The Inside Story of afghanistan with Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

Program Description

For millennia the forbidding territory of Afghanistan has served as a vital crossroads for armies, and has witnessed history-shaping clashes between civilizations: Greek, Arab, Mongol, Tartar, and in more recent times, British, Russian, and American. Many people in the U.S. have no idea of the hidden dimensions that lay beneath the current situation. Films such as Charlie Wilson’s War and The Man Who Would Be King, have served only to further confuse what’s actually happening. Gould points out, “At this late date the American mainstream media is still delivering a lot of the propaganda aspects of the story about Afghanistan, when it was put out in the 1980s. [There are] a lot of Americans, who are very anxious about supporting a good policy, but have no idea how to know when they are being offered a good policy.” Now, with the increasing involvement of the U.S. in Afghanistan, it behooves every American to learn as much as possible. This extraordinary dialogue is your opportunity.

Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, a husband and wife team, began working together in 1979, co-producing a documentary, The Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance, for Paul’s television show, “Watchworks.” Soon they found themselves in the midst of a swirling controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As the first American journalists to delve deeply inside the story, they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the U.S. defined itself against the rest of the world under the veil of superpower confrontation. Together they are the authors of The Voice (Xlibres Books 2000) and Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (City Lights Books 2009). To learn more about the work of Gould and Fitzgerald go to www.invisiblestory.com or www.grailwerk.com

Topics Explored in this Dialogue:

• How the U.S. media misled Americans about Afghanistan
• Why the boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan has never been accepted by the Afghans
• How the Taliban came to existence in the 1990s
• How the Afghan people became victims of the cold war
• How Dan Rather and “Sixty Minutes” reported the soviet departure from Afghanistan, and negatively affected Americans’ view
• What did 19th century Russian mystics say about Afghanistan
• What is the way out of the unfolding quagmire

Program Number: 3310             Host: Michael Toms              Interview Date: 5/18/2009