David DeGraw at Alternet.org describes how US intelligence ishas been behind both sides of the war on terror and how the media aids the war effort with calculated psyops like the recent “finding” of mineral deposits in Afghanistan that was trumpeted in the New York Times.
“Reports of American tax dollars ending up in the hands of the Taliban have been coming out since the start of the war and the ISI, as the CIA has been well aware of for years now, has been playing both sides of this war and is pivotal in keeping the war going. Secondly, I have long wondered when the CIA / US military would start exposing all of this in the mainstream propaganda press as a pretext to further expand the war into Pakistan.
#3) As a result of all this, and not surprising at all to people who were paying close attention to Obama’s surge strategy, costs and death counts are quickly rising. Jim Lobe reports from Afghanistan that the “News is Bad.”
While U.S. officials insist they are making progress in reversing the momentum built up by the Taliban insurgency over the last several years, the latest news from Afghanistan suggests the opposite may be closer to the truth.
Even senior military officials are conceding privately that their much-touted new counterinsurgency strategy of “clear, hold and build” in contested areas of the Pashtun southern and eastern parts of the country are not working out as planned despite the “surge” of some 20,000 additional U.S. troops over the past six months.
Casualties among the nearly 130,000 U.S. and other NATO troops now deployed in Afghanistan are also mounting quickly. [read more]
#4) In a propaganda effort to spin away from all the latest bad news, the desperate US military has pulled this dusty old news report out of their back-pocket and launched a psychological operation in the NY Times to give a positive spin in hopes of further manipulating US public opinion:
U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves…. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. [read more]
In the process of this latest propaganda campaign, the Pentagon has unwittingly exposed two things that I will now jump on. A) The real reason why we are in this war to begin with: it’s all about natural resources. And B) All the BS statements about these “previously unknown deposits” clearly prove, yet again, that the NY Times is only too happy to play the role of a straight-up propaganda paper. For those of us paying attention, we’ve been reading reports about these minerals for the past decade!”
Read the rest of this report by David DeGraw at Alternet.org, June 16, 2010
So the CIA is funding the Taliban while Pentagon generals faint in front of Congress? Hm-mm.
Al Qaeda was very obviously “blowback” but the Taliban is a different story. It was likely funded by Pakistan to gain control Afghanistan and thus, in a sense, aimed at India. It existed and still exists and the US does not like it and seeks to eradicate it and the Pashtuns (as a military entity) in order to exercise control over Afghanistan, as the US exercises increasing control over the Middle East, Central America, Asia etc. (for purposes of advancing global governance). The US may see India as an ally in this regard and increasingly, it seems, sees Pakistan as an enemy.
The war has little or nothing to do with “resources” or “pipelines” which are just pretexts floated by the powers-that-be so that leftist newspapers can rail against capitalist exploitation (and for other propagandistic purposes). The idea that the Taliban are controlled by the CIA is … unusual to say the least. Didn’t the Taliban just blow up six CIA agents not long ago? Did they die just to confuse the issue?
Hi –
The “CIA being behind” both is a broad brush..
1. The CIA is a huge bureaucracy with many factions.
2. The CIA has its open, research oriented, above-board element
3. It has its covert element
4. It has its rogue element (that works sometimes against other factions and has different loyalties and might be very task specific).
The CIA has certainly funded the ISI or worked with it..often in opposition to understood US policy in the state dept.
So yes, I think elements of the CIA have worked covertly to undermine CIA and state policy.
This doesn’t mean specific incidents are orchestrated to confuse, necessarily. It means, you have lots of forces and different agendas playing out..sometimes in opposition to each other..
Yes, black ops would run counter to stated policy.
Yes, there is every reason to surmise that the CIA has its contacts and agents in the Taliban. Certainly to monitor and spy, and certainly to work with.
I’ll try to find links
While natural resources are a “meme’ – they are also very much as real issue.
Memes are powerful – not because they are untrue and the “real” reason is something else.
Memes are powerful because they HAVE some truth in them..but the truth is liable to distortion or misunderstanding.
The elites are not solely interested in resources. That doesn’t mean they AREN’T interested.
That doesn’t mean they don’t use the notion of resources to further the binary capitalist-communist
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_CIA_Taliban.html
————
In 1994, a new group, the Taliban (Pashtun for “students”), emerged on the scene. Its members came from madrassas set up by the Pakistani government along the border and funded by the U.S., Britain, and the Saudis, where they had received theological indoctrination and military training. Thousands of young men-refugees and orphans from the war in Afghanistan-became the foot soldiers of this movement:
These boys were from a generation who had never seen their country at peace-an Afghanistan not at war with invaders and itself. They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbors nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that made up their villages and their homeland. These boys were what the war had thrown up like the sea’s surrender on the beach of history …
They were literally the orphans of war, the rootless and restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan’s lumpen proletariat.
With the aid of the Pakistani army, the Taliban swept across most of the exhausted country promising a restoration of order and finally capturing Kabul in September 1996. The Taliban imposed an ultra-sectarian version of Islam, closely related to Wahhabism, the ruling creed in Saudi Arabia. Women have been denied education, health care, and the right to work. They must cover themselves completely when in public. Minorities have been brutally repressed. Even singing and dancing in public are forbidden.
The Taliban’s brand of extreme Islam had no historical roots in Afghanistan. The roots of the Taliban’s success lay in 20 years of “jihad” against the Russians and further devastation wrought by years of internal fighting between the warlord factions. Initially, villagers-especially the majority Pashtuns in the south who shared the Taliban’s ethnicity-welcomed them as a force that might end the warfare and bring some order and peace to Afghanistan. Their lack of a social base within Afghanistan made them appear untainted by the factional warfare, and their moral purism made them appear above compromise. Before launching their war to conquer power, they first won some public support by appearing as the avenger against the warlords’ raping of women and boys. Of course, they could not have risen so far and so fast without the financial and military backing of Pakistan.
The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban’s reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul,” adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.” “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said another U.S. diplomat in 1997.
The reference to oil and pipelines explains everything. Since the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, U.S. oil companies and their friends in the State Department have been salivating at the prospect of gaining access to the huge oil and natural gas reserves in the former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian Sea and in Central Asia. These have been estimated as worth $4 trillion. The American Petroleum Institute calls the Caspian region “the area of greatest resource potential outside of the Middle East.” And while he was still CEO of Halliburton, the world’s biggest oil services company, Vice President Dick Cheney told other industry executives, “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.” The struggle to control these stupendous resources has given rise to what Rashid has dubbed the “new Great Game,” pitting shifting alliances of governments and oil and gas consortia against one another.
Afghanistan itself has no known oil or gas reserves, but it is an attractive route for pipelines leading to Pakistan, India, and the Arabian Sea. In the mid-1990s, a consortium led by the California-based Unocal Corporation proposed a $4.5 billion oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan. But this would require a stable central government in Afghanistan itself. Thus began several years in which U.S. policy in the region centered on “romancing the Taliban.” According to one report,
In the months before the Taliban took power, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asia Robin Raphel waged an intense round of shuttle diplomacy between the powers with possible stakes in the [Unocal] project.
“Robin Raphel was the face of the Unocal pipeline,” said an official of the former Afghan government who was present at some of de meetings with her….
In addition to tapping new sources of energy, de [project] also suited a major U.S. strategic aim in the region: isolating its nemesis Iran and stifling a frequently mooted rival pipeline project backed by Teheran, experts said.
But Washington’s initial enthusiasm for the Taliban’s seizure of power provoked a hostile reaction from human rights and women’s organizations in the United States. The Clinton administration quickly decided to take a more cautious public approach. Plans to send the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan on a visit to Kabul were canceled, and the State Department decided not to recognize the new regime immediately. Nevertheless, Unocal executive vice president Chris Taggart continued to maintain, “If the Taliban leads to stability and international recognition then it’s positive.”
Tacit U.S. support for the Taliban continued until 1998, when Washington blamed Osama bin Laden for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and retaliated by launching cruise missiles at bin Laden’s alleged training camps in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s refusal to extradite bin Laden- not its atrocious human rights record-led to UN-imposed sanctions on the regime the following year. “Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright used to say that she cared about the women suffering under the Taliban, but after the Taliban took over the U.S. accepted very few refugees,” points out journalist Laura Flanders. “In ’96 and ’97 no Afghan refugees were admitted to the United States; in ’98, only 88, in ’99, some 360.”
Whatever the U.S. government’s current rhetoric about the repressive nature of the Taliban regime, its long history of intervention in the region has been motivated not by concern for democracy or human rights, but by the narrow economic and political interests of the U.S. ruling class. It has been prepared to aid and support the most retrograde elements if it thought a temporary advantage would be the result. Now Washington has launched a war against its former allies based on a strategic calculation that the Taliban can no longer be relied upon to provide a stable, U.S.-friendly government that can serve its strategic interests. No matter what the outcome, the war is certain to lay the grounds for more “blowback” in the future.
Phil Gasper is a professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University, and is also a member of the International Socialist Organization in San Francisco.
Thanks very much, AF.
Yes.
It goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s policy under Carter which was to fund Muslim militants and bring them to the centerstage..as a way to subvert the USSR (with its Muslim neighbors and populations)..
Afghanistani sucked the USSR into a confrontation and was one of the factors that led to the soviet state unraveling
See also this piece I wrote a while back on the New Great Game
http://www.ipcs.org/article/us-south-asia/with-friends-like-these-1367.html
George Bush’s game-plan for terrorism has had its bizarre moments: stalling on the 9-11 investigation was one; standing up Osama to tango with Saddam was another. But when, on 18 March 2004, Secretary Powell made Pakistan a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA), a status also shared by Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Egypt, we enter the world of Mad Hatters, Red Queens, and vanishing Cheshire cats.
Pakistan’s Musharraf is being rewarded for his help in investigating the leak of nuclear secrets by top scientist, A. Q. Khan, to Libya, Iran, and North Korea, despite a good chance that Musharraf knew, turned a blind eye, and has therefore pardoned Khan. The MNNA status brings a few plums with it – Pakistan gets to store US-owned military stockpiles outside US bases, gets easier terms and priority on defense purchases, and becomes eligible to buy depleted uranium ammunition.
A rather tidy deal for a country which, since its creation in 1947 has been front and center in the lurid annals of terrorism. In a 1998 interview, National Security Advisor Brzezinski admitted that the CIA, using Saudi money, and working through Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), destabilized the pro-Soviet Afghan government deliberately to provoke an invasion that would lead to a Soviet Vietnam. Saudi Arabia and the U.S. channeled some 40 billion dollars through the ISI to mujahedeen fighters from all over the world. Unaware of this, they believed that they were fighting a jihad against godless communism. Osama Bin Laden, with his Saudi royal ties, fit the ISI bill exactly for a Saudi connection that would ensure royal money flowing in. Meanwhile, the rebels’ drug trafficking was tacitly sanctioned, the funds going to sponsor madrassas and military training. No wonder then that former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto had warned that, in funding the Islamic freedom fighters, the U.S. was creating a Frankenstein monster.
But the ISI’s terrorist ties are even more blatant: Pakistan’s Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) funds financed practically every major terrorist network in the world; Saeed Sheikh, a central figure in the financing of 9/11, was earlier trained and defended by the ISI; the Taliban was midwifed by the ISI and therefore indirectly by the CIA; ISI head, Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed was linked to the wiring of 100,000 dollars to Mohammed Atta, one of the WTC bombers prior to 9/11, and met top US government officials both before and after the attack.
All this is a matter of public record. So, a theocratic military government that even the US government admits sponsors terrorism is now its ally, and the press has nothing to say about it.
Afghanistan is only the best known of Pakistan’s terrorist credentials. Pakistan was involved in terrorism much before that, beginning with the bankrolling of insurgency in Kashmir soon after its ruler acceded to India in 1947. Democratic India has had Muslims in high office, but Pakistan, in the hands of corrupt military juntas since the late 50’s, is a theocracy, run by a well-heeled minority for whom war is a lucrative business and where madrassas churn out generations of jihadists who can supply the common fodder for that war. Suffering from paranoia about its more powerful neighbor, the Pakistani junta has been inciting insurrection in India for quite some time using the same tactics that it used in dismembering Soviet central Asia.
After pro-India Bangladesh leader Mujibur Rehman was killed, Bangladeshi intelligence started receiving ISI help to foment trouble across its eastern border with India. In the 1980’s, the ISI was involved in funding Sikh fundamentalists fighting to dismember the Punjab. In these brazen politics, religious fundamentalists, Sikh or Muslim, are cannon fodder to achieve military objectives.
What are we missing here? Could it be that the Bush government is not interested in pursuing the terrorist threat, but in covering up its own complicity with the ISI in creating the threat in the first place? Or is this part of another “great game” being played by the U.S. and the U.K. for control of the oil and gas in Central Asia, from where fuel can be piped to the vast Asian market? In this game the control of Afghanistan, through which the most viable pipe line runs, is paramount. Otherwise, what are we to make of the US courting Pakistan but downgrading India, a country which has been democratic and secular, since its inception and has been actively fighting terrorism for much longer than the US?
This is the operative point:
“Tacit U.S. support for the Taliban continued until 1998, when Washington blamed Osama bin Laden for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and retaliated by launching cruise missiles at bin Laden’s alleged training camps in Afghanistan.”
Sometimes a rose is just a rose and a war is just a war. Regardless of its antecedents, the US is now at war with the Taliban and, in a sense, covertly, with elements of Pakistan that support the Taliban. The US will be at war with the Taliban and elements of Pakistan until the elite objective is achieved – which is some sort of sociopolitical control over Afghan governance – or until it is defeated. Chances are this will be something of a stalemate.
Key point:
“Washington blamed Osama Bin Laden….”
With that history, what is one to make of that blame?
In international affairs a rose is never a rose and a war is never a war, methinks.
But food for thought.
“Washington blamed Osama Bin Laden….”
Of course, as you point it, it is convoluted. But regardless of the rationale for invasion, which was almost bound to be false, a decision was made to “retake” or “consolidate” Afghanistan. A war resulted, which is ongoing. It is a war with consequences, the last war of colonialism. When the Left characterizes it merely as another CIA operation – mounted for commercial gain – they are trivializing it reprehensibly.
Well, they are not trivializing it so much as reframing it- maybe, they think focusing on the material aspect (the “money”) (rich corporations versus poor people) makes it easier to invoke human solidarity across countries, races, and religions.
I prefer to stick to the truth even if it makes people uncomfortable. Which is that there’s a racial element to all of it, not simply a commercial element. There’s also a cultural element. And a religious element. But then when you talk about those elements, even in the most civil manner, you get labeled as anti-this or anti-that.