[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] America's great game

[Bill Totten]

The US and Britain claim defeating the Taliban is part of a "good war"
against al-Qaeda. Yet there is evidence the 2001 invasion was planned
before 9/11

by John Pilger

New Statesman (January 10 2008)

"To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is
being played out a game for dominion of the world".
-- Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898

I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the
Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no.
She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was Rawa,
had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through
contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like
earthquake victims awaiting rescue.

Rawa is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which
since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in
that country. There is no organisation on earth like it. It is the high
bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, Rawa
agents have travelled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at
clandestine girls' schools, ministering to isolated and brutalised
women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas.
They were the Taliban regime's implacable foes when the word Taliban was
barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly
courting the mullahs so that the oil company Unocal could build a
pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian.

Indeed, Rawa's understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western
governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now
reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a
"good war".

When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her
nom de guerre. She said: "We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a
cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly
became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but
they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over
the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no
different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in
[Hamid] Karzai's government. In some ways, we were more secure under the
Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you
take your life into your hands."

The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October
2001 was "to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of
9/11". The women of Rawa say this is false. In a rare statement on 4
December that went unreported in Britain, they said: "By experience, [we
have found] that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and
al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan
and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and
strategic interests in the region".

The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence
that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable
response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months
prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not
the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the
Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin
factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to
fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s.
Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a
creation of Washington, which believed the "jihadi card" could be used
to bring down the Soviet Union. The Taliban were a product of this and,
during the Clinton years, they were admired for their "discipline". Or,
as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most
capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history".

The "moment in history" was a secret memorandum of understanding the
mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal.
However, by the late 1990s, the Northern Alliance had encroached further
and further on territory controlled by the Taliban, whom, as a result,
were deemed in Washington to lack the "stability" required of such an
important client. It was the consistency of this client relationship
that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's
aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer
had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with
a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which
meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that", he said.)

By early 2001, convinced it was the presence of Osama Bin Laden that was
souring their relationship with Washington, the Taliban tried to get rid
of him. Under a deal negotiated by the leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic
parties, Bin Laden was to be held under house arrest in Peshawar. A
tribunal of clerics would then hear evidence against him and decide
whether to try him or hand him over to the Americans. Whether or not
this would have happened, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf vetoed the plan.
According to the then Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, a senior US
diplomat told him on 21 July 2001 that it had been decided to dispense
with the Taliban "under a carpet of bombs".

Acclaimed as the first "victory" in the "war on terror", the attack on
Afghanistan in October 2001 and its ripple effect caused the deaths of
thousands of civilians who, even more than Iraqis, remain invisible to
western eyes. The family of Gulam Rasul is typical. It was 7:45 am on 21
October. The headmaster of a school in the town of Khair Khana, Rasul
had just finished eating breakfast with his family and had walked
outside to chat to a neighbour. Inside the house were his wife, Shiekra,
his four sons, aged three to ten, his brother and his wife, his sister
and her husband. He looked up to see an aircraft weaving in the sky,
then his house exploded in a fireball behind him. Nine people died in
this attack by a US F-16 dropping a 500 pound bomb. The only survivor
was his nine-year-old son, Ahmad Bilal.

"Most of the people killed in this war are not Taliban; they are
innocents", Gulam Rasul told me. "Was the killing of my family a
mistake? No, it was not. They fly their planes and look down on us, the
mere Afghan people, who have no planes, and they bomb us for our
birthright, and with all contempt."

There was the wedding party in the village of Niazi Qala, 100 kilometers
south of Kabul, to celebrate the marriage of the son of a respected
farmer. By all accounts it was a wonderfully boisterous affair, with
music and singing. The roar of aircraft started when everyone was
asleep, at about three in the morning. According to a United Nations
report, the bombing lasted two hours and killed 52 people: seventeen
men, ten women and 25 children, many of whom were found blown to bits
where they had desperately sought refuge, in a dried-up pond. Such
slaughter is not uncommon, and these days the dead are described as
"Taliban"; or, if they are children, they are said to be "partly to
blame for being at a site used by militants" - according to the BBC,
speaking to a US military spokesman.

Return of opium

The British military have played an important part in this violence,
having stepped up high- altitude bombing by up to thirty per cent since
they took over command of Nato forces in Afghanistan in May 2006. This
translated to more than 6,200 Afghan deaths last year. In December, a
contrived news event was the "fall" of a "Taliban stronghold", Musa
Qala, in southern Afghanistan. Puppet government forces were allowed to
"liberate" rubble left by American B-52s.

What justifies this? Various fables have been spun - "building
democracy" is one. "The war on drugs" is the most perverse. When the
Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001 they had one striking success.
They brought to an abrupt end a historic ban on opium production that
the Taliban regime had achieved. A UN official in Kabul described the
ban to me as "a modern miracle". The miracle was quickly rescinded. As a
reward for supporting the Karzai "democracy", the Americans allowed
Northern Alliance warlords to replant the country's entire opium crop in
2002. Twenty-eight out of the 32 provinces instantly went under
cultivation. Today, ninety per cent of world trade in opium originates
in Afghanistan. In 2005, a British government report estimated that
35,000 children in this country were using heroin. While the British
taxpayer pays for a GBP 1 billion military super-base in Helmand
Province and the second-biggest British embassy in the world, in Kabul,
peanuts are spent on drug rehabilitation at home.

Tony Blair once said memorably: "To the Afghan people, we make this
commitment. We will not walk away ... [We will offer] some way out of
the poverty that is your miserable existence." I thought about this as I
watched children play in a destroyed cinema. They were illiterate and so
could not read the poster warning that unexploded cluster bombs lay in
the debris.

"After five years of engagement", reported James Fergusson in the
Independent on 16 December, "the [UK] Department for International
Development had spent just GBP 390 million on Afghan projects".
Unusually, Fergusson has had meetings with Taliban who are fighting the
British. "They remained charming and courteous throughout", he wrote of
one visit in February. "This is the beauty of malmastia, the Pashtun
tradition of hospitality towards strangers. So long as he comes unarmed,
even a mortal enemy can rely on a kind reception. The opportunity for
dialogue that malmastia affords is unique."

This "opportunity for dialogue" is a far cry from the surrender-or-else
offers made by the government of Gordon Brown. What Brown and his
Foreign Office advisers wilfully fail to understand is that the tactical
victory in Afghanistan in 2001, achieved with bombs, has become a
strategic disaster in south Asia.

Exacerbated by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the current turmoil
in Pakistan has its contemporary roots in a Washington-contrived war in
neighbouring Afghanistan that has alienated the Pashtuns who inhabit
much of the long border area between the two countries. This is also
true of most Pakistanis, who, according to opinion polls, want their
government to negotiate a regional peace, rather than play a prescribed
part in a rerun of Lord Curzon's Great Game.

www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/200801100021

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