[R-G] Backstage at the theater of 'terror'

[Anthony Fenton]

South Asia
Feb 27, 2009
THE ROVING EYE
Backstage at the theater of 'terror'
By Pepe Escobar

Afghanistan is not only the graveyard of empires; it's a graveyard of  
misconceptions.

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden believed that the mujahideen single- 
handedly defeated the Soviet empire; so a more compact mujahid band,  
al-Qaeda, would be the vanguard in defeating the American empire. It  
was never that simple.

In the United States, the myth rules that the Central Intelligence  
Agency (CIA) delivered the Soviets "their Vietnam"; thus this was  
basically a US victory, with the "freedom fighters" (copyright  
president Ronald Reagan) as supporting actors. It was never that simple.

The Pakistani military-intelligence establishment believes since the  
late 1970s, that a puppet Afghanistan was essential for its "strategic  
depth". It was never that simple.

It's also useful to remember today that little has changed regarding  
the Afghan tragedy in these past three decades. And that makes the  
upcoming US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) surge in  
Afghanistan a certified road to ruin.

Behind the red curtain
It's easy to forget in the US that Soviet intelligence in late 1979  
was more than aware of an imminent anti-Soviet pact between China and  
the US - crystallizing what the USSR feared the most: to be encircled  
by enemy powers.

There were, of course, Afghan political elements that forced the  
Soviet hand. Moscow was keen to support a communist government in  
Kabul, and was very wary of the Islamic revolution being exported from  
Iran to western Afghanistan.

But there was also the fact that around 100 top Soviet officials -  
including three KGB colonels - had been assassinated by tribal  
fundamentalists in plain sight of then-resident Hafizullah Amin's  
government. (After the Soviet invasion Amin was dispatched to the  
Lubyanka, the KGB's headquarters in Moscow, and tortured: he had made  
such a mess in Kabul that he was believed to be a CIA agent. Amin was  
finally executed by "administrative process" - a shot in the back of  
the neck.)

Former US president Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew  
Brzezinski - today a President Barack Obama foreign policy shadow  
eminence - of course instrumentalized the mujahideen. After all, what  
Zbig really wanted - and got - was "to induce a Soviet military  
intervention".

But when Carter got his invasion, he interpreted it as the USSR really  
wanting to invade the Persian Gulf and cut off the oil supply of "our"  
Western world. Few sane voices in the US remarked that if the USSR  
ever attempted such a move that would mean a nuclear war with the US.

Historian, diplomat, strategist and US foreign policy establishment  
icon George Kennan - the author of the "containment" of communism  
strategy - was one of these voices; he dismissed Carter as "immature".

Kennan also made two points that remain extremely valid today; that if  
the Persian Gulf was so "vital" for the US, that was because of US oil  
greed; and that instability in the Middle East was not due to USSR  
moves but to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the US blindly  
backing one side.

When in doubt, pre-empt
Most of all, from the Soviet point of view, the invasion of  
Afghanistan was classic pre-emptive action - a sort of replay of the  
Cuban missile crisis. In 1962, Fidel Castro informed Moscow that the  
US was preparing the invasion of Cuba. The Soviet high command then  
came up with a pre-emptive action - deploying the missiles with the  
understanding that they would be sent back home if president John F  
Kennedy protested, thus winning Cuba's inviolability in the process.

In the invasion of Afghanistan, which had had pro-communist or pro- 
Soviet governments for the past few years - although its support by  
Moscow was no exactly enthusiastic - the Soviets were pre-empting the  
possibility that via a pact with the US, China would enter Afghanistan  
on the trail of its ally, ultra-conservative Pakistan, and probably  
using American money.

Thus the Soviet action was justified in terms of its survival  
strategy. Pakistan at the time was already involved in an operation -  
alongside China and the US - against political and social sectors in  
Afghanistan. With the invasion of Afghanistan and Indira Gandhi's  
electoral victory in India, the USSR created a pawn.

What nobody could imagine in 1979 was that the mighty Red Army would  
be, if not defeated, at least paralyzed by a bunch of mountain  
warriors with rifles. As for Pakistan, its master plan was always to  
control Afghanistan, even indirectly, in the name of its "strategic  
depth" theory (and that has not changed to this day).

The influence of leftist movements in Afghanistan could be seen  
already in a more-or-less free election in 1954, when the left elected  
50 congressmen out of a total of 120. A good deal of these leftists  
were nationalists and radical Islamists. The USSR had been helping  
Afghanistan ever since the October 1917 revolution. As much as Moscow,  
Mohammed Daoud - who dethroned his cousin, King Zahir Shah, in 1973 -  
wanted to modernize Afghanistan by force. The precedent was not very  
encouraging, namely the failure of King Amanullah in 1919, also  
supported by the Russians.

Even if Washington under Obama would be interested today (and it's  
not), modernization of Afghanistan by force also would not work. What  
would be really needed is hardcore nation-building - lots of  
investment in education and infrastructure that would generate real  
employment opportunities, while making sure the money does not  
disappear in the Kabul bureaucracy's ministerial black hole.

To promote socialism, progress or simply democracy in Afghanistan just  
by distributing aid - without fundamentally changing a centuries-old  
social structure - is impossible. This was - and will continue to be -  
the key to the Afghan riddle, and the main reason why the Obama/ 
Pentagon/NATO surge, full or half-full, will fail.

Losing a 'revolutionary civil war'
As for the end of the Soviet invasion/occupation a little over 20  
years ago, the dynamic had changed compared to the late 1970s. There  
was a detente in place with both the US and China. A US myth rules  
that the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan because the US (and Pakistan,  
plus Saudi Arabian money) manipulated the largest guerrilla war of the  
20th century, whose coup de grace were those precious Stinger missiles  
the CIA finally shipped to the mujahideen.

That was only one among a myriad of reasons, all related to a  
compounded Soviet financial disaster: the fall in oil and gas prices;  
the fallout from Chernobyl; a horrible earthquake in Armenia; a very  
bad performance in agriculture; and the perestroika paralysis.

By early 1989, a majority of Russians considered the invasion of  
Afghanistan in December 1979 as a major mistake. Plus they had to  
count their dead. In the first wave the dead were Uzbeks, Tajiks,  
Turkmen and Kyrgyz. Then they were Belorussians, Ukrainians, Estonians  
and, yes, Russians.

Since the peace of Brest Litovsk in 1918, the Soviets had never  
suffered a politico-military defeat. For the official ideologues close  
to former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, this was a not a war of  
conquest, but a revolutionary civil war with the "internationalist"  
help of the USSR.

But this "revolutionary civil war" was ultimately won by a bunch of  
Muslim tribals - Rabbani, Khalis, Abdul Haq, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,  
Ahmad Shah Masoud, Ishmail Khan - and their commanders. (It's  
interesting to remember that Abdul Haq was later killed by the  
Taliban, Masoud was killed by al-Qaeda two days before 9/11, Ishmail  
Khan still rules in western Afghanistan and Hekmatyar is still a  
Washington bete noire on the loose.)

 From the point of view of Moscow, at least the USSR's southern  
frontier was pacified. The special units of General Boris Gromov left  
behind millions of landmines. But most of all the USSR - and the US -  
left behind a festering, multi-level guerrilla army divided between  
seven Sunni parties, based in Pakistan, and eight Shi'ite parties,  
supported by Iran. The outlook for Kabul was a Saigon scenario or a  
Beirut scenario. In the end, "Beirut" won: out of this enlarged  
Lebanese situation emerged the Pakistan Frankenstein - the Taliban.

It's never enough to stress it: almost every Taliban is a Pashtun but  
not every Pashtun is a Taliban. The current US and NATO strategy of a  
war against Pashtun peasants is as pointless as the failed war against  
the Ba'athists in Iraq. (Almost all Ba'athists were Sunni Arabs, but  
not every Sunni Arab was a Ba'athist.)

General Gromov, the former commander of the Soviet 40th Army in  
Afghanistan - and currently the governor of the Moscow region - did  
not mince his words "celebrating" the 20th anniversary of the Soviet  
pull out, on February 15: "I believe that the war was a huge and in  
many respects irreparable political mistake of the leadership of the  
Soviet Union at the time."

Nowadays, Gromov stresses "the Moscow region regularly sends  
humanitarian aid to Afghanistan". If Obama placed a call to Gromov he  
would hear a few sobering words: persist in your "strategy" and you  
and NATO will be defeated at the "graveyard of empires".

The freedom fighters return Unlike standard Obama rhetoric,  
Afghanistan is not the "central front in the war on terror". The key  
to the riddle lies in the middle-echelons of the Pakistani Inter- 
Services Intelligence (ISI) and the army. The ISI "invented" the  
Taliban - and the middle to upper ranks, as well as some Pashtun army  
officers, continue to fully support not only the "historic" Taliban of  
the Mullah Omar group but the neo-Taliban of the Baitullah Mehsud and  
Maulana Sufi Mohammed varieties.

The problem is Washington has no leverage, no credibility and no  
inside intelligence to conduct a wide-ranging purge of the ISI and the  
Pakistani army.

And then there's the problem of endemic Afghan corruption. If you  
supply 93% of the world's opium, you are definitely a narco-state. The  
Taliban may not control the complex web of poppy cultivation - but  
they profit from its transportation and smuggling.

The Northern Alliance, hegemonic in the Kabul power game, is directly  
involved, as much as the Pashtun family of President Hamid Karzai
. An extra measure of Washington's puzzlement in Afghanistan is that a  
new "solution" being floated involves getting rid of Karzai and  
installing a new asset/puppet dictator.

Obama - even without being familiar with the Afghanistan-Pakistan  
theater - has got to be clever enough to see the surge per se as a  
suicidal gambit. The problem is he still seems to believe the war is  
"winnable". His latest definition of "winning", during his short visit  
to Canada, is "to defeat al-Qaeda" and to make sure the Afghanistan- 
Pakistan theatre is not a "launching pad for attacks against North  
America". So, if that is the mission he must acknowledge, the key node  
is Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

To the detriment of romanticized politics, 9/11 was never organized in  
a cave in Afghanistan; it was plotted in cells in Germany and Spain by  
Saudis and Pakistanis, with not a single Afghan among them. All  
subsequent attacks were planned basically in Western Europe, not in  
Afghanistan.

For its part, "historic" al-Qaeda today has nothing to do with a  
terror-oriented Citigroup; it is composed by no more than a few dozen  
shadowy figures - including Ayman al-Zawahiri - most probably hiding  
in the Waziristans and the enormous empty spaces of Balochistan.

Obama's problems are compounded by the fact that he is surrounded by  
people, such as Pentagon supremo Robert Gates, that remain locked in  
"war on terror"/Long War mode. Vice President Joe Biden and special  
envoy to the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater Richard Holbrooke - not to  
mention General David "I'm positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus - are  
certified hawks. They will do everything in their power to steer the  
conclusions of the Afghanistan strategic policy review Obama is  
waiting for towards the Long War concept .

For Andrew Bacevich, professor of International Relations and History  
at Boston University, the last hope for sanity is represented by  
Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations  
committee.

It's never enough to stress the Bush "war on terror" framework remains  
in full effect. Leon Panetta, the Obama nominee as CIA director, said  
that the CIA will basically continue with extraordinary renditions.  
Elena Kagan, the Obama nominee for solicitor general, said that  
indefinite detention without trial still rules - wherever the detainee  
was captured. And acting Assistant Attorney General Michael Hertz said  
that detainees in Bagram air base in Afghanistan remain without legal  
rights. If Obama is serious about closing Guantanamo, he must be  
serious about closing Bagram.

The two-fold, "Western alliance" strategy at the Afghanistan-Pakistan  
theater, as it stands, consists of the US and NATO occupying the parts  
of Afghanistan not occupied by the Taliban while Washington bribes  
Islamabad to let it attack Pashtun peasants inside Pakistan's  
Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA).

No wonder that after de facto losing a war in Iraq to a bunch of  
"irregulars" with Kalashnikovs, the Pentagon is now terrified that  
NATO is about to lose the war in Afghanistan for good, thus proving to  
the whole world its absolute irrelevancy - and shattering once and for  
all the shaky pillar of US hegemony over Europe.

NATO is incompetent even at lying. A NATO report in January claimed  
that "only" 973 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008, and  
"only 97" of these by NATO. This month a UN report confirmed that NATO  
was lying. According to the UN, at least 2,118 Afghan civilians were  
killed in 2008 - 828 of them by the US or NATO.

Everyone's talking about US fighter jets and CIA Predator drones  
raising hell out of three secret Pakistani air bases - with  
Islamabad's complicit silence. But nobody talks about the "humint", or  
human intelligence, component of the US's covert war in Afghanistan,  
conducted by what the New York Times defines, with spectacular  
hypocrisy, as "military units operating outside the normal chain of  
command".

US special forces are part of this deadly mix. A recent UN report  
identifies these US commandos as the key culprits as far as the  
killing of Afghan civilians is concerned. Washington happens to  
identify similar outfits - if they operate under a different banner,  
or religion - as "terrorists".

In the case of this new American breed, it's fair to expect the  
Pentagon and the Washington establishment to sooner or later start  
calling them - in a sinister echo of recent Afghan past - "freedom  
fighters".

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is  
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a  
snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama  
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.