Russian weaponry. Government forces purposely killing its own citizens. Russia unwilling to back down from supporting its secular ally.
You might think that these headlines are from Syria today. But you’d be wrong. These are headlines from the U.S. right-wing echo chamber that appeared in newspapers and on broadcasts in the 1980s to justify the U.S. arming the Afghan mujaheddin against the Afghan government and Soviet military forces sent to the country to prevent it from falling into the hands of Wahhabist Muslim extremists.
However, the past has become the present in Syria where the same propaganda is being used to enlist American and other Western support for jihadist Syrian and foreign fighters that are battling against the secularist government of Bashar al Assad for control of Syria. And, once again, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Britain are fighting a proxy war against Russia to hand over yet another Muslim nation to Wahhabist extremists, including elements associated with Al Qaeda.
One of the popular memes of the 1980s was that poorly-armed Afghan “holy warriors” were fighting against Soviet helicopter gunships and tanks with World War II-era British Lee-Enfield rifles. This was, of course, pure disinformation designed to convince Congress to fund the covert arming of Afghan mujaheddin, many of whom would later join the Taliban and Al Qaeda to fight against the United States.
Another favorite CIA propaganda ploy was to report mass defections by members of the Soviet-supported Afghan Army to the Islamist rebel forces. The CIA has resorted to the same playbook in Syria to convince the Syrian government that most of its army is defecting to the rebel side. As it was in Afghanistan, the notion of mass government army defections to rebel forces is spun from whole cloth in the propaganda factories of Langley, Virginia, the Pentagon, and the State Department. It’s as if the famous “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam Hussein’s press spokesman, was crafting Syrian rebel press releases.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan referred to the Afghan mujaheddin rebel leaders as follows: “These gentlemen (the mujahideen) are the moral equivalents of America’s Founding Fathers.” Today, President Obama’s administration and Republicans like Senator John McCain refer to Syria’s jihadist rebels in similar laudatory terms.
The Obama White House's bizarre Middle East map.
Obama has his “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) advocates for intervention in Arab countries in UN ambassador Samantha Power, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and her deputy Ben Rhodes. The Reagan administration had its own pre-R2P advocate in Freedom House in Soviet emigré Ludmilla Zemels Thorne, who headed up the Soviet program at the right-wing Freedom House in New York. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Thorne continued her anti-Russia activities as the director of the Russian Area Program for Freedom House. It was Thorne who placed propaganda in the Western press on behalf of the CIA suggesting that the Soviets killed their own prisoners of war being held by the mujaheddin to avoid having to admit there were any POWs in Afghanistan.
Thorne’s propaganda found its way into CIA reports. A formerly SECRET CIA National Intelligence Officer/USSR report stated, “After interviewing Soviet prisoners in Afghanistan, Freedom House staffer Ludmilla Thorn [sic] has stated that “If the Soviet high command hears where there are Soviet prisoners located, it will immediately order the bombing of the place, even give it precedence for bombing.”
Thorne’s and the CIA’s gambit was to use propaganda and disinformation about Soviet military strikes on their own POWs to drive a wedge between Soviet ground troops, often Farsi speakers from the Tajik and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics who could converse with Afghans, and Soviet military commanders who were mostly ethnic Russian.
Any journalists who discovered on their own that the Soviets were not the barbaric monsters as painted by propagandists like Thorne and her friends in the media and Reagan administration were called “itinerant” by the CIA. This what one formerly CONFIDENTIAL CIA-prepared set of talking points for the White House, dated October 7, 1986, stated about outside observers reporting on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan: “Outside observers, including itinerant journalists who see isolated pockets of the war and hear the anxieties of Peshawar, are sometimes misled into believing that what the Soviets are trying to do is actually working when it rarely is.”
What the CIA did not want the public to know about Afghanistan in 1986, just as it doesn’t want the public to known about Syria today, is the presence of so many Western-hating Wahhabist and Salafist jihadists among the rebel groups supported by the CIA. Independent reporters in Peshawar in 1986 would have been well-aware of the radical nature of Arab jihadist volunteers and native Afghan mujaheddin who were fighting the Soviets and the Afghan government.
Thorne’s story was blatantly untrue just as many stories of Syrian troops using civilian human shields and indiscriminately bombing and killing innocent Syrian civilians. Thorne used the lie as effectively as did her co-ideologues, the Nazi propagandists who served under Joseph Goebbels. Today, the Obama administration continues to use the “big lie” in Syria as effectively as it did in Libya and as it’s currently doing in Yemen.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2013 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
