By Andrew J. Bacevich

 

 

BY ALL MEANS AVAILABLE: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy, by Michael G. Vickers

 

 

An implicit question haunts this illuminating and richly detailed memoir by Michael G. Vickers, the senior intelligence official at the center of America’s long war for the greater Middle East. It’s a question that has acquired greater immediacy since it was posed in 1998 by Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “What is more important in the history of the world?” he said. “Some stirred-up Islamists or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

That comment appeared in an interview with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. Asked whether he regretted sending covert U.S. aid to Afghanistan in 1979, all but ensuring the Soviet invasion and the subsequent rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Brzezinski demurred. “Drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” he replied, had been “an excellent idea.”

In 1983, a few years into the Russian invasion, a 30-year-old Vickers left an early career as a Green Beret to join the C.I.A. The Cold War of the 1980s was mostly quite cold; covert operations promised action. At the agency, Vickers rose fast. Before the end of the decade, the young operative had become an architect of the Russian defeat in Afghanistan. This was, he writes, the “decisive battle” in the struggle that brought “an end to the Soviet Empire.”

After a stretch of graduate education and a turn at a Washington think tank, Vickers earned a new job, this time at the Pentagon. For eight years, he oversaw operations in various far-flung theaters of the global war on terror. Yet it was Afghanistan, occupied by U.S. forces beginning in 2001, that once more became the focal point of his attention.

 

In America’s very long confrontation with stirred-up Islamists, Vickers became the nation’s pre-eminent silent warrior. He brought to the science of war the same qualities that Ted Williams brought to the science of hitting a baseball: preternatural aptitude coupled with a relentless determination to master his craft.

The combination can cause myopia. In Vickers’s case, it manifested as a lack of appreciation for war’s political dimensions. His military strategy reduces to a single imperative: the pursuit of “escalation dominance.” When embarking upon war, “go in on the offense and with what it takes to win.” Don’t pussyfoot. Don’t worry about costs. A well-endowed nation like the United States always has another log to throw on the fire.

 

Vickers writes that Afghanistan in the ’80s was “my great war of liberation.” Other members of the U.S.-led anti-Soviet coalition — Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Britain — entertained their own disparate notions about the war’s purpose. Few of them were seeking to advance the cause of human freedom. Vickers suggests he was also heeding a more basic impulse: “I wanted to follow the sound of guns.”

 

His keys to victory were a plentiful supply of advanced arms — especially U.S.-manufactured Stinger antiaircraft missiles — plus “the indomitable fighting spirit, toughness and resilience of the Afghan people” along with the “wildly unrealistic” Soviet expectations of creating in Kabul a “foreign-dominated, centrally directed, secular, cohesive” state.

 

Vickers’s C.I.A. training included disguise work and not-quite-simulated torture survival tests. But he was not into spycraft. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the Aaron Sorkin-scripted 2007 film about covert ops in Afghanistan, presents Vickers as a wiry, hyperconfident wunderkind with a deep knowledge of military weaponry.

 

The portrait is largely accurate. In addition to providing munitions, he orchestrated a comprehensive suite of logistical support for the Afghan resistance fighters known as the mujahedeen. The insurgents got sophisticated “frequency-hopping” tactical radios, and new training camps offered courses in command. By the end of 1987, Vickers writes, the mujahedeen “had become equipped with more technologically advanced weapons than any insurgent force had been in history.” (They also got 20,000 mules shipped in from China for battlefield transport.)

 

The pain inflicted on Russian forces proved to be more than the sclerotic Soviet regime was willing to endure. In the winter of 1989, the Russian military withdrew. Three years later, the Kremlin-installed government in Kabul collapsed. Washington lost interest in Afghanistan and Vickers retreated into studies of Thucydides and Sun Tzu. The Afghans, meanwhile, claimed the fruits of their victory: anarchy and civil war leading to draconian rule by the Taliban.

The events of 9/11 prompted senior members of the George W. Bush administration to rediscover Afghanistan and to embark upon their own wildly unrealistic state-building project there. In 2007, the Pentagon called up Vickers to be its point man in this ill-fated enterprise. This time, he trained his strategy of “escalation dominance” against the indigenous resistance, now backed by elements of Al Qaeda.

The book loses its swagger as it moves closer to the present, reading less like an action-packed memoir and more like an official history. There is much to account for. Afghanistan was only one front in what Vickers characterizes as the “Battle for the Middle East.” His fight against Qaeda franchises and offshoots unfolded in Libya, Yemen, Syria and the Indian subcontinent, with Marxist insurgents and drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico thrown in for good measure.

 

Vickers addressed this hydra-headed threat with a buildup of Predator drones, the tool that would become part of Barack Obama’s legacy in the region. Critics have charged that this reliance on drones resulted in many needless civilian deaths. Drone warfare is not “collateral-free,” Vickers writes. But Predator strikes, he insists, “are what has kept America safe.”

 

Still, winning meant above all prevailing in Afghanistan, the site of his great victory in the 1980s. Vickers labors mightily to demonstrate that his strategy there, centered on President Obama’s 30,000 troop “surge,” was a viable one. Few readers will find the argument convincing. And, when U.S. forces finally departed in 2021, the Afghan state created at a cost of $2.3 trillion over a period of 20 years fell apart in a matter of days, rendering a definitive judgment on the entire enterprise.

Vickers holds Donald Trump and Joe Biden jointly responsible. By initiating and then committing to U.S. withdrawal, the two presidents had turned a useful “stalemate” into a “self-inflicted defeat.” This “major and completely unnecessary strategic blunder,” according to Vickers, has “greatly emboldened the global jihadist movement.”

In fact, by the time Vickers left government, in 2015, the U.S. effort to achieve escalation dominance in Afghanistan had devolved into an open-ended campaign of attrition. “Though beaten down by the surge,” he admits, the Taliban “never left.” The enemy’s persistence obliged Washington “to accept the fact that Afghanistan would be a much longer war.” How much longer he does not say. America’s wars in Afghanistan consumed Vickers for most of his adult life. In his memoir, he almost seems sad to see them go.

 

Today, Vickers concedes, “the underlying conditions that gave rise to global jihadist terrorism remain largely intact.” If true, then the methods devised to deal with Brzezinski’s stirred-up Islamists have been inherently defective, with further efforts to achieve escalation dominance — even with whole fleets of missile-laden Predators — unlikely to yield anything like definitive success.

The final minutes of “Charlie Wilson’s War” suggest that terrorism took root in Afghanistan and blossomed on 9/11 because the United States did not invest in nation building after the Soviets left. In his memoir, Vickers instead focuses his regrets on military strategy: if only they had gotten the mujahedeen bigger guns earlier; if only they had kept a closer eye on foreign insurgents, like Osama bin Laden, who were spurred by the fighting.

He does, however, gesture at something more than perpetual war. “Operationally dismantling” terrorist networks “is necessary but not sufficient,” he writes. “You also have to defeat their ideology and prevent their reconstitution.”

Defeat their ideology? On that issue, no one in the U.S. national security apparatus has a clue about where even to begin.

 

https://archive.is/cbRUB#selection-801.0-833.122

 

THIS IS BULLSHIT PLUS.... AS WE'VE SHOWN MANY TIMES ON THIS SITE, AMERICA HAS BEEN THE SPONSOR OF TERRORISTS TO OVERTHROW LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENTS, INCLUDING FINANCING THE NAZIS IN UKRAINE.... 

 

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A Declassified Dossier on HAK’s Controversial Historical Legacy, on His 100th Birthday

Archive Posts Revealing Records of Kissinger’s Role in Secret Bombing Campaigns in Cambodia, Illegal Domestic Spying, Support for Dictators and Dirty Wars Abroad

 

Washington D.C., May 25, 2023 - As Henry Alfred Kissinger (HAK) reaches 100 years of age on May 27, his centennial is generating global coverage of his legacy as a leading statesman, master diplomat, and realpolitik foreign policy strategist. “Nobody alive has more experience of international affairs,” as The Economist recently put it in a predictably laudatory tribute to Kissinger. During his tenure in government as national security advisor and secretary of state (January 1969 to January 1977), Kissinger generated a long paper trail of secret documents recording his policy deliberations, conversations, and directives on many initiatives for which he became famous—détente with the USSR, the opening to China, and Middle East shuttle diplomacy, among them.

But the historical record also documents the darker side of Kissinger’s controversial tenure in power: his role in the overthrow of democracy and the rise of dictatorship in Chile; disdain for human rights and support for dirty, and even genocidal, wars abroad; secret bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia; and involvement in the Nixon administration’s criminal abuses, among them the secret wiretaps of his own top aides.

To contribute to a balanced and more comprehensive evaluation of Kissinger’s legacy, the National Security Archive has compiled a small, select dossier of declassified records—memos, memcons, and “telcons” that Kissinger wrote, said and/or read—documenting TOP SECRET deliberations, operations and policies during Kissinger’s time in the White House and Department of State. The revealing “telcons”—over 30,000 pages of daily transcripts of Kissinger’s phone conversations many of which he secretly recorded—were taken by Kissinger as “personal papers” when he left office in 1977 and used, selectively, to write his best-selling memoirs. The National Security Archive forced the U.S. government to recover these official records by preparing a lawsuit that argued that both the State Department and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had inappropriately allowed classified U.S. government documentation to be removed from their control; once they were returned, Archive senior analyst William Burr filed a FOIA request for their declassification. The draft lawsuit—which was never filed—is included in this dossier, since Kissinger’s effort to remove, retain and control these highly informative and revealing historical records should be considered a critical part of his official legacy.

This special posting also centralizes links to dozens of previously published collections of documents related to Kissinger’s tenure in government that the Archive, led by the intrepid efforts of William Burr, has identified, pursued, obtained and catalogued over several decades. Together, these collections constitute an accessible, major repository of records on one of the most consequential U.S. foreign policy makers of the 20th century.

. KISSINGER, THE SECRET BOMBINGS AND WIRETAPS

In the fall of 1968, then Harvard professor Henry Kissinger used his access as an advisor to the State Department to become a secret informant to the Nixon campaign on the Johnson Administration’s peace talks in Vietnam. If LBJ succeeded in ending the war, Nixon feared losing the election to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Secretly, Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese government to jettison the talks, promising them a better deal once he was elected.

Within weeks of Nixon’s inauguration, he decided with his new national security advisor that secretly bombing North Vietnamese supply routes in Cambodia and Laos was one way to force Ho Chi Minh back to the negotiating table on U.S. terms. The bombing raids, codenamed “Breakfast Plan” and “Operation Menu,” began on March 17, 1969, and lasted over a year, killing thousands of Cambodian noncombatants. After the New York Times ran its first story on May 9, 1969, exposing the covert B-52 bombing program, Kissinger asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap specific journalists and U.S. officials, including his own aides at the NSC, to identify who was leaking information to the media. The first of his aides to be placed under surveillance, an NSC staffer named Morton Halperin, resigned and eventually sued Kissinger, Nixon and the Justice Department for illegally wiretapping his office and home phones.

When the wiretap scandal broke, Kissinger stated that his role was limited to supplying an initial set of names to the FBI; when he was deposed in the Halperin lawsuit, however, he claimed that Hoover had identified those individuals. Kissinger’s deputy, Alexander Haig, who transmitted the names of suspected leakers to the FBI for a period of two years, said that Kissinger provided him with those names. According to Halperin’s lawsuit, on the day of the first New York Times story, “Hoover and Kissinger conferred by telephone four times that day, and the wiretap on the Halperin home telephone was in place by evening.”

Hoover sent wiretap surveillance reports on Halperin and other targets directly to President Nixon. One of those reports was recently declassified by the Nixon library and is included in this posting. “The illegal and rule-less government wiretaps not only violated the right to privacy but interfered with the political rights of those surveilled and those they talked to,” Halperin noted in a statement to the Archive for this posting. ”These surveillance records remind us of the need for eternal vigilance and accountability.”

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cold-war-henry-kissinger/2023-05-25/henry-kissingers-documented-legacy

 

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Republicans 'Too Afraid' to Remove Adam Schiff From Office Over Russiagate Hoax

 

BY ANDREI DERGALIN

 

Despite being censured in the US Congress, Adam Schiff is in fact doing pretty well for himself and is likely going to “get a promotion for lying to the American people for four years,” says a former Colorado state senator.

The US House of Representatives voted to censure Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff this week for his role in promoting unsubstantiated claims that former US President Donald Trump colluded with Russia.

Former Colorado Senator Ted Harvey (Rep.), however, argued that Schiff deserves worse for essentially lying to the American people while in the capacity of the House Intelligence Committee head.

Despite basically knowing that there was no substance to allegations of Trump colluding with Russia, Schiff told the US public that there was “ample evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” Harvey told Sputnik.

 

“That is everything Schiff said to the American people for four years as the chairman of the intelligence community, he should not just be censured. He should be removed from office,” he said.

 

Alas, Harvey lamented, the US Republicans are simply “too afraid” to pursue this course of actions and instead managed to make a “martyr” out of Schiff.

“And he is raising money by the boatloads and he is now running for the United States Senate and will get a promotion for lying to the American people for four years,” Harvey mused about Schiff's prospects. “And instead of being held accountable for that, he's going to be promoted for that.”

During his tenure as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump was hounded by allegations of colluding with Russia in order to be elected in 2016, with said allegations being actively promoted by his political opponents.

Despite the seriousness of the allegations brought against him, an investigation into the alleged Russian election interference led by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to produce conclusive evidence to back claims that Trump campaign members conspired with Russia.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230625/republicans-too-afraid-to-remove-adam-schiff-from-office-over-russiagate-hoax-1111460519.html

 

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