Dear CCI friends,

We all have watched the fury-set-in-motion in Afghanistan over the past few days. So, so tragic!

Thursday’s scores of deaths at the airport are absolutely deplorable … At the same time, we read that an estimated quarter of a million Afghan deaths have been ignored during the past 20 years. Could this be so?

John Pilger gives a remarkable picture of what Kabul looked like before our forces destabilized the changes in Afghan life during the Soviet era. Were there downsides to the life the Soviets offered? No doubt, yes. They were outlawing the tribal religions, educating young women, etc. Afghans were joining the rest of the world it seems from Pilger’s photos. It is hard to believe that Afghanistan wasn’t always a country of clerics wrapped in desert cloth with women in burkas.

Read and weep over what might have been possible in Afghanistan …

[Continue Reading]

Strategic Culture
August 23, 2021
By Alastair Crooke

China is more determined to shape the region than many analysts realise, Alastair Crooke writes.

A huge geo-political event has just occurred in Afghanistan: The implosion of a key western strategy for managing what Mackinder, in the 19th century, called the Asian heartland. That it was accomplished, without fighting, and in few days, is almost unprecedented.

It has been a shock. Not just one of those ephemeral shocks that is soon forgotten, but a deeply traumatic one. Unlike the psychological impact of 9/11, the western world is treating the experience as mourning for the loss of ‘a loved one’. There have been ministerial tears, chest beating and an entry into the first three stages of grief simultaneously: Firstly, shock and denial (a state of disbelief and numbed feelings); then, pain and guilt (for those allies of ours huddled at Kabul airport), and finally, anger. The fourth stage is already in sight in the U.S.: Depression – as the polls show America already swinging towards deep pessimism about the pandemic, economic and prospects, as well as the course on which the American Republic is set.

Here we have a clear statement from the editors of The New York Times of who that ‘loved one’ was:

[The Afghan debacle is] “tragic because the American Dream of being the ‘indispensable nation’ in a world where the values of civil rights, women’s empowerment and religious tolerance rule – proved to be just a dream”.

Michael Rubin representing the hawkish AEI pronounced an eulogy over ‘the corpse’:

Biden, Blinken, and Jake Sullivan might craft statements about the mistakes of earlier NATO overreach, “and the need for Washington to focus on its core interests further West. And Pentagon officials and diplomats might contest any lessening of America’s commitment with indignation, yet the reality is NATO is a Dead Man Walking”.

[Continue Reading]

ACURA Viewpoint

Legacy of failure in Afghanistan started in 1979, not 2001

By James Carden
August 18, 2021

A decade ago, John Lamberton Harper, a professor of US Foreign Policy and European Studies at Johns Hopkins in Bologna, Italy published an indispensable history of the first cold war (The Cold War, Oxford University Press, 2011) in which he described the origins of what became known as ‘the Carter doctrine.’

The Carter Doctrine pledged US military action against any state that attempted to gain control of the Persian Gulf. As Quincy Institute president Andrew Bacevich has pointed out it “implied the conversion of the Persian Gulf into an informal American protectorate” and set the stage for repeated (and disastrous) interventions over the coming decades. Among other things, the Carter Doctrine, the brainchild of Carter’s Polish-born national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, caused the US to ally with primitive Saudi Arabia at the expense of manageable relations with civilized Persia.

It is also a story of miscalculation and hubris, one which resonates rather profoundly this week as American soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officials and many thousands of Afghans flee the Taliban’s assault on Kabul.

How did we get here?

[Continue Reading]

Dear CCI Followers,

Often our CCI professionals send me their commentaries that elucidate or question what is appearing in our U.S. mainstream media. Below is one commentary that I asked Sylvia Demarest’s permission to share with you. Sylvia is the retired trial lawyer who took the Catholic Church to court and won huge reparations for innocent altar boys who had been abused by Catholic priests. Further, she collected an archive of documents of the sex abuse crisis and compiled a database of priests who had been publicly accused of abusing children. The documents and the database were donated to Bishop Accountability and is on line at https://www.bishop-accountability.org.  Any parishioner who has a question about a priest moving to their diocese can check the registry to see whether the priest has a prior history of abuse. It is planned that the document collection and the database will be donated as an archive to an educational institution to be available for scholarly research. Among Sylvia’s other vital NGO tasks, she is a cherished CCI volunteer.

[Continue Reading]

Dear CCI Friends,

I have my own perspective on Mikhail Gorbachev and “Who Destroyed the USSR” as do many others. I cringe when Russians and Americans assume that Gorbachev should have known how or what to do to regarding the break up of the USSR with its 286,000,000 peoples across 11 time zones.

There was no person around who could even think seriously how to break up the Soviet Union, there had never been such a huge, overarching, dictatorial country on the planet. The average Russian or the other 159 nationalities living in the 11 time zones were at the mercy of whoever was in power. Of all others available, Mikhail Gorbachev was probably the most sensitive and kind-hearted. Rumor has it that he was mentored secretly in the basement of the U.S.-Canada Institute by Georgi Arbatov, the closet innovator among the other Communists.

Gorbachev welcomed President Reagan with open arms, he trusted that Americans would be truthful with him regarding NATO, not moving farther than East Germany. During a coup attempt, his beloved wife sustained a stroke from which she never recovered. His greatest nemesis, Yeltsin, was voted in as president of the new Russia December 1991 and made a horrible mess of the next nine years. The 1990’s were devastating years for the whole population except for the young oligarchs. Yeltsin left office a sick and excessive man and Gorbachev has lived out his life as a figure respected by most Americans and disrespected by most Russians … which must be heart-breaking for him. He has my deep respect for trying to be retrospective throughout these ensuing years and for still having passion for today’s Russia and the world.

[Continue Reading]