[ALBSA-Info] (no subject)

[Mimoza Meholli]

Dear friends,
One question that the corporate news media has hardly asked at all about the 
tragedy of Sept. 11 is the question "why?" Mostly they have been satisfied 
with President Bush's statement in his address to the nation that the 
terrorists envied us because we are a bastion of freedom and democracy in 
the world. Unfortunately, the truth is quite dramatically different from 
this self-serving propaganda designed to put the nation on a war footing.
The two very interesting articles below briefly examine the history of US 
dealings with the Taliban of Afghanistan.
   The first article deals with the period of the Soviet invasion of that 
tragic country. Would you be surprised to find that in US's paranoia over 
Communist Russia the US played a major role in creating the Taliban as a 
fighting force? So the first article below documents.
   The second article deals with the continued US embrace of the Taliban 
after the Russians withdrew in defeat, in spite of the fact that it was 
known that they were a brutal fundamentalist group that was committing 
horrible atrocities against the people of Afghanistan, especially women. 
Would you be surprised to find out that the reason was oil? So the second 
article documents. Read the last two paragraphs of the second article. They 
were written in 1998 and are almost prophetic - only the US didn't get 
burned by losing the pipeline. We got September 11th.
    I can't help but wonder how much the oil question lies in the background 
of the thinking and planning of the military-industrial complex that now 
rules in Washington and the Pentagon.
MIMOZA

New "Anti-Terrorist" Alliance: Same Old Mistakes

By

Stanley Heller

(The author is a Jewish-American who has chaired the Middle East Crisis 
Committee of New Haven since 1982.)

After Pearl Harbor, there were formal investigations into what went wrong, 
culminating in a full Congressional investigation. After the 9/11 disaster 
we deserve no less. Since 1979, US policy toward Afghanistan and Islamic 
fundamentalists has been a series of disastrous schemes to utilize those 
reactionary forces. There must be an accounting because the same dubious 
"realism" is at work again in Washington. The documentary evidence about CIA 
and government support for fundamentalism must be brought out into the open.

The strain of virulent fundamentalism in Afghanistan was merely a regional 
problem until U.S. administrations funded, armed and trained it into a 
sophisticated force. Jimmy Carter started it all with his hysterical 
response to the cruel Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. In his state of the 
union address on January 21, 1980 he said, "The implications of the Soviet 
invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace 
since the Second World War. ". In truth, however terrible the war was in 
remote Afghanistan, it was of no strategic importance to the United States. 
Yet our presidents jumped in enthusiastically. Ahmed Rashid's book "Taliban" 
estimates that well over $4 billion dollars worth of weapons, supplies and 
equipment was sent over to the fundamentalists during the Carter, Reagan and 
Bush administrations. The Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI), a division of 
the Zia ul Haq military dictatorship, was the conduit of the aid. It trained 
the mujahadeen and "Arab-Afghans" in all the dirty tricks that have come 
back to haunt us.

The American people were lied to about whom we were helping. Ronald Reagan 
in his proclamation of March 21, 1983 stated, "The resistance of the Afghan 
freedom fighters is an example to all the world of the invincibility of the 
ideals we in this country hold most dear, the ideals of freedom and 
independence." Freedom fighters indeed. They were out to set up a 
totalitarian society as our CIA knew full well. Whenever they took over a 
town they would make it a practice of murdering school teachers because of 
their "wicked" practice of teaching girls in schools. It's not as if the 
terrible potential of fundamentalism was a surprise. Khomeini's Iran was in 
its worst in those years.

All this was ignored because of Cold War obsessions. Short term gain. 
Outrageously this continued even after the Soviet Union was in the dust. The 
Taliban take-over of Afghanistan was welcomed by the Clinton's State 
Department. The New York Times reported on December 12, 1996, "From early 
on, American diplomats in Islamabad had made regular visits to Kandahar to 
see Taliban leaders. In briefings for reporters, the diplomats cited what 
they saw as positive aspects of the Taliban, which they listed as a capacity 
to end the war in Afghanistan and its promises to put an end to the use of 
Afghanistan as a base for narcotics trafficking and international 
terrorism."

The same short-term thinking that made fundamentalism into a world force is 
now the logic cobbling together a friendly "Islamic" alliance of tyrants 
(Uzbekistan), fundamentalists (the Afghan "Northern Alliance", Saudi Arabia) 
and military dictators (Pakistan). To stop Bin Laden's terrorism and to 
avoid future Bin Ladens it's obviously necessary to win over the Islamic 
countries. Yet what's crucial is to win over the people in those countries 
not a group of newly "anti-terrorist" Moslem despots.

You don't win over the people when you ally with the dictators and corrupt 
regimes that victimize them. You don't win over the people when you stop the 
food going to millions of starving Afghans. You don't win over the people 
with blind support of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians.

The Congressional leaders who investigated Pearl Harbor were granted full 
subpoena power. Witnesses testified under oath. We need such a committee 
today to ask hard questions about where we've been and where we're going. We 
need them to call witnesses outside the old boy network, and instead get 
testimony from journalists and writers who are not afraid to criticize 
error.

The President has sent American troops into harms way to repair one foreign 
policy catastrophe. Let's think hard about what we're doing before we set 
the stage for another.



Follow the Oil Trail - Mess in Afghanistan Partly Our Government's Fault

By William O. Beeman, Pacific News Service, August 24, 1998

We must face the fact that if President Clinton is right about who bombed 
our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the action came in part as the result 
of the muddled actions of our own government.

The story is worthy of a Tom Clancy novel.

It is no secret, especially in the region, that the United States, Pakistan 
and Saudi Arabia have been supporting the fundamentalist Taliban in their 
war for control of Afghanistan for some time. The U.S. has never openly 
acknowledged this connection, but it has been confirmed by both intelligence 
sources and charitable institutions in Pakistan.

Given U.S. rhetoric regarding the Middle East, the Taliban would seem to be 
strange partners. They are a brutal fundamentalist group that has conducted 
a cultural scorched-earth policy for Afghanistan. They have committed 
atrocities against their enemies and their own citizens -- according to 
extensive documentation. So why would the United States support them?

Middle Easterners understand. As the ancient saying goes, "The enemy of my 
enemy is my friend." In Afghanistan the dominant ethnic groups are the 
Pushtuns, who spill over the border into Pakistan, and the Tajiks, whose 
language is a form of Persian. The Pushtun Taliban have virtually eliminated 
their Tajik opposition, which had been heavily supported by Iran. And so, 
according to this line of reasoning, the United States -- as an enemy of 
Iran -- must be a friend of the Taliban.

But this does not fully explain why the United States would support such a 
group -- or for that matter why Pakistan, itself a fundamentalist Islamic 
state, would risk the wrath of Tehran's religious government. The answer to 
this part of the question has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity -- 
but only with the economics of oil.

To the north of Afghanistan is one of the world's wealthiest oil fields, on 
the Eastern Shore of the Caspian Sea in republics formed since the breakup 
of the Soviet Union (see PNS article by Thomas Goltz on Caspian Oil 
Sweepstakes). Here, U.S. oil companies are involved in a boom larger than 
any in the last 40 years in this region. Untold wealth is at stake -- but it 
depends on getting the oil out of the landlocked region through a warm water 
port.

The simplest and cheapest route is through Iran. This route is favored by 
all oil companies, because it involves building a short pipeline and then 
transshipping the oil through the existing Iranian network.

The U.S. government has such antipathy to Iran that it is willing to do 
anything to prevent this. An alternate route would go through Afghanistan 
and Pakistan -- but this would require securing the agreement of the 
powers-that-be in Afghanistan.

>From the U.S. standpoint, the way to deny Iran everything is for the 
anti-Iranian Taliban to win in Afghanistan and agree to the pipeline through 
their territory. The Pakistanis would also benefit from this arrangement -- 
which is why they are willing to defy the Iranians.

Enter Osama bin Laden, a sworn enemy of the United States living in 
Afghanistan. His forces could see that the Taliban would eventually end up 
in the American camp. Thus his bombing of U.S. Embassies in East Africa 
(there are none in Afghanistan) was accompanied by a message calling for 
Americans to get out of "Islamic countries." By this he meant specifically 
Afghanistan.

The U.S. response was to bomb bin Laden's outposts while carefully noting 
that his forces were "not supported by any state." This statement is an 
attempt to rescue the Taliban relationship, while sending Taliban leaders 
the message that they must ditch bin Laden. American missiles also took out 
a factory in the Sudan, but that was only a smokescreen.

Now matters are really in a mess. Iran has actually issued a statement 
supporting the U.S. actions. The Taliban are angry, and American citizens 
across the globe are now the targets of the most fanatical of Islamic 
militants. The U.S. may even lose control of the pipeline.

Every time the United States attempts one of these slick back-door deals, 
U.S. citizens get burned. Our foreign policy community never seems to learn 
that religion and ideology are as strong a force in this region as money or 
guns. We underestimate these factors every time, and this gets us in trouble 
every time.


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