David Ignatius
David Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist who is notable for his coziness with his sources in the CIA. So when he writes a column (4/8/14) headlined “Putin Steals the CIA’s Playbook on Anti-Soviet Covert Operations,” it’s hard to know how to take that: Is it supposed to be a criticism or a compliment?
More specifically, Ignatius writes that Putin
may in fact be taking a page out of the United States’ playbook during the Ronald Reagan presidency, when the Soviet empire began to unravel thanks to a relentless US covert-action campaign. Rather than confront Moscow head-on, Reagan nibbled at the edges, by supporting movements that destabilized Russian power in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and, finally, Poland and Eastern Europe.
Ignatius credits this view to “John Maguire, a former CIA paramilitary covert-action officer, who served in the Contras program in Nicaragua and later in the Middle East.” Maguire argues that what Putin is doing in Ukraine is similar to what he and his colleagues did in Nicaragua. Really?
What the actual “Reagan playbook” looked like (cc photo: John Hoagland)
Though this history has largely gone down the memory hole, as demonstrated by the whitewashing of Reagan’s record at the time of his death (Media Advisory, 6/9/04), the CIA-backed Contras were not just “hit-and-run guerrillas in Nicaragua,” as Ignatius describes them. They were an organized terrorist force that targeted schools, health clinics and other civilian facilities.
Their standard tactics, in the words of human rights advocate Reed Brody, were “the killing of unarmed men, women, children and the elderly” and “premeditated acts of brutality including rape, beatings, mutilation and torture.” The war left an estimated 30,000 dead.
The use of large-scale violence against civilians to achieve political goals was a hallmark of the Reagan “playbook,” employed not just in Nicaragua but in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Angola. If Russia has been doing anything remotely resembling this in Ukraine, the Washington Post has certainly been falling down on the job.
After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States funded guerrillas, many of them religious extremists, to fight the occupation government. If Putin was actually following Reagan’s example, wouldn’t he have responded to the US invasion of Afghanistan in a similar fashion? Yet Ignatius curiously fails to mention any signs of Russian support for the Taliban.
While there’s little evidence that Putin is following in Reagan’s footsteps, AlterNet‘s Alex Kane (4/8/14) makes a more plausible case for another world leader drawing inspiration from Reagan Era foreign policy—noting President Barack Obama’s current support for death squad–linked governments in Kenya and Honduras.
Or how about Obama’s support for the Islamist cannibals in Syria? Isn’t that a more obvious parallel?
Not to mention that Nicaragua under the Sandinistas was not in any way an outpost of Soviet power.
“Yet Ignatius curiously fails to mention any signs of Russian support for the Taliban.”
I don’t think Russia needs to support the Taliban. I’ve read that the US supports the Pakistan ISI and the ISI provides support for the Taliban.
Thus if the US is, through an intermediary, supporting the Taliban there’s no need for Russia to also support them.
These facts are so twisted that if Reagan appeared in the room while this story was being worked on ,his constantly repeated question of “who are they talking about”,would of been damn annoying.
“After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the United States funded guerrillas, many of them religious extremists, to fight the occupation government”
Actually the CIA was stirring up Islamic resistance to the Socialist government of Afghanistan before the USSR invaded. That was one of the reasons for the invasion. It was Zibignew Brezensky (spelled wrong I’m sure) that started that during the Carter administration.
The US purveys violence across the world, as MLK well and often noted, in its neo-colonial quests. We tore up societies in Nicaragua, Viet Nam, and Chile while the USSR were dominating much of Eastern Europe.
However, the USSR did not carry off and exploit the natural resources of their occupied satellites, though they did insist on pro-USSR governments for defense reasons. Like the Nazis, we stripped the countries we dominated of their wealth and resources; unlike the Soviets, we didn’t establish lenient trade or economic agreements to soften our often harsh dominance, content to let the peasantry suffer under our dictatorial proxies. That was the difference, as a peasant in El Salvador would have thought he were in heaven had he awoken in 1981 Poland. That’s the sad reality of it all.
John where do people like you crawl up from.Do you really believe this hate America first crap.You view this country as our enemies see it.Revealing.
Excuses-moi, but the US and UK started funding and training the mujahedeen in Afghanistan BEFORE the Soviet invasion, IN ORDER TO lure the Soviets into Afghanistan. Pretty important fact! The mastermine behind the operation, Zbigniew Brzezinski, finally bragged about it to a French magazine in 1998. http://williamblum.org/essays/read/how-the-us-provoked-the-soviet-union-into-invading-afghanistan-and-starting
“One of the most closely guarded secrets of the cold war was America’s and Britain’s collusion with the warlords, the mojahedin, and the critical part they played in stimulating the jihad that produced the Taliban, al-Qaida and September 11.
For 17 years, Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the most brutal men on earth – with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in a futile war. One of them, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly favoured by the CIA, received tens of millions of dollars. His speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/20/afghanistan.weekend7