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Terrorist
attacks
create terror
because, from the victim's
perspective, there is no easily
identifiable enemy, no sovereign state to
bombard or invade, no
territory to conquer, no easily
identifiable specific force to overwhelm
and no clear
strategic objective to attain.
In response to the attack on September 11, 2001
America invaded
Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 to dispossess the
Taliban and to capture
Osama bin Laden who was
identified as "the mastermind" behind
the attack on the World Trade Center.
The Taliban were identified as enablers.
An
identifiable enemy
army, a sovereign state to
bombard and invade, a
territory to conquer, and a
clear objective.
America shocked and
awed the Afgani's (and later the
Iraqi's) having identified
convenient scapegoats.
America's invasion of
Iraq was presented as a war against a physical enemy (insurgents,
terrorists, gorilla
fighters,
rebels,
revolutionaries,
tribal elements, et al) as well as a war against fanatical
Islamists identifed as embodied in the fanatical religious literalism of Wahabbism .
The "War on Terror" or "Long War" has been presented by pundits,
think tank experts, news anchors,
journalists and academics as a "clash
of civilizations" - an epistemological
battle between logos and
mythos with Western civilization -the advanced
social culture based on science, logic and reason -representing
reality{logos} and Islam representing
myth{mythos}.
(Note: The definition of myth has been corrupted by mass media
snapshots to mean a fanciful story of the supernatural as opposed to
a carefully woven tale meant to convey multiple
levels of meaning to the listener.)
Epistemology is the branch of
science and
philosophy that concerns
knowledge, specifically,
how we know what we know.
Primarily
there are two 'ways of
knowing'. For convenience we will use the
term logos for one and
mythos for the other. Although we are using the
same terms as above we will define them substantially differently than the mass
media snapshot.
Mythos, relying on intuition and emotion, embodies a form of
mental artistry which
symbolically and aesthetically resonates with an
individual's past
subconscious
experiences of personal
enlightenment.
Logos relies on reason and logic,
on what we call
rational ways of knowing, a
form of
science.
In the
madrasas, the Islamic religious
schools in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, students are strictly forbidden from
learning anything except the
Qur'an as taught by the Wahhabi sect - as a
literal text,
without an
understanding of
metaphor, symbolic archetypes and social
cultural bias, the
Qur'an presents a corrupted
mythos just as the Bible or the Talmud do when
taken literally.
Islamic literalists see themselves not as
individuals with desires, a
relatively modern notion, but as operatives of
Allah.They live
deep within mythos and have subordinated themselves to mythos -
living for Allah.
The
spiritual/mythos and
the rational/logos exist
together in every society but
religious literalists and
secular literalists do not
see it that way. Religious
literalists are theocratic
absolutists who believe any worldview other
than there own is heretical and
evil while secular literalists have a
utopian vision.
The
religious literalists of Christianity,
Talmudism and Islam do not want reason, critical
thinking or
intellectual pursuits to
challenge tradition; they demand
blind faith and
obedience to
traditional interpretations of their
sacred texts. Secular literalists claim
to follow logic and reasonand yet, economists for example, continue to worship at the
altar of "the invisible hand" which is
a "science of economics" myth.
Religious
literalists and market literalists,
both avid followers of their own particular form of mythos, demand
obedience to modes of
thought bound by their
tradition. Neither are willing to
acknowledge any way of
thought other than their
traditionally prescribed
way. Both would prefer it if the
population remained passive and
did not employ the halo of critical thinking.
Butrus Elias, a communications major at the
University of Cairo, admits to being a
democracy advocate. Butrus Elias owns the DVD of
the movie Forrest Gump. Butrus
Elias favorite scenes are the surreal handshakes between Forrest Gump, played by
Tom Hanks, and an assortment of
smiling American presidents who are juxtaposed
with evidence of their political
dark sides.
"Forrest Gump
helped me understand that my country's leaders are not in accord with
reality. I saw in the
movie Forrest Gump how a
politician would
behave dishonestly just to
influence the
society around him, and I identified with the
simple character who could be so easily manipulated by falsehood.
It helped me to look at my own country and see
our leadership through a similar lens."-
Butrus Elias
In 1095, Pope
Urban II launched the First Crusade
knowing that the Great Seljuk empire had
dissolved with infighting and that the balance of power in Central Asia had been overturned as a
result.
Once Ghengis Khan conquered
most of Asia religious discord set in. Mongols
were shamanists who, although
acknowledging the existence of one
God, also venerated the forces of
nature - the sun, moon,
Earth,water,
etcetera which did not go over well with Islamic
literalists.
In response to the the
Crusades and the Mongol
invasion Islam turned from the
path of
enlightenment towards a more
literal translation of the Quran much as Christianity
had done 700 years earlier.
The path of
literalist religious zealotry
creates cultural
stagnation as thought outside
traditional
patterns is forbidden. The stagnation in
Islam mirrors the stagnation that occured in the Christian countries of the dissolved
Roman Empire during the time that was properly
titled the Dark Ages. The stagnation of which was
only broken in the Christian countries of the
West by renewed contact with the
East.
"If
Allah's grace and
mercy are present, then surely one
reforms, otherwise, the person just wanders around in the desert of
knowledge and intellectualism. After studying the
educational history of the Earth, this point becomes very clear that all the
mischief and chaos that were
created, were all at the
hands of
intellectuals and geniuses.
During the period of Ilm (knowledge) a
greater portion of Fitna (mischief) appeared by
the way of Ilm. Even among the Ulama-e-Haqq, many geniuses due to their sharp
intelligence and accentricity became
victims of their wrong
thoughts and ideas." - Moulana Muhammad Yusuf
Binnori
Islamic literalists have been
fighting imperial Christian and Talmudic
powers for over a millineum.
Islamic literalists understand that
America supports corrupt regimes that
suppress any religion other than the
secular state religion as any religion other than the secular state religion is
a threat to the corrupt regimes
existence.
Islamic literalists
insist that Islamic
governments be based on the Sharia, or Islamic law. Sharia, Shari-'ah,
Shari'a,
Shariah or
Syariah is the Arabic
word for Islamic
law, also known
as the Law of Allah. Islam classically draws no distinction between
religious, and secular
life. Sharia covers not only
religious rituals, but many aspects of
day-to-day
life, politics,
economics, banking, business or contract
law, and social
issues much in the same way that the
Torah does. As a matter of fact the real
reason that Zionists oppose Sharia is that contracts can be found
null and void if deception has occurred
whereas in Talmudism
deception in contracting for
self-enrichment at the expense of
others, especially contracts made with goy, is looked upon as the ultimate
success.
To the
devout religious literalists -
Talmudist,
Islamist or Christian - the most abhorrent effects of
rationality has been the growing replacement
of God with the logos of the State.
The original American
system of
government, born of
reason with the hope of
freedom and liberty for all men, is not just under the
assault of the
Islamic literalists but is also under the
assault of
American Zionists,
imperial Christians and the
false prophets of (neo)evangilism.
When
one is fighting for land the terms of
battle are relatively
clear. When one is
fighting for one's ideological "Promised
Land" the terms of battle are
incomprehensible.
In this new conflict, religious literalists have many
targets,
virtually anything and
everything that does not fit within their narrow religious literalist worldview,
but
American Zionists,
imperial Christians and the
false prophets of (neo)evangilism, have no
military targets to hit.
The
enemy is not easily identifiable.
The
enemy could be the guy next door.
(He
could very well harbor heretical
thoughts.)
"Western
civilization is supposed to be based on
free and rational thought. Closed-minded
fundamentalism of any sort,
whether denying empirical scientific evidence or blowing up
abortion clinics, seems more akin to the ancient,
mindless ways of the Middle East than the
civilization that brought you
Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin and the
Enlightenment." - Dirik
Lolkus
Islamic fundamentalism, in the form of Mawdudi and
the Jamaat-e-Islami, have existed in Pakistan
for over a half century. Recent events have increased the fortunes of
Islamic fundamentalism.
The
Iranian revolution, in which
the Shah was deposed, elevated the
Shiite
religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini to the center of
power. The Shah had come back to
power after the democratically elected
government of
Iran was dispossessed with the
help of the Central Intelligence Agency
in Operation Ajax.
"Allen W. Dulles, the director of
the Central Intelligence Agency, approved $1 million on April 4 to be used "in
any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh". The chief of the
C.I.A.'s Near East and Africa division, Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of
Theodore Roosevelt, arrived in Tehran to direct Operation Ajax. The house of at
least one prominent Muslim leader was bombed by CIA agents posing as
Communists." - James Risen
United States
Foreign Policy Towards Iran
The civil war in Afghanistan,
fought between Islamic
literalists and the United Soviet Socialist Republic, proved to
Islamic literalists that they could gain
control of a country by evicting a
world superpower. The
civil war in Afghanistan was ‘the straw that broke the camel's
back' of the United Soviet Socialist Republic(not
Ronald Reagan's 'Starwars' program and accompanying military buildup).
Islamic
literalists, the
Mujahideen, were recruited to
fight in this ‘holy' war or
jihad, struggle, from all over the Islamic
world. When the civil war ended there existed tens of thousands trained professional
guerrilla
fighters who subscribed to
Islamic literalist belief
systems and who had
successfully caused the withdrawal of a
superpower from Afghanistan. They became known as the Taliban.
The house of Saud had been powerful on the Arabian pennisula ever since the
eighteenth century, when the radical cleric Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, the
founder of the puritanical Wahhabi
movement, wandered into Dar'iya, near present-day Riyadh, and made a bargain with its
ruler, Muhammad ibn Saud. The Saud
family would provide the generals, and the
Wahhabi's would provide the foot
soldiers.
In Saudi Arabia
wahhabism has been on the rise due
to a deal that the house of Saud cut with Islamic literalist
religious leaders. Islamic
literalist religious leaders promised not to speak out against the
opulent and ostentatious life style of the
royal family members of the house of Saud if they were
given funds to run their
Wahhabi Islamic literalist
schools.
Popular imams all over Saudi
Arabia have called openly for a jihad against the West. Two out of every three
Ph.D.s earned in Saudi Arabia are in Islamic
studies. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11 were Saudis.
Until 911, Saudis were not even
required to appear at the American embassy in
Riyadh or the consulate in Jidda for a visa interview. Under a
system called Visa Express a Saudi had only
to send his passport, an application, and the application fee to a travel
agent.
All of the wealth of the house of
Saud comes from oil sales, much of that
oil is and was sold to
America. Much of the Saudi
money was funneled into Pakistan to
support religious literalist schools in Pakistan. In 1997 Abdul Aziz, a
youngest of King Fahd's children, coordinated a $100 million aid package for
the Taliban.
Even after the 1998 attacks on the
American embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, which
were organized by Osama bin
Laden from his bases in Afghanistan, the Saudi
royals continued to aid the
Taliban and its main supporter in the region,
Pakistan.
The Pakistanis were directly involved with the civil
war in Afghanistan
as money, supplied by the
American government through the
Central Intelligence Agency, was
funneled through the Pakistani Intelligence Service to provide
arms and ammunition to professional
guerrilla
fighters,
Osama bin Laden for one, that
were fighting the United Soviet Socialist Republic supported
marxist government of Afghanistan.
It is ironic that
America, directly and indirectly, supported
the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism -
wahhabism. Directly by supporting
the Taliban in the civil war in Afghanistan,
the despotic governments of Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and the military
government of Pakistan. Indirectly by
purchasing oil from the house of
Saud.
history
of conflict in
AfghanistanAfghanistan is populated with a mosaic of ethnic groups
who have subscribed to a variety of religions.
Afghanistan, an ancient focal point of trade and migration,
exists at the junction of the crossroads
between the East and West in the center of the "world island" - Asia.
Afghanistan has suffered almost continuous conflict being repeatedly
invaded throughout recorded
history (and no doubt prerecorded history as
well).
Afghanistan's first known
invasion was by the Medians. The Medians
came from the region south of the Caspian Sea and controlled Afghanistan in the 6th century BC.
Next the Persians invaded during
the reign of the Zoroastrian Darius I
creating the Achaemenid Persian
empire which reached to the Indus river.
The Scythian empire reached its
greatest extent in the 4th century BC during the reign of Ateas and included
Bactria (present-day Balkh).
Following the
defeat of the Achaemenid Persian
empire, in 328 BC, the Greek
Alexander the Great entered the
territory of present-day Afghanistan to
capture Bactria and finally
conquered a region reaching to the Indus
river.
{Alexander the
Great's army brought leprosy to Europe from India.}
When
Alexander the Great's
empire crumbled along came the ruthless
Indian Hindu warrior and general Ashoka
the Great who reigned from 273 BC to 232 BC as the emperor of the Mauryan
empire. The brutality of the
conquests led Ashoka the Great later in
life to adopt
Buddhism under the guidance of the
Brahmin Buddhist sages Radhaswami and
Manjushris.
The Bactrian Hellenistic Greek king Euthydemus and his son
Demetrius crossed the Hindu Kush and began the conquests of Northern Afghanistan and the
Indus valley creating the Indo-Greek
empire at the turn of the 2nd century BC.
Bactria had been populated with deported unreliable Greek colonists by the
Persian kings of the past.
The Kushan empire wrestled control of the area from the Bactrian's including
the Kabul valley, part of Qandahar and established the twin capitals near
present-day Kabul and Peshawar then
known as Kapisa and Pushklavati respectively.
The Kushans adopted elements of the Hellenistic
culture of Bactria including a writing
system that used the Greek alphabet. During
the Kushana empire
rule, Afghanistan and Gandhara became major
centers of culture and learning.
White
Huns, the Hephthalite empire, were an
agricultural people with a developed
set of laws. They displaced the Kushan and
conquered Sogdiana and Khorasan before 425.
They crossed the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) River and invaded Persia in 425. Held off
at first by Bahram Gur, they later succeeded in
making Persia a tributary in 485. After a series of wars they were driven out of Persia, permanently
lost the offensive, and were finally defeated by Khosru I in 557 . The White Huns
also invaded India and
succeeded in extending the
empire to include the Ganges river valley.
The Göktürks or Kök-Türks were
a Turkic people of ancient North and Central Asia, Eastern Europe and
northwestern China. Known in medieval Chinese
sources as Tujue, the Göktürks under the
leadership of Bumin/Tuman Khan/Khaghan and
his sons, established the first known Turkic
empire around 552 in the general area of
territory that had earlier been occupied
by the White Huns, and expanded rapidly to rule wide territories in Central Asia.
The Göktürks originated from the Ashina tribe, an Altaic
people who lived in the northern corner
of the area presently called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomus Region of China.
They were the first Turkic tribe to use the name "Türk" as a
political name.
The Sassanid
empire, Sassanian
empire, second Persian
empire, the fourth Iranian dynasty, and
other powers ruled the
rest of Afghanistan before the Arab Muslims invaded the entire region and introduced
Islam in 642.
The Sassanid
empire's territory encompassed all of
today's Iran,
Iraq, Armenia, Afghanistan, eastern
parts of Turkey, and parts of Syria, Pakistan, Caucasia, Central Asia and
Arabia.
Afghanistan, like all the others conquered by the Arab
Muslims, had local
rulers including the
empire of Tang China, which had extended its
influence all the way to Kabul.
The Samanids, who reigned from 875-999, founded a reemerging Persian
empire in Central Asia and eastern Iran,
named after its founder Saman Khoda. It was among the first native Iranian
dynasties in Iran and Central Asia after the Arab
conquest and the collapse of the Sassanid
Persian empire.
The Persian Samanids
empire, continued to
rule eastern Afghanistan from the mid-7th
century until they were conquered by the
Turkic invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni and,
Harun, Bughra Khan.
In 999, Bughra Khan, grandson of the paramount
tribal chief of the Turk Karluk empire,
occupied Bukhara, the capital of the
Persian Samanids empire. The Samanid domains
were split up between the Ghaznavids, who gained Khorasan and Afghanistan, and
the Karakhanids, who received Transoxania; the Oxus River thus became the
boundary between the two rival empires.
During this period the Karakhanid, Kara-Khanid Khanate, were converted to
Islam.
Mahmud of Ghazni, founder
of the Ghaznavid empire, a
Sunni Muslim state in
Khorasan in modern day Afghanistan that
existed from 962 to 1187, consolidated the conquests of his predecessors and
turned Ghazna, Ghazni, into a great cultural
center as well as a base for frequent forays into India.
Khwarezm was a
province of the Ghaznavid Empire from 992 to 1041.
In 1041 the Seljuk
Turks gained control of Khwarezm.
The
Seljuk Turks were a Muslim dynasty of originally Oghuz Turkic descent that
ruled parts of Central Asia and the Middle
East. The Seljuk Turks power was at it's zenith
under Malik Shah until 1092 when the Great Seljuk
empire stretched from Anatolia to
Pakistan.
When Malik Shah I died in 1092 the Great Seljuk
empire split, as his
brother and four sons quarrelled over the
apportioning of the empire among themselves
thus becoming the target of the
First Crusade.
In 1041 Muhammad
'Ayn ad-Dawlah took over the administration of the western branch of the
Kara-Khanid Khanate, centred at Bukhara. The unity of the Karakhanid
empire was fractured by constant internal
warfare and later served the dual suzerainty of both the Kara-Khitan
empire to the north and the Seljuk
empire to the south.
The Khitan
empire, Kara-Khitan Khanate, 1124-1218 was
founded by Yelü Dashi, who led the remnants of the Liao dynasty to Central
Asia after fleeing from the Jurchen conquest of their homeland in Manchuria. In
1141, the Seljuk Sultan Ahmed Sanjar was defeated by the Kara-Khitan Khanate and the
Great Seljuk empire fell into
chaos. Anu-sh Tigin's grandson Ala
ad-Din Aziz was forced to submit as a vassal to the Khitan
empire as was the the Kara-Khanid Khanate.
The Khwarezms expanded their territories south when the Great Slejuk
empire collapsed in 1141.
Uthman,
reigned 1204–11, briefly reestablished the independence of the Karakhanids
empire, but in 1211 the Karakhanids were
defeated by the Khwarezm-Shah 'Ala'
ad-Din Muhammad and the dynasty was extinguished.
The Ghaznavid
empire was defeated in 1146 by the Muhammad of Ghor,
who founded the Ghurid empire. The Ghaznavid
Khans continued to live in Ghazni as the
'Nasher' until the early 20th century, but they did not regain any
power until 1709 when the Ghilzai Pashtuns's
defeated the Safavid Persians in
Kandahar.
The Ghurid Empire, between 1175 and 1192, under the
leadership of Muhammad of Ghor, stretched
over a vast area including parts of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India,
Turkistan, Iraq and parts of
other Arab countries. Muhammad of
Ghor occupied Uch, Multan, Peshawar,
Lahore, and Delhi.
In 1206, one of the Ghurid generals, Qutb-ud-din
Aybak, the conqueror of Delhi, made himself
independent and founded the first of a succession of dynasties collectively
known as the Delhi Sultanate which lasted
from 1206-1526.
In 1194, the last Sultan of Great Seljuk
empire, was
defeated and killed by the Khwarezm ruler Ala ad-Din Tekish.
In 1200, Ala
ad-Din Tekish died and was succeeded by his
son, Ala ad-Din Muhammad, who by 1205 had conquered all of Great Seljuk
empire and declared himself Shah , Persian
for king, he became known as the Kwarezmshah,
the ruler of the
empire of Khwarezm.
In 1212 Ala
ad-Din Muhammad defeated the Ghurid
empire and conquered the lands of the Kutluk, the
Gur-Khan of the Kara-Khitan Khanate, expanding the
empire of Khwarezm, ruling a territory from
the Syr Darya nearly to Baghdad, and from the Indus River to the Caspian Sea.
The empire of Khwarezm
conquered and ended both the
empires of Khitan and of Ghurid. This
continuous warfare between these empires drained the life from them making them vulnerable to
hostilities.
The Mongol
Genghis Khan
invaded Afghanistan in 1219 slaughtering
the resisters, salting fertile agricultural areas and
destroying many cities including Herat,
Ghazni, and Balkh.
"The Mongols took no
prisoners and allowed no
torture. They executed swiftly and
efficiently, including all the soldiers of
the defeated army who, they
believed, would be a constant source of future
problems if allowed to live. The first
several months of a Mongol invasion were
bloody, but once the takeover ended, the bloodshed ended." - Jack
Weatherford
To enhance the heinous legends of his conquests
Genghis Khan left
mountains of the skulls of the defenders of
those cities that would not submit throughout Central
Asia.
Following Genghis
Khan's death in 1227, a succession of petty chiefs and princes struggled
for supremacy until late in the 14th century, when one of his descendants,
Timur Lang, Tamerlane or Tamburlaine, incorporated what is
today Afghanistan into his own vast Asian
Timurid empire.
At this time there
were two factions of the ruling
class;
the Tajik, men of the pen,
wazirs in Persian, of Persian descent,
chancellors, merchants, artists and scholars.
the warriors, men of the
sword, a combination of Turk and Mongol descent.
Prince Babur, a
descendant of Timur Lang or Tamerlane, established the Moghul
empire in 1526 by
defeating Ibrahim Lodi, the last of the
Delhi Sultans, at the First Battle of Panipat. The Moghul
empire's capital was based in Kabul.
At its greatest territorial extent the Moghul
empire included most of the Indian
subcontinent, then known as Hindustan, and
parts of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The Persian
word for Mongol is Moghul, generally used to refer
to Central Asian nomads who claimed descent from the Mongol
warriors of
Genghis Khan. The Moghul
rulers were adherents of
Islam.
On the whole the
indigenous Pashtun tribes, Afgans living in the Kandahar area pitted
foreigner against foreigner, Persian against Arab against Turk against Mongol,
siding sometimes with the Persians, sometimes with the Turks, sometimes with
the Moghuls, but never with each other, they perpetuated tribal disunity
and prolonged foreign domination.
Afghanistan
was divided in many parts in the 16th, 17th and early 18th century. North were
the Turkisk Uzbeks, west was Persian Safavid's rule and east was the Mongol's or Moghuls
rule and local Pashtun
rule.
The Persian Safavid's were an
Azeri -speaking Iranian dynasty, the Safavid empire, that ruled from 1501 to 1736, and which
established Shi'a Islam as Iran 's official religion.
Much of Central
Asia was conquered by the Pashtun Sher Shah
Suri, Sher Khan, the Lion King, in the mid 15th century, during the time of
Moghul Humayun the second Moghul ruler. Sher
Khan founded the Sur empire of northern Indian.
Under Akbar the Great
the Moghul empire grew considerably, all of Hindustan and continued to grow
until the end of Aurangzeb's rule.
Jahangir, the son of Moghul Emperor
Akbar and Rajput princess Mariam-uz-Zamani, ruled the empire from 1605–1627.
In October
1627, Shah Jahan, the son of Moghul Emperor
Jahangir and Rajput princess Manmati, succeeded
to the throne, where he inherited a vast and rich
empire in India - at mid-century the
greatest empire on Earth. Shah Jahan commissioned the famous Taj Mahal
(between 1630–1653), in Agra as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died
giving birth to their 14th child.
In 1709, the Pashtuns decided to rise
against the ruling Persian Safavids in
Kandahar. The Persians were defeated and
the Afghans conquered and held Isfahan,
Iran, from 1719-1729.
Nadir Shah of Persia pushed back the Afghans in
the 1729 Battle of Damghan. In 1738, Nadir Shah conquered Kandahar, in the same year he
occupied Ghazni, Kabul and Lahore.
Pashtun martial prowess has been renowned since Alexander the Great ran
up against them in the 3rd century BC. The Pashtuns were one of the few groups
that managed to impede British imperialism during the 19th century.
The
Pashtuns are the world's largest patriarchal segmentary lineage tribal group.
The total population of the group is estimated to be at least 45 million, but
an accurate count remains elusive because there has not been an official census
in Afghanistan since the 1970s, and because of the migratory nature of many
Pashtun tribes and the practice of secluding women in Pakistan.
After
Nadir Shah death in 1747, the Durrani Pashtuns became the principal Afghan
rulers.
Ahmed Shah Durrani, founder
of Afghanistan, established rule in 1747.
Ahmad Shah Durrani, a Pashtun, was elected King in a loya jirga after the
assassination of Nadir Shah.
Throughout his reign, Ahmad Shah Durrani
consolidated chieftains, petty principalities, and fragmented provinces into
one country. Ahmad Shah Durrani's rule
extended from Mashad in the west to Kashmir and Delhi in the east, and from the
Amu Darya (Oxus) River in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south.
From 1747 until the 1978 Marxist coup, all of Afghanistan's
rulers, with the exception of a 9-month
period in 1929, were from Durrani's Pashtun tribal confederation, and all were
members of that tribe's Mohammadzai clan.
In the 19th century,
Afghanistan became a battleground in the rivalry between imperial Britain and
czarist Russia for control of Central Asia.
"Imperial planners saw themselves playing "the Great Game." In 1809
they sacrificed an entire British army of
twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan." - Peter Dale Scott
Three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839-1842,
1878-1880, and 1919) ended inconclusively. In 1893 Britain established an
unofficial border, the Durand Line, separating Afghanistan from British India,
and London granted full independence in 1919.
Emir Amanullah
founded an Afghan monarchy in 1926.
King Amanullah, governing from 1919
to 1929 moved to end Afghanistan's traditional isolation in the years
following the Third Anglo-Afghan war. King Amanullah established diplomatic
relations with most major countries and introduced several reforms intended to
modernize Afghanistan. Some of these reforms, such as the abolition of the
traditional Muslim veil for women and
the opening of a number of co-educational schools, quickly alienated many tribal and
religious leaders. Faced with
overwhelming armed opposition, King
Amanullah was forced to abdicate in January 1929 after Kabul fell to forces led
by Bacha-i-Saqao, a Tajik.
Prince Mohammed Nadir Khan, a cousin of
Amanullah's, in turn defeated and
killed Bacha-i-Saqao in October of the same year,
and with considerable Pashtun tribal support he was declared King Nadir Shah.
King Nadir Shah began consolidating power
and regenerating Afghanistan. King Nadir Shah promoted a more gradual approach
to modernization and reversed the reforms of Amanullah Khan .
In 1933
King Nadir Shah was assassinated in a revenge killing by a Kabul student.
Mohammad Zahir Shah, Nadir
Khan's 19-year-old son, succeeded to the throne and reigned from 1933 to 1973.
Until 1946 Zahir Shah ruled with the
assistance of his uncle Sardar Mohammad Hashim Khan, who held the post of Prime
Minister and continued the policies of Nadir Shah. In 1946
another of Zahir Shah's uncles, Sardar
Shah Mahmud Khan, became Prime Minister.
In 1953 Sardar Shah Mahmud
Khan was replaced as Prime Minister by Mohammed Daoud Khan, the king's cousin
and brother-in-law.
Mohammed Daoud Khan sought a closer relationship
with the Soviet Union and a more hostile one towards Pakistan. The dispute with
Pakistan led to an economic crisis and Mohammed
Daoud Khan resigned in 1963.
From 1963 until 1973 Zahir Shah took a
more active role. In 1964, King Zahir Shah promulgated a
liberal constitution providing for a
bicameral legislature to which the king appointed one-third of the deputies.
The people elected another third, and
the remainder were selected indirectly by provincial tribal assemblies.
Although King Zahir Shah's "experiment in
democracy" produced few lasting reforms, it
permitted the growth of extremist parties on both the left and the right. These
included the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan which
had close ideological ties to the Soviet
Union.
In 1967, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan
split into two major rival factions: the Khalq (Masses) faction headed by Nur
Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin and supported by elements within the military, and the Parcham (Banner)
faction led by Babrak Karmal. The split reflected ethnic, class, and
ideological divisions within Afghan
society.
Most of the following
presidents and heads of state were Ghilzai (Taraki, Amin, Najib, Mullah Omar),
once again trying to take power away from the Durrani.
Former Prime
Minister Mohammad Sardar Daoud Khan seized power
in a military coup on July 17, 1973.
King Zahir Shah fled the country.
Mohammad Sardar Daoud Khan abolished the monarchy, abrogated the 1964
constitution, and declared Afghanistan a republic with himself as its first
President and Prime Minister.
Mohammad Sardar Daoud Khan attempts to
carry out economic and social reforms met with little
success, and the new constitution promulgated
in February 1977 failed to quell chronic political instability. In 1978 Iranian
intelligence agency (SAVAK) and CIA-supported Islamist agents arrived from Iran
with bulging bankrolls in an attempt to create a clamp-down on the People's
Democratic Party of Afghanistan by purging left-wing officers from the
Afghan army. On April 27, 1978, the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan initiated a bloody coup, which resulted in the overthrow and
murder of Mohammad Sardar Daoud Khan and most of his family.
Nur Muhammad
Taraki, Secretary General of the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan, became President of the Revolutionary Council and Prime
Minister of the newly established Democratic Republic of Afghanistan,
strongly supported by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The
People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan implemented a socialist agenda
which included decrees abolishing usury,
banning forced marriages, state recognition of women's rights to vote,
replacing religious and
traditional laws with secular and Marxist ones, banning tribal
courts, and land reform. Men were obliged to cut their beards, women couldn't
wear a burka, and mosque visiting was forbidden.
The Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics sent contractors to build roads, hospitals,
schools and dig water wells; they also
trained and equipped the Afghan army.
These secular decrees and the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan's monopoly on
power were met with a large backlash, partly led
by members of the traditional
establishment, partly by tribal elements.
Many
groups were formed in an attempt to reverse the dependence on the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, some resorting to violent means and sabotage of the Afghanistan's
industry and infrastructure. The
government responded with a heavy
handed military intervention and arrested,
exiled and executed many mujahideen
- "Allah's
warriors."
Pashtuns played a
pivotal role in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, as many joined the ranks of the
mujahideen.
On July 3, 1979 the largest covert operation in the history
of the CIA, Operation Cyclone, was launched in Afghanistan shortly after
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. signed the first executive directive for secret
aid.
Saudi-born Osama
bin Laden, was recruited to organize and train the
mujahideen.
Under this secret
presidential directive James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. gave the CIA the
authority to arm the mujahideen
under Osama bin Laden.
The CIA's secret aid, approved by James Earl "Jimmy"
Carter, Jr., laid the foundations of
al-Qa`ida.
"With
the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, who wanted to turn the
Afghan Jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet
Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined
Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study
in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually, more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals
were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad." - Ahmed Rashid
"It was
the government of the United States who supported Pakistani dictator General
Zia-ul Haq in creating thousands of religious schools, from which the germs of
the Taliban emerged." - Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan
United States government support to the Mujahideen was
presented to world public opinion as a "necessary response" to Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal but
the CIA's military-intelligence operation in Afghanistan was launched prior to
the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan.
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to
the Mujahideen began on 24 December 1979. On July 3, 1979, President Carter
signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet
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 induce a Soviet
military intervention." - Zbigniew
Brzezinski
Zbigniew Brzezinski is "Deeply Troubled"
{Zalmay Khalizad, an ethnic
Pashtun, was mentored by Zbigniew
Brzezinski, the Carter Administration's architect of the policy supporting
the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.
Zalmay Khalizad was given Council on
Foreign Relations fellowship were he was mentored by Paul Wolfowitz Director of
Policy Planning at the State Department. Zalmay Khalizad served Ronald Reagan as a
senior State Department official advising on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and
the Iran–Iraq War. During this time he was the State Department's
Special Advisor on Afghanistan to Undersecretary of State Michael H.
Armacost. In this role he developed and guided the international program to
promote the merits of a Mujahideen-led Afghanistan to oust the Soviet
occupation. Zalmay Khalizad served under
President George H. W. Bush in the Defense Department as Deputy
Undersecretary for Policy Planning. Between 1993 and 2000, Khalilzad was
the Director of the Strategy, Doctrine, and Force Structure at the RAND
Corporation. During this time, he helped found RAND's Center for Middle
Eastern Studies as well as "Strategic Appraisal," a periodic RAND
publication. Zalmay Khalizad consulted
for Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which at the time was conducting a
risk analysis for Unocal, now part of Chevron, for a proposed 1,400 km (890
mile), $2-billion, 622 m³/s (22,000 ft³/s) Trans-Afghanistan gas
pipeline project which would have extended from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan and
further proceeding to Pakistan. Zalmay
Khalizad acted as a special liaison between UNOCAL and the Taliban regime.
As one of the original members of Project for the New
American Century, Zalmay
Khalizad was a signatory of the letter
to President Bill Clinton sent on January 26, 1998, which called for him to
accept the aim of "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power" using "a
full complement of diplomatic, political and military
efforts.}
Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism,
Zbigniew Brzezinski replied: "Regret
what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the
Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets
officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence:
'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its
Vietnam War.'"
{Thus began
the New Great Game. The New Great Game is a term used to describe the
conceptualization of modern geopolitics in Central Eurasia as a competition
between the United States, the United Kingdom and other NATO countries against
Russia, the People's Republic of China and other Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation countries for "influence, power, hegemony and profits in Central
Asia and the Transcaucasus".}
In 1979 the Afghan
army was overwhelmed by the number of
mujahideen incidents. The Soviet
Union sent troops which entered Kabul on December 25, 1979, five months after
the CIA hired Osama bin
Laden and al-Qa`ida
was founded, to crush the insurrection and install another pro-Moscow
government.
SOVIET AFGHAN
WAR DOCUMENTARY
Osama bin Laden, one of 57
children born into one of Saudi Arabia's richest oil/construction families,
used his experience in the construction trade to build bases where the Afghan
resistance fighters, or Mujahadeen, could be trained by American and Pakistani
agents to help keep the Soviets from controlling Afghanistan. During the 1980s
and early 1990s, the CIA reportedly split an estimated $500 million between
Osama bin Laden's
training bases and the Hezb-e Islami faction of the mujahideen led by Gulbeddin
Hekmatyar who received American weapons including Stinger anti-aircraft
missiles. American officials estimated that from 1985 to 1992, some 12,500
people were trained in bomb-making, sabotage, and urban guerrilla warfare.
{The Ghilzai Pashtun, Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, the
preferred client of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), also built a
sophisticated heroin supply network in Afghanistan's Kunar and Nuristan
provinces with CIA funds. Heroin from the Golden Crescent, negligible before
1979, amounted in 1980 to 60 percent of the American market. By 1986 the Golden
Crescent supplied 70 percent of the high-grade heroin in the world. Eight tons
of Afghan-Pakistani morphine base from a single Pakistani source supplied the
Sicilian mafia "Pizza Connection" in New York - 80% of the heroin reaching the
United States between 1978 and 1984. Witnesses confirmed that opium was shipped
out of the area on the same Pakistan Army trucks which shipped in "covert" US
military aid. At the same time the the CIA and ISI together encouraged the
mujahedin to get Soviet troops addicted to heroin, hashish, and cocaine from
Latin America in Operation Mosquito.}
"Relations between the
Central Intelligence Agency (United States - CIA) and the Inter-Services
Intelligence (Pakistan - ISI) had grown increasingly warm following Zia's
ouster of Bhutto and the advent of the military regime. … During most of
the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United
States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Zia sent
his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central Asian states." - Diego
Cordovez and Selig Harrison
{"The CIA has funneled
hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the
Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy
agency's annual budget. The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has
collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that
pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants. The ISI has used the
covert CIA money for a variety of purposes, including the construction of a new
headquarters in Islamabad, the capital. The CIA has routinely brought ISI
operatives to a secret training facility in North Carolina. The CIA also
directs millions of dollars to other foreign spy services. But the magnitude of
the payments to the ISI reflect Pakistan's central role. The CIA depends on
Pakistan's cooperation to carry out missile strikes by Predator drones that
have killed dozens of suspected extremists in Pakistani border areas. CIA
payments to the ISI can be traced to the 1980s, when the Pakistani agency
managed the flow of money and weapons to the Afghan mujahedin. In addition to
bankrolling the ISI's budget, the CIA created a clandestine reward program that
paid bounties for suspected terrorists. The first check, for $10 million, was
for the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda figure. The ISI got $25 million
more for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's capture. "We would show up in someone's
office, offer our thanks, and we would leave behind a briefcase full of $100
bills, sometimes totaling more than a million in a single transaction." - CIA
Director George J. Tenet " - Greg Miller November 15, 2009
"Militants in
Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from
U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to
evade or monitor U.S. military operations. Senior defense and intelligence
officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking
advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown
planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as
SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly
capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the
matter." - Sioban Gorman, Yochi J. Dreazen, August Cole }
"Half
of Taliban manpower and equipment originate in Pakistan under the ISI." -
Jane's Defence Weekly
Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production
in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was
no local production of heroin. Researcher Alfred McCoy's study confirms that
within two years of the beginning of the CIA
operation in Afghanistan, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the
world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 per cent of United States demand."
The Central
Intelligence Agency, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia assisted in the
financing of the resistance because of their anti-communist stance. In the case
of Saudi Arabia the House of Saud made a deal with the Wahabbi to share the oil
revenues - revenues that would be spent on the support of Wahabbi theology
madrasahs.
For over nine years the Soviet Army
occupied Afghanistan while conducting
military operations against the Afghan
mujahideen rebels.
“At
first, everyone thought, There’s no way to beat the Soviets. So what we
have to do is throw the worst crazies at them that we can find, and there was a
lot of collateral damage. We knew exactly who these people were, and what their
organizations were like, and we didn’t care. Then, we allowed them to get
rid of, just kill all the moderate leaders. The reason we don’t have
moderate leaders in Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all.
They killed the leftists, the moderates, the middle-of-the-roaders. They were
just eliminated, during the 1980s and afterward.” - Cheryl Benard, a RAND
Corporation expert on Islam and the wife of future US ambassador to Afghanistan
Zalmay Khalilzad (formerly a Unocal lobbyist)
The Soviet Union withdrew
its troops in February 1989, but continued to aid the
government, led by Mohammed
Najibullah. Massive amounts of aid from the Central Intelligence Agency
and Saudi Arabia to the mujahideen
continued. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Najibullah
government was overthrown on April
18, 1992 when Abdul Rashid Dostum mutinied, and allied himself with Ahmed Shah
Massoud, to take control of Kabul and declare
the Islamic State of
Afghanistan.
An interim Islamic Jihad Council was put in place, first
led by Sibghatullah Mojadeddi for two months, then by Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, an ethnic Tajik became Defence Minister under
President Burhanuddin Rabbani's regime. Following the collapse of Burhanuddin
Rabbani's government and the rise of
the Taliban regime, Ahmed Shah Massoud became the
military leader of the United
Islamic Front for the Salvation of
Afghanistan.
In reaction to the anarchy and warlordism prevalent in
Afghanistan, and the lack of Pashtun representation in the Kabul
government, the Taliban, a movement
of religious scholars and former
mujahideen, emerged from the
southern province of Kandahar.
The Taliban took
control of approximately 95% of Afghanistan by
the end of 2000, limiting the opposition mostly to a small
corner in northeastern Afghanistan.
The opposition formed the Afghan Northern Alliance, which continued to
receive diplomatic recognition in the United Nations as the
government of Afghanistan. The Afghan
Northern Alliance was led by Ahmed Shah Massoud who was assassinated in late
September 2001.
"The Taliban conducted simultaneous negotiations with
two potential oil companies: Argentinean Bridas and Unocal/CentGas. Once George
W. Bush was elected president, Unocal and BP-Amoco, which had in the meantime
bought Bridas, the Argentinean rival resumed consortium negotiations with the
Taliban. Under Secretary of State Richard Armitage, previously a lobbyist for
Unocal, represented the administration's interests. The Taliban, for their
part, employed as their PR officer in the US Laila Helms, niece of Richard
Helms, former director of the CIA and former US ambassador to Iran. In March
2001, Helms brought Rahmatullah Hashami, Mullah Omar's adviser, to Washington.
Throughout the 1990's Hamid Karzai, a top adviser and lobbyist for Unocal, was
involved in negotiations with the Taliban regime for the construction of a
Central Asian gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to
Pakistan. At the same time, Zalmay Khalizad, who was also working for Unocal,
lobbied the Clinton administration to ‘engage' with the Taliban." -
Loretta Napoleoni
"One of the world's richest oil fields is on the
eastern shore of the Caspian sea, just northeast of Afghanistan. The Caspian
oil reserves are of top strategic importance in the quest to control the
earth's remaining oil supply. The U.S. government developed a policy called
"The Strategy of the Silk Route." The strategy was designed to lock out Russia,
China, and Iran from the oil in this region. This called for U.S. corporations
to construct an oil pipeline running through Afghanistan.
Since the mid
1990s, a consortium of US oil companies led by Unocal, which was later bought
by Chevron, have been pursuing this goal. The plan was to build a
Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline from Turkmenistan's natural gas fields to Pakistan.
Unocal partnered with Saudi Delta Oil, which was owned by al Qeada funders
Khalid bin Mahfouz and Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi, and they formed Central Asia
Gas Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas).
A feasibility study for the Central Asian
pipeline project was performed by Enron. This study concluded that as long as
the country was split among fighting warlords the pipeline could not be built.
Stability was necessary for the $4.5 billion project and the US believed that
the Taliban would impose the necessary order. U.S. intelligence and Pakistan's
ISI then continued the close relationship that they established through Bank of
Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and agreed to funnel arms and funding
to the Taliban in their war for control of Afghanistan.
Until 1999, US
taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government
official.
The U.S., Saudi and Pakistani alliance established within
Bank of Credit and Commerce International reunited to facilitate the rise of
the Taliban.
The American oil interests at the heart of this pipeline
deal took control of the White House on January 20, 2001, when George W. Bush
became president. Enron was heavily involved in this oil deal. Enron CEO Ken
Lay was an old Bush family friend and was George W. Bush's biggest campaign
contributor. Donald Rumsfeld, who became the Secretary of Defense, was a large
stockholder in Enron. Thomas White, former vice-chairman of Enron, became the
Secretary of the Army. Condoleezza Rice, a former Chevron board member, became
National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State.
A major
benefactor of the CentGas deal was going to be Halliburton. Dick Cheney, who
became Vice President, was Halliburton's CEO. Richard Armitage, who worked as a
key lobbyist for Unocal, became Under Secretary of State. Hamid Karzai, who
would later become Afghanistan's Prime Minister, was a top Unocal adviser.
Shortly after taking office, the Bush Administration lost faith in the
Taliban's ability to control Afghanistan and be a reliable partner in the
pipeline deal. James Baker, a key Bank of Credit and Commerce International
player, who had served as Treasury Secretary, Secretary of State and Chief of
Staff during Bank of Credit and Commerce International's reign, was a leading
player in developing the "Strategy of the Silk Route."
In April 2001,
Baker and the Council on Foreign Relations demanded immediate action and
publicly released a Task Force Report entitled, "Strategic Energy Policy
Challenges For The 21st Century," by the James A. Baker III Institute. They
stressed the urgency of the pipeline project and openly called for the Bush
Administration to "quickly facilitate higher exports of oil from the Caspian
Basin region…" and they reiterated the basic premise of the "Strategy of
the Silk Route," stating, "the exports from oil discoveries in the Caspian
Basin could be hastened if a secure, economical export route could be
identified swiftly."
That "export route," as previously planned, would
need to run through Afghanistan and into Pakistan. The Chairman of the
911 Commission investigation was Thomas
Kean, director of Hess Corp., which was in a joint venture called Delta Oil,
with Khalid Bin Mahfouz and Mohammed Hussein al Amoudi. It is also important to
mention that James Baker, who had a lead role in developing the "Strategy of
the Silk Route" and Bank of Credit and Commerce International operations, was
hired by these same BCCI/Saudi/al Qaeda oil interests to defend them against
lawsuits brought by families of 911
victims." - David DeGraw
Under the auspices of a response to the
September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States and its coalition allies launched
an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the
Taliban government. Sponsored by the
United Nations, Afghan factions met in Bonn, Germany and choose a 30 member
interim authority led by Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from Kandahar.
Afghanistan's Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural
Gas
After governing for 6 months, former King Zahir Shah convened a
Loya Jirga, which elected Hamid Karzai as president and gave him authority to
govern for two more years.
On October 9, 2004, Hamid Karzai was elected
as president of Afghanistan in the country's first ever direct presidential
election.
In January 2007 the
federal government contracted for up to $300 million with AEY Incorporated to
became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan's army and police forces.
AEY Incorporated provided ammunition that was more than 40 years old in
decomposing packaging manufactured in China. The federal government contributed
$2 million to destroy excess small-caliber weapons and 2,000 tons of ammunition
in Albania, according to the State Department through 2007 which included 104
million 7.62 millimeter cartridges. AEY bought more than 100 million cartridges
manufactured in China from Albania for the Pentagon contract.
AEY also
provided ammunition or equipment in 2004 to the Department of Energy, the
Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Administration and
the State Department. AEY was operated by Efraim E. Diveroli, president, and
David M. Packouz, vice president, (son of Rabbi Kalman Packouz) both in their
early 20's. Yoav Botach, an Israeli citizen and "entrepreneur" who "co-owns"
144 commercial and other properties in Los Angeles through Botach Tactical,
incorporated AEY and is the father of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and grandfather of
Efraim E. Diveroli. AEY won the contract primarily because the federal
government declared Hasidic Jews to be a disadvantaged minority for purposes of
minority business encouragement in 1984.
On February 3, 2009 the Taliban
closed a major supply route ferrying some 80 percent of NATO supplies into
Afghanistan by blowing up a 30-yard-long iron highway bridge in the Khyber
Pass.
On February 18, 2009 Barack Obama ordered 17,000 American troops
to Afghanistan "to stabilize a deteriorating situation."
Late in February 2009 American troops set up bases along a
dirt track that a Chinese firm is paving as part of a $3 billion project to
gain access to the Aynak copper reserves.
American troops are providing security to enable China to exploit one of the
world's largest unexploited deposits of copper, earn tens of billions of dollars and
feed its voracious appetite for raw materials.
"As of March 2009, there
were 68,197 DOD contractors in Afghanistan, compared to 52,300 uniformed
personnel. Contractors made up 57% of DOD’s workforce in Afghanistan. This
apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by
DOD in any conflict in the history of the United States. Poor contract
management has also played a role in abuses and crimes committed by certain
contractors against local nationals, which likely has undermined U.S.
counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan." - Congressional Research
Service, 08/13/2009
In early May 2009 140 Afghan
peasants were killed in rural Farah province by American
airstrikes according to the Red Cross.
Relatives received about $2,000 for family members killed and $1,000 for those
injured.
"An internal military investigation into an U.S.
airstrike in western Afghanistan
acknowledged that U.S. forces may have killed as many as 86 civilians." - Nancy
Youssef
Daniel Offield, a 25-year DEA veteran who oversees marijuana
eradication in California's national forests, appeared on an MSNBC news program
where he told reporters that he didn't think the DEA was winning the battle
against California's marijuana cultivators. Daniel Offield was rewarded for his
honesty with a new assignment - in Afghanistan. In interviews with McClatchy,
more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some
pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking
their superiors.
“Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American
and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with
corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of
President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban
government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the
enrichment of those who run it.” - Dexter Filkins
“The chief
effect of military operations in Afghanistan so far has been to push radical
Islamists across the Pakistani border. As a result, efforts to stabilize
Afghanistan are contributing to the destabilization of Pakistan, with
potentially devastating implications. No country poses a greater potential
threat to United States national security - today and for the foreseeable
future - than Pakistan. To risk the stability of that nuclear-armed state in
the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake. Sending
more troops to the region will only turn Operation Enduring Freedom into
Operation Enduring Obligation. Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming
resources neither the United States military nor the United States government
can afford to waste. One of history's enduring lessons is that Afghans don't
appreciate it when outsiders tell them how to govern their affairs - just ask
the British or the Soviets.” - Andrew Bacevich
"Hell's Angels" of
the Taliban engineered a revolt in the Swat valley of Pakistan in 2009
exploiting
profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and
their landless tenant sharecroppers.
On July
2, 2009, four thousand newly arrived Marines and 650 Afghan troops poured into
Taliban-infested villages of southern Afghanistan with armor and helicopters in
the first major operation under Barack Obama's strategy to clear insurgents
from the hotly contested region before the nation's August 20 presidential
election. Southern Afghanistan is a Taliban stronghold but also a region where
Afghan president Hamid Karzai is seeking votes from fellow Pashtun
tribesmen.
"We are kind of forging new ground here. We are going to a
place nobody has been before." - Capt. Drew Schoenmaker
"We do not want
people of Helmand province to see us as an enemy, we want to protect them from
the enemy." - Capt. Bill Pelletier
Hamid Karzai is reelected August 20,
2009 in a "landslide victory".
"The astonishing level of fraud
perpetrated on Mr. Karzai's behalf, coupled with his near-refusal to accept the
election results, might reasonably be expected to prompt Americans to wonder
exactly what those extra troops would be fighting for." - Dexter Filkins
On
August 27th 2009 a suicide bomber hit a Pakistani border security checkpoint
killing at least 18 border guards (dozens reported wounded) at the Torkham
checkpoint, the main border crossing from the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.
On August 30th 2009 the Chaman border crossing had been closed for two
days due to a dispute between Afghan and Pakistani customs officers. 1,000
trucks were backed up along the road waiting to cross the border. An explosion
set several NATO vehicles on fire: three oil tankers, two container trucks and
two dump trucks.
NATO troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan get
about 75 percent of their supplies from Pakistan through the Chaman and Torkham
border crossings.
"In al-Qaeda's view, the ‘bleeding wars' offer
the best opportunity to defeat the United States. It is much easier to kill the
enemy in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan's traps." - Bruce Riedel
Bruce Riedel is a CIA analyst who predicted the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism in Iran if the CIA interveined.
"This is a warrior culture. If you walk around
looking scared,
they are not going to respect you." - Army Gen. Stanley A.
McChrystalNineteenth-century militaries were organized
around "foraging" principles. Soldiers extensively interacting with locals to
acquire supplies in the conflict zone also gathered information.
World
War I ushered in a new systematized method of waging warfare which neglects
personal contact with the occupied populace.
After World War I supplies
were shipped directly to the combat zone from centralized distribution
tremendously reducing personal contact with locals. Higher levels of
mechanization also separate the occupier from the occupied - with steel plate.
"Faced with "information starvation," mechanized forces often
inadvertently fuel, rather than suppress, insurgencies." - Jason Lyall &
Isaiah Wilson III
"A Stryker coming around the corner may evoke a Hind
gunship coming over the hill." - Commander Jeff Eggers, Navy SEAL
Hind = Soviet attack helicopter gunship, Stryker = Mine
Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle
"When you get into an
MRAP, you have one person who has the ability to connect to the people - and
that is up in the gunner's seat." - Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez
"The U.S.
military command in Bagram, Afghanistan, confirmed on 10/04/09 that it has
barred reporters embedded with its forces from videotaping or photographing
U.S. military personnel killed in action." - John M. Donnelly
"Contrary
to the official portrayal of the Afghan National Army (ANA) as ethnically
balanced, the latest data from U.S. sources reveal that the Tajik minority now
accounts for far more of its troops than the Pashtuns, the country's largest
ethnic group. Tajik domination of the ANA feeds Pashtun resentment over the
control of the country's security institutions by their ethnic rivals, while
Tajiks increasingly regard the Pashtun population as aligned with the Taliban."
- Gareth Porter
Just as in Iraq US special forces are supporting
anti-Taliban militias in at least 14 areas of Afghanistan as part of a
secretive program that experts warn could fuel long-term instability in the
country. $1.3 billion is being
made available as bribes. It is unknown whether this cash will come shrink
wrapped on pallets as it did in Iraq.
The Campaign for a
U.S.-Afghanistan Partnership is a nonprofit pro-war front group established
by Washington's most monied lobbying firm Patton Boggs LLP. One of
Patton Boggs LLP clients is NCL Holdings, a U.S. firm headed by
Hamed Wardak, the Afghan-American son of Afghanistan's defense minister,
General Abdul Rahim Wardak. NCL Holdings runs supply lines in
Afghanistan for the DoD. NCL Holdings is believed to be paying
protection money to the Taliban to leave supply lines alone.
"The Afghan war is the center of a Western military
operation that is broadening into wider and wider circles throughout Eurasia
and in varying degrees taking in dozens of nations from the Chinese border to
the Indian Ocean to the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea. Nations being absorbed
into this military transit, overflight, troop recruitment, training network
include all those in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia), the Black Sea region (Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine)
and the Southern Balkans (Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro,
Serbia and Slovenia) in addition to Afghanistan and Pakistan. With the
exception of the Central Asian states (so far), all of those nations mentioned
above have sent troops to the war theater or soon will, Serbia alone possibly
excepted." - Rick Rozoff 09/09
"Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired Army general
and former commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, objected in two
cables delivered to the State Department saying that additional troops would be
unwise because of the corruption and ineffectiveness of the Afghan government."
- Paul Richter, 11/12/09
"U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there
are only about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in the entire country of Afghanistan.
Intelligence officials estimate there are several hundred al Qaeda fighters
just across the border in Pakistan." - Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Brian
Ross12/02/09
"To this date, however, there is no proof that al
Qaeda was behind the 911 attacks.
Neither is there evidence that Afghanistan as a Nation State was behind or any
way complicit in the 911 attacks." -
Michel Chossudovsky 12/21/09
"Who rules East Europe
commands the Heartland;
Who rules the heartland commands the World Island;
Who rules the World Island commands the World."
- Sir Halford
Mackinder
"So it is down to you and it is down to
me."
In the battle
of wits between Wesley and the Sicilian
in the movie The Princess
Bride the Sicilian states,
"You fell
victim to one of the classic blunders
-
never get involved in a land war in
Asia."
opium resurgence
"Our own spy agency is behind the killing of
thousands of American soldiers and civilians all over the world. They are also
responsible for continued Afghan opium production, as it has always served as
the primary funding source for CIA paramilitary operations there." - Peter
ChamberlinIn 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. During
the 1980s, while the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), working through Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, spent some
$2 billion to support the Mujahideen Afghan resistance. When the operation
started in 1979, this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced
no heroin. Within two years, however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands
became the world's top heroin producer. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict
population went from near zero in 1979 to 5,000 in 1981 and to 1.2 million by
1985-a much steeper rise than in any other nation.
As the Mujahideen
guerrillas territorial control increased more and more farmers planted opium
poppies as cash crops. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local
syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of
heroin laboratories to generate cash which they used to purchase weapons to
fight the Soviets. The CIA helped facilitate distribution, even going so far as
to squelch Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) investigations. Once the heroin left
Pakistan's laboratories, the Sicilian mafia managed its export to the United
States, and a chain of syndicate-controlled pizza parlors distributed the drugs
to street gangs in American cities. Most ordinary Americans did not see the
links between the CIA's alliance with Afghan drug lords, the pizza parlors, and
the heroin on America's streets.
In 1980 Afghanistan produced 200 metric tons of
opium. In 2006 Afghanistan produced 6,724 metric
tons of opium - more than 30 times as much
opium as in 1980. Approximately 448,000 Afghan
families cultivated opium poppy in 2005-2006. In
2006 - 2007 approximately 9000 metric tons of opium were grown.
"There
are powerful business and financial interests behind narcotics. Geopolitical
and military control over the drug routes is as strategic as oil and oil
pipelines. The bulk of the revenues associated with the global trade in
narcotics are not appropriated by terrorist groups and warlords. Narcotics
constitute a major source of wealth formation not only for organized crime but
also for the US intelligence apparatus, which increasingly constitutes a
powerful actor in the spheres of finance and banking. Intelligence agencies,
powerful business, drug traders and organized crime are competing for the
strategic control over the heroin routes. A large share of this multi-billion
dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Most
of the large international banks together with their affiliates in the offshore
banking havens launder large amounts of narco-dollars." - Michel
Chossudovsky
"The White
House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking,
and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother
is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said in
interviews last week." - James Risen, October 4, 2008
In October 2009
it was revealed that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the payroll of the Central
Intelligence Agency since the invasion.
"Ahmed Wali Karzai is the
biggest drug baron of Afghanistan. What is most disturbing from my point of
view is that the military aircraft, American military aircraft are also being
used." - ISI General Hamid Gul
"In most cases, the CIA's role involved
various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade,
not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking. The CIA did not handle
heroin, but it did provide its drug-lord allies with transport, arms, and
political protection. In sum, the CIA's role in the Southeast Asian heroin
trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability." - Alfred W.
McCoy
"When five drug traffickers in military uniforms were caught
transporting heroin in a police truck in 2007, it was a victory for a dogged
team of Afghan investigators and their US mentors who are waging a Quixotic
battle against narcotics, the nation's largest industry. The men were
prosecuted by a special drug court that the US government has spent tens of
millions of dollars developing as a bulwark against corruption. They were
sentenced to between 16 and 18 years in prison. But in April, Afghan president
Hamid Karzai pardoned the five men. One was the nephew of a powerful politician
managing Karzai's reelection campaign, and the presidential decree ordering
their release notes that they had ties to a well-respected family, according to
a senior Afghan official." - Farah Stockman July 3, 2009
Before NATO
invaded Afghanistan the Taliban had nearly
eradicated the opium trade, according to a
federal government state department
report - trade was reduced to 1980 level. The opium trade was denounced as immoral and would not
be permitted under the Islamic
law of the Taliban. This was facilitated by a $90
million downpayment on the rights to an oil pipeline deal approved by the
George W. Bush administration.
Three and a
half years after America led the
invasion of Afghanistan to oust the
Taliban regime the government of
America has issued a that
Afghanistan is in of becoming a
narcotics centered state
controlled by narcotics traffickers. The State Department
of the United States calls the
Afghanistan drug trade 'an enormous
threat to world stabilty'. The United Nations
estimated that Afghanistan produces 87% of the Earth's opium in
2004.
"Opium
production has grown exponentially since 2001 as much as 60% of the country's
GDP is either generated by or dependent on it. As many as 90% of Afghanistan's
police chiefs are reportedly involved in or
protecting the drug trade." -Chris Mason,
formerly an Afghanistan policy officer at the
State Department from 2001 through 2005 and is a senior fellow at the Center
for Advanced Defense Studies.
In the year 2006 the United Nations
anti-drug chief announced a staggering increase in Afghani
opium production of 60% over 2005. The record
crop of opium poppies yielded 6100 tons of
opium, enough to make 610 tons of pure heroin,
outstripping world demand by a third. Ten dollars worth of heroin is enough to
kill an inexperienced or
infrequent user.
The
Afghan minister of counter narcotics General Khodaidad Khodaidad claims the
majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the
US, the UK, and Canada.
"Like Afghanistan, South Vietnam at the national
level was a massively corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of
them deeply implicated in the profitable opium trade, with almost nonexistent
legitimacy outside the capital city. The purely military gains achieved at such
terrible cost in our nation's blood and treasure in Vietnam never came close to
exhausting the enemy's manpower pool or his will to fight, and simply could not
be sustained politically by a venal and incompetent set of dysfunctional state
institutions where self-interest was the order of the day." - Peter Dale
Scott
In late 2006 remnants of the Taliban, with the
support of the Afghan people, begin staging more effective guerilla attacks.
"The Afghan people are
rebelling because the
American government is currently committed to
destroying 60% of their
economy.
In the name of the "war on
drugs," an American
corporation, DynCorp, is being paid to
barge into the fields of some of the poorest people on
Earth and systematically destroy their only livelihood.
A quarter of all Afghan babies
die before their fifth birthday.
If Western
governments continue this program of
economic destruction - and the negative
propaganda bonanza it
creates - the Taliban may be sufficiently
rejuvenated to march on Kabul.
There is an alternative to this
disastrous spiral. The
Earth is suffering
from a shortage of legal opiates.
The World Health
Organization describes it as "an unprecedented global
pain crisis."
About 80% of
the Earth's population has almost no access to
painkillers at all.
In developed
countries, for cancer care alone there
is an unmet annual need for 550 metric tons more opium to make morphine.
Instead of
destroying Afghanistan's most valuable
resource, Western governments should
buy it outright and resell it to producers of legal opiate-based
painkillers on the global market.
Both Turkey and India produce opium as
legal suppliers of opiates for pain-control purposes.
Add Afghanistan
to the legal opium producers and the Taliban
would be conquered." -
Johann
Hari
{DynCorp grew up as part of
the paramilitary drug eradictaion efforts in Columbia. Over forty years an
estimated 40,000 have been killed and 2 million displaced as a result of the
fighting in Columbia between government forces and the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC). In 1985 the FARC laid down its arms and entered into
a peace process with the government of Belisario Betancur. The Patriotic Union
was founded to participate in electoral activities but within several years as
many as 5,000 Patriotic Union elected officials, candidates, trade unionists,
community organizers and other activists were murdered by Colombian security
forces and government-linked right-wing death squads, especially the notorious
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and its late leader Carlos
Castano. Eight congressmen, 70 councilmen, dozens of deputies and mayors and
hundreds of trade unionists and peasant leaders were slain and in 1989-1990 two
of its presidential candidates were murdered within seven months. Faced with
complete extermination, the FARC rearmed and sought refuge in the southeast of
the country. In April of 2007 Washington transferred its ambassador to
Colombia, William Wood, to Afghanistan to oversee the application of the
Colombian model of counterinsurgency under the guise of combating drug
cultivation. Two years later Afghanistan was estimated to account for over 90%
of the illegal opium production in the world.}
In late 2006,
with DynCorp and the
American Drug Enforcement Agency
overwhelmed, the
American military is once again getting into
the business of opium poppy eradication.
"In 2007 private security guards working for Blackwater and Dyncorp
were earning up to $1,222 a day or $445,000 a year. An Army sergeant earned
$140 to $190 a day in pay and benefits, a total of $51,100 to $69,350 a year."
- Joseph Stiglitz
This new push will destroy the livelihood of poor Afghani people.
The killing of Afghans civilians marked as
mujahideen will only cause the
Afghans to resist the occupation more
intensely.
Many empires have invaded and conquered Afghanistan throughout
history and all have eventually been
defeated.
Western
civilization has an
opportunity to
create prosperity in Afghanistan.
On
Earth there is a shortage of
painkillers and the Afghans are producing
more opium than ever.
Although different
factions will always struggle for control of
Afghanistan, just as they do everywhere else on Earth, control is
less important if all prosper.
Civil unrest always occurs when living conditions are harsh.
Spraying opium poppy crops with 2-4,D
(Agent Orange) is not the answer to the Afghan problem.
Prosperity for
common Afghans could bring a peace to Afghanistan
that could endure for centuries.
Unfortunately those in power can not see the
reality of life on
Earth, the reality of life in
Afghanistan and the reality that attempts to
control Afghanistan with a foreign
occupation have failed throughout
history.
"Afghan peasants grow opium because it is the only crop they can sell for
a decent price. Will we win their hearts and
minds by burning their fields or
bombing them with
toxic
chemicals? Not likely. How then to
deal with this crop in a way that also will
advance our larger objectives? Buy it - all of it. Offer a price equal to or
slightly above what the drug lords pay.
Offer the peasants protection against drug
lords who object. We are the toughest gang in town, after all. Refine our
purchases into morphine to sell (or better, give) to hospitals. If we have any
left over, destroy it. Keep doing this year
after year until we can help the growers find an equally lucrative crop to
sustain their meager lifestyles. " - Charles
Bell
"Could someone please explain to me why a
defenseless senior citizen dying
in excruciating pain does not have a
right to die free of
pain?" - Bob Aronoff
One must question the thought process' of a social system that makes it's members
live in excruciating
pain when
pain relief is possible.
opiate usersRush Limbaugh - addicted to
OxyContin for 20 years
"Drug use, some might say, is destroying this
country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs,
importing drugs. ... And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs,
they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be
sent up." - Rush Limbaugh, October 5, 1995
As a result of high demand for tea, silk and porcelain
in Britain and the low demand for British commodities in China, Britain had a
large trade deficit with China and had to trade goods for
silver as the Chinese would only except
silver in trade.
Britain had
conquered Bengal in the Battle of Plassey in 1757 so the
British East India
Company pursued a monopoly on production and export of
opium in India. In 1773, the Governor-General of
Bengal pursued the monopoly on the sale of opium
in earnest, and abolished the old opium
syndicate at Patna. For the next 50 years, opium
would be key to the British East India
Company's hold on India.
Since importation of
opium into China was against Chinese law, the
British East India
Company would buy tea in Canton on credit, carrying no
opium, but would instead sell
opium for silver at the auctions in Calcutta leaving
it to be smuggled to China.
British exports of
opium to China skyrocketed from an estimated 15
tons in 1730, to 75 tons in 1773, shipped in over two thousand "chests", each
containing 140 pounds (64 kg) of opium.
The British crown with it's surrogate, the
corporate chartered British East India
Company, was directly responsible for the opium flood that lead to the
Opium Wars in China as they functioned
much as the Medellin Cartel of Pablo Escobar functioned in bringing
cocaine to America in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 2001 DynCorp oversaw an aerial
fleet of forty-six helicopters and twenty-three fixed-wing aircraft which
operated from twenty-three locations spread out over Colombia, Bolivia and
Peru.
Representative Janice D.
"Jan" Schakowsky, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, claimed that
American taxpayers have been
funding a
secret war that has the potential to slowly but surely
draw America further into a poorly understood
counterinsurgency conflict in South
America.
In 2002 DynCorp, headquartered in
Reston, Virginia, was the nation's 13th largest
military contractor with $2.3 billion in
revenue until it merged with
Computer Sciences
Corporation.
According to
Federation of
American Scientists secrecy
specialist
Steven
Aftergood, the federal government -DynCorp contract is a prime
example of how the executive branch is
unilaterally projecting power and implementing
policy by taking shortcuts to the
rule of law.
No
one knows what DynCorp specifically is
contracted to do because of claims that disclosure would compromise information
proprietary to DynCorp - protected by the
"trade secrets exemption" in the Freedom of Information Act.
"The kind of routine oversight that official
military activities would be subjected to
are evaded by contractors as a matter of course. This highlights how the whole
phenomenon of privatizing
military functions has enabled the
government to evade oversight to a
shocking degree." -
Steven
Aftergood
See
Original Sin
See
Social Control
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This website defines a new religious
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