How Brzezinski started the Mujahideen
Fresh from the archives, a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur:
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs 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. 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?
Brzezinski: 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?
Brzezinski: 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, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. 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.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: 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?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
Brzezinski: 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.
Elephant aid
While President Bush announces $320 million of aid for Afghanistan, according to BBC Online, South Africa is going in for far more heavyweight assistance. Scientists are busy tranquillising and freighting 1,000 Nellies to neighbouring Mozambique, where the civil war led to their own Babar population being hunted to extinction. South Africas peaceful transition, however, resulted in a population bulge in Dumbos.
Global coalition at work
Novosti, via the Jamestown Foundations excellent e-briefing on Chechnya, relays us news of Putins latest effort in support of the global coalition against terrorism. Akhmad Kadyrov, head of the pro-Moscow Chechen administration, has been in Baghdad talking to Saddam Hussein. Could Saddam please persuade the Chechen diaspora living in Iraq to end their resistance to Russia and hand over their weapons? Although he would not go quite that far, his foreign minister Naji Sabri Ahmad al-Hadithi did make a significant statement: Chechnya is an integral part of the Russian Federation, and we fully respect Russias sovereignty and territorial integrity and condemn any attempts to destroy that sovereignty.
Buoyed by the visit, Kadyrov headed for the Jordanian capital of Amman to put the same question to the King.
China syndrome
Meanwhile, in Beijing, Isabel Hilton delights in the early morning routines of park life. Pulsating rhythms blare from a portable loudspeaker as between the trees, twenty couples are locked in the tango. Here and there, men and women are indulging in a spot of backwards walking (to tonify body and spirit). Others have brought their pet birds out for an airing: the lower branches of the trees are hung with cages. A man is practicing his trumpet; two girls are conversing to one another in halting English, while a group of men stand around slapping parts of their bodies, declaring them fit and healthy, or hug the trees. Men are squatting, practicing calligraphy. Dipping their large brushes in water, they write their poems on the paving stones. They get up and leave and the rising sun dries up their verse.
The horror, the horror!
Novosti reports more travels into the heart of darkness. This weeks Kurtz is Colonel Yury Budanov who has just undergone a third psychiatric evaluation by medical experts at Moscows Serbsky Institute. Budanov has been charged with abducting and murdering an 18-year-old Chechen woman, Elza Kungaeva. Reports from the still-classified results have deemed him temporarily insane at the time of murder. Witnesses to this temporal psychosis are few, although it is rumoured (not by Novosti) that the Colonel has said he remembers seeing a ten-foot chicken tap dancing. This medical stitch-up is likely to lead to a significant decrease in Budanovs sentence, or even to his release. In Conrads words, a hollow man indeed.
openButterfly news
openDemocracys ongoing fascination with butterflies was heightened by news from Northern Ireland of a new species. Leptidea reali has excited lepidopterists everywhere with its distinguishing feature: enlarged genitalia. Still, here at openDemocracy, we remain convinced that its quality that matters.
Contact the Diary editor: dominic.hilton@opendemocracy.net
