Book extract: Freedom Next Time – Liberating Afghanistan
John Pilger, June 2006
An extract from the chapter about Afghanistan in John Pilger’s book. Describes how the USA is determined to get power and influence in Central Asia and disempower Russia, beginning with the 1980s Afghanistan war.
Marina corroborated this. “Marina” is the codename for a leading member of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of Afghani Women, which since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of Afghani women. Rawa women still travel secretly throughout the country, with cameras concealed beneath their burqas. During the Taliban time, they filmed an official execution and other atrocities, and smuggled the videotape to the West. “We took it to all the main media groups,” said Marina. “Reuters, ABC Australia, for example, and they said, ‘Yes, it’s very nice, but we can’t show it because it’s too shocking for people in the West.’”
That was before September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush and the American media discovered the women of Afghanistan. “The Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America,” she said. “They persecuted women, yes, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the West over the atrocious nature of the Western-backed warlords, who are no different. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands.”
We met clandestinely and she wore a veil to disguise her identity. “This is what happens in the countryside under these so-called commanders,” she said, opening a thick file. “In March, two girls who went to school without their burqas were killed and their bodies were put in front of their houses. Last month, thirty-five women jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is not uncommon; it is Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have attacked the master on September 11, 2001.”
At the height of the British Empire, in 1898, Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, wrote: “I confess that countries are pieces on a chessboard, upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.” He was referring in particular to Afghanistan, whose strategic trade routes the British regarded as vital to their holding sway over Central Asia and the Caspian basin, The ruthlessness and “grand illusions” of the “great game” are etched on the pages of Afghanistan’s modern history, telling us much about the origins of the “war on terror.” A secret chapter is America’s and Britain’s support for and collusion with tribal groups known as the mujahedin, and the critical part they played in launching and stimulating the jihad that led to the attack on “the master” on September 11, 2001.
The Afghani mujahedin – and the Taliban and al-Qaida – were effectively created by the CIA, its Pakistani equivalent the ISI, and Britain’s M16. In admitting this, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser in the late 1970s, has disclosed Carter’s secret directive to bankroll the mujahedin and America’s collaboration “with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese to start providing weapons to the mujahedin.” Regarded in Washington as something of a guru of Pax Americana, Brzezinski believed that the post-colonial liberation movements and their gains throughout the “third world” presented a challenge to the United States, as demonstrated by the recent American humiliation in Vietnam. Moreover, the AngloAmerican client regimes in the Middle East and the Gulf, notably Iran under the Shah, were vulnerable to gathering forces of insurrection.
The immediate problem, however, was the coming to power of Afghanistan’s first secular, modernist government, which promised unheard-of social reforms. This was formed by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which had opposed the autocratic rule of King Zahir Shah and, with progressive military officers, had overthrown the regime of the king’s cousin, Mohammad Daud, in 1978. Most foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, found that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said they were delighted with the coup.”
This may have been true in the cities, but in the countryside the coup provoked bitter resistance from Muslim traditionalists, especially when the new government outlined a reform program that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom of religion and equal rights for women. So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who were their beneficiaries. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who escaped the Taliban in September 2001, recalled:
Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked […] We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday […] It all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning […] They used to kill teachers and burn schools […] It was funny and sad to think these were people the West had supported.
For Washington, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. At Brzezinski’s urging, and unknown to the American public and Congress, President Carter authorised $500 million to fund and arm the mujahedin: in effect, to set up what the Americans would now describe as a terrorist organisation. The aim was to overthrow the Afghan government and to draw the Soviets into Afghanistan.
In an interview in 1998, Brzezinski said:
According to the official view of history, CIA aid to the mujahedin began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on 24 December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on 3 July 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the proSoviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to provoke a Soviet military intervention […] We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Brzezinski was asked if, having seen the consequences, he had any regrets. “Regret what?” he replied.
The secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap […] The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War.” Indeed, for almost ten years, Moscow had to carry on a conflict that brought about the demoralisation and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
For seventeen years, the United States deliberately cultivated an extremism against which it would later proclaim a “war on terror.” “Central to the US-sponsored operation,” wrote Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism,
was the attempt to manufacture an extremist religious ideology by amalgamating local Afghan feudal traditions with Islamic rhetoric […] The extremist religious “jihadi” ideology cultivated in CIA-sponsored training programs was interspersed with tribal norms, giving rise to a distinctly distorted system of war values garbed with “Islamic” jargon […] Among the myriad of policies designed to generate the desired level of extremism, the US funded – to the tune of millions of dollars – the production and distribution in Afghanistan of school textbooks promoting murder and fanaticism.
These primers, disclosed the Washington Post in 2002, “were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines. They have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books.” According to candid American officials, the textbooks “steeped a generation in violence.”
American administrations poured $4 billion into the pockets of some of the world’s most brutal fanatics. Men like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received tens of millions of CIA dollars. Hekmatyar’s speciality was trafficking in opium and harassing women who refused to wear the veil. Invited to London in 1986, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a “freedom fighter.” Following the fall of the PDPA government in 1992, mujahedin warlords attacked Kabul with such ferocity that an estimated fifty thousand people were killed. “In 1994 alone,” reported Human Rights Watch, “an estimated 25,000 people were killed in Kabul, most of them civilians, in rocket and artillery attacks. One-third of the city was reduced to rubble.” Hekmatyar, the West’s favourite warlord at the time, rained American-supplied missiles on Kabul, killing two thousand people in two days, until the other factions agreed to make him Prime Minister.
Brzezinski’s “great game” coincided with the ambition of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to dominate the region. In 1986, CIA Director William Casey approved a plan put forward by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. Some hundred thousand Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1982 and 1992; these were taliban, which means students. Mujahedin camps were run by the CIA and Britain’s M16, with British special forces, the SAS, training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. In the United States, CIA operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the Twin Towers – and given paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was codenamed Operation Cyclone.
Osama bin Laden’s notoriety was the product of this. In Afghanistan, wrote John Cooley in Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, he operated
with the full approval of the Saudi regime and the CIA […] He brought in engineers from his father’s company and heavy construction equipment to build roads and warehouses for the mujaheddin. In 1986, he helped build a CIA-financed tunnel complex, to serve as a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical center for the mujaheddin, deep under the mountains close to the Pakistan border […] The CIA gave Usama bin Laden full rein in Afghanistan, as did Pakistan’s intelligence generals.
According to Michael Springmann, former head of the US Visa Bureau in Jeddah, it was policy “to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA.”
Operation Cyclone, wrote Nafeez Ahmed, provided the CIA with the ability to recruit, finance and train terrorist groups throughout the Muslim world.
The goal of these policies was to destabilise nationalist and communist movements that threatened US interests […] Extremists in Pakistan were thus mobilised by the CIA in tandem with the Saudis to proliferate extremist sects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Algeria, Yemen, Indonesia, the Philippines and elsewhere. Simultaneously, organised criminal financial centers intertwined with the latter were established in Malaysia, Madagascar, South Africa, Nigeria, Latin America, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Turkestan and elsewhere.
During NATO’s assault on Serbia in 1999, al-Qaida militants joined up with and fought alongside the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which was also funded and armed by the United States – and al-Qaida. The Clinton administration’s quarry then was Slobodan Milosevic and its goal the final break-up of multi-ethnic, “socialist” Yugoslavia. This was achieved by enduring bedfellows: American foreign policy (bombing) and “Islamic terrorism.” Such an important irony, which helped to explain the rise of the jihadis, eluded the media reporting of Kosovo’s “liberation.”
In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Brzezinski writes, “Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some 500 years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power.” He defines Eurasia as all the territory east of Germany and Poland, stretching through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean and including the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. The key to controlling this vast area of the world is Central Asia. Dominance of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan ensures not only new sources of energy and mineral wealth, but a “guardpost” over American control of the oil of the Persian Gulf.
The first priority has been achieved, says Brzezinski. This is the economic subjugation of the former superpower. Once the Soviet Union had collapsed, the United States looted some $300 billion in Russian assets, destabilising the currency and ensuring that a weakened Russia would have no choice but to look westward to Europe for economic and political revival, rather than south to Central Asia. What Brzezinski calls “local wars as responses to terrorism,” such as the invasion of Afghanistan, are the beginning of a final conflict leading inexorably to the dissolution of national governments and world domination by the United States. Nation states will be incorporated in the “new order,” controlled solely by economic interests as dictated by international banks, corporations and ruling elites concerned with the maintenance (by manipulation and war) of their power. “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires,” he writes, “the grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”
Surveying the ashes of the Soviet Union he helped to destroy, the Islamic jihad he helped generate and the terrorism he supported, Brzezinski mused: did it matter that all this had created “a few stirred up Muslims”? On September 11, 2001, “a few stirred up Muslims” provided the answer. When I met Brzezinski in Washington in 2003, I asked him if he regretted the consequences. He became very angry and did not reply.
The potential of the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian basin has excited imperialists since the discovery of oil there at the end of the nineteenth century. It is not only America and the European powers that have wanted the Caspian oilfields. Hitler, in his invasion of Russia, and before running short of fuel and being defeated at Stalingrad, planned “to take the saving prize of Caspian resources, then drive south for the even greater prize of Persia and Iraq.” For the West, the Soviet Union barred the way to the Caspian, the vast inland sea that was said, perhaps optimistically, to contain a third of the world’s oil and gas.
With the Soviet Union gone, dominion in the “great game” and its “chessboard” passed to the administration of Bill Clinton. The former Soviet republics of Central Asia, declared Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, “are all about America’s energy security. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”
What he meant was that the region’s oil and gas were worthless without the means to carry them to deep-water ports. There were three routes a pipeline to the West could take: through Russia, Iran or Afghanistan. For Washington, dependence on Russia was anathema, and Iran was the country America had spent more than two decades isolating. It was not surprising that when the Taliban, the latest mutation of America’s rnujahedin clients, took power in Kabul in 1996, they found themselves courted by the American oil lobby and its friends in the administration and the media.
Following September 11, 2001, none was more fervent in calling for the overthrow of the Taliban than the Wall Street Journal. However, five years earlier, the authentic voice of American capital struck an entirely different note. The Taliban, the paper declared, “are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.” Moreover, the success of these ultrafundamentalists was crucial to secure Afghanistan as “a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources.”
In February 1998, John J. Maresca, Vice-President for International Relations at the Union Oil Company (Unocal), reassured a congressional inquiry that “the Taliban does not practise the anti-US style of fundamentalism practised by Iran.” He made no mention of the Taliban’s extremism, notably its persecution of women. Unocal had secretly signed a contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline which the company would build from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The Taliban would get fifteen cents for every thousand cubic feet the company pumped through Afghanistan.
The problem of the Taliban’s reputation was foreseen; shortly after the mullahs seized power in 1996, the State Department dropped Afghanistan from its list of governments that “protect and promote terrorists.” That the Taliban were then harbouring Osama bin Laden was not a factor. When asked about their appalling human rights record, a senior American diplomat said that it was likely that “the Taliban will develop like the Saudis,” running an oil colony with no democracy and “lots of Sharia law,” such as the legalised persecution of women. “We can live with that,” he said.
In his Yale University study Taliban, Ahmed Rashid wrote that “the State Department and Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence Agency agreed to funnel arms and funding to the Taliban in their war against the ethnically Tajik Northern Alliance. As recently as 1999, US taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban official.”
The initial plans for the pipeline were drawn up by Enron, the world’s largest energy company, which was to collapse in 2002 under the weight of its corruption. According to an FBI official, “when Clinton was bombing bin Laden camps in Afghanistan in 1998, Enron was making payoffs to Taliban and bin Laden operatives to keep the pipeline project alive. And there’s no way that anyone could not have known of the Taliban and bin Laden connection at that time, especially Enron.”
In 1997, with a pipeline “memorandum of understanding” agreed, Taliban leaders were flown in high secrecy to the United States, where they were courted and entertained lavishly. Their visit was so secret that a search of TV news archives failed to reveal a single item on it. Yet the Taliban themselves were not so shy, and hired a public relations consultant, Laila Helms, the part-Afghan niece of the former CIA Director Richard Helms. Dressed in the traditional flowing salwar khalneez and loose, black turbans, men accustomed to a life without electricity and running water dined in the luxurious homes of Texan oil barons. At a party in their honour hosted by Unocal Vice-President Marty E. Miller, they expressed awe at his vast swimming pool, six bathrooms and views over a golf course. “The first day, they were stiff and cautious,” said Miller. “But before long, they were totally relaxed and happy. They asked what the Christmas tree was for. They were interested to know what the star was.” It was this “good old Texas hospitality” that clinched the pipeline deal.
Linked from 4/10/2006, 28/12/2007 Journal