islamic state

What is clear is that there is a context—no matter how painful to admit—of U.S. and Western complicity in creating the very forces that now terrorize the imagination of the Western public. Just a cursory glance at that sordid history reveals the baselessness of the assumption of innocence that underlies the dominant narrative pushed by the corporate press in the U.S. and inculcated as a part of Western commonsense.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, congratulated himself on his brilliant strategy to create the "Soviet Union's Vietnam" by bogging it down militarily in Afghanistan with the creation of an international corps of right-wing Islamists ready to fight the godless Soviets. Like all colonialist calculations, the Pentagon thought that these elements could be weaponized to do the bidding of U.S. and Western imperialism. They mistakenly believed that once the mission was completed that they could conveniently toss them aside like the Hmong in Vietnam, the Gurkhas from Nepal, the black Buffalo soldiers in the West of the U.S. - the list goes on. With direct logistical support from the Pakistani ISI, the Mujahedeen performed marvelously, destroying a secular nationalist government with Marxist leanings and plunging the nation into the chaos that led to the establishment of the Taliban who created their 8th century version of an Islamic state.