Does anyone remember when the Afghan Freedom Fighters were the medias cause celebre?

[NNN0LHI]

The members of that group eventually changed their name to the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda. Even Osama bin Laden was a famous Afghan Freedom Fighter. As was Mohammed Omar, the current leader of the Taliban. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Omar

Soviet invasion and radicalization

Omar fought as a guerilla with the Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami faction of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen under the command of Nek Mohammad, and fought against the Najibullah regime between 1989 and 1992. It was reported that he was thin, but tall and strongly built, and "a crack marksman who had destroyed many Soviet tanks during the Afghan War."

Omar was wounded four times, and lost an eye either in 1986 or in the 1989 Battle of Jalalabad, which also marred his cheek and forehead. Taliban lore has it that, upon being wounded by a piece of shrapnel, Omar removed his own eye and sewed the eyelid shut. However, reports from a Red Cross facility near the Pakistan border indicate that Omar was treated there for the injury, where his eye was surgically removed.




I remember when Dan Rather did a 60 Minutes show where he accompanied the Afghan Freedom Fighters on a terrorist mission against the Soviet Army.

Everyone loved the Mujahiddin back then. Our media. Our politicians. US citizens. They all loved them. They were our heroes. Ronald Reagan went so far as to dedicate a 1982 Space Shuttle launch to the resistance fighters in Afghanistan. Watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipszh14WPFY

Here Reagan hosted a reception with some of them in the White House:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGm-4MRuGF0

Lets not forget how that big move turned out.

Don

http://www.fair.org/extra/0201/afghanistan-80s.html

Forgotten Coverage of Afghan "Freedom Fighters"

The villains of today's news were heroes in the '80s

January/February 2002

By David N. Gibbs

The current war in Afghanistan is increasingly presented as a war for the human rights of the Afghan people, to liberate them from their oppressive Taliban rulers. The Taliban’s severely regressive policies toward women have received particular attention, with even First Lady Laura Bush issuing condemnations of this repression. And the press has overwhelmingly followed suit, portraying the war as an ideological struggle against the evils of Islamic extremism.

But the U.S. government and the American press have not always opposed Afghan extremists. During the 1980s, the Mujahiddin guerrilla groups battling Soviet occupation had key features in common with the Taliban. In many ways, the Mujahiddin groups acted as an incubator for the later rise of the Taliban in the 1990s.

The senior members of the Taliban had Mujahiddin combat roles; Taliban leader Mohammed Omar fought with the Mujahiddin and lost an eye in combat. Many of the Taliban members who were too young to participate in that struggle grew up in Mujahiddin-controlled refugee camps in Pakistan. The religious schools from which many Taliban emerged were steeped in the zealous, politicized form of Islam that the Mujahiddin did so much to foster. Many of the Taliban’s ugliest features--notably their mistreatment of women--had clear precedents in the conduct of the Mujahiddin forces.

There has, in short, been a fairly dramatic and Orwellian shift in the tone of public discourse regarding Afghanistan. While Islamic extremism is now viewed with great hostility, in the 1980s U.S. policy strongly supported such extremism; there is scarcely any recognition that a little more than a decade ago, the U.S. press waxed eloquent about the Afghan "freedom fighters." snip

Adventure tourism

Beyond this lack of criticism, there was a remarkable amount of simple sensationalism--often mixed with self-indulgence--in much of the reporting. It became quite popular for reporters to make excursions inside Afghanistan, accompanied by one of the Mujahiddin groups. The resulting reports were often short on substance; they appeared as a type of adventure tourism, more suited perhaps to the Travel Section. The standard was clearly established by Dan Rather’s excursion in 1980, broadcast on 60 Minutes and described in the Washington Post (4/7/80):


"The resistance fighters have opened up with automatic weapons from the top of the ridge toward the tanks below," {Rather} said breathlessly. "Anti-tank gun goes off. Now, again, silence. Artillery shell. Anti-tank round. Impossible to know where it hit. Or if it struck home.... That round hit the ridge just below us." And then, the ordeal {was} over: "I don't know when anybody's been so glad to see stars."...

Rather himself tended to emphasize the hardships of the reportage. He made a "three-hour trek" down the mountain, a "two-day walk" from one village to another, and as for getting to the ridge, "the climb was straight up--10,000 feet."

The Mujahiddin struggle often was characterized in stirring, epic terms. An article in the Wall Street Journal (7/24/81) filed from Peshawar, began as follows:


Despite the adolescent crack in his voice, Haji Murad is a seasoned veteran of the Moslem holy war against communism in Afghanistan.

"We’ll fight until the last breath in our bodies," the turbaned 19-year old Tadjik tribesman says. He is here with other Mujahiddin, or Moslem holy warriors to get arms from an Afghanistan resistance group. "If the communists decide not to leave for 100 years, then we will still fight them," he says with the Mujahiddin conviction that they can’t lose because God is on their side.