On 7 October 2001, George W. Bush solemnly gives an address on TV. His speech isn't transmitted out of the Oval Office, but from the White House treaty room: the war has just begun.
Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.
We are joined in this operation by our staunch friend, Great Britain. Other close friends, including Canada, Australia, Germany and France, have pledged forces as the operation unfolds. More than 40 countries in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and across Asia have granted air transit or landing rights. Many more have shared intelligence. We are supported by the collective will of the world.
More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps; hand over leaders of the al Qaeda network; and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens, unjustly detained in your country. None of these demands were met. And now the Taliban will pay a price.
[…] the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we'll also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan.
The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people, and we are the friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith. The United States of America is an enemy of those who aid terrorists and of the barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by committing murder in its name.
[…] We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it.
[http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html]
In London, Tony Blair addresses the British people from 10 Downing Street. He confirms that Her Majesty's troops will fight alongside the Americans.
While a rain of fire crashes down on Kabul, the Qatari TV channel Al-Jazeera broadcasts a pre-recorded response from Osama bin Laden:
"Here is America, struck by Allah in its most vulnerable spot, destroying, thanks be to God, its most prestigious buildings, and we give thanks to God for this. Here is America filled with terror from the north to the south and from the east to the west, and we give thanks to God for this. God has directed the steps of a group of Muslims, a group in the vanguard who have destroyed America and we implore God to elevate their rank and to receive them into paradise. […] After what has taken place and after what the high officials of the United States, at the first rank of which the world's chief infidel, Bush, have said, and after they'll have mobilized their men and their horses and have set against us the countries which claim to be Muslim… they have set out to fight a group which hews to its religion and which cares not for this world, they have set out to combat Islam and to attack people under the pretext of terrorism. […] These events have divided the entire world into two parts: those who have faith and are free of hypocrisy, and those of the infidels, from whom God preserve us. Every Muslim must set himself to defend his religion, for the wind of faith and change has blown in order to annihilate injustice in Muhammad's peninsula [the Arabian Peninsula, where the prophet of Islam was born]. To America I address these words, I swear to God that America will never know safety until Palestine knows it, and until all the atheist Western armies have quit the holy lands." [[Translated from Meyssan's French]]
This televisual dialogue between President Bush and CIA agent bin Laden having confirmed to the world that the war in Afghanistan is a response to the 11 September attacks, the affairs may commence.
The collapse of the USSR and the independence of the Central Asian states re-opened the "Great Game" [The expression "the Great Game" came back into vogue through articles by Ahmad Rashid in the Far Eastern Economic Review. See The New Great Game in Muslim Central Asia by M. Ehsan Ahrari, McNair Paper no. 47 (Nat'l Defense University, 1996), downloadable at http://www.ndu.edu/inss/mcnair/mcnair47/mcnair47.pdf; Central Asia: A New Great Game? by Dianne L. Smith (US Army War College, 1996), http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usassi/ssipubs/pubs96/centasia/centasia.pdf; The New Great Game: Oil, Politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia (Heritage Foundation, 1996); Jihadi Groups, Nuclear Pakistan, and the New Great Game by Ehsan Ahrari (US Army War College, 2001), http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usassi/ssipubs/pubs2001/jihadi/jihadi.pdf. See also Oil Rivalries in the Caspian Sea by Comité 4 of the 51st session of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Défense Nationale, http://www.ihedn.fr.]. The expression, coined by Kipling in the 19th century, refers to the power struggles which the great empires waged in the region without actually directly facing one another.
The region possesses very important oil and natural gas reserves. There are also precious stones to be found in the mountains. Poppies are also grown there [Taliban and the Drug Trade, by Richard Perl (Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 5 October 2001, http://www.fpc.gov/CRS_REPS/crstalib.pdf; and Central Asia: Drugs and Conflict by the International Crisis Group, http://www.crisisweb.org/projects/asia/centralasia/reports/A400495_26112001-2.pdf].
When he took over the White House, George W. Bush put together his governmental team with high-level people from the oil lobby. Such as Condoleezza Rice [Critics Knock Naming Oil Tanker Condoleezza, by Carla Marinucci, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 April 2001], is a former director of Chevron-Texaco [Ms. Rice was a Chevron administrator and shareholder up until her nomination as National Security Adviser. Chevron is the new name of the firm founded by John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil of California, called Esso Standard. Chevron and Texaco merged on 9 October 2001. With a market capitalization of 124 billion euros, the new company is the second largest US multinational country after Exxon-Mobil (worth 242 billion euros).], or the Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, who represented BP-Amoco's interests [BP-Amoco is the third-biggest worldwide oil company, worth 157 billion euros. BP-Amoco merged some of their European operations with Mobil.] and those of the Saudi company Delta Oil. Dick Cheney, former president of Halliburton, the biggest worldwide petroleum equipment supplier [http://www.halliburton.com; worth 12.5 billion euros], founded a National Energy Political Development group. Its meetings are top-secret, the list of participants is a state secret, and it's forbidden to commit the meetings' minutes to paper. Everything about it is so secret that the Washington Post quickly called it a "sort of secret society." [Energy Task Force Works In Secret, by Dana Milbank and Eric Pianin, Washington Post, 16 April 2001.]
Commentators, who still aren't aware of what will be the great weakness of Enron, the world's biggest energy broker, agree to think that the essential objective of the NEPD is to exploit the Caspian Sea hydrocarbon resources. The question is to figure out how to transport oil and gas without having to negotiate with Russia and Iran. A pipeline will be built to connect the Caspian with the Mediterranean by crossing Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey (this is called the "BTC project," for Baku, Tblisi, and Ceyhan). In the meantime, another has been carried out to connect the Caspian with the Black Sea, unfortunately crossing Russia, who will deduct their tithe. It connects Tengiz with Novorossisysk and was officially opened on 27 November 2001. A third one, the most promising of the lot, will have to connect the Caspian with the Indian Ocean (a project of UNOCAL with the assistance of Delta Oil) [in order to bring its project to light, UNOCAL first created the Central Asia Gas (CentGas) consortium with Delta Oil, Gazprom, and Turkmenogaz. It ran up against the unforeseen concurrence of the Argentine Bridas. Then UNOCAL created the Central Asian Oil Pipeline Project with the Saudi company Delta Oil, the Turkmenistan government, Indonesian Petroleum (INPEX), the Japanese company ITOCHU, the Korean firm Hyundai, and the Pakistani Crescent Group.]. Problem: it would have to cross not only Pakistan, but also Afghanistan, which is rife with internal struggles during which all forms of government disappeared in the Soviet debacle. In December 1997, UNOCAL had to shelve its project, faced with the incomprehension of the Taliban. All attempts to get it going again have since run aground, although the VP of the company, John J. Maresca, was named US Ambassador to Afghanistan.
To revive the discussion, Secretary of State Colin Powell approves a $43 million subsidy, in May 2001, to the Taliban regime, for the "redeployment" of peasant poppy growers. After having gotten approval at the G-8 summit (which India attended as observer), multipartite negotiations are held in Berlin which bring together America, the UK, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Russia. Germany acts as host country, for Germany runs the UN group monitoring Afghanistan. But with which Afghans should they talk? With the legal government of President Rabbani, internationally recognized, but who really doesn't control much of anything; or with the Islamic emirate governed by a medieval sect: the Taliban? The decision is made to invite the latter, in violation of a UN Security Council resolution which forbids dealing with them. Holding genuine visas, the Taliban dignitaries benefit from their trip to Germany by preaching and raising funds in Hamburg.
The Taliban [Shadow of the Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid, Editions Autrement, 2001] are a closed brotherhood, a Sunni sect, who profess a return to a primitive brand of Islam. Their directors are veterans of the Soviet war, all with war wounds. They recognize the authority of a rural mullah, Omar, who has never traveled in his life and is not even familiar with one-third of his own country. In the chaos which followed the Soviet exodus, the Taliban succeeded in playing their game quite well at bringing ethnic solidarity into play: like most of the leaders of the Pakistani secret service (ISI), they are Pashtuns.
Mullah Omar proclaimed himself Commander of the Faithful and created an emirate, recognized only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Having no training at all in international relations, they got back in touch with some of their American friends with whose help they fought the Soviets. So they're represented at the UN by Leila Helms, niece of Richard Helms, who was CIA director from 1966 to 1973. As far as internal policy, the Taliban imposed an iron discipline on their population, segregating women and forbidding impious acts. After having long tolerated the poppy-cultivating culture, they forbade it, cutting off a sector of the peasantry from their only source of income. The sect ceded a vast portion of territory to Osama bin Laden.
The Taliban, not well-versed in diplomatic protocol, attempt to obtain international recognition in exchange for allowing the pipeline. Seeing that there's no question of that happening, as the UN recognizes a different government for Afghanistan—that of the inconsistent President Rabbani—they cut off negotiations. According to the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik, the American delegation becomes belligerent and announces in mid-July that they're going to settle the dispute with arms.
The USA plans on eliminating the main players in the Afghan factions, mainly Mullah Omar or the commandant Massoud (whose anti-American feelings are legendary), and to substitute a puppet government in their place. He [[?]] pulls an apparent legitimacy from the extreme unction of former king Zaher Shah, the forgotten old monarch breathing his last in exile in Rome.
In mid-July, the major powers give their blessing to the plan. This is evident in the final communiqué from the meeting between Hubert Védrine (French minister of foreign affairs) and Francesc Vendrell (head of the UN Special Mission to Afghanistan) on 17 July 2001: "The two parties together explored the paths which would permit an eventual favorable evolution, particularly the encouragement which the international community could bring to the efforts of the King [sic] to reunite with him representatives of Afghan society. They also evoked the usefulness of reinforcing dialogue with Pakistan. Hereafter, one will have to naturally consider the supposed reconstruction of Afghanistan, once the conflict has come to an end [sic]." [Press conference of 17 July 2001.]
Yes, from the month of July on, one speaks of the deposed sovereign Zaher Shah as the King of Afghanistan, and one evokes parallel debates about the "conflict" and the "reconstruction" of the country!
The negotiations are pursued, in London, then in Geneva, under the aegis of the Business Humanitarian Forum [sic] [http://www.bhforum.org/]—whose budget is generously funded by the UNOCAL oil company—but with different objectives and different guests (including the Japanese, who have a particular hope for Caspian oil deposits). As Messrs. Védrine and Vendrell foresaw, nobody's preparing for peace, but for war and reconstruction.
Fearing too much pressure Anglo-American pressure, Pakistan looks for new allies before the tempest gets underway. It invites a Chinese delegation to Islamabad and promises them to open a door for China to the Indian Ocean in exchange for military support. Irritated, the Anglo-Americans decide to go on the offensive more quickly than previously planned, in any case before the Chinese can get into the Great Game [Never-broadcast video interview with Niaz Naik by Benoît Califano, Pierre Trouillet and Guilhem Rondot (ITV-Dokumenta coproduction, October 2001]. The Sea of Oman sees the biggest British naval deployment since the Falkland Islands war, while NATO assembles 40,000 men in Egypt. On 9 September, the charismatic leader of the Islamic Front, the very anti-American commander Massoud, is assassinated [The assassination of Shah Massoud was kept secret for a few days and wasn't revealed until after the attacks in the US. It was then attributed to Osama. Now, the official version of his death doesn't correspond at all with the breaking-story reports from the French journalist Françoise Causse. At the moment, Shah Massoud's entourage had attributed the assassination rather to the ISI.]. The 11 September attacks allowed what's nothing but a classic colonial expedition to pass for a legitimate operation.
The operation had to be called "Infinite Justice," but that message resonates terribly in the Muslim world. It will thus be redubbed "Enduring Freedom" [The best analyses of "Enduring Freedom" are those assembled by the British parliamentary research service: 11 September 2001, The Response (Research Paper 01/72, 3 October 2001), Operation Enduring Freedom and the Conflict in Afghanistan, an Update (Research Paper 01/81, 31 October 2001), and The Campaign Against International Terrorism, Prospects After the Fall of the Taliban (Research Paper 01/112). You can download these documents from http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp2001/rp01-072.pdf (rp01-081.pdf and rp01-112.pdf, respectively).]. It's supported by a circumstantial diplomatic alliance, the Global Coalition, which consists of 136 nations [for a state-by-state analysis, see Operation Enduring Freedom: Foreign Pledges of Military and Intelligence Support, Congressional Research Service (Library of Congress, 17 October 2001), http://www.fpc.gov/CRS_REPS/crsfree.pdf] who offered the USA their military assistance [The Global War on Terrorism, The First 100 Days, official document of the Coalition Information Center, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/100dayreport.pdf]. The Americans keeping in mind how the Soviets got bogged down in a ground war during the 1979-1989 war, they abstain from sending GIs over there. They prefer to buy war chiefs at high prices and send them to fight in their stead against the Taliban. This method evidently entails arming rival factions in violation of the UN embargo. In view of this turn of events, Russia massively arms Massoud's Islamic Front, while Iran arms the Shiite Hazaris. The USAF contents itself with precision bombing to prop up the anti-Taliban forces, and sometimes also to contain them. Indeed, the various factions' war objectives have nothing in common with those of the Global Coalition (to apprehend Osama bin Laden), nor with the official oil ambitions.
So the Anglo-Americans change their tactics. They go back to traditional carpet bombing under which they vitrify their irksome foes. The Taliban are unable to keep up their dictatorship over their territory and find themselves isolated in separate groups. At the same time, the Islamic Front, rebaptized the "Northern Alliance" for the expediency of international communication, penetrates the disorganized front lines of the Taliban.
The USAF hounds the runaways. The Taliban try to rally at Kandahar, while the victors hand out various massacres, notably at Mazar-e-Sharif under the command of Gen. Dostum. After all is said and done, one or two thousand fanatics, Taliban and Al-Qaeda members together, hole up in the mountains at Tora Bora under a deluge of steel, then negotiate their surrender into the hands of their Pakistani friends. In total, the Anglo-American air forces flew 4700 sorties, in the course of which they dropped 12,000 bombs, killing more than 10,000 combatants [AFP dispatch, 6 December 2001] and "collateral damage" of at least a thousand civilians [Operation Enduring Freedom: Why A Higher Rate of Civilian Bombing Casualties, Project on Defense Alternatives, Briefing Report #11 (18 January 2002), http://www.comw.org/pda/0201oef.html; US Silence and Power of Weaponry Conceal Scale of Civilian Toll, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 2002; Afghans Are Still Dying As Air Strikes Go On, But No One Is Counting by Ian Traynor, The Guardian; and Civilian Toll in US Raids Put at 1000 by John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid, Boston Globe, 17 February 2002]. The military escalation led the USAF to abandon the idea of "surgical strikes" and to use weapons of mass destruction, BLU-82 bombs (called "daisy cutters") [The BLU-82 wasn't originally designed for combat, as the damage they cause are important and blind, but for engineering. They were used in Vietnam to clear jungle and to cut landing pads for helicopters.], to neutralize the least remaining fighters spread out in the mountains.
The war ends with UN Security Council Resolution 1378 [http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01111512.htm]. It sets the scope of negotiations at Bonn where the various Afghan factions agree on a new government [Strange Victory: A Critical Appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghan War, by Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives, Monograph #6, 30 January 2002, http://www.comw.org/pda/0201strangevic.html]. The round table puts in place a provisional administration which it wishes to be presided over by the ex-king Zahir Shah. Zahir Shah withdrawing, as foreseen, Hamid Karzai becomes Prime Minister. During the Soviet war, he had personal ties with the then-CIA director William Casey. Afterwards, he had emigrated to the United States, where he became a friend of the Bush family and was employed by an UNOCAL subsidiary [Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team by Wayne Madsen, Democrats.Com, 23 January 2002]. Gen. Abdel Rasheed Dostum, nicknamed "Genghis Khan" in honor of the atrocities he committed over the course of 20 years, succeeds in bringing together the Global Coalition in time. He's not sought for war crimes, but brought into the new administration. This plan of action is validated on 6 December 2001 by UN Security Council Resolution 1383 [http://www.un.org/docs/scres/2001/res1383e.pdf]. The hundreds of thousands of Afghans who fled their country to escape from the bombardments take the way back home.
Operation "Enduring Freedom" was steered through the National Security Council by Zalmay Khalilizad [The Roving Eye, Pipelineistan, a two-part investigation by Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, 25-26 January 2002]. Son of an advisor of the ex-king Zahir Shah, he studied in America at the University of Chicago. He fought in his country in connection with the CIA during the Soviet war after having gained US citizenship and having become a State Dept advisor under Reagan. During the first Bush administration, he was named undersecretary of defense and played a key role in "Desert Storm" against Iraq. During the Clinton years, he worked for Rand Corporation and for UNOCAL. While the negotiations with the Taliban were rolling right along, he took their side in in the Washington Post, writing that they "do not at all practise the anti-Americanism which Iranian fundamentalists espouse." He changed his point of view once the oil negotiations wore out, and became the Bush administration's reference expert after 11 September [See his portrait in Bush's Favorite Afghan, by Jacob Weisberg, in Slate (http://slate.msn.com), 5 October 2001, and New US Envoy to Kabul Lobbied for Taliban Oil Rights by Kim Sengupta and Andrew Gumber, The Independent, 10 January 2002. One will carefully read the writings of Zalmay Khalilizad: Speech Before the LA World Affairs Council (9 March 2000), http://www.lawac.org/speech/khalilzad.html, and the article co-written with Daniel Byrman: Afghanistan, The Consolidation of a Rogue State, in The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2000.]. At the outbreak of the war, he is named special representative for Afghanistan. He will have to oversee the construction of the so-coveted pipeline.
The international press is invited to visit the vestiges of Taliban and al-Qaeda facilities. They discover miserable tumbledown cottages where hand-me-down weapons from the Soviet war lie heaped up. But no journalist manages to locate the chemical-and-bacteriological weapon factories, nor the atomic bomb plants, and even less the satellite launching pads which Rumsfeld had denounced.
The affairs continue. Poppy cultivation can finally bloom, destined for the North American market [Opium Farmers Rejoice at Defeat of the Taliban by Richard Lloyd Parry, The Independent, 21 November 2001; and Victorious Warlords Set To Open The Opium Floodgates, by Paul Harris, The Observer, 25 November 2001]. And on 9 December 2002, Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani homologue, Gen. Musharraf, conclude an agreement for construction of the Central Asian pipeline [Musharraf, Karzai Agree Major Oil Pipeline in Cooperation Pact, Irish Times, 9 February 2002].
[[END OF CHAPTER 9]]
[[This document is part of the English translation of
"L'effroyable imposture."
[[ (c) 2002, Christopher Schroen.
[[ See http://www.boss-tweed.com/gpdl.txt for copying
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