Saturday, 15 September, 2001
Monday, 22 October, 2001
Sunday, 28 October, 2001
Murky Deals that Fuelled International Terrorism
Acknowledgements:
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The British newspaper The Guardian published this fascinating article four days after the horrors of Sept. 11th. It is well worth reading carefully. It makes some shocking allegations; a sampling is listed below including SAS training Afghans in Scotland! The British colonial presence in the Middle East is, of course, well known. Less known is the covert US CIA's funding of the ouster of the Soviets in Afghanistan (from 1979 '89) and beyond the agencies largest operation ever! Mix in oil, and you have the basis for the present UK-US axis in the war. As outrageous as these allegations may be, they are backed up by research in 5 books. I think they merit close consideration. (text and occasional additions [ ] have been inserted)
Sample of Allegations:
Bush Sr. & Jr. have close ties to the oil company Unocal, which wanted to put a pipeline across Afghanistan. Among their partners in the venture were BP and the Saudi royal family
Books Cited:
Murky Deals that Fuelled International Terrorism
By Giles Foden - The Guardian
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, US officials passed billions [$43 billion!] in funding and training to the Mujahedin. The CIA, in particular while under the direction of William Casey - head of the agency during the Reagan administration - was the main manager of these operations. With the Russian withdrawal in 1989, the CIA "celebrated its victory with champagne". So says Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press, £12.99), the definitive account by ABC journalist John Cooley.
The celebrations, under the presidency of George Bush senior (himself a former CIA director), were premature. The sophisticated methods taught to the Mujahedin, and the thousands of tonnes of arms supplied to them by the US - and Britain - are now tormenting the west in the phenomenon known as "blowback", whereby a policy strategy rebounds on its own devisers. The sins of the father, it might well be said, are being heaped on the head of the son.
Self-laceration may seem the last thing the US needs right now. But the lesson of these books is that only by facing up to its dark past will a beleaguered country be able to create a future in which terrorist attacks on this scale can be avoided. The whole issue of American "creation" of bin Laden in the Frankenstein's laboratory of Afghanistan during the 1980s is generally avoided by government sources. Cooley points out that while the State Department released a fact sheet on bin Laden in 1997 (the year prior to the bombing of the East African embassies), the document "omits the background facts which help to explain how early and close were his connections in the United States - making it easier for the Reagan-Casey jihad team to enlist his talents and his fortune".
The British military establishment colluded with the US in supporting the Mujahedin, with SAS and Green Berets going into Afghanistan itself. As ex-SAS soldier Tom Carew explains in his Andy McNab-like Jihad: The Secret War in Afghanistan (Mainstream, £7.99), they were inevitably drawn into actual combat. "We came to a small hamlet and were stopped by a couple of Mujahedin. They asked us, surprisingly politely, whether we would mind helping them, as their commander had decided he was going to make some kind of stand against the Russians."
As Cooley points out, in this country, "it was only Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's British government which supported the jihad with full enthusiasm". Hindered by Congressional interference, the CIA covertly sought Mrs Thatcher's help - in one incident, during the Falklands war, they curried favour by handing over an illegal supply of Stinger missiles to British officials in a Washington car park. Much of the help given to the Mujahedin was coordinated by an MI6 field officer in Islamabad. It was surely only a matter of time before some of this aid would find its way to the likes of bin Laden. Like the covert British and American teams, many of which received dollar-for-dollar funding from the Saudi royal family, he arrived in Afghanistan directly after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Everyone was getting along famously, according to Cooley. "Delighted by his impeccable Saudi credentials, the CIA gave Osama free rein in Afghanistan, as did Pakistan's intelligence generals."
In Ken Connor's Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS (Orion, £7.99), it is claimed that the elite [SAS] regiment actually trained Afghan fighters in remote locations in Scotland. In Afghanistan itself, the services of Keenie-Meenie Services (KMS) were used. This was an offshoot of British security firm Control Risks, mainly comprising ex-SAS members and former members of Rhodesian and South African special forces. It took its name from the Swahili word for the movement of a snake through grass. KMS later played a role in the Oliver North, Iran-Contra affair of 1987. On American soil, the CIA used Muslim charities and mosque communities as fronts for recruitment of fighters in their secret war against the USSR in the Hindu Kush. As Cooley writes in Unholy Wars: "One was [in] New York's Arab district, in Brooklyn along Atlantic Avenue... Another was a private rifle club in an affluent community of Connecticut."
Bin Laden and a man named Mustafa Chalaby, who ran a jihad refugee centre in Brooklyn, were both protégés of Abdullah Azzam. A formative influence on bin Laden, the charismatic Azzam was killed in a car-bomb in 1987: according to some rumours he was killed by the CIA. Others claim he was himself a CIA agent.
Cooley says that those directly recruited by the US went to Camp Peary - "the Farm", as the CIA's spy training centre in Virginia is known in the intelligence community - in scenes, as he tells them, reminiscent of the preparations for the killing of JFK recounted in Don DeLillo's Libra. At the Farm and other secret camps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries such as Egypt and Jordan learned strategic sabotage skills. Passed down to the younger jihad generation which filled the ranks of the bin Laden organisation, these skills would come back to haunt the US.
Simon Reeve's The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (Deutsch, £17.99) looks at how they were applied at the time of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre and the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.
In the financial world, too, there is a blowback scenario, given that for years global banking has gained considerable benefits from lack of transparency and regulation. BCCI, the British-Pakistani bank that was closed down in 1991 after a massive fraud, was a regular route for Mujahedin funding, including that provided by Saudi intelligence.
Financing for Pentagon and CIA "black budget" operations - particularly in the era of William Casey [Iran Contra, etc.] - also passed through BCCI, as did drug money. Some analysts claim black-budget US and British operatives flew out opium on the planes with which they brought in arms. Later, jihad funding came from the construction-industry coffers of Osama bin Laden and other Muslim "philanthropists".
Bin Laden established his own bank, the Al-Shamal Islamic, in Khartoum, Egypt.
In Unholy Wars, Cooley provides convincing evidence that Arab businessman and arms merchant Adnan Kashoggi had dealings with bin Laden's father, receiving a $50,000 cheque from him. Oil broker Roy Furmark, Cooley says, provided a link between his CIA friend Casey and Kashoggi, introducing the latter to Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, "the Iranian middleman who became a central figure in the arms for hostages and funds for [Nicaraguan] Contras deals with Iran, in which Kashoggi got involved".
Oil itself has long been a factor in the "great game" of Asian geopolitics, one which brings the other big player in the blowback scenario, Russia, into the picture. As Afghan expert Michael Griffin puts it in Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (Pluto, £19.95): "A trans-Afghan pipeline would undermine Russia's control of energy prices from Central Asia".
Griffin argues that the US under Clinton trimmed its opposition to the Taliban to gain an advantage in oil politics. By that time, in this high-stakes game of snakes and ladders, Clinton's successor was effectively already in the picture, as the son of a man with close ties to the oil company Unocal, which wanted to put a pipeline across Afghanistan. Among their partners in the venture were BP [British Petroleum] and the Saudi royal family. The future was beginning to cast as heavy a shadow as the past.
Griffin's introduction was penned seven months ago, but what he has to say still makes sobering reading.
"The accession in the US of President George W. Bush... may shed yet fresh light on at least two central mysteries of the Taliban ... The first is the extent to which the administration of Bill Clinton actively encouraged its former cold war allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to assemble and finance a tribal military force to end the misrule of the Mujahedin in the post-Soviet years. The second - of greater sensitivity - is to provide a coherent explanation for the studied incompetence of the FBI, CIA and other American intelligence agencies in addressing the alleged threats posed to the US by Osama bin Laden and his network. Bush's links with the US energy industry, most notably Unocal, are, regrettably, more likely to restrict the current state of knowledge about US policy in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, than to enlarge it."
Copyright © 2001 The Guardian
War Is Peace
The world doesn't have to choose between the Taliban and the US government.
All the beauty of the world - literature, music, art - lies between these two fundamentalist poles.
By Arundhati Roy - from the Indian weekly The Outlook
As darkness deepened over Afghanistan on Sunday, October 7, 2001, the US government, backed by the International Coalition Against Terror (the new, amenable surrogate for the United Nations), launched air strikes against Afghanistan. TV channels lingered on computer-animated images of Cruise missiles, stealth bombers, Tomahawks, 'bunker-busting' missiles and Mark 82 high-drag bombs. All over the world, little boys watched goggle-eyed and stopped clamouring for new video games.
The UN, reduced now to an ineffective abbreviation, wasn't even asked to mandate the air strikes. (As Madeleine Albright once said, "The US acts multilaterally when it can, and unilaterally when it must." The 'evidence' against the terrorists was shared amongst friends in the 'Coalition'. After conferring, they announced that it didn't matter whether or not the 'evidence' would stand up in a court of law. Thus, in an instant, were centuries of jurisprudence carelessly trashed.
Nothing can excuse or justify an act of terrorism, whether it is committed by religious fundamentalists, private militia, people's resistance movements — or whether it's dressed up as a war of retribution by a recognised government. The bombing of Afghanistan is not revenge for New York and Washington. It is yet another act of terror against the people of the world. Each innocent person that is killed must be added to, not set off against, the grisly toll of civilians who died in New York and Washington.
People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They first use flags to shrink-wrap peoples' minds and suffocate real thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to cloak the mangled corpses of the willing dead. On both sides, in Afghanistan as well as America, civilians are now hostage to the actions of their own governments. Unknowingly, ordinary people in both countries share a common bond — they have to live with the phenomenon of blind, unpredictable terror. Each batch of bombs that is dropped on Afghanistan is matched by a corresponding escalation of mass hysteria in America about anthrax, more hijackings and other terrorist acts.
“President George Bush said, "We're a peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people." So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.”
There is no easy way out of the spiralling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever. Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war — these words have taken on new meaning. Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility. Unfortunately, up to now, there has been no sign of any introspection from the leaders of the International Coalition. Or the Taliban.
When he announced the air strikes, President George Bush said, "We're a peaceful nation." America's favourite ambassador, Tony Blair, (who also holds the portfolio of Prime Minister of the UK), echoed him: "We're a peaceful people." So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.
Speaking at the FBI headquarters a few days later, President Bush said: "This is our calling. This is the calling of the United States of America. The most free nation in the world. A nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, rejects murderers and rejects evil. We will not tire."
Here is a list of the countries that America has been at war with — and bombed — since World War II: China (1945-46, 1950-53); Korea (1950-53); Guatemala (1954, 1967-69); Indonesia (1958); Cuba (1959-60); the Belgian Congo (1964); Peru (1965); Laos (1964-73); Vietnam (1961-73); Cambodia (1969-70); Grenada (1983); Libya (1986); El Salvador (1980s); Nicaragua (1980s); Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-99), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998); Yugoslavia (1999).And now Afghanistan.
Certainly it does not tire — this, the Most Free nation in the world. What freedoms does it uphold? Within its borders, the freedoms of speech, religion, thought; of artistic expression, food habits, sexual preferences (well, to some extent) and many other exemplary, wonderful things. Outside its borders, the freedom to dominate, humiliate and subjugate — usually in the service of America's real religion, the 'free market'. So when the US government christens a war 'Operation Infinite Justice', or 'Operation Enduring Freedom', we in the Third World feel more than a tremor of fear.
“Young boys — many of them orphans — who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women. Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalise women; they don't seem to know what else to do with them.”
Because we know that Infinite Justice for some means Infinite Injustice for others. And Enduring Freedom for some means Enduring Subjugation for others.
The International Coalition Against Terror is largely a cabal of the richest countries in the world. Between them, they manufacture and sell almost all of the world's weapons, they possess the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological and nuclear. They have fought the most wars, account for most of the genocide, subjection, ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in modern history, and have sponsored, armed and financed untold numbers of dictators and despots. Between them, they have worshipped, almost deified, the cult of violence and war. For all its appalling sins, the Taliban just isn't in the same league.
The Taliban was compounded in the crumbling crucible of rubble, heroin and landmines in the backwash of the Cold War. Its oldest leaders are in their early 40s. Many of them are disfigured and handicapped, missing an eye, an arm or a leg. They grew up in a society scarred and devastated by war. Between the Soviet Union and America, over 20 years, about $45 billion worth of arms and ammunition was poured into Afghanistan. The latest weaponry was the only shard of modernity to intrude upon a thoroughly medieval society. Young boys — many of them orphans — who grew up in those times, had guns for toys, never knew the security and comfort of family life, never experienced the company of women.
Now, as adults and rulers, the Taliban beat, stone, rape and brutalise women; they don't seem to know what else to do with them. Years of war have stripped them of gentleness, inured them to kindness and human compassion. They dance to the percussive rhythms of bombs raining down around them. Now they've turned their monstrosity on their own people.
“The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony — every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious and cultural.”
With all due respect to President Bush, the people of the world do not have to choose between the Taliban and the US government. All the beauty of human civilisation — our art, our music, our literature — lies beyond these two fundamentalist, ideological poles. There is as little chance that the people of the world can all become middle-class consumers as there is that they'll all embrace any one particular religion. The issue is not about Good vs Evil or Islam vs Christianity as much as it is about space. About how to accommodate diversity, how to contain the impulse towards hegemony — every kind of hegemony, economic, military, linguistic, religious and cultural. Any ecologist will tell you how dangerous and fragile a monoculture is. A hegemonic world is like having a government without a healthy opposition. It becomes a kind of dictatorship. It's like putting a plastic bag over the world, and preventing it from breathing. Eventually, it will be torn open.
One and a half million Afghan people lost their lives in the 20 years of conflict that preceded this new war. Afghanistan was reduced to rubble, and now, the rubble is being pounded into finer dust. By the second day of the air strikes, US pilots were returning to their bases without dropping their assigned payload of bombs. As one pilot put it, Afghanistan is "not a target-rich environment". At a press briefing at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, was asked if America had run out of targets.
"First we're going to re-hit targets," he said, "and second, we're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is..." This was greeted with gales of laughter in the Briefing Room.
By the third day of the strikes, the US defence department boasted that it had "achieved air supremacy over Afghanistan". (Did they mean that they had destroyed both, or maybe all 16, of Afghanistan's planes?)
On the ground in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance — the Taliban's old enemy, and therefore the International Coalition's newest friend — is making headway in its push to capture Kabul. (For the archives, let it be said that the Northern Alliance's track record is not very different from the Taliban's.
“The fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all. Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.”
But for now, because it's inconvenient, that little detail is being glossed over.) The visible, moderate, "acceptable" leader of the Alliance, Ahmed Shah Masood, was killed in a suicide-bomb attack early in September. The rest of the Northern Alliance is a brittle confederation of brutal warlords, ex-communists and unbending clerics. It is a disparate group divided along ethnic lines, some of whom have tasted power in Afghanistan in the past.
Until the US air strikes, the Northern Alliance controlled about 5 per cent of the geographical area of Afghanistan. Now, with the Coalition's help and 'air cover', it is poised to topple the Taliban. Meanwhile, Taliban soldiers, sensing imminent defeat, have begun to defect to the Alliance. So the fighting forces are busy switching sides and changing uniforms. But in an enterprise as cynical as this one, it seems to matter hardly at all. Love is hate, north is south, peace is war.
Among the global powers, there is talk of 'putting in a representative government'. Or, on the other hand, of 'restoring' the Kingdom to Afghanistan's 89-year-old former king, Zahir Shah, who has lived in exile in Rome since 1973. That's the way the game goes — support Saddam Hussein, then 'take him out'; finance the mujahideen, then bomb them to smithereens; put in Zahir Shah and see if he's going to be a good boy. (Is it possible to 'put in' a representative government? Can you place an order for Democracy — with extra cheese and jalapeno peppers?)
Reports have begun to trickle in about civilian casualties, about cities emptying out as Afghan civilians flock to the borders which have been closed. Main arterial roads have been blown up or sealed off. Those who have experience of working in Afghanistan say that by early November, food convoys will not be able to reach the millions of Afghans (7.5 million according to the UN) who run the very real risk of starving to death during the course of this winter. They say that in the days that are left before winter sets in, there can either be a war, or an attempt to reach food to the hungry. Not both.
“They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile. First, because the food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race.”
As a gesture of humanitarian support, the US government air-dropped 37,000 packets of emergency rations into Afghanistan. It says it plans to drop a total of 5,00,000 packets. That will still only add up to a single meal for half-a-million people out of the several million in dire need of food. Aid workers have condemned it as a cynical, dangerous, public-relations exercise. They say that air-dropping food packets is worse than futile. First, because the food will never get to those who really need it. More dangerously, those who run out to retrieve the packets risk being blown up by landmines. A tragic alms race. Nevertheless, the food packets had a photo-op all to themselves. Their contents were listed in major newspapers. They were vegetarian, we're told, as per Muslim Dietary Law(!) Each yellow packet, decorated with the American flag, contained: rice, peanut butter, bean salad, strawberry jam, crackers, raisins, flat bread, an apple fruit bar, seasoning, matches, a set of plastic cutlery, a serviette and illustrated user instructions.
After three years of unremitting drought, an air-dropped airline meal in Jalalabad! The level of cultural ineptitude, the failure to understand what months of relentless hunger and grinding poverty really mean, the US government's attempt to use even this abject misery to boost its self-image, beggars description.
Reverse the scenario for a moment. Imagine if the Taliban government was to bomb New York City, saying all the while that its real target was the US government and its policies. And suppose, during breaks between the bombing, the Taliban dropped a few thousand packets containing nan and kababs impaled on an Afghan flag.
“What if the Taliban was to bomb NYC and also drop packets of nan and kababs impaled on Afghan flags? Would the good people of New York be able to forgive the Afghan government?”
Would the good people of New York ever find it in themselves to forgive the Afghan government? Even if they were hungry, even if they needed the food, even if they ate it, how would they ever forget the insult, the condescension? Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York City, returned a gift of $10 million from a Saudi prince because it came with a few words of friendly advice about American policy in the Middle East. Is pride a luxury only the rich are entitled to? Far from stamping it out, igniting this kind of rage is what creates terrorism. Hate and retribution don't go back into the box once you've let them out. For every 'terrorist' or his 'supporter' that is killed, hundreds of innocent people are being killed too. And for every hundred innocent people killed, there is a good chance that several future terrorists will be created. Where will it all lead?
Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable definition of what 'terrorism' is. One country's terrorist is too often another's freedom fighter. At the heart of the matter lies the world's deep-seated ambivalence towards violence. Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the morality and political acceptability of terrorists (insurgents or freedom fighters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain.
The US government itself has funded, armed and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world. The CIA and Pakistan's ISI trained and armed the mujahideen who, in the '80s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. While President Reagan posed with them for a group portrait and called them the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers.
“People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text — from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita — can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation.”
Today, Pakistan — America's ally in this new war — sponsors insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as 'freedom fighters', India calls them 'terrorists'. India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lanka — the LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism. (Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide-bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.)
It is important for governments and politicians to understand that manipulating these huge, raging human feelings for their own narrow purposes may yield instant results, but eventually and inexorably, they have disastrous consequences. Igniting and exploiting religious sentiments for reasons of political expediency is the most dangerous legacy that governments or politicians can bequeath to any people — including their own. People who live in societies ravaged by religious or communal bigotry know that every religious text — from the Bible to the Bhagwad Gita — can be mined and misinterpreted to justify anything, from nuclear war to genocide to corporate globalisation.
This is not to suggest that the terrorists who perpetrated the outrage on September 11 should not be hunted down and brought to book. They must be. But is war the best way to track them down? Will burning the haystack find you the needle? Or will it escalate the anger and make the world a living hell for all of us?
At the end of the day, how many people can you spy on, how many bank accounts can you freeze, how many conversations can you eavesdrop on, how many e-mails can you intercept, how many letters can you open, how many phones can you tap? Even before September 11, the CIA had accumulated more information than is humanly possible to process.
(Sometimes, too much data can actually hinder intelligence — small wonder the US spy satellites completely missed the preparation that preceded India's nuclear tests in 1998.)
The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom — that precious, precious thing — will be the first casualty. It's already hurt and haemorrhaging dangerously.
“The sheer scale of the surveillance will become a logistical, ethical and civil rights nightmare. It will drive everybody clean crazy. And freedom — that precious, precious thing — will be the first casualty. It's already hurt and haemorrhaging dangerously.”
Governments across the world are cynically using the prevailing paranoia to promote their own interests. All kinds of unpredictable political forces are being unleashed. In India, for instance, members of the All India People's Resistance Forum, who were distributing anti-war and anti-US pamphlets in Delhi, have been jailed. Even the printer of the leaflets was arrested. The right-wing government (while it shelters Hindu extremists groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal) has banned the Students' Islamic Movement of India and is trying to revive an anti-terrorist act which had been withdrawn after the Human Rights Commission reported that it had been more abused than used. Millions of Indian citizens are Muslim. Can anything be gained by alienating them?
Every day that the war goes on, raging emotions are being let loose into the world. The international press has little or no independent access to the war zone. In any case, mainstream media, particularly in the US, has more or less rolled over, allowing itself to be tickled on the stomach with press hand-outs from militarymen and government officials
Afghan radio stations have been destroyed by the bombing. The Taliban has always been deeply suspicious of the Press. In the propaganda war, there is no accurate estimate of how many people have been killed, or how much destruction has taken place. In the absence of reliable information, wild rumours spread.
Put your ear to the ground in this part of the world, and you can hear the thrumming, the deadly drumbeat of burgeoning anger. Please. Please, stop the war now. Enough people have died. The smart missiles are just not smart enough. They're blowing up whole warehouses of suppressed fury.
President George Bush recently boasted: "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." President Bush should know that there are no targets in Afghanistan that will give his missiles their money's worth. Perhaps, if only to balance his books, he should develop some cheaper missiles to use on cheaper targets and cheaper lives in the poor countries of the world. But then, that may not make good business sense to the Coalition's weapons manufacturers. It wouldn't make any sense at all, for example, to the Carlyle Group — described by the Industry Standard as 'the world's largest private equity firm', with $12 billion under management. Carlyle invests in the defence sector and makes its money from military conflicts and weapons spending.
Carlyle is run by men with impeccable credentials. Former US defence secretary Frank Carlucci is Carlyle's chairman and managing director (he was a college roommate of Donald Rumsfeld's). Carlyle's other partners include former US secretary of state James A. Baker III, George Soros, Fred Malek (George Bush Sr's campaign manager). An American paper — the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel — says that former President George Bush Sr is reported to be seeking investments for the Carlyle Group from Asian markets. He is reportedly paid not inconsiderable sums of money to make 'presentations' to potential government-clients.
“Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.”
Ho Hum. As the tired saying goes, it's all in the family. Then there's that other branch of traditional family business — oil. Remember, President George Bush (Jr) and Vice-President Dick Cheney both made their fortunes working in the US oil industry. Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years (or a developing country's energy requirements for a couple of centuries.) America has always viewed oil as a security consideration, and protected it by any means it deems necessary. Few of us doubt that its military presence in the Gulf has little to do with its concern for human rights and almost entirely to do with its strategic interest in oil.
Oil and gas from the Caspian region currently moves northward to European markets. Geographically and politically, Iran and Russia are major impediments to American interests. In 1998, Dick Cheney — then CEO of Halliburton, a major player in the oil industry — said: "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight." True enough.
For some years now, an American oil giant called Unocal has been negotiating with the Taliban for permission to construct an oil pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and out to the Arabian Sea.
>From here, Unocal hopes to access the lucrative 'emerging markets' in South and Southeast Asia. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban mullahs travelled to America and even met US State Department officials and Unocal executives in Houston.At that time the Taliban's taste for public executions and its treatment of Afghan women were not made out to be the crimes against humanity that they are now. Over the next six months, pressure from hundreds of outraged American feminist groups was brought to bear on the Clinton administration. Fortunately, they managed to scuttle the deal. And now comes the US oil industry's big chance.
“Shall we look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?”
In America, the arms industry, the oil industry, the major media networks, and, indeed, US foreign policy, are all controlled by the same business combines. Therefore, it would be foolish to expect this talk of guns and oil and defence deals to get any real play in the media. In any case, to a distraught, confused people whose pride has just been wounded, whose loved ones have been tragically killed, whose anger is fresh and sharp, the inanities about the 'Clash of Civilisations' and the 'Good vs Evil' discourse home in unerringly. They are cynically doled out by government spokesmen like a daily dose of vitamins or anti-depressants. Regular medication ensures that mainland America continues to remain the enigma it has always been — a curiously insular people, administered by a pathologically meddlesome, promiscuous government.
And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we're hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?
As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders — have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty? Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a new-born gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear — without thinking of the World Trade Center and Afghanistan?
Copyright © 2001 The Outlook
This War is a Fraud
By John Pilger, http://www.johnpilger.com/
Former Mirror (English daily newspaper) chief foreign correspondent
The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.
Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.
Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.
And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them.
If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name.
None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States.
The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.
The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.
With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.
A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.
Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.
So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power.
The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years".
The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo to a Taliban goose.
In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.
By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office and Downing Street.
GRIEF: A father weeps over his dead son after the bombs blunder in Kabul
If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government.
Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.
If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger.
He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member.
He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under the age of five.
That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World Trade Center.
There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War Two.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? £800 million so far.
According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley; there were no military targets nearby.
"I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.
The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media.
Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries.
There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth.
There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage.
The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us.
"It is not the way to go...not in our son's name."
Copyright © 2001 John Pilger