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What
Good Friends Left Behind in Afghanistan
by
John Pilger
September
22, 2003
At
the Labour party conference following the September 11 attacks, Tony Blair said
memorably: "To the Afghan people, we make this commitment. We will not
walk away... If the Taliban regime changes, we will work with you to make sure
its successor is one that is broadbased, that unites all ethnic groups and
offers some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence." He
was echoing George Bush, who had said a few days earlier: "The oppressed
people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and its allies. As we
strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the
starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. The US is a
friend of the Afghan people."
Almost
every word they spoke was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel
illusions that prepared the way for the conquest of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
As the illegal Anglo-American occupation of Iraq now unravels, the forgotten
disaster in Afghanistan, the first "victory" in the "war on
terror", is perhaps an even more shocking testament to power.
It
was my first visit. In a lifetime of making my way through places of upheaval,
I had not seen anything like it. Kabul is a glimpse of Dresden post-1945, with
contours of rubble rather than streets, where people live in collapsed
buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for rescue. They have no light and
heat; their apocalyptic fires burn through the night. Hardly a wall stands that
does not bear the pock-marks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie
upended at roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses
are twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top of each other,
reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer Rouge to mark Year
Zero.
There
is a sense of Year Zero in Afghanistan. My footsteps echoed through the once
grand Dilkusha Palace, built in 1910 to a design by a British architect, whose
circular staircase and Corinthian columns and stone frescoes of biplanes were
celebrated. It is now a cavernous ruin from which reed-thin children emerge
like small phantoms, offering yellowing postcards of what it looked like 30
years ago: a vainglorious pile at the end of what might have been a replica of
the Mall, with flags and trees. Beneath the sweep of the staircase were the
blood and flesh of two people blown up by a bomb the day before. Who were they?
Who planted the bomb? In a country in thrall to warlords, many of them
conniving in terrorism, the question itself is surreal.
A
hundred yards away, men in blue move stiffly in single file: mine-clearers.
Mines are like litter here, killing and maiming, it is calculated, every hour
of every day. Opposite what was Kabul's main cinema and is today an art deco
shell, there is a busy roundabout with posters warning that unexploded cluster
bombs "yellow and from USA" are in the vicinity. Children play here,
chasing each other into the shadows. They are watched by a teenage boy with a
stump and part of his face missing. In the countryside, people still confuse
the cluster canisters with the yellow relief packages that were dropped by
American planes almost two years ago, during the war, after Bush had prevented
international relief convoys crossing from Pakistan.
More
than $10bn has been spent on Afghanistan since October 7 2001, most of it by
the US. More than 80% of this has paid for bombing the country and paying the
warlords, the former mojahedin who called themselves the "Northern
Alliance". The Americans gave each warlord tens of thousands of dollars in
cash and truckloads of weapons. "We were reaching out to every commander
that we could," a CIA official told the Wall Street Journal during the
war. In other words, they bribed them to stop fighting each other and fight the
Taliban.
These
were the same warlords who, vying for control of Kabul after the Russians left
in 1989, pulverised the city, killing 50,000 civilians, half of them in one
year, 1994, according to Human Rights Watch. Thanks to the Americans, effective
control of Afghanistan has been ceded to most of the same mafiosi and their
private armies, who rule by fear, extortion and monopolising the opium poppy trade
that supplies Britain with 90% of its street heroin. The post-Taliban
government is a facade; it has no money and its writ barely runs to the gates
of Kabul, in spite of democratic pretensions such as the election planned for
next year. Omar Zakhilwal, an official in the ministry of rural affairs, told
me that the government gets less than 20% of the aid that is delivered to
Afghanistan - "We don't even have enough money to pay wages, let alone
plan reconstruction," he said. President Harmid Karzai is a placeman of
Washington who goes nowhere without his posse of US Special Forces bodyguards.
In
a series of extraordinary reports, the latest published in July, Human Rights
Watch has documented atrocities "committed by gunmen and warlords who were
propelled into power by the United States and its coalition partners after the
Taliban fell in 2001" and who have "essentially hijacked the
country". The report describes army and police troops controlled by the
warlords kidnapping villagers with impunity and holding them for ransom in
unofficial prisons; the widespread rape of women, girls and boys; routine
extortion, robbery and arbitrary murder. Girls' schools are burned down.
"Because the soldiers are targeting women and girls," the report
says, "many are staying indoors, making it impossible for them to attend
school [or] go to work."
In
the western city of Herat, for example, women are arrested if they drive; they
are prohibited from travelling with an unrelated man, even an unrelated taxi
driver. If they are caught, they are subjected to a "chastity test",
squandering precious medical services to which, says Human Rights Watch,
"women and girls have almost no access, particularly in Herat, where fewer
than one per cent of women give birth with a trained attendant". The death
rate of mothers giving birth is the highest in the world, according to Unicef.
Herat is ruled by the warlord Ismail Khan, whom US defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld endorsed as "an appealing man... thoughtful, measured and self-confident".
"The
last time we met in this chamber," said George Bush in his state of the
union speech last year, "the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were
captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today,
women are free, and are part of Afghanistan's new government. And we welcome
the new minister of women's affairs, Dr Sima Samar." A slight, middle-aged
woman in a headscarf stood and received the choreographed ovation. A physician
who refused to deny treatment to women during the Taliban years, Samar is a
true symbol of resistance, whose appropriation by the unctuous Bush was
short-lived. In December 2001, Samar attended the Washington-sponsored
"peace conference" in Bonn where Karzai was installed as president
and three of the most brutal warlords as vice-presidents. (The Uzbek warlord
General Rashid Dostum, accused of torturing and slaughtering prisoners, is
currently defence minister.) Samar was one of two women in Karzai's cabinet.
No
sooner had the applause in Congress died away than Samar was smeared with a
false charge of blasphemy and forced out. The warlords, different from the
Taliban only in their tribal allegiances and religious pieties, were not
tolerating even a gesture of female emancipation.
Today,
Samar lives in constant fear for her life. She has two fearsome bodyguards with
automatic weapons. One is at her office door, the other at her gate. She
travels in a blacked-out van. "For the past 23 years, I was not
safe," she told me, "but I was never in hiding or travelling with
gunmen, which I must do now... There is no more official law to stop women from
going to school and work; there is no law about dress code. But the reality is
that even under the Taliban there was not the pressure on women in the rural
areas there is now."
The
apartheid might have legally ended, but for as many as 90% of the women of
Afghanistan, these "reforms" - such as the setting up of a women's
ministry in Kabul - are little more than a technicality. The burka is still
ubiquitous. As Samar says, the plight of rural women is often more desperate
now because the ultra-puritanical Taliban dealt harshly with rape, murder and
banditry. Unlike today, it was possible to travel safely across much of the
country.
At
a bombed-out shoe factory in west Kabul, I found the population of two villages
huddled on exposed floors without light and with one trickling tap. Small
children squatted around open fires on crumbling parapets: the day before, a
child had fallen to his death; on the day I arrived, another child fell and was
badly injured. A meal for them is bread dipped in tea. Their owl eyes are those
of terrified refugees. They had fled there, they explained, because warlords
routinely robbed them and kidnapped their wives and daughters and sons, whom
they would rape and ransom back to them.
"During
the Taliban we were living in a graveyard, but we were secure," a
campaigner, Marina, told me. "Some people even say they were better. That's
how desperate the situation is today. The laws may have changed, but women dare
not leave their homes without the burka, which we wear as much for our
protection."
Marina
is a leading member of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,
a heroic organisation that for years tried to alert the outside world to the
suffering of the women of Afghanistan. Rawa women travelled secretly throughout
the country, with cameras concealed beneath their burkas. They filmed a Taliban
execution and other abuses, and smuggled their videotape to the west. "We
took it to different media groups," said Marina. "Reuters, ABC
Australia, for example, and they said, yes, it's very nice, but we can't show
it because it's too shocking for people in the west." In fact, the
execution was shown finally in a documentary broadcast by Channel 4.
That
was before September 11 2001, when Bush and the US media discovered the issue
of women in Afghanistan. She says that the current silence in the west over the
atrocious nature of the western-backed warlord regime is no different. We met
clandestinely and she wore a veil to disguise her identity. Marina is not her
real name.
"Two
girls who went to school without their burkas were killed and their dead bodies
were put in front of their houses," she said. "Last month, 35 women
jumped into a river along with their children and died, just to save themselves
from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is Afghanistan today; the Taliban
and the warlords of the Northern Alliance are two faces of the same coin. For
America, it's a Frankenstein story - you make a monster and the monster goes
against you. If America had not built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and
all the fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they
would not have attacked the master on September 11 2001."
Afghanistan's
tragedy exemplifies the maxim of western power - that third world countries are
regarded and dealt with strictly in terms of their usefulness to
"us". The ruthlessness and hypocrisy this requires is imprinted on
Afghanistan's modern history. One of the most closely guarded secrets of the
cold war was America's and Britain's collusion with the warlords, the
mojahedin, and the critical part they played in stimulating the jihad that
produced the Taliban, al-Qaida and September 11.
"According
to the official view of history," Zbigniew Brzezinski, Presi dent Carter's
national security adviser, admitted in an interview in 1998, "CIA aid to
the mojahedin began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army invaded
Afghanistan... But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely
otherwise." At Brzezinski's urging, in July 1979 Carter authorised $500m
to help set up what was basically a terrorist organisation. The goal was to
lure Moscow, then deeply troubled by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in
the Soviet central Asian republics, into the "trap" of Afghanistan, a
source of the contagion.
For
17 years, Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the most brutal
men on earth - with the overall aim of exhausting and ultimately destroying the
Soviet Union in a futile war. One of them, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord
particularly favoured by the CIA, received tens of millions of dollars. His
speciality was trafficking opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who
refused to wear the veil. In 1994, he agreed to stop attacking Kabul on
condition that he was made primeminister - which he was.
Eight
years earlier, CIA director William Casey had given his backing to a plan put
forward by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from
around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants
were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA
and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in
bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in
Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the
Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.
"I
confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard," said Lord Curzon,
viceroy of India in 1898, "upon which is being played out a great game for
the domination of the world." Brzezinski, adviser to several presidents
and a guru admired by the Bush gang, has written virtually those same words. In
his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic
Imperatives, he writes that the key to dominating the world is central Asia,
with its strategic position between competing powers and immense oil and gas
wealth. "To put it in terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age
of ancient empires," he writes, one of "the grand imperatives of
imperial geostrategy" is "to keep the barbarians from coming
together".
Surveying
the ashes of the Soviet Union he helped destroy, the guru mused more than once:
so what if all this had created "a few stirred up Muslims"? On
September 11 2001, "a few stirred up Muslims" provided the answer. I
recently interviewed Brzezinski in Washington and he vehemently denied that his
strategy precipitated the rise of al-Qaida: he blamed terrorism on the
Russians.
When
the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the chessboard was passed to the Clinton
administration. The latest mutation of the mojahedin, the Taliban, now ruled
Afghanistan. In 1997, US state department officials and executives of the Union
Oil Company of California (Unocal) discreetly entertained Taliban leaders in
Washington and Houston, Texas. They were entertained lavishly, with dinner
parties at luxurious homes in Houston. They asked to be taken shopping at a
Walmart and flown to tourist attractions, including the Kennedy Space Centre in
Florida and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where they gazed upon the faces of
American presidents chiselled in the rockface. The Wall Street Journal,
bulletin of US power, effused, "The Taliban are the players most capable
of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history."
In
January 1997, a state department official told journalists in a private
briefing that it was hoped Afghanistan would become an oil protectorate,
"like Saudi Arabia". It was pointed out to him that Saudi Arabia had
no democracy and persecuted women. "We can live with that," he said.
The
American goal was now the realisation of a 60-year "dream" of building
a pipeline from the former Soviet Caspian across Afghanistan to a deep-water
port. The Taliban were offered 15 cents for every 1,000 cubic feet of gas that
passed through Afghanistan. Although these were the Clinton years, pushing the
deal were the "oil and gas junta" that was soon to dominate George W
Bush's regime. They included three former members of George Bush senior's
cabinet, such as the present vice-president, Dick Cheney, representing nine oil
companies, and Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser, then a director
of Chevron-Texaco with special responsibility for Pakistan and Central Asia.
Peel
the onion of this and you find Bush senior as a paid consultant of the huge
Carlyle Group, whose 164 companies specialise in oil and gas and pipelines and
weapons. His clients included a super-wealthy Saudi family, the Bin Ladens.
(Within days of the September 11 attacks, the Bin Laden family was allowed to
leave the US in high secrecy.)
The
pipeline "dream" faded when two US embassies in east Africa were
bombed and al-Qaida was blamed and the connection with Afghanistan was made.
The usefulness of the Taliban was over; they had become an embarrassment and
expendable. In October 2001, the Americans bombed back into power their old
warlord friends, the "Northern Alliance". Today, with Afghanistan
"liberated", the pipeline is finally going ahead, watched over by the
US ambassador to Afghanistan, John J Maresca, formerly ofUnocal.
Since
it overthrew the Taliban, the US has established 13 bases in the nine former
Soviet central Asian countries that are Afghanistan's resource-rich neighbours.
Across the world, there is now an American military presence at the gateway to
every major source of fossil fuel. Lord Curzon would never recognise his great
game. It's what the US Space Command calls "full spectrum dominance".
It
is from the vast, Soviet-built base at Bagram, near Kabul, that the US controls
the land route to the riches of the Caspian Basin. But, as in that other
conquest, Iraq, all is not going smoothly. "We get shot at every time we
go off base," said Colonel Rod Davis. "For us, that's a combat zone
out there."
I
said to him, "But President Bush says you liberated Afghanistan. Why
should people shoot at you?"
"Hostile
elements are everywhere, my friend."
"Is
that surprising, when you support murderous warlords?" I replied.
"We
call them regional governors." (As "regional governors",
warlords such as Ismail Khan in Herat are deemed part of Karzai's national
government - an uneasy juxtaposition. Karzai has pleaded with Khan to release
millions of dollars of customs duty.)
The
war that expelled the Taliban never stopped. Ten thousand US troops are
stationed there; they go out in their helicopter gunships and Humvees and blow
up caves in the mountains or they target a village, usually in the south-east.
The Taliban are coming back in the Pashtun heartland and on the border with
Pakistan. The level of the war is not independently known; US spokesmen such as
Colonel Davis are the sources of news reports that say "50 Taliban
fighters were killed by US forces". Afghanistan is now so dangerous that
it is virtually impossible for reporters to find out.
The
centre of US operations is now the "holding facility" at Bagram,
where suspects are taken and interrogated. Two former prisoners, Abdul Jabar
and Hakkim Shah, told the New York Times in March how as many as 100 prisoners
were "made to stand hooded, their arms raised and chained to the ceiling,
their feet shackled, unable to move for hours at a time, day and night".
From here, many are shipped to the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.
They
are denied all rights. The Red Cross has been allowed to inspect only part of
the "holding facility"; Amnesty has been refused access altogether.
In April last year, a Kabul taxi driver, Wasir Mohammad, whose family I
interviewed, "dis-appeared" into Bagram after he inquired at a
roadblock about the whereabouts of a friend who had been arrested. The friend
has since been released, but Mohammad is now in a cage in Guantanamo Bay. A
former minister of the interior in the Karzai government told me that Mohammad
was in the wrong place at the wrong time: "He is innocent." Moreover,
he had a record of standing up to the Taliban. It is likely that many of those
incarcerated at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay were kidnapped for ransoms the
Americans pay for suspects.
Why,
I asked Colonel Davis, were the people in the "holding facility" not
given the basic rights he would expect as an American taken prisoner by a
foreign army. He replied: "The issue of prisoners of war is way off to the
far left or the right depending on your perspective." This is the
Kafkaesque world that Bush's America has imprinted on the recently acquired
additions to its empire, real and virtual, rising on new rubble in places where
human life is not given the same value as those who perished at Ground Zero in
New York. One such place is a village called Bibi Mahru, which was attacked by
an American F16 almost two years ago during the war. The pilot dropped a MK82
"precision" 500lb bomb on a mud and stone house, where Orifa and her
husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, lived. The bomb killed all but Orifa and
one son - eight members of her family, including six children. Two children in
the next house were killed, too.
Her
face engraved with grief and anger, Orifa told me how the bodies were laid out
in front of the mosque, and the horrific state in which she found them. She
spent the afternoon collecting body parts, "then bagging and naming them
so they could be buried later on". She said a team of 11 Americans came
and surveyed the crater where her home had stood. They noted the numbers on
shrapnel and each interviewed her. Their translator gave her an envelope with
$15 in dollar bills. Later, she was taken to the US embassy in Kabul by Rita
Lasar, a New Yorker who had lost her brother in the Twin Towers and had gone to
Afghanistan to protest about the bombing and comfort its victims. When Orifa
tried to hand in a letter through the embassy gate, she was told, "Go
away, you beggar."
In
May last year, the Guardian published the result of an investigation by
Jonathan Steele. He concluded that, in addition to up to 8,000 Afghans killed
by American bombs, as many as 20,000 more may have died as an indirect
consequence of Bush's invasion, including those who fled their homes and were
denied emergency relief in the middle of a drought. Of all the great
humanitarian crises of recent years, no country has been helped less than
Afghanistan. Bosnia, with a quarter of the population, received $356 per
person; Afghanistan gets $42 per person. Only 3% of all international aid spent
in Afghanistan has been for reconstruction; the US-led military
"coalition" accounts for 84%, the rest is emergency aid. Last March,
Karzai flew to Washington to beg for more money. He was promised extra money
from private US investors. Of this, $35m will finance a proposed five-star
hotel. As Bush said, "The Afghan people will know the generosity of America
and its allies."
John Pilger is a renowned investigative
journalist and documentary filmmaker. This year, Pilger was named the winner of
the Sophie Prize, one of the world's most
distinguished environmental and development prizes. He was also named Media Personality of the Year, at this
year's EMMA awards. His latest book is The New Rulers of the World
(Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s website at: http://www.johnpilger.com
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