In early 1980, as the diplomatic fallout from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began to play itself out on the grand chessboard, then-US President Jimmy Carter sent his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Pakistan to rally the mujahideen fighters waging jihad against the Russian invaders.

In the footage of that incident, Brzezinski can be seen helicoptering to a spot in the Khyber Pass on the Afghanistan border to address the Islamic fighters taking up arms against the Soviets. Assuring the assembled “freedom fighters” that their struggle will succeed, he raises a finger in the air in the direction of Afghanistan, proclaiming: “That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail. And you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side.”

This was, as we now know, pure manipulative hogwash. Uncle Sam couldn’t have cared less about the fate of these fighters. The US government didn’t believe in their God and it didn’t care if they had their homes and their mosques back again. In fact, as Brzezinski himself has since admitted, the Soviet invasion had, in a sense, been a Western operation, the successful culmination of a covert US plan to lure the USSR into Afghanistan and slowly bleed the Red Army in a years-long proxy war.

In the infamous 1998 interview where Brzezinski confirmed this hidden truth, he was asked whether he regretted his role in fostering the rise of the Taliban and Al CIAda.

Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

These are not the words of a pious believer in the righteous struggle of Islamic freedom fighters. They are not even the words of an earnest Cold Warrior, blindly supporting anyone who could strike at his Soviet enemy. They are the words of the man who literally wrote the book on The Grand Chessboard—the words of a self-proclaimed geopolitical grandmaster who cooly calculates several moves ahead as he manipulates his pawns on the grand chessboard as part of a grand strategy to checkmate his opponent.

Last week I revealed how the would-be rulers of the world see the grand struggle for geopolitical dominance as a type of chess game and how people around the globe (including the mujahideen in Afghanistan) are treated as mere pawns in that game, to be used, abused and sacrificed in pursuit of the grandmasters’ aims.

This week I will examine the growing political awareness of the pawns in the grand chess game and show what it looks like when they strike back against their masters.

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