Imperial dreams

British journalist Robert Fisk writes in his book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (2005) about going to Afghanistan in 1980 to cover the Soviet invasion of that country:

For the next two months, we few journalists who managed to enter Afghanistan were witness to the start of a fearful tragedy, one that would last for more than a quarter of a century and would cost at least a million and a half innocent lives, a war that would eventually reach out and strike at the heart, not of Russia but of America. How could we have known? How could we have guessed that while an Islamic revolution had enveloped Iran, a far more powerful spiritual force was being nursed and suckled here amid the snows of early January 1980? Again, the evidence was there, for those of us who chose to seek it out, who realised that the narrative of history laid down by our masters — be they of the Moscow or the Washington persuasion — was essentially short-term, false and ultimately self-defeating. Perhaps we were too naive, too ill-prepared for events on such a scale. Who could grasp in so short a time the implications of this essentially imperial story, this latest adventure in the "Great Game"? ... I had spent Christmas in Ireland and returned to wartime Beirut on 3 January to prepare for my onward assignment to cover the continuing revolution in Iran. But no event could compare to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (my emphasis)

Because the Russians had just essentially taken over the country, Fisk was very surprised to find that the Afghan embassies were still issuing visas:

The was astonishing. The Russians wanted us there. Their "fraternal support" for the new Karmal government — and the supposedly hideous nature of his predecessor's regime — was to be publicised. The Russians were coming to liberate Afghanistan. This was obviously the story the Kremlin was concocting.

Did the Bush administration hire former Soviet publicists to explain its own foreign adventures?

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