Musharraf: "We Did It Together" US & Pakistan Created Terrorists+Terrorism

[kpete]

Musharraf blames US and the West for importing, breeding extremism into Pakistan

Excerpts from article:

“Whatever extremism or terrorism is in Pakistan is a direct fallout of the 26 years of warfare and militancy around us. It gets back to 1979 when the West, the United States and Pakistan waged a war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,” Musharraf told EU lawmakers.

“We launched a jihad, brought in mujahideen from all over the Muslim world, the US and the West…We armed the Taliban and sent them in; we did it together. In 1989 everyone left Pakistan with 30,000 armed mujahideen who were there, and the Taliban who were there,” he said, adding that Pakistan had “paid a big price for being part of the coalition that fought the Soviet Union.”

more at:
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Musharraf_blames_U.S._West_for_extremism_0913.html

[originalpckelly]

1. Yeah, they really hated us for our freedoms, when they were working...

for us in the '80s.

[annabanana]

2. WE imported terrorists into Pakistan....

SURE we did. I doubt if we made anything any better in Pakistan, but that's one I don't think we should shoulder the blame for.

[sweetheart]

4. we sold them F16's

'we' support a dictator there today, surely its better,
don't you see! Don't you see the women's equality, the
100% literacy and wealthy inventive society creating
wealth in every corner, unfettered from the ugly hatreds
of history and looking to the future. Don't you see it!
Look at all we did for them! Its all there. Every
person in pakistan is on the internet, there is no
sexual discrimination and the education levels are the
highest in the world, heck, pakistan even has more
patents than any other nation. IT is the last
nation on earth when one ponders a degenerate backwater
of middle ages morons... indeed. :-)

[rman]

12. The facts indicate differently,

as some in this thread point out (see the BCCI affair).

[WilliamPitt]

14. Here is some history for you

In 1979, Zbignew Brzezinski was serving as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, and he decided the time had come to challenge the Soviet Union in their own back yard. At this time, Afghanistan was ruled by a communist puppet regime of the Soviets called the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, or PDPA. Brzezinski instituted a plan to train fundamentalist Islamic mujeheddin fighters in Pakistan, and sent those fighters to attack the PDPA. The idea was not to destroy the PDPA, but to make the Soviets so nervous about the stability of their puppet regime that they would invade Afghanistan to protect it. Brzezinski wanted, at bottom, to hand the Soviet Union their own debilitating Vietnam.

The plan worked. The Soviets invaded in 1979, and over the next ten years spent its blood and treasure trying to defeat the Afghan warriors who banded together to defend their country. By 1989 millions of Afghan civilians had been killed, millions more had been internally displaced, and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops had been killed or wounded. In the process, the nation of Afghanistan was torn to pieces. Worst of all, the United States ? which energetically worked to start the war, and which armed and funded the Afghan mujeheddin once the war was underway ? did absolutely nothing to aid ravaged Afghanistan once the Soviets withdrew. Brzezinski proudly described the Afghan Trap in an interview he gave to a French publication called Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs <"From the Shadows">, that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

How innocent we were in 1998. How gravely we misjudged the dire ramifications of empowering the Taliban. How profoundly we underestimated the strength of the "stirred-up Moslems" we armed and trained with American tax dollars. What a price we have paid.

You see, the Afghan Trap led to the incredibly vicious civil war in Afghanistan that came once the Soviets withdrew. By 1996, the Taliban ? made up of our secret allies in the Soviet war - had won the civil war and controlled the nation. The Afghan Trap likewise gave birth to a man named Osama bin Laden, who became a demigod to the Taliban and the Afghan people for his service in the war against the Soviets we started in the first place. The combination of our efforts to begin that war, the social annihilation in Afghanistan caused by that war, the Taliban's rise, and the succor they gave bin Laden, led like an arrow to the attacks of September 11 and the dire estate we currently endure.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/042203A.shtml

[Union Thug]

3. and ironically, the soviets were building a more progressive

society, modernizing power plants and building technical institutes when the US started funding the islamic radicals and instigating the soviet invasion.

D'OH!

<to which nelson replies> HA! HA!

[JohnyCanuck]

5. Collusion with the Enemy

Nafeez Ahmed: Interrogating 9/11

SNIP

Collusion with the Enemy

In fact, overwhelming evidence confirms that al-Qaeda networks in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Asia-Pacific, have been penetrated and manipulated by Western intelligence services. Conspiraloonery? If only it was. As I argue in my 3rd book, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (2005), the evidence for this is extremely well-documented, deriving from innumerable, credible intelligence sources. But why? Largely to destabilize regional environments to pave the way for new “security” policies that serve to protect not people, but foreign investors taking over regional markets -- especially markets with significant oil and gas deposits.

Although it is widely acknowledged that our governments used al-Qaeda to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, after the Cold War our geostrategic connections with al-Qaeda did not end. Actually, they proliferated in surprising and disturbing ways. Indeed, one CIA analyst described the covert strategy in plain words to Swiss television journalist Richard Labeviere, currently chief editor at Radio France International: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvellously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.”

SNIP

The implication is dire, but it is one supported by other academics such as University of Ottawa professor Michel Chossudovsky and University of California (Berkeley) professor Peter Dale Scott: that al-Qaeda in many ways has continued to function throughout the post-Cold War period as an instrument of Western statecraft, a covert operations tool. The geostrategic arc of this policy across Central Asia, the Balkans and North Africa is charted more specifically in the latter one-third of my latest book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (2006), which draws on some of my War on Truth research and expands on it directions more relevant for understanding the context of 7/7.

The thesis that Western power continues to connect with al-Qaeda in the pursuit of strategic and economic interests in the key regions mentioned, flies in the face of everything we are force-fed by the official narrative sponsored by governments and mass media. But consider the fact that my research in The War on Truth has been endorsed by people like Robert D. Steele, a retired Marine Corps infantry and intelligence veteran who worked as an operations officer in all four CIA Directorates. Apart from that, Steele was responsible for founding and setting-up the newest US intelligence facility, the Marine Corps Intelligence Center. He described The War on Truth as

“… consistent with both my years of experience as a clandestine case officer, and my extensive reading on national security misadventures. ... I find the author’s speculation that the US, the UK, and France, among others, have been actively using terrorists, nurturing terrorists, as part of a geopolitical and economic strategy… to be completely credible.”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/2771

[AntiFascist]

6. K&R, just for this post...

just what I've suspected all along, we've created a clone army for the empire. Now it has a base in Anbar Province.

[JohnyCanuck]

7. US Shipped Muslim Extremist Schoolbooks to Afghanistan

Why has the US been Shipping Muslim Extremist Schoolbooks into Afghanistan...for 20 Years?

And why is President Bush hiding it?

By Jared Israel


=======================================

Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal?

Or perhaps I should say, "Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that's waiting to happen?"

Because it has been almost unreported in the Western media that the US government shipped, and continues to ship, millions of Islamist textbooks into Afghanistan.

Only one English-speaking newspaper we could find has investigated this issue: the Washington Post. The story appeared March 23rd. (1)

Washington Post investigators report that during the past twenty years the US has spent millions of dollars producing fanatical schoolbooks, which were then distributed in Afghanistan.

"The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books..." -- Washington Post, 23 March 2002 (1)

According to the Post the U.S. is now "...wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism."

So the books made up the core curriculum in Afghan schools. And what were the unintended consequences? The Post reports that according to unnamed officials the schoolbooks "steeped a generation in violence."

How could this result have been unintended? Did they expect that giving fundamentalist schoolbooks to schoolchildren would make them moderate Muslims?

Continued at:
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/jihad.htm

[blm]

8. BCCI - Pakistan was crucial - and why Poppy Bush PROTECTED the terrorists

and the dealings of AQKhan. They KNEW they were terrorists and funders of terrorism and Poppy HELPED them every step of the way.

THIS is why they would rig machines to keep Kerry out of office. They knew he'd open the books on BCCI and ALL OF THIS.

[Peace Patriot]

9. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm finding it REALLY strange that

Musharraf would say this. Anybody have insight into Pakistan's current relations with the Bush Junta?

It occurs to me that Pakistan now has a terribly unstable region on its border--Afghanistan--due to the Bushites' disinterest both in catching Osama bin Laden, and general disinterest in anybody's welfare but their own (least of all the welfare of the Afghan people and bordering countries). Is this a falling out (bet. Musharraf and our Junta)? Broken promises? A new realization of the stupidity of anyone (and I include Israel in that) allying themselves with the most despised and treacherous bunch of self-serving liars, thieves and murderous on earth?

Are these Musharraf statements not rather surprising and unexpected? Is this another rat deserting the Titanic? What's going on with this?

[JohnyCanuck]

10. Mujahideen were funded and supported originally

under the Carter administration and starting some months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The idea was to draw the Soviet Union into their own "Viet Nam war" according to Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (see link below). Rejoice America, the Red Menace is no more!

From emperors-clothes.com:

Below is our translation of an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is important for three reasons.

First, it flatly contradicts the official US justification for giving billions of dollars to the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, namely that the US and Saudi Arabia were defending so-called freedom fighters against Soviet aggression.

Not so, says Brzezinski. He confirms what opponents have charged: that the US began covert sponsorship of Muslim extremists five months *before* the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. He says that after President Carter authorized the covert action:

"I explained to the president that this support would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets."

Second, the interview is instructive concerning so-called "conspiracy theory." To be sure, there are plenty of nutty theories out there. And of course, there are plenty of just plain wrong theories. But as Brzezinski demonstrates, the US foreign policy establishment did, for want of a better word, conspire. Even as they claimed to oppose Muslim extremism, they knowingly fomented it *as a weapon of policy.* And they lied about what they were doing, pretending they were helping freedom fighters resist an invasion. In other words, deceit on two levels.

Continued at:
http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm

[indepat]

11. What goes around comes again

[JohnyCanuck]

13. Brzezinski, no regrets.

Le Nouvel Observateur: And also, don't you regret having helped future terrorists, having given them weapons and advice?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: What is most important for world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? Some Islamic hotheads or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

http://emperors-clothes.com/interviews/brz.htm

[WilliamPitt]

15. No regrets then

Plenty now. Go look up his more recent statements. He has plenty of regrets now.

[newspeak]

16. Bhutto from Pakistan, in an interview

some years ago, stated that the building up of extremists, Al Quaeda, will be blowback for the US. Our government aided in building them, but did they initially create them? In the Nation magazine, when our government was supporting Al Quada against the Soviets in Afghanistan, an article was questioning why we were funding these extremists who were basically from other countries, instead of funding moderate Afghanis who wanted their country back? We could have actually aided the people of Afghanistan, instead of recruiting an extremist group, mostly consisting of individuals from other countries, that might not have the best interest of the people in Afghanistan.

[Disturbed]

17. Musharef is hanging on to his power.

He is making these statements to Pakistanis. Three assassination attempts have made him acutely aware that his reign is in serious jeopardy.