Taliban came into power because they were better than the thugs the US was supporting

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/752/38879

Afghanistan — an unjust war

Tony Iltis
24 May 2008

<snip>While the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was ostensibly a response to the killing of about 3000 civilians in the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, by December 31, 2001, ABC Radio National was reporting that Western bombing had already taken a higher toll of Afghan civilians.

Since then civilian deaths have not been counted: some are reported as deaths of Taliban fighters while others are not reported at all. In addition to air strikes, civilian deaths are also caused by crossfire and arbitrary violence and terrorism by both pro- and anti-occupation militias. Some estimates put the number of civilian deaths in the millions.

The direct intervention of the US-led forces in 2001 was not the start of Western involvement in Afghanistan. Following a leftist revolution in 1978, whose social base was in the small urban population, the US began arming an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency based on the rural tribal aristocracy, as part of a covert Cold War strategy to draw the neighbouring Soviet Union into an unwinnable war.

The strategy was successful. The Soviet Union invaded in December 1979 and for 10 years was militarily held down by the Mujahideen — as the coalition of rival Afghan Islamist militias were known — and a Saudi-led multinational Islamist force headed by Osama bin Laden. Both forces were run by Pakistani military intelligence (the ISI) under the direction of the US.

This operation, which was financed by the US and Saudi governments and by Afghan heroin exports, directly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and US victory in the Cold War.

The leftist government of Afghanistan outlasted the Soviet Union, however in 1992 it was overthrown by the Mujahideen warlords, who then turned on each other in a devastating civil war. Murder, looting, abduction, torture and rape were combined with an ultra-violent version of religious law that actually owed more to local traditions and the brutalising effects of intergenerational war than to Islamic theology.

In 1996 the Taliban, a religious militia created by the ISI, took control of the capital, Kabul, and 80% of the country. At first people welcomed them for reducing inter-warlord violence but their corrupt and brutal theocracy rapidly alienated the population.

[PDJane]

1. The US founded and funded

what later became the Taliban. Of course, it also founded and funded the Northern Alliance. Oddly enough, the CIA also founded and funded al Quaeda. Maybe if the US would stop playing games, things might settle down? Alternatively, of course, if the war money were invested in infrastructure projects, hiring the Afghanis themselves to build the country.......

[ConsAreLiars]

11. Self-deleted, sorry, posted in the wrong place.

[bluesmail]

16. The Taleban is fiercely anti opium poppies

[Canuckistanian]

2. I've been watching Charlie Wilson's War

And Wilson not only predicted the rise of the militant Taliban, he tried to warn everyone else about it.

The US spent $100's of millions shooting down Soviet helicopters yet didn't spend a penny helping Afghanis rebuild their infrastructure and institutions.

But I'm not sure what to make of the theory that the Soviets were drawn in to Aghanistan.

To me, they saw an opportunity to expand their empire and went for it.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. Zbigniew Brzezinski wasn't shy about taking credit for drawing the USSR into Afghanistan

The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 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?

Q: 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?

Q: 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?

http://www.takeoverworld.info/brzezinski_interview_short.html

The US spent $100's of millions shooting down Soviet helicopters yet didn't spend a penny helping Afghanis rebuild their infrastructure and institutions.

They also spent millions producing jihad preaching, fundamentalist textbooks and shipping them off to Afghanistan. These were the same text books the Western media discussed in shocked tones and told their audiences were used by fundamentalist teachers to brainwash their charges and to inculcate in young Afghanis a jihad mindset, hatred of foreigners and non-Muslims etc.

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.

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?

Nobody with normal intelligence could expect to distribute millions of violent Islamist schoolbooks without influencing school children towards violent Islamism. Therefore one would assume that the unnamed US officials who, we are told, are distressed at these "unintended consequences" must previously have been unaware of the Islamist content of the schoolbooks.

But surely someone was aware. The US government can't write, edit, print and ship millions of violent, Muslim fundamentalist primers into Afghanistan without high officials in the US government approving those primers.

http://www.tenc.net/articles/jared/jihad.htm

[Canuckistanian]

8. Amazing stuff, thanks

As always where the CIA is involved, the story is never simple.

And certainly not ethical.

[Hissyspit]

14. Don't make Charlie Wilson into a hero:

http://www.alternet.org/story/71286

[bluesmail]

17. My thought exactly.

[liberal N proud]

3. The US has a history of giving and taking power

Saddam
Noriega
The Taliban
there are many others

[90-percent]

4. CIA

CIA blowback has been causing the USA to run in circles chasing it's own tail for at least 50 years now.

We create them, then go in and bomb them back to the stone age when they get uppity and dont know their place.

It's as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.

As always, just who the hell is being served by this CIA mayhem? Sure as hell wasn't all the poor souls that died in 9/11, now was it?

-90% Jimmy

[ljm2002]

6. Who is being served?

The war profiteers.

The oil companies.

The authoritarians.

All the forces that we oppose, are being very well served by endless war.

[Arctic Dave]

7. The elites are now doing to the US what they did to every country

they have ever exploited. They are in the process of destroying the government so they can sell off anything that was socially owned and enslave the population for their gain. It worked well to bring down the USSR and they are now using the same strategy to do it to the US. The parallels are so obvious that only the truely deranged will not accept it.

[JohnyCanuck]

9. "A great game"

The "good war" is a bad war
9 Jan 2008

In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the invasion of Afghanistan, which was widely supported in the West as a 'good war' and justifiable response to 9/11, was actually planned months before 9/11 and is the latest instalment of 'a great game'.

"To me, I confess, countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world."
Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898

I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no. She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was Rawa, had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like earthquake victims awaiting rescue.

Rawa is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in that country. There is no organisation on earth like it. It is the high bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, Rawa agents have travelled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at clandestine girls’ schools, ministering to isolated and brutalised women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas. They were the Taliban regime’s implacable foes when the word Taliban was barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly courting the mullahs so that the oil company Unocal could build a pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian.

Indeed, Rawa’s understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a “good war”. When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: “We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorise, yet they hold seats in Karzai’s government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands.”

The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 was “to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11”. The women of Rawa say this is false. In a rare statement on 4 December that went unreported in Britain, they said: “By experience, that the US does not want to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, because then they will have no excuse to stay in Afghanistan and work towards the realisation of their economic, political and strategic interests in the region.”

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=470

[JohnyCanuck]

10. kick n/t

[ConsAreLiars]

12. For photos of Afghanistan taken by the same photographer, Luke Powell, from 1973 to 2003,

go to: http://www.lukepowell.com /

Before Brzezinski started his game, during the inter tribal conflicts that resulted, during the Taliban, and during the further US occupation and brutalization of that poor land.

[defendandprotect]

13. No -- the US created the Taliban and what they later dubbed "Al Qaeda" . . .

it's one and the same ---
The CIA created and set up/funded the Taliban thru Pakistan ---

See Zbigniew Brezinski ... former national security advisor ---

He tells us in his book and in an interview with O'Reilly --- where he was pretty much bragging ---
that "The US went into Afghanistan six months before --- 6 months before! -- the Russians entered Afghanistan." And that we did so ... "In order to bait the Russians into Afghanistan . . .
in hopes of giving them a Vietnam-type experience" . . . !!!!

That's why we set up the Taliban -- to draw together religious fanatics who are the most obsessed
warriors.

Now consider that Nixon armed right-wing religiously fanatical Israel ...

and think about the Middle East ---

[eridani]

15. If you want to fuck with countries, dominate their populations, and grab their resources--

--you need local cat's paws. There just isn't enough raw military power held by any power, evn the US, to get that goal accomplished. The inevitable problem is that the local cat's paws tend to have their own agendas, requiring the would-be dominators to constantly switch sides.

[JohnyCanuck]

18. History does seem to bear out your observation.

Noriega and Saddam are two names that come to mind.

[Disturbed]

19. Afghanistan is a complicated situation.

I highly recommend the book Imperial Hubris for a clearer understanding.

Even though I disagreed with the conclusions, the analysis was enlightening.