Recommended Reading, Afghanistan

The Valediction – Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Most of the events we are told are taking place in Afghanistan appear to have been staged as with this video being circulated by the CIA’s New York Times. As a very astute colleague of mine, who is firmly convinced that this whole COVID thing is a prelude to world war with China, recently pointed out about the video: “No windshield wipers and a black painted on docking portal below the copilots window. It’s a rubber mockup complete with CGI rag heads. Watch old Joe fuck up Afghanistan, while they’re moving the pieces in the South China Sea. We did tell you. Get ready to duck if you’re near a big city, amigo. Later.” He adds in a postscript: “And note the fuselage I.D. number [1109]. Just a coincidence…”

It was I with no formal training in military intelligence and only my fascination with the Afghan people to motivate me to sift through the data, that called just how Americas twenty-year debacle in Afghanistan would end as soon as she pulled out. I wrote The Shadow of Evil originally as a college paper then I refined it for publication in VT over ten years ago.

My fascination with Afghanistan began when I was a small boy not yet even able to read. My father owned a very expensive collection of geographical books published at the dawn of the twentieth century, replete with old photographs of people in their customary costume from all over the world. With those pictures as a five-year-old child I could wander the world and witness the nudity of Africa and the Australian aborigines. I could marvel at the vivid colors of northern European traditional dress and the intricate patterns of oriental silk.

But I would spend hours looking at one photo. It was a Pashtun warrior in his baggy pants and flowing robe, knives and pistols hanging from his belt as he caressed his rifle against the backdrop of the wild snowcapped mountains that stretched endlessly behind him. In the world of the sixties that I lived in, real men were already an endangered species, and this I knew by instinct was what a real man looked like. Later I would find out that these were among the toughest people in the world and were considered by the British and the Americans who conquered everyone by habit, unconquerable.

At this stage of the game its difficult to believe there is a sentient being left on this planet that believes the Taliban had anything to do with what happened in America almost twenty years ago till this day. “9/11,” the premise for Americas war in Afghanistan, was untenable from the very beginning. As the years of unrelenting and unwinnable guerilla warfare have rolled by, the reason for America staying there became absurd.

Gordon Duff, well known military intelligence analyst and my senior editor at VT sums up the morale fostered in the Afghan National Army very nicely: “and of course can you imagine being a soldier representing the US backed Kabul government, being trained continually for twenty years, of being trained by American mercenary contractors? Twenty years of being taught by ignorant hillbillies. Teaching anybody in Afghanistan like they need to learn how to fight, these are the people who taught the world how to fight…” (1)

Why anybody would want to hear another word from the mouths of a media that has done nothing but lie about Afghanistan from the very beginning is beyond me. Now a proven fact this should not have to be said but apparently it does. Nobody, not the perfumed princes of the pentagon, not CNN, not FOX, not any of the pasty-faced academics whose only credentials are they “read a book,” that were and are now being paraded before the public, know one fucking thing about Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a place of violence and mystery that stretches back before recorded history. Unless one is a warrior, a mystic and a poet, a combination of Gordon Duff, me, and Rudyard Kipling, one cannot be expected to know.

I met a lot of experts on Afghanistan over the internet and through VT after I wrote The Shadow of Evil. Only two ever impressed me and have become my friends to this very day.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are a husband-and-wife team that were the first American journalists to enter Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Following their 1981 news story for CBS, they produced a PBS documentary and returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline in 1983. They worked on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone in the 1990s. In 2002, they made a documentary about Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali’s first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978; Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story. It was published in 2009. Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire was published in 2011.

They have also written The Voice, an esoteric adventure story published in 2001. It serves them well in understanding the occult underpinnings that have always lurked just beneath the surface of what the British call the “Great Game.” Afghanistan is the place where the two great oceans of esoteric thought meet; British Israelism and Eastern Mysticism. The supernatural disturbance generated makes it a sea unnavigable by anyone foolish enough to believe in rationalism.

Gould and Fitzgerald have no such problem and their newest publication; The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond is scheduled to be released on September 22, 2021. In their own words The Valediction is a “novelized memoir of how the United States lured the Soviet Union into Afghanistan in 1979, demonized it as a threat to world peace, and paid Muslim extremists to destabilize Afghanistan in order to squash détente, scuttle the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and justify a massive arms build-up that neglects infrastructure investment in America to this day.

“Afghanistan changed everything,” Mr. Fitzgerald said in a recent interview. “It killed the peace movement that ended the Vietnam War and was trying to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Overnight, the left fell silent and let pro-war voices dictate foreign policy. Ms. Gould said, “President Carter called the so-called invasion the greatest threat to peace since World War II Yet America had been secretly destabilizing the Muslim countries of the Soviet Union for years by that time.”

According to Fitzgerald and Gould, President Reagan’s crusade against the Evil Empire set the stage for endless war by privatizing covert action and spawning an independent financial network that put the planet up for grabs to the highest bidder – and Afghanistan’s mythic dimension as the graveyard of empires is undoing not only the American empire but also the concept of empire itself.”

By my now proven expertise on Afghanistan this book is a must read for anyone who really wants to understand Afghanistan. In fact I wrote one of the reviews: “It is impossible to stop reading The Valediction! The motives of those who really rule this world will forever remain inscrutable to those who remain cloistered in the left/right paradigm offered for what passes as education. The Valediction offers a chance to take a peek behind the veil. This is a very exclusive club. You must be born into it. But I must warn you, to paraphrase Jim Morrison paraphrasing William Blake, Realms of Bliss, realms of light, some are born to happiness.  Some are born to endless night…”

Citations

1 – Duff, Gordon. “Radio Islam Interview on Afghanistan 8 27 01 (4:00 – 4:30).” Radio Islam. YouTube, 27 Aug 2021. Web. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asJIkawDTLU