MOSCOW, October 8. /TASS/. The Afghan conflict has demonstrated destructive consequences of media wars waged in the interests of this or that group, the head of Military Academy of the Russian Army General Staff told an international conference on Afghanistan on Thursday.
"The experience acquired by the US during an information operation in Afghanistan gained momentum in Iraq, Libya and Syria," Sergey Makarov said.
"During the Iraqi, and especially the Libyan conflict, an efficient program was tested and implemented in practice to remove from power regimes that don’t fit within the political concept of world structure developed by American ruling circles," he said.
Between 1979 and 1989, the United States, other countries and the Afghan opposition widely used disinformation aimed against the then USSR and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which included such conceptual blocs as "threat to Islam from the atheistic Kabul government", "genocide against the Afghan people from Soviet troops" as well as "protection of human rights and freedoms" and others.
"As a result, the Soviet Union was discredited and presented as aggressor in the eyes of a sizable part of the global community," Makarov said. "But the main result of the information war unleashed by Western countries was a growing scope of the internal armed conflict (in Afghanistan)," he said.