Militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan
By The Associated Press
The Associated Press
03/16/00 1:04 AM Eastern
Following are some of the Islamic militant groups the
United States is pressuring Pakistan to close down or ban:
HARAKAT-UL-MUJAHEDEEN: Previously Harakat-ul-Ansar,
but changed its name after United States declared the
group a terrorist organization. Harakat-ul-Ansar was
founded by Masood Azhar, one of three Kashmiri
militants freed by India last December to end the
hijacking of an Indian Airlines jetliner.
Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen's leader is Fazal-ur-Rehman
Khalil. Headquartered in Pakistan, with a membership
believed to be in the hundreds, the group is committed
to fighting Indian soldiers in Indian-ruled Kashmir.
It's fighters, trained in Afghanistan, are believed to
have also fought in the breakaway republic of
Chechnya, Bosnia and Algeria.
HARAKAT-UL-JEHAD-E-ISLAMI: The parent organization of
Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar,
who spends most of his time in Afghanistan. It is
believed to have thousands of fighters, who train in
Afghanistan and have fought in Chechnya and Bosnia.
LASHKAR-E-TAYYABA: Led by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, it is
based in Muridke, in Pakistan's eastern Punjab
province, and has a membership in the thousands, who
are trained in Afghanistan and in Pakistan-ruled
Kashmir.
AL QAIDA: Led by Osama bin Laden, Al Qaida is
committed to forcing the United States to withdraw its
army from Saudi Arabia, where two of Islam's holiest
sites are located. Its membership figure is unknown
but bin Laden is believed to have thousands of
followers. His popularity soared after 1998, when the
United States fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at
eastern Afghanistan where bin Laden is believed to
operate military training camps. Bin Laden, a
millionaire Saudi, also raises millions of dollars
from sympathizers throughout the Muslim world. Al
Qaida members fight alongside the Taliban in
Afghanistan and reportedly train militants to fight in
Indian-held Kashmir. Al Qaida also is known to have
sent fighters to Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo.
==========================================
Osama Bin Laden
Le ditte del terrorista islamico Bin Laden in tutta Europa
Un giornalista del giornale "Vecernji list" di Zagabria, ha soggiornato
segretamente nel segreto campo di addestramento dei seguaci del più
famoso e ricercato terrorista del mondo, Osam Bin Laden.
Il giornalista conferma che, questo ricchissimo estremista musulmano
ha delle ditte in tutta la Europa, comprese la Croazia e la Bosnia.
- Bin Laden i soldi li guadagna attraverso le sue ditte che sono
registrate con i nomi dei presta nomi, o con i nomi falsi.
Le ditte si trovano in Albania, Olanda, Gran Bretagna, Romania,
Croazia, Bosnia ...- ha dichiarato Abu Baker, uno dei più stretti
collaboratori di Bin Laden e aggiunge che, "durante la ultima guerra
in Zagabria operava una organizzazione pseudo-umanitaria di Bin Laden
"Moafak".
Nel testo del detto quotidiano si dice pure che, le ditte di Bin Laden
in Croazia sono abbastanza bene organizzate e funzionano molto bene, e
la maggioranza delle persone che fanno gli affari con queste ditte non
sanno con chi hanno che fare.
... e in lingua originale:
"VECERNJI LIST" O NAJTRA?ENIJEM TERORISTI
LADENOVE FIRME PO CELOJ EVROPI
Reporter zagrebackog "Vecernjeg lista" koji je boravio u tajnom kampu za
obuku sledbenika najtra?enijeg teroriste na svetu Osame Bin Ladena tvrdi
da ovaj bogati muslimanski ekstremista ima preduzeæa sirom Evrope,
ukljucujuci Bosnu i Hrvatsku.
- Bin Laden novac zaradjuje preko svojih preduzeæa koja su registrovana
na tudja i la?na imena koja su rasuta po celom svetu. Preduzeca su u
Albaniji, Holandiji, Britaniji, Rumuniji, Hrvatskoj, Bosni... - ka?e Abu
Baker, jedan od najbli?ih saradnika Bin Ladena i dodaje da je za vreme
poslednjeg rata u Zagrebu radila Ben Ladenova navodna humanitarna
organizacija "Moafak".
U tekstu se navodi da je Bin Ladenovo preduzece u Hrvatskoj veoma
razgranato i da vecina ljudi koja posluje sa njim nema pojma sa kim se
upusta u biznis.
V. Mt.
(tratto da Vecernji List, aprile 2000; comunicazione personale)
=================================================
Subject: [COMMUNISM LIST]Afghanistan background
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 00:15:58 +0100
From: "Karl Carlile" <dagda@...>
Reply-To: communism@...
Organization: Communism List
To: <communism@...>
Communism List:
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
Workers of the world unite!
_______________________________________
Afghanistan 1979-1992: America's Jihad
His followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of
women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department
officials I have spoken with call him "a fascist," "definite
dictatorship material."
This did not prevent the United States government from showering the
man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported
government of Afghanistan. His name was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was
the head of the Islamic Party and he hated the United States almost
as much as he hated the Russians. His followers screamed "Death to
America" along with "Death to the Soviet Union'", only the Russians
were not showering him with large amounts of aid.
The United States began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in
1979 despite the fact that in February of that year some of them had
kidnapped the American ambassador in he capital city of Kabul,
leading to his death in the rescue attempt. The support continued
even after their brother Islamic fundamentalists in next-door Iran
seized the US Embassy in Teheran in November and held 55 Americans
hostage for over a year. Hekmatyar and his were, after all, in battle
against the Soviet Evil Empire; he was thus an important member of
those forces Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters".
On 27 April 1978, a coup staged by the People's Democratic Party
(PDP) overthrew the government of Mohammad Daoud. Daoud, five years
earlier, had overthrown the monarchy and established a republic,
although he himself was a member of the royal family. He had been
supported by the left in this endeavor, but it turned out that
Daoud's royal blood was thicker than his progressive water. When the
Daoud regime had a PDP leader killed, arrested the rest of the
leadership, and purged hundreds of suspected party sympathizers from
government posts, the PDP, aided by its supporters in the army,
revolted and took power.
Afghanistan was a backward nation: a life expectancy of about 40,
infant mortality of at least 25 percent, absolutely primitive
sanitation, widespread malnutrition, illiteracy of more than 90
percent, very few highways, not one mile of railway, most people
living in nomadic tribes or as impoverished farmers in mud villages,
identifying more with ethnic groups than with a larger political
concept, a life scarcely different from many centuries earlier.
Reform with a socialist bent was the new government's ambition; land
reform (while still retaining private property), controls on prices
and profits, and strengthening of the public sector, as well as
separation of church and state, eradication of illiteracy,
legalization of trade unions, and the emancipation of women in a land
almost entirely Muslim.
Afghanistan's thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union had always
produced a special relationship. Even while it was a monarchy, the
country had been under the strong influence of its powerful northern
neighbor, which had long been its largest trading partner, aid donor,
and military supplier. But the country had never been gobbled up by
the Soviets, a fact that perhaps lends credence to the oft-repeated
Soviet claim that their hegemony over Eastern Europe was only created
as a buffer between themselves and the frequently-invading West.
Nevertheless, for decades Washington and the Shah of Iran tried to
pressure and bribe Afghanistan in order to roll back Russian
influence in the country. During the Daoud regime, Iran, encouraged
by the United States, sought to replace the Soviet Union as Kabul's
biggest donor with a $2 billion economic aid agreement, and urged
Afghanistan to join the Regional Cooperation for Development, which
consisted of Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. (This organization was
attacked by the Soviet Union and its friends in Afghanistan as being
"a branch of CENTO" the 1950s regional security pact that was part of
the US policy of containment of the Soviet Union.) At the same time,
Iran's infamous secret police SAVAK was busy fingering suspected
Communist sympathizers in the Afghan government. In September 1975,
prodded by Iran which was conditioning its aid on such policies,
Daoud gradually dismissed 40 Soviet-trained military officers and
moved to reduce future Afghan dependence on officer training in the
USSR by initiating training arrangements with India and Egypt. Most
important, in Soviet eyes, Daoud gradually broke off his alliance
with the PDP, announcing that he would start his own party and ban
all other political activity under a projected new constitution.
Selig Harrison, the Washington Post's South Asia specialist, wrote an
article in 1970 entitled "'The Shah, Not the Kremlin, Touched off
Afghan Coup", concluding:
"The Communist takeover in Kabul (April 1978] came about when it did,
and in the way that it did, because the Shah disturbed the tenuous
equilibrium that had existed in Afghanistan between the Soviet Union
and the West for neatly three decades. In Iranian and American eyes,
Teheran's offensive was merely- designed to make Kabul more truly
nonaligned, but it went far beyond that Given the unusually long
frontier with Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would clearly go to great
lengths to prevent Kabul from moving once again toward a pro-western
stance."
When the Shah was overthrown in January 1979, the United States lost
its chief ally and outpost in the Soviet-border region, as well as
its military installations and electronic monitoring stations aimed
at the Soviet Union. Washington's cold warriors could only eye
Afghanistan even more covetously than before.
After the April revolution, the new government under President Noor
Mohammed Taraki declared a commitment to Islam within a secular
state, and to non-alignment in foreign affairs. It maintained that
the coup had not been foreign inspired, that it was not a "Communist
takeover", and that they were not "Communists" but rather
nationalists and revolutionaries. (No official or traditional
Communist Party had ever existed in Afghanistan.) But because of its
radical reform program, its class-struggle and anti-imperialist-type
rhetoric, its support of all the usual suspects (Cuba, North Korea,
etc.), its signing of a friendship treaty and other cooperative
agreements with the Soviet Union, and an increased presence in the
country of Soviet civilian and military advisers (though probably
less than the US had in Iran at the time), it was labeled "communist"
by the world's media and by its domestic opponents.
Whether or not the new government in Afghanistan should properly have
been called communist, whether or not it made any difference what it
was called, the lines were now drawn for political, military, and
propaganda battle: a jihad (holy war) between fundamentalist Muslims
and "godless atheistic communists"; Afghan nationalism vs. a
"Soviet-run" government; large landowners, tribal chiefs,
businessmen, the extended royal family, and others vs. the
government's economic reforms. Said the new prime minister about this
elite, who were needed to keep the country running, "every effort
will be made to attract them. But we want to re-educate them in such
a manner that they should think about the people, and not, as
previously, just about themselves-to have a good house and a nice
car" while other people die of hunger."
The Afghan government was trying to drag the country into the 20th
century. In May 1979, British political scientist Fred Halliday
observed that "probably more has changed in the countryside over the
last year than in the two centuries since the state was established."
Peasant debts to landlords had been canceled, the system of usury (by
which peasant were forced to borrow money against future crops, were
left in perpetual debt to lenders) was abolished, and hundreds of
schools and medical clinics were being built in the countryside.
Halliday also reported that a substantial land-redistribution program
was underway, with many of the 200,000 rural families scheduled to
receive land under this reform already having done so. But this last
claim must be approached with caution. Revolutionary land reform is
always an extremely complex and precarious under the best of
conditions, and ultra-backward, tradition-hound Afghanistan in the
midst of nascent civil war hardly offered the best of conditions for
social experiment.
The reforms also encroached into the sensitive area of Islamic
subjugation of women by outlawing child marriage and the giving of a
woman in marriage in exchange for money or commodities, and teaching
women to read, at a time when certain Islamic sectors were openly
calling for reinforcement of 'purdah', the seclusion of women from
public observation.
Halliday noted that the People's Democratic Party saw the Soviet
Union as the only realistic source of support for the long-overdue
modernization. The illiterate Afghan peasant's ethnic cousins across
the border in the Soviet Union were, after all, often university
graduates and professionals.
The argument of the Moujahedeen ("holy warriors") rebels that the
"communist" government would curtail their religious freedom was
never borne out in practice. A year and a half after the change in
government, the conservative British magazine The Economist reported
that "no restrictions had been imposed on religious practice".
Earlier, the New York Times stated that the religious issue "is being
used by some Afghans who actually object more to President Taraki's
plans for land reforms and other changes in this feudal society."
Many of the Muslim clergy were in fact rich landowners. The rebels,
concluded a BBC reporter who spent four months with them, are
"fighting to retain their feudal system and stop the Kabul
government's left-wing reforms which [are] considered anti-Islamic."
The two other nations which shared a long border with Afghanistan,
and were closely allied to the United States, expressed their fears
of the new government. To the west, Iran, still under the Shah,
worried about "threats to oil-passage routes in the Persian Gulf".
Pakistan, to the south, spoke of "threats from a hostile and
expansionist Afghanistan." A former US ambassador to Afghanistan saw
it as part of a "gradually closing pincer movement aimed at Iran and
the oil regions of the Middle East." None of these alleged fears
turned out to have any substance or evidence to back them up, but to
the anti-communist mind this might prove only that the Russians and
their Afghan puppets had been stopped in time.
Two months after the April 1978 coup, an alliance formed by a number
of conservative Islamic factions was waging guerrilla war against the
government. By spring 1979, fighting was taking place on many fronts,
and the State Department was cautioning the Soviet Union that its
advisers in Afghanistan should not interfere militarily in the civil
strife. One such warning in the summer by State Department spokesman
Hodding Carter was another of those Washington monuments to chutzpah;
"We expect the principle of nonintervention to be respected by all
parties in the area, including the Soviet Union." This while the
Soviets were charging the CIA with arming Afghan exiles in Pakistan;
and the Afghanistan government was accusing Pakistan and Iran of also
aiding the guerrillas and even of crossing the border to take part in
the fighting. Pakistan had recently taken its own turn toward strict
Muslim orthodoxy, which the Afghan government deplored as a
"fanatic," while in January, Iran had established a Muslim state
after overthrowing the Shah. (As opposed to the Afghan fundamentalist
freedom fighters, the Iranian Islamic fundamentalists were regularly
described in the West as terrorists, ultra-conservatives, and
anti-democratic.)
A "favorite tactic" of the Afghan freedom fighters was "to torture
victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their noses, ears, and
genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another", producing
"a slow, very painful death". The Moujahedeen also killed a Canadian
tourist and six West Germans, including two children, and a U.S.
military attaché was dragged from his car and beaten; all due to the
rebels' apparent inability to distinguish Russians from other
Europeans.
In March 1979, Taraki went to Moscow to press the Soviets to send
ground troops to help the Afghan army put down the Moujahedeen. He
was promised military assistance, but ground troops could not be
committed. Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin told the Afghan leader:
"The entry of our troops into Afghanistan would outrage the
international community, triggering a string of extremely negative
consequences in many different areas. Our common enemies are just
waiting for the moment when Soviet troops appear in Afghanistan. This
will give them the excuse they need to send armed bands into the
country."
In September, the question became completely academic for Noor
Mohammed Taraki, for he was ousted (and his death soon announced) in
an intra -party struggle and replaced by his own deputy prime
minister, Hafizullah Amin. Although Taraki had sometimes been
heavy-handed in implementing the reform program, and had created
opposition even amongst the intended beneficiaries, he turned out to
be a moderate compared to Amin who tried to institute social change
by riding roughshod over tradition and tribal and ethnic autonomy.
The Kremlin was unhappy with Amin. The fact that he had been involved
in the overthrow and death of the much-favored Taraki was bad enough.
But the Soviets also regarded him as thoroughly unsuitable for the
task that was Moscow's sine qua non; preventing an anti-communist
Islamic state from arising in Afghanistan. Amin gave reform an
exceedingly bad name. The KGB station in Kabul, in pressing for
Amin's removal, stated that his usurpation of power would lead to
"harsh repressions and, as a reaction, the activation and
consolidation of the opposition". Moreover, as we shall see, the
Soviets were highly suspicious about Amin's ideological convictions.
Thus it was, that what in March had been unthinkable, in December
became a reality. Soviet troops began to arrive in Afghanistan around
the 8th of the month - to what extent at Amin's request or with his
approval, and, consequently, whether to call the action an "invasion"
or not, has been the subject of much discussion and controversy.
On the 23rd the Washington Post commented "There was no charge [by
the State Department] that the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan,
since the troops apparently were invited."
However, at a meeting with Soviet-bloc ambassadors in October, Amin's
foreign minister had openly criticized the Soviet Union for
interfering in Afghan affairs. Amin himself insisted that Moscow
replace its ambassador. Yet, on 26 December, while the main body of
Soviet troops was arriving in Afghanistan, Amin gave "a relaxed
interview" to an Arab journalist. "The Soviets," he said, "supply my
country with economic and military aid, but at the same time they
respect our independence and our sovereignty. They do not interfere
in our domestic affairs." He also spoke approvingly of the USSR's
willingness to accept his veto on military bases.
The very next day, a Soviet military force stormed the presidential
palace and shot Amin dead.
He was replaced by Babrak Karmal, who had been vice president and
deputy prime minister in the 1978 revolutionary government.
Moscow denied any part in Amin's death, though they didn't pretend to
be sorry about it, as Brezhnev made clear:
"The actions of the aggressors against Afghanistan were facilitated
by Amin who, on seizing power, started cruelly repressing broad
sections of Afghan society, party and military cadres, members of the
intelligentsia and of the Moslem clergy, that is, the very sections
on which the April revolution relied. And the people under the
leadership of the People's Democratic Party,' headed by Babrak
Karmal, rose against Amin's tyranny and put an end to it. Now in
Washington and some other capitals they are mourning Amin. This
exposes their hypocrisy with particular clarity. Where were these
mourners when Amin was conducting mass repressions, when he forcibly
removed and unlawfully killed Taraki, the founder of the new Afghan
state?"
After Amin's ouster and execution, the public thronged the streets in
"a holiday spirit". "If Karmal could have overthrown Amin without the
Russians," observed a Western diplomat, "he would have been seen as a
hero of the people."
The Soviet government and press repeatedly referred to Amin as a "CIA
agent", a charge which was greeted with great skepticism in the
United States and elsewhere. However, enough circumstantial evidence
supporting the charge exists so that it perhaps should not be
dismissed entirely out of hand.
During the late 1950s and early '60s, Amin had attended Columbia
University Teachers College and the University of Wisconsin. This was
a heyday period for the CIA-using impressive bribes and threats-to
regularly try to recruit foreign students in the United States to act
as agents for them when they returned home. During this period, at
least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA),
Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the United States and
later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the
Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit,
Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key
officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the United
States "are either CIA trained or indoctrinated. Some are cabinet
level people." It has been reported that in 1963 Amin became head of
the ASA, but this has not been corroborated. However, it is known
that the ASA received part of its funding from the Asia Foundation,
the CIA's principal front in Asia for many years, and that at one
time Amin was associated with this organization.
In September 1979, the month that Amin took power, the American
charge d'affaires in Kabul, Bruce Amstutz, began to hold friendly
meetings with him to reassure him that he need not worry about his
unhappy Soviet allies as long as the US maintained a strong presence
in Afghanistan. The strategy may have worked, for later in the month,
Amin made a special appeal to Amstutz for improved relations with the
United States. Two days later in New York, the Afghan Foreign
Minister quietly expressed the same sentiments to State Department
officials. And at the end of October, the US Embassy in Kabul
reported that Amin was "painfully aware of the exiled leadership the
Soviets [were] keeping on the shelf" (a reference to Karmal who was
living in Czechoslovakia). Under normal circumstances, the Amin-US
meetings might be regarded as routine and innocent diplomatic
contact, but these were hardly normal circumstances-the Afghan
government was engaged in a civil war, and the United States was
supporting the other side.
Moreover, it can be said that Amin, by his ruthlessness, was doing
just what an American agent would be expected to do: discrediting the
People's Democratic Party, the Party's reforms, the idea of socialism
or communism, and the Soviet Union, all associated in one package.
Amin also conducted purges in the army officer corps which seriously
underlined the army's combat capabilities.
But why would Amin, if he were actually plotting with the Americans,
request Soviet military forces on several occasions? The main reason
appears to be that he was being pressed to do so by high levels of
the PDP and he had to comply for the sake of appearances. Babrak
Karmal has suggested other, more Machiavellian, scenarios.
"The Carter administration jumped on the issue of the Soviet
"invasion" and soon launched a campaign of righteous indignation,
imposing what President Carter called "Penalties"-from halting the
delivery of grain to the Soviet Union to keeping the US team out of
the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
The Russians countered that the US was enraged by the intervention
because Washington had been plotting to turn the country into an
American base to replace the loss of lran.
Unsurprisingly, on this seemingly clear-cut anti-communist issue, the
American public and media easily fell in line with the president. The
Wall Street Journal called for a "military" reaction, the
establishment of US bases in the Middle East, "reinstatement of draft
registration", development of a new missile, and giving the CIA more
leeway, adding "Clearly we ought to keep open the chance of covert
aid to Afghan rebels." The last, whether the newspaper knew it or
not, had actually been going on for some time. In February 1980, the
Washington Post disclosed that while the United States was now
supplying weapons to the guerrillas,
"U.S. covert aid prior to the December invasion, according to
sources, was limited to funneling small amounts of medical supplies
and communications equipment to scattered rebel tribes, plus what is
described as "technical advice" to the rebels about where they could
acquire arms on their own ."
US foreign service officers had been meeting with rebel leaders to
determine their need at least as early as April 1979, and the CIA had
been training guerrillas in Pakistan and beaming radio propaganda
into Afghanistan since the year before.
Intervention in the Afghan civil war by the United States, Iran,
Pakistan, China and others gave the Russians grave concern about who
was going to wield power next door. They consistently cited these
"aggressive imperialist forces" to rationalize their own intervention
into Afghanistan, which was the first time Soviet ground troops had
engaged in military action anywhere in the world outside its post-
World War II Eastern European borders. The potential establishment of
an anti-communist Islamic state on the borders of the Soviet Union's
own republics in Soviet Central Asia that were home to some 40
million Muslims could not be regarded with equanimity by the Kremlin
any more than Washington could be unruffled about a communist
takeover in Mexico.
As we have seen repeatedly, the United States did not limit its
defense perimeter to its immediate neighbors, or even to Western
Europe, but to the entire globe. President Carter declared that the
Persian Gulf area was "now threatened by Soviet troops in
Afghanistan," that this area was synonymous with US interests, and
that the United States would "defend" it against any threat by all
means necessary. He called the Soviet action "the greatest threat to
peace since the Second World War", a statement that required
overlooking a great deal of post-war history. But 1980 was an
election year.
Brezhnev, on the other hand, declared that "the national interests or
security of the United States of America and other states are in no
way affected by the events Afghanistan. All attempts to portray
matters otherwise are sheer nonsense."
The Carter administration was equally dismissive of Soviet concerns.
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski later stated that "the
issue was not what might have Brezhnev's subjective motives in going
into Afghanistan but the objective consequences of a Soviet military
presence so much closer to the Persian Gulf."
The stage was now set for 12 long years of the most horrific kind of
warfare, a daily atrocity for the vast majority of the Afghan people
who never asked for or wanted this war.
But the Soviet Union was determined that its borders must be
unthreatening. The Afghan government was committed to its goal of a
secular, reformed Afghanistan. The United States was determined that,
at a minimum, this should be the Soviets' Vietnam that they should
slowly bleed as the Americans had at a minimum; at a maximum ... that
was perhaps not as well thought out but American policymakers could
not fail to understand - though they dared not say it publicly and
explicitly - that support of the Moujahedeen (many of whom carried
pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini with them) could lead to a
fundamentalist Islamic state established in Afghanistan every bit as
repressive as in next-door Iran, which in the 1980s; was Public Enemy
Number One in America. Neither could the word "terrorist" cross the
lips of Washington officials in speaking of their new allies/clients,
though these same people shot down civilian airliners and planted
bombs at the airport. In 1986, British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, whose emotional invectives against "terrorists" were second
to none, welcomed Abdul Haq, an Afghan rebel leader who admitted that
he had ordered the planting of a bomb at Kabul airport in 1984 which
killed at least 28 people. Such, then, were the scruples of cold-war
anti-communists in late 20th century. As Anastasio Somoza had been
"our son of a bitch", the Moujahedeen were now "our fanatic
terrorists". At the beginning there had been some thought given to
the morality of the policy. "The question here," a senior official in
the Carter administration said, "was whether it was morally
acceptable that, in order to keep the Soviets off balance, which was
the reason for the operation, it was permissible to use other lives
for our geopolitical interests."
But such sentiments could not survive. Afghanistan was a
cold-warrior's dream: The CIA and the Pentagon, finally, had one of
their proxy armies in direct confrontation with the forces of the
Evil Empire. There was no price too high to pay for this Super
Nintendo game, neither the hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, nor
the destruction of Afghan society, nor three billion (sic) dollars of
American taxpayer money poured into a bottomless hole, much of it
going only to make a few Afghans and Pakistanis rich. Congress was
equally enthused-without even the moral uncertainty that made them
cautious about arming the Nicaraguan contras-and became a veritable
bipartisan horn of plenty as it allocated more and more money for the
effort each year. Rep. Charles Wilson of Texas expressed a
not-atypical sentiment of official Washington when he declared:
"There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam and we owe the Russians one ... I
have a slight obsession with it, because of Vietnam. I thought the
Soviets ought to get a dose of it ... I've been of the opinion that
this money was better spent to hurt our adversaries than other money
in the Defense Department budget."
--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@... on 09/16/2001
Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
Communism List _______________________________________________
Communism@...
By The Associated Press
The Associated Press
03/16/00 1:04 AM Eastern
Following are some of the Islamic militant groups the
United States is pressuring Pakistan to close down or ban:
HARAKAT-UL-MUJAHEDEEN: Previously Harakat-ul-Ansar,
but changed its name after United States declared the
group a terrorist organization. Harakat-ul-Ansar was
founded by Masood Azhar, one of three Kashmiri
militants freed by India last December to end the
hijacking of an Indian Airlines jetliner.
Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen's leader is Fazal-ur-Rehman
Khalil. Headquartered in Pakistan, with a membership
believed to be in the hundreds, the group is committed
to fighting Indian soldiers in Indian-ruled Kashmir.
It's fighters, trained in Afghanistan, are believed to
have also fought in the breakaway republic of
Chechnya, Bosnia and Algeria.
HARAKAT-UL-JEHAD-E-ISLAMI: The parent organization of
Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, led by Qari Saifullah Akhtar,
who spends most of his time in Afghanistan. It is
believed to have thousands of fighters, who train in
Afghanistan and have fought in Chechnya and Bosnia.
LASHKAR-E-TAYYABA: Led by Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, it is
based in Muridke, in Pakistan's eastern Punjab
province, and has a membership in the thousands, who
are trained in Afghanistan and in Pakistan-ruled
Kashmir.
AL QAIDA: Led by Osama bin Laden, Al Qaida is
committed to forcing the United States to withdraw its
army from Saudi Arabia, where two of Islam's holiest
sites are located. Its membership figure is unknown
but bin Laden is believed to have thousands of
followers. His popularity soared after 1998, when the
United States fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at
eastern Afghanistan where bin Laden is believed to
operate military training camps. Bin Laden, a
millionaire Saudi, also raises millions of dollars
from sympathizers throughout the Muslim world. Al
Qaida members fight alongside the Taliban in
Afghanistan and reportedly train militants to fight in
Indian-held Kashmir. Al Qaida also is known to have
sent fighters to Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo.
==========================================
Osama Bin Laden
Le ditte del terrorista islamico Bin Laden in tutta Europa
Un giornalista del giornale "Vecernji list" di Zagabria, ha soggiornato
segretamente nel segreto campo di addestramento dei seguaci del più
famoso e ricercato terrorista del mondo, Osam Bin Laden.
Il giornalista conferma che, questo ricchissimo estremista musulmano
ha delle ditte in tutta la Europa, comprese la Croazia e la Bosnia.
- Bin Laden i soldi li guadagna attraverso le sue ditte che sono
registrate con i nomi dei presta nomi, o con i nomi falsi.
Le ditte si trovano in Albania, Olanda, Gran Bretagna, Romania,
Croazia, Bosnia ...- ha dichiarato Abu Baker, uno dei più stretti
collaboratori di Bin Laden e aggiunge che, "durante la ultima guerra
in Zagabria operava una organizzazione pseudo-umanitaria di Bin Laden
"Moafak".
Nel testo del detto quotidiano si dice pure che, le ditte di Bin Laden
in Croazia sono abbastanza bene organizzate e funzionano molto bene, e
la maggioranza delle persone che fanno gli affari con queste ditte non
sanno con chi hanno che fare.
... e in lingua originale:
"VECERNJI LIST" O NAJTRA?ENIJEM TERORISTI
LADENOVE FIRME PO CELOJ EVROPI
Reporter zagrebackog "Vecernjeg lista" koji je boravio u tajnom kampu za
obuku sledbenika najtra?enijeg teroriste na svetu Osame Bin Ladena tvrdi
da ovaj bogati muslimanski ekstremista ima preduzeæa sirom Evrope,
ukljucujuci Bosnu i Hrvatsku.
- Bin Laden novac zaradjuje preko svojih preduzeæa koja su registrovana
na tudja i la?na imena koja su rasuta po celom svetu. Preduzeca su u
Albaniji, Holandiji, Britaniji, Rumuniji, Hrvatskoj, Bosni... - ka?e Abu
Baker, jedan od najbli?ih saradnika Bin Ladena i dodaje da je za vreme
poslednjeg rata u Zagrebu radila Ben Ladenova navodna humanitarna
organizacija "Moafak".
U tekstu se navodi da je Bin Ladenovo preduzece u Hrvatskoj veoma
razgranato i da vecina ljudi koja posluje sa njim nema pojma sa kim se
upusta u biznis.
V. Mt.
(tratto da Vecernji List, aprile 2000; comunicazione personale)
=================================================
Subject: [COMMUNISM LIST]Afghanistan background
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 00:15:58 +0100
From: "Karl Carlile" <dagda@...>
Reply-To: communism@...
Organization: Communism List
To: <communism@...>
Communism List:
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
Workers of the world unite!
_______________________________________
Afghanistan 1979-1992: America's Jihad
His followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of
women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department
officials I have spoken with call him "a fascist," "definite
dictatorship material."
This did not prevent the United States government from showering the
man with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported
government of Afghanistan. His name was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He was
the head of the Islamic Party and he hated the United States almost
as much as he hated the Russians. His followers screamed "Death to
America" along with "Death to the Soviet Union'", only the Russians
were not showering him with large amounts of aid.
The United States began supporting Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in
1979 despite the fact that in February of that year some of them had
kidnapped the American ambassador in he capital city of Kabul,
leading to his death in the rescue attempt. The support continued
even after their brother Islamic fundamentalists in next-door Iran
seized the US Embassy in Teheran in November and held 55 Americans
hostage for over a year. Hekmatyar and his were, after all, in battle
against the Soviet Evil Empire; he was thus an important member of
those forces Ronald Reagan called "freedom fighters".
On 27 April 1978, a coup staged by the People's Democratic Party
(PDP) overthrew the government of Mohammad Daoud. Daoud, five years
earlier, had overthrown the monarchy and established a republic,
although he himself was a member of the royal family. He had been
supported by the left in this endeavor, but it turned out that
Daoud's royal blood was thicker than his progressive water. When the
Daoud regime had a PDP leader killed, arrested the rest of the
leadership, and purged hundreds of suspected party sympathizers from
government posts, the PDP, aided by its supporters in the army,
revolted and took power.
Afghanistan was a backward nation: a life expectancy of about 40,
infant mortality of at least 25 percent, absolutely primitive
sanitation, widespread malnutrition, illiteracy of more than 90
percent, very few highways, not one mile of railway, most people
living in nomadic tribes or as impoverished farmers in mud villages,
identifying more with ethnic groups than with a larger political
concept, a life scarcely different from many centuries earlier.
Reform with a socialist bent was the new government's ambition; land
reform (while still retaining private property), controls on prices
and profits, and strengthening of the public sector, as well as
separation of church and state, eradication of illiteracy,
legalization of trade unions, and the emancipation of women in a land
almost entirely Muslim.
Afghanistan's thousand-mile border with the Soviet Union had always
produced a special relationship. Even while it was a monarchy, the
country had been under the strong influence of its powerful northern
neighbor, which had long been its largest trading partner, aid donor,
and military supplier. But the country had never been gobbled up by
the Soviets, a fact that perhaps lends credence to the oft-repeated
Soviet claim that their hegemony over Eastern Europe was only created
as a buffer between themselves and the frequently-invading West.
Nevertheless, for decades Washington and the Shah of Iran tried to
pressure and bribe Afghanistan in order to roll back Russian
influence in the country. During the Daoud regime, Iran, encouraged
by the United States, sought to replace the Soviet Union as Kabul's
biggest donor with a $2 billion economic aid agreement, and urged
Afghanistan to join the Regional Cooperation for Development, which
consisted of Iran, Pakistan and Turkey. (This organization was
attacked by the Soviet Union and its friends in Afghanistan as being
"a branch of CENTO" the 1950s regional security pact that was part of
the US policy of containment of the Soviet Union.) At the same time,
Iran's infamous secret police SAVAK was busy fingering suspected
Communist sympathizers in the Afghan government. In September 1975,
prodded by Iran which was conditioning its aid on such policies,
Daoud gradually dismissed 40 Soviet-trained military officers and
moved to reduce future Afghan dependence on officer training in the
USSR by initiating training arrangements with India and Egypt. Most
important, in Soviet eyes, Daoud gradually broke off his alliance
with the PDP, announcing that he would start his own party and ban
all other political activity under a projected new constitution.
Selig Harrison, the Washington Post's South Asia specialist, wrote an
article in 1970 entitled "'The Shah, Not the Kremlin, Touched off
Afghan Coup", concluding:
"The Communist takeover in Kabul (April 1978] came about when it did,
and in the way that it did, because the Shah disturbed the tenuous
equilibrium that had existed in Afghanistan between the Soviet Union
and the West for neatly three decades. In Iranian and American eyes,
Teheran's offensive was merely- designed to make Kabul more truly
nonaligned, but it went far beyond that Given the unusually long
frontier with Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would clearly go to great
lengths to prevent Kabul from moving once again toward a pro-western
stance."
When the Shah was overthrown in January 1979, the United States lost
its chief ally and outpost in the Soviet-border region, as well as
its military installations and electronic monitoring stations aimed
at the Soviet Union. Washington's cold warriors could only eye
Afghanistan even more covetously than before.
After the April revolution, the new government under President Noor
Mohammed Taraki declared a commitment to Islam within a secular
state, and to non-alignment in foreign affairs. It maintained that
the coup had not been foreign inspired, that it was not a "Communist
takeover", and that they were not "Communists" but rather
nationalists and revolutionaries. (No official or traditional
Communist Party had ever existed in Afghanistan.) But because of its
radical reform program, its class-struggle and anti-imperialist-type
rhetoric, its support of all the usual suspects (Cuba, North Korea,
etc.), its signing of a friendship treaty and other cooperative
agreements with the Soviet Union, and an increased presence in the
country of Soviet civilian and military advisers (though probably
less than the US had in Iran at the time), it was labeled "communist"
by the world's media and by its domestic opponents.
Whether or not the new government in Afghanistan should properly have
been called communist, whether or not it made any difference what it
was called, the lines were now drawn for political, military, and
propaganda battle: a jihad (holy war) between fundamentalist Muslims
and "godless atheistic communists"; Afghan nationalism vs. a
"Soviet-run" government; large landowners, tribal chiefs,
businessmen, the extended royal family, and others vs. the
government's economic reforms. Said the new prime minister about this
elite, who were needed to keep the country running, "every effort
will be made to attract them. But we want to re-educate them in such
a manner that they should think about the people, and not, as
previously, just about themselves-to have a good house and a nice
car" while other people die of hunger."
The Afghan government was trying to drag the country into the 20th
century. In May 1979, British political scientist Fred Halliday
observed that "probably more has changed in the countryside over the
last year than in the two centuries since the state was established."
Peasant debts to landlords had been canceled, the system of usury (by
which peasant were forced to borrow money against future crops, were
left in perpetual debt to lenders) was abolished, and hundreds of
schools and medical clinics were being built in the countryside.
Halliday also reported that a substantial land-redistribution program
was underway, with many of the 200,000 rural families scheduled to
receive land under this reform already having done so. But this last
claim must be approached with caution. Revolutionary land reform is
always an extremely complex and precarious under the best of
conditions, and ultra-backward, tradition-hound Afghanistan in the
midst of nascent civil war hardly offered the best of conditions for
social experiment.
The reforms also encroached into the sensitive area of Islamic
subjugation of women by outlawing child marriage and the giving of a
woman in marriage in exchange for money or commodities, and teaching
women to read, at a time when certain Islamic sectors were openly
calling for reinforcement of 'purdah', the seclusion of women from
public observation.
Halliday noted that the People's Democratic Party saw the Soviet
Union as the only realistic source of support for the long-overdue
modernization. The illiterate Afghan peasant's ethnic cousins across
the border in the Soviet Union were, after all, often university
graduates and professionals.
The argument of the Moujahedeen ("holy warriors") rebels that the
"communist" government would curtail their religious freedom was
never borne out in practice. A year and a half after the change in
government, the conservative British magazine The Economist reported
that "no restrictions had been imposed on religious practice".
Earlier, the New York Times stated that the religious issue "is being
used by some Afghans who actually object more to President Taraki's
plans for land reforms and other changes in this feudal society."
Many of the Muslim clergy were in fact rich landowners. The rebels,
concluded a BBC reporter who spent four months with them, are
"fighting to retain their feudal system and stop the Kabul
government's left-wing reforms which [are] considered anti-Islamic."
The two other nations which shared a long border with Afghanistan,
and were closely allied to the United States, expressed their fears
of the new government. To the west, Iran, still under the Shah,
worried about "threats to oil-passage routes in the Persian Gulf".
Pakistan, to the south, spoke of "threats from a hostile and
expansionist Afghanistan." A former US ambassador to Afghanistan saw
it as part of a "gradually closing pincer movement aimed at Iran and
the oil regions of the Middle East." None of these alleged fears
turned out to have any substance or evidence to back them up, but to
the anti-communist mind this might prove only that the Russians and
their Afghan puppets had been stopped in time.
Two months after the April 1978 coup, an alliance formed by a number
of conservative Islamic factions was waging guerrilla war against the
government. By spring 1979, fighting was taking place on many fronts,
and the State Department was cautioning the Soviet Union that its
advisers in Afghanistan should not interfere militarily in the civil
strife. One such warning in the summer by State Department spokesman
Hodding Carter was another of those Washington monuments to chutzpah;
"We expect the principle of nonintervention to be respected by all
parties in the area, including the Soviet Union." This while the
Soviets were charging the CIA with arming Afghan exiles in Pakistan;
and the Afghanistan government was accusing Pakistan and Iran of also
aiding the guerrillas and even of crossing the border to take part in
the fighting. Pakistan had recently taken its own turn toward strict
Muslim orthodoxy, which the Afghan government deplored as a
"fanatic," while in January, Iran had established a Muslim state
after overthrowing the Shah. (As opposed to the Afghan fundamentalist
freedom fighters, the Iranian Islamic fundamentalists were regularly
described in the West as terrorists, ultra-conservatives, and
anti-democratic.)
A "favorite tactic" of the Afghan freedom fighters was "to torture
victims [often Russians] by first cutting off their noses, ears, and
genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another", producing
"a slow, very painful death". The Moujahedeen also killed a Canadian
tourist and six West Germans, including two children, and a U.S.
military attaché was dragged from his car and beaten; all due to the
rebels' apparent inability to distinguish Russians from other
Europeans.
In March 1979, Taraki went to Moscow to press the Soviets to send
ground troops to help the Afghan army put down the Moujahedeen. He
was promised military assistance, but ground troops could not be
committed. Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin told the Afghan leader:
"The entry of our troops into Afghanistan would outrage the
international community, triggering a string of extremely negative
consequences in many different areas. Our common enemies are just
waiting for the moment when Soviet troops appear in Afghanistan. This
will give them the excuse they need to send armed bands into the
country."
In September, the question became completely academic for Noor
Mohammed Taraki, for he was ousted (and his death soon announced) in
an intra -party struggle and replaced by his own deputy prime
minister, Hafizullah Amin. Although Taraki had sometimes been
heavy-handed in implementing the reform program, and had created
opposition even amongst the intended beneficiaries, he turned out to
be a moderate compared to Amin who tried to institute social change
by riding roughshod over tradition and tribal and ethnic autonomy.
The Kremlin was unhappy with Amin. The fact that he had been involved
in the overthrow and death of the much-favored Taraki was bad enough.
But the Soviets also regarded him as thoroughly unsuitable for the
task that was Moscow's sine qua non; preventing an anti-communist
Islamic state from arising in Afghanistan. Amin gave reform an
exceedingly bad name. The KGB station in Kabul, in pressing for
Amin's removal, stated that his usurpation of power would lead to
"harsh repressions and, as a reaction, the activation and
consolidation of the opposition". Moreover, as we shall see, the
Soviets were highly suspicious about Amin's ideological convictions.
Thus it was, that what in March had been unthinkable, in December
became a reality. Soviet troops began to arrive in Afghanistan around
the 8th of the month - to what extent at Amin's request or with his
approval, and, consequently, whether to call the action an "invasion"
or not, has been the subject of much discussion and controversy.
On the 23rd the Washington Post commented "There was no charge [by
the State Department] that the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan,
since the troops apparently were invited."
However, at a meeting with Soviet-bloc ambassadors in October, Amin's
foreign minister had openly criticized the Soviet Union for
interfering in Afghan affairs. Amin himself insisted that Moscow
replace its ambassador. Yet, on 26 December, while the main body of
Soviet troops was arriving in Afghanistan, Amin gave "a relaxed
interview" to an Arab journalist. "The Soviets," he said, "supply my
country with economic and military aid, but at the same time they
respect our independence and our sovereignty. They do not interfere
in our domestic affairs." He also spoke approvingly of the USSR's
willingness to accept his veto on military bases.
The very next day, a Soviet military force stormed the presidential
palace and shot Amin dead.
He was replaced by Babrak Karmal, who had been vice president and
deputy prime minister in the 1978 revolutionary government.
Moscow denied any part in Amin's death, though they didn't pretend to
be sorry about it, as Brezhnev made clear:
"The actions of the aggressors against Afghanistan were facilitated
by Amin who, on seizing power, started cruelly repressing broad
sections of Afghan society, party and military cadres, members of the
intelligentsia and of the Moslem clergy, that is, the very sections
on which the April revolution relied. And the people under the
leadership of the People's Democratic Party,' headed by Babrak
Karmal, rose against Amin's tyranny and put an end to it. Now in
Washington and some other capitals they are mourning Amin. This
exposes their hypocrisy with particular clarity. Where were these
mourners when Amin was conducting mass repressions, when he forcibly
removed and unlawfully killed Taraki, the founder of the new Afghan
state?"
After Amin's ouster and execution, the public thronged the streets in
"a holiday spirit". "If Karmal could have overthrown Amin without the
Russians," observed a Western diplomat, "he would have been seen as a
hero of the people."
The Soviet government and press repeatedly referred to Amin as a "CIA
agent", a charge which was greeted with great skepticism in the
United States and elsewhere. However, enough circumstantial evidence
supporting the charge exists so that it perhaps should not be
dismissed entirely out of hand.
During the late 1950s and early '60s, Amin had attended Columbia
University Teachers College and the University of Wisconsin. This was
a heyday period for the CIA-using impressive bribes and threats-to
regularly try to recruit foreign students in the United States to act
as agents for them when they returned home. During this period, at
least one president of the Afghanistan Students Association (ASA),
Zia H. Noorzay, was working with the CIA in the United States and
later became president of the Afghanistan state treasury. One of the
Afghan students whom Noorzay and the CIA tried in vain to recruit,
Abdul Latif Hotaki, declared in 1967 that a good number of the key
officials in the Afghanistan government who studied in the United
States "are either CIA trained or indoctrinated. Some are cabinet
level people." It has been reported that in 1963 Amin became head of
the ASA, but this has not been corroborated. However, it is known
that the ASA received part of its funding from the Asia Foundation,
the CIA's principal front in Asia for many years, and that at one
time Amin was associated with this organization.
In September 1979, the month that Amin took power, the American
charge d'affaires in Kabul, Bruce Amstutz, began to hold friendly
meetings with him to reassure him that he need not worry about his
unhappy Soviet allies as long as the US maintained a strong presence
in Afghanistan. The strategy may have worked, for later in the month,
Amin made a special appeal to Amstutz for improved relations with the
United States. Two days later in New York, the Afghan Foreign
Minister quietly expressed the same sentiments to State Department
officials. And at the end of October, the US Embassy in Kabul
reported that Amin was "painfully aware of the exiled leadership the
Soviets [were] keeping on the shelf" (a reference to Karmal who was
living in Czechoslovakia). Under normal circumstances, the Amin-US
meetings might be regarded as routine and innocent diplomatic
contact, but these were hardly normal circumstances-the Afghan
government was engaged in a civil war, and the United States was
supporting the other side.
Moreover, it can be said that Amin, by his ruthlessness, was doing
just what an American agent would be expected to do: discrediting the
People's Democratic Party, the Party's reforms, the idea of socialism
or communism, and the Soviet Union, all associated in one package.
Amin also conducted purges in the army officer corps which seriously
underlined the army's combat capabilities.
But why would Amin, if he were actually plotting with the Americans,
request Soviet military forces on several occasions? The main reason
appears to be that he was being pressed to do so by high levels of
the PDP and he had to comply for the sake of appearances. Babrak
Karmal has suggested other, more Machiavellian, scenarios.
"The Carter administration jumped on the issue of the Soviet
"invasion" and soon launched a campaign of righteous indignation,
imposing what President Carter called "Penalties"-from halting the
delivery of grain to the Soviet Union to keeping the US team out of
the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
The Russians countered that the US was enraged by the intervention
because Washington had been plotting to turn the country into an
American base to replace the loss of lran.
Unsurprisingly, on this seemingly clear-cut anti-communist issue, the
American public and media easily fell in line with the president. The
Wall Street Journal called for a "military" reaction, the
establishment of US bases in the Middle East, "reinstatement of draft
registration", development of a new missile, and giving the CIA more
leeway, adding "Clearly we ought to keep open the chance of covert
aid to Afghan rebels." The last, whether the newspaper knew it or
not, had actually been going on for some time. In February 1980, the
Washington Post disclosed that while the United States was now
supplying weapons to the guerrillas,
"U.S. covert aid prior to the December invasion, according to
sources, was limited to funneling small amounts of medical supplies
and communications equipment to scattered rebel tribes, plus what is
described as "technical advice" to the rebels about where they could
acquire arms on their own ."
US foreign service officers had been meeting with rebel leaders to
determine their need at least as early as April 1979, and the CIA had
been training guerrillas in Pakistan and beaming radio propaganda
into Afghanistan since the year before.
Intervention in the Afghan civil war by the United States, Iran,
Pakistan, China and others gave the Russians grave concern about who
was going to wield power next door. They consistently cited these
"aggressive imperialist forces" to rationalize their own intervention
into Afghanistan, which was the first time Soviet ground troops had
engaged in military action anywhere in the world outside its post-
World War II Eastern European borders. The potential establishment of
an anti-communist Islamic state on the borders of the Soviet Union's
own republics in Soviet Central Asia that were home to some 40
million Muslims could not be regarded with equanimity by the Kremlin
any more than Washington could be unruffled about a communist
takeover in Mexico.
As we have seen repeatedly, the United States did not limit its
defense perimeter to its immediate neighbors, or even to Western
Europe, but to the entire globe. President Carter declared that the
Persian Gulf area was "now threatened by Soviet troops in
Afghanistan," that this area was synonymous with US interests, and
that the United States would "defend" it against any threat by all
means necessary. He called the Soviet action "the greatest threat to
peace since the Second World War", a statement that required
overlooking a great deal of post-war history. But 1980 was an
election year.
Brezhnev, on the other hand, declared that "the national interests or
security of the United States of America and other states are in no
way affected by the events Afghanistan. All attempts to portray
matters otherwise are sheer nonsense."
The Carter administration was equally dismissive of Soviet concerns.
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski later stated that "the
issue was not what might have Brezhnev's subjective motives in going
into Afghanistan but the objective consequences of a Soviet military
presence so much closer to the Persian Gulf."
The stage was now set for 12 long years of the most horrific kind of
warfare, a daily atrocity for the vast majority of the Afghan people
who never asked for or wanted this war.
But the Soviet Union was determined that its borders must be
unthreatening. The Afghan government was committed to its goal of a
secular, reformed Afghanistan. The United States was determined that,
at a minimum, this should be the Soviets' Vietnam that they should
slowly bleed as the Americans had at a minimum; at a maximum ... that
was perhaps not as well thought out but American policymakers could
not fail to understand - though they dared not say it publicly and
explicitly - that support of the Moujahedeen (many of whom carried
pictures of the Ayatollah Khomeini with them) could lead to a
fundamentalist Islamic state established in Afghanistan every bit as
repressive as in next-door Iran, which in the 1980s; was Public Enemy
Number One in America. Neither could the word "terrorist" cross the
lips of Washington officials in speaking of their new allies/clients,
though these same people shot down civilian airliners and planted
bombs at the airport. In 1986, British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, whose emotional invectives against "terrorists" were second
to none, welcomed Abdul Haq, an Afghan rebel leader who admitted that
he had ordered the planting of a bomb at Kabul airport in 1984 which
killed at least 28 people. Such, then, were the scruples of cold-war
anti-communists in late 20th century. As Anastasio Somoza had been
"our son of a bitch", the Moujahedeen were now "our fanatic
terrorists". At the beginning there had been some thought given to
the morality of the policy. "The question here," a senior official in
the Carter administration said, "was whether it was morally
acceptable that, in order to keep the Soviets off balance, which was
the reason for the operation, it was permissible to use other lives
for our geopolitical interests."
But such sentiments could not survive. Afghanistan was a
cold-warrior's dream: The CIA and the Pentagon, finally, had one of
their proxy armies in direct confrontation with the forces of the
Evil Empire. There was no price too high to pay for this Super
Nintendo game, neither the hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, nor
the destruction of Afghan society, nor three billion (sic) dollars of
American taxpayer money poured into a bottomless hole, much of it
going only to make a few Afghans and Pakistanis rich. Congress was
equally enthused-without even the moral uncertainty that made them
cautious about arming the Nicaraguan contras-and became a veritable
bipartisan horn of plenty as it allocated more and more money for the
effort each year. Rep. Charles Wilson of Texas expressed a
not-atypical sentiment of official Washington when he declared:
"There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam and we owe the Russians one ... I
have a slight obsession with it, because of Vietnam. I thought the
Soviets ought to get a dose of it ... I've been of the opinion that
this money was better spent to hurt our adversaries than other money
in the Defense Department budget."
--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@... on 09/16/2001
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