Bob Feldman : A People's History of Afghanistan /Conclusion

Iran-Turkmenistan gas pipeline. The Turkmenistan government is apparently still interested in moving forward with a pipeline through Afghanistan. Photo from Tehran Times.
Conclusion: 2001-2010
A People’s History of Afghanistan

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2010

[If you're a Rag Blog reader who wonders how the Pentagon ended up getting stuck "waist deep in the Big Muddy" in Afghanistan (to paraphrase a 1960s Pete Seeger song) -- and still can't understand, "what are we fighting for?" (to paraphrase a 1960s Country Joe McDonald song) -- this 15-part "People's History of Afghanistan" might help you debate more effectively those folks who still don't oppose the planned June 2010 U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan? The entire series can be found here.]

By November 13, 2001, the U.S. government and NATO-backed Northern Alliance coalition of right-wing Mujahideen groups had marched into Kabul and taken control of Kabul from the Taliban’s Afghan government. But apparently the U.S. government-supported Northern Alliance militias also committed a number of war crimes in Afghanistan in late 2001. As Guilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending recalled:

Enemy military losses…went unrecorded. However, a number of war crimes were committed by allies of the United States. For example, on 25 November hundreds of Taliban prisoners were killed in the prison at Mazar-i-Sharif, after a revolt in which a CIA agent who had been interrogating prisoners was killed. Apparently many prisoners were summarily executed once they had been recaptured. The most serious incident concerned the deaths of Taliban and foreign prisoners who were suffocated inside containers. According to a meticulous inquiry, around 3,000 Taliban prisoners were massacred by Northern Alliance forces, an atrocity which by some accounts was perpetrated in the presence of American soldiers. Despite the gravity of these reports, and the known locations of communal graves, the UN declined to carry out an inquiry in order not to embarrass the Afghan and U.S. government...

After the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul, an agreement to eventually begin construction of the proposed Unocal pipeline project in Afghanistan was soon reached. A former Unocal consultant, Zhalamy Khalizad, was named as the Bush II Administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan, and a former Unocal consultant, Hamid Karzai, was soon brought back to Afghanistan by the Bush II Administration to be the new Afghan president in Kabul. (In 2005, Unicol became a subsidiary of a company -- Chevron Texaco -- on whose corporate board former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat before joining the Bush II Administration.)

As Revolution Unending observed, “his exile in the United States... enabled Karzai to gain the backing of the U.S. government and therefore achieve his present position.” According to the same book, Karzai “is the son of a... Pashtun family from Kandahar ” and is “related to the royal family” of Afghanistan, whose members controlled the government of Afghanistan until the 1970s.

But outside of Kabul, “local warlords and militia commanders... were able to take de facto control of their respective areas,” and “Karzai’s tolerance of the warlords has been seen by Afghans in general as a weakness,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Since 30 to 50 percent of the recruits in the Karzai regime’s new Afghan Army of 6,000 troops deserted in 2003, in 2004 the Pentagon still had to spend $11 billion on U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in order to prop up the Karzai regime. As Afghanistan : A Modern History observed:

...The balance of armed forces was weighted heavily on the side of the warlord militias, variously estimated at between 60,000 full time fighters to over 100,000, if one includes "part-timers" from the swollen ranks of the unemployed…

As before, warlords have been able to expand their financial base by imposing customs duties and other taxes on their own account. Some have benefited substantially from smuggling and drug trafficking...The opium crop earned Afghan farmers and traffickers some $2.3 billion, or around 50 percent of the gross domestic product... The crop in Afghanistan accounted for over 75 percent of the world’s illicitly grown opium in 2003... The New York-based Human Rights Watch has produced detailed documentation of the abuses committed with impunity by militia leaders and their followers...

The U.S. soldiers first sent to occupy Afghanistan in late 2001 (who now number between 70,000 and 100,000) were apparently seen by many people in Afghanistan as yet another set of the foreign invaders that have attempted to manipulate Afghanistan’s internal affairs since the 19th-century. As Revolution Unending observed in 2005:

The U.S. forces are unwelcome, especially in the Pashtun areas, where the civilians have complained of harassment. Regularly and predictably, military operations result in civilian casualties... For instance, 42 Afghans died and 181 were wounded on the night of June 30-July 1, 2002, when four villages near Kabraki in the province of Uruzgan were bombed during a marriage ceremony... The treatment of prisoners of war also does not measure up to international standards. In a communique on January 28, 2003 the World Organization Against Torture stated that Taliban detained by the Americans had been subjected to torture in CIA interrogation centers, particularly at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and on the island of Diego Garcia..."

Around 1,025 U.S. soldiers have been killed and around 5,275 have been wounded in Afghanistan since October 2001 (along with around 500 troops killed from other nations whose governments agreed to send troops to fight with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] -- which, besides its 70,000 to 100,000 U.S. soldiers, now includes 38,000 troops from other nations).

But the number of Afghan civilian casualties produced by the Pentagon’s war in Afghanistan since October 2001 has been far greater. As James Lucas’s “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan” article, for example, noted, “since the U.S. started its bombing in 2001 an estimated 7,309 Afghan civilians have been killed by U.S.-led forces as of June 20, 2008, according to an estimate made by University of New Hampshire Professor Mark Herold.”

In his “ America ’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan ” article, Lucas also summarized what life is apparently like for the people of Afghanistan in 2010:

Today the ordinary Afghan is caught between three forces: the U.S., the Taliban, and the puppet government composed of former members of the Mujahideen whom many Afghans would like to have tried as war criminals. Also, the Upper House of Parliament is not a democratic institution, its members being appointed by the President... Up to 60% of the deputies in the Lower House are directly or indirectly connected to current and past human rights abuses.

Under the newly established government in 2001, women were allowed to once again work and go to school. Nevertheless, the abuse of women continues, since the government is too weak to enforce many of the laws, especially in the rural areas.

According to Human Rights Watch, "The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her."

...About one in ten Afghans is disabled, mostly due to the wars and landmines. Their life expectancy is about 43 years...

Although more than 3.7 million Afghan refugees have returned to their homes in the past six years, several million still live in Pakistan and Iran. About 132,000 people are internally displaced as a result of drought, violence and instability. Furthermore, there are reportedly about 400,000 orphans in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan suffers from an unemployment rate of 40 percent and most of those who have jobs earn only meager wages. Many youth joined the Mujahideen or Taliban in order to receive some food, shelter and income. The average educational level of Afghans is 1.7 years of schooling, which severely limits their job opportunities. As many as 18 million Afghans still live on less than $2 a day.

..."On their land there are still about 10 million mines which cause loss of life and limbs and reduces the amount of land available for farming...

But the Turkmenistan government is apparently still “interested in moving forward with a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan,” according to a Feb. 15, 2010 UPI article. The same article noted that the proposed 1,044-mile Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India [TAPI] pipeline “is seen as a rival to a long-delayed natural gas pipeline from the Iranian South Pars gas field” and “TAPI is favored by Western powers over the South Pars option because of diplomatic concerns with dealing with Iran.”

And since much of the $230 billion that the U.S. War Machine has spent on the endless war in Afghanistan between October 2001 and the end of 2009 has gone to private war contractors, the recipients of the Pentagon’s lucrative war contracts have also apparently profited much more from the 21st-century historical situation in Afghanistan than have the people of Afghanistan.

So, not surprisingly, the Pentagon is still apparently planning to use some of the additional 30,000 U.S. troops sent to Afghanistan in 2010 in a planned military offensive against the Taliban in Kandahar this June 2010 that it has nicknamed “Operation Omid.”

The word “omid” means “hope” in the Dari language of Afghanistan. Yet -- as this people’s history of Afghanistan indicates -- people in Afghanistan are not likely to accept the endless presence in their country of still more foreign troops. Whether they come from the UK, from India, from Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia, from Russia, from the United States, from Canada, from NATO, or from the ISAF.

So it’s not necessarily historically inevitable that a Taliban guerrilla force of about 25,000 Afghan fighters will be easily defeated militarily by the Obama Administration’s troops in 2010, if the U.S. troops continue to be seen as foreign invaders by most people in Afghanistan in 2010. As an Afghan farmer in Kandahar named Abdul Salaam recently told the Global Post (April 19, 2010): “You cannot bring peace through war.”

End of series.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

• The entire series can be found here.

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Follow the Poppies : Opium, Afghanistan, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Soldier among the poppies at opium field in Afghanistan. Image from Aftermath News.
Working with the warlords:
Afghanistan and the heroin trade

The U.S. used the international heroin network to serve its geopolitical aims in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / May 24, 2010

When George W. Bush and Tony Blair decided to first attack Afghanistan, one consideration was bringing enough stability to run a pipeline down through the country to Pakistan. One wonders if Blair and Bush gave any thought to the heroin trade when they decided to attack the Taliban.

Between 1991 and 2003, about 60 tons of heroin from Afghanistan went to wholesalers along the Volga and in the Urals Districts of Russia. Who knows how much went to the rest of Russia. Northern Afghanistan is the bridgehead for moving drugs into Russia. Far more Afghan heroin went to Europe, the largest single consumer of heroin.

Drugs and banks

In June, 2003, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan estimated that the international drug trade was worth between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year. The banks that launder this money have a strong incentive to see that the drug trade continues. The Independent reported on February 28, 2004, that, in cash terms, narcotics ranked third in world trade, following oil and arms. Drugs are particularly important because they constitute a form of currency vital to the underworld, international crime, and intelligence agencies.

Making this point could mislead readers into thinking that a high wall separates legitimate and illegitimate transactions. Today, business transactions have become so complex that many so-called legitimate businesses have found it necessary to deal with international criminal organizations and to use their currency of choice, drugs. All too often it is very hard to distinguish between government intelligence agencies and the criminal elements they must cooperate with, and the welfare of some politicians also depends upon the free flow of drugs. Heroin constitutes but one part of that trade.

By then between 80 and 90% of the world’s heroin was coming from Afghanistan. In 2007, the country produced 8,200 tons of opium poppies. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the Taliban earns from $90 to $400 million from drugs. Most experts place the figure at $125 billion and add that this includes taxes it imposes upon chemicals used to process opium.

The whole country’s annual drug take is somewhere between $2.8 and $3.4 billion. Much of that money goes to line the pockets of Afghan police and officials. A 2008 U.S. Senate report put the value of the transnational sales of all Afghan opiates at between $400 and 500 billion in street value. Some of that found its way to western chemical companies via doubtful routes. Of that amount, about $70 billion is heroin. Up to 10% of the heroin money moves through an informal banking system called hawala. The rest is laundered through Western banks.

Some financial analysts claim that the hundreds of billions in narco-dollars held by huge financial institutions provided the liquidity that made it possible to pull the world back from the potential wreckage of its financial system.

Antonio Maria Costa of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said, “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” Costa added, “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor."

Afghanistan’s poppies are enormously important in today’s world, but it is difficult to sort out how drugs have influenced U.S. policy there.


Engineer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hezb-i Islami, addressing a rally in Peshawar, Pakistan, November 1987. Photo by Mohammad Karim / Neiman Reports.

Fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan

In the 1980s, the C.I.A. helped drug lords become mujahidin leaders. One was Gulbuddin Hekmatya who dominated the local drug trade and became the world’s most important heroin trafficker. Of course, these leaders were encouraged to finance their insurgency through drug sales. With the blessing of the Americans, the drug lords ordered the peasants to raise many poppies. The drug barons were also encouraged to spread heroin to the Russian forces, and this effort was largely successful. Within two years, Afghanistan was the world’s main heroin producer.

Drugs moved from the drug lords to Soviet troops with the help of reputed Russian crime figures such as Vladimir Filin and Aleksei Likhvintsev. They were part of what Russians call “OPS,” an organized crime society. According to Indian observer Theruvath Raman, the C.I.A. controlled this flow.

Since then, massive quantities of heroin have made their way into Russia with the help of an international drug network and likely successor to the BCCI that includes the Russian mafia and Islamic extremists there. Drug addiction there is now as serious as the alcohol problem.

While attempting to combat Islamic extremists in the Middle East, the U.S. was probably working with elements of the Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami in Russia. It is a “liberation army” intent upon creating an Islamic caliphate in Central Asia. More recently, it appears that elements in the Russian government and military are sharing business with the narco-barons and bringing some order to the trade by squeezing out the ethnic criminal/drug groups.

A worldwide drugs/arms network takes form

The Russian mafia soon became a major player in moving drugs and arms throughout the world. Many of the arms came from the arsenals of the collapsed Soviet Union that were not located on Russian territory. Some of the leaders in this criminal underground were former intelligence officers, and some of them are highly educated and even respected scholars.

These Russians are the most visible element in a worldwide network that seems to control the movement of drugs in most places, other than the route from Burma to South China. There is much speculation about the extent of U.S. cooperation with this network, and especially its Russian members.

In 1994, the U.S. began shipping arms into Angola through Victor Bout of the OPS, whom the U.S. later employed in Iraq, and is now seeking to arrest. The overthrow of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania and the fall of Shevardnadze in Georgia also involved cooperation with the network. It is possible that the “tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan was another joint project. Far West, LLC, an arm of the Russian mob that supposedly specializes in intelligence consulting, moved into Kyrgyzstan after the fall of Askar Akayev, and heroin traffic through that land soon trebled.

Whatever U.S. and Western involvement there was in these nasty activities was masked by various cut-outs. As the Wall Street Journal reported in respect to Georgia, that was work of “a raft of non-government organizations... supported by American and other foundations.” One of the officers of Far West has said that an unnamed American firm had invested in it. Far West has done business with Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR Halliburton), and Diligence Iraq LLC, a private military firm considered a CIA. spin-off. It is tied to Diligence Middle East, which has links to New Bridge Strategies, which is linked to Neil Bush.

It is known that representatives of the drug network and people close to the CIA met in 1999 under the aegis of Adnan Khashoggi at Beaulieu, France. He has been a CIA asset since the 1960s when he was passing Lockheed money to Saudi officials. One topic at the meeting must have been affairs in the former Yugoslavia, where Kosovo was becoming a major drug entrepot.

Without the knowledge of their defense ministry, Russian paratroopers on June 11, 1999, seized the Slatina airport, giving Russia a base in Kosovo. This was an instance in which the U.S. and the Russian narco-barons were not on the same page. Wesley Clark ordered General Sir Mike Jackson to oust the Russians, but the Brit declined to “start World War Three for him.”

The Russians remained there until 2003, when they shifted their main platform for the export of drugs to Novorossiysk on the Black Sea. That port and St. Petersburg are used to export cocaine brought in from Columbia.

Saudi millionare Adnan Khashoggi in his New York apartment in 1987. Photo by Ted Thai / Life.

The U.S. and the Caucuses

The Caspian area in 1999 was estimated to have a reserve of 200 billion barrels of black gold or oil. Two years later, it appeared that the reserve was about one tenth that amount.

In December, 1999, the United States again began to play a major role in Turcic, in Central Asia. It sent representatives to a meeting in Azerbaijan where arrangements were made to train mujahedeen from the Caucases and Central/South Asia and also Arabs to assist Chechen rebels. U.S. “private security companies” were used to evade the international embargo against helping the Chechen rebels.

The thinking was that higher levels of violence would dissuade Western investors from making oil deals with Russia. The U.S. was promoting the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline to get oil from the Caspian Basin to the Mediterranean. James Baker III, Adnan Khashoggi, and Lord Mc Alpine had created a Caucasian Common Market to serve this effort. It is administering $3 billion in United States development funds for infrastructure projects in the area. The Bush administration spent $11 in Georgia to train a pipeline protection battalion.

The US intervenes in Afghanistan

The Taliban took over the Afghan drug trade in 1994, with the CIA’s consent, and they seized power in 1996. Relations between the Taliban and the U.S. soured, and in July, 2000, the Taliban moved to end poppy cultivation, calling it un-Islamic. Of course, they were probably doing this to put pressure on the West. The long-term consequences of this currency contraction could have dealt a serious blow to Western financial systems.

Drying up that crop deprived Western banks of billions in new deposits. At that time, Afghanistan produced two-thirds of the world’s heroin, and the absence of new narco-dollars could damage the finanCIAl system. Le Monde and the IMF estimated that about $300 billion in Afghan heroin money had been making its way to Wall Street. Narco-dollars provided needed liquidity to the American and Western financial markets.

The Taliban decision also hurt the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Ironically, the ban also made Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, major drug operators, far less valuable to the Pakistani spooks. About 60% of Pakistan’s GDP also came from drugs, and the Taliban’s move was a serious blow to its neighbor.

Of course, the Taliban also alienated the Afghan drug lords when they dried up 97% of the opium poppy crop. Banning the drug trade alienated Afghan drug lords, many of whom were in the Northern Alliance. In 2001, the United States began reestablishing close ties with Afghan drug lords, perhaps as preparation for making war in that country.

Drug trafficker Ahmad Shah Massoud became very important to American planners because his guerrilla attacks on the Taliban were often successful. Haji Zaman, “Mr. Ten Percent,” another drug lord, was another important American ally then. He fled to Dijon, France, when the Taliban seized Jalalabad, and the U.S. and British representatives persuaded him to return to Afghanistan.

War lords Hazrat Ali, left, and Haji Zaman. Image from Rawa News.
With the help of Afghan and Pakistani drug lords, Hamid Karzai, a former Unocal employee, gathered support in Pashtun areas. The U.S. seems to have turned a blind eye to the heroin reserves and refineries kept maintained by these people.

General Tommy Franks gave drug barons Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman the job of trapping and bringing in Osama bin Laden, who was known to be at Tora Bora. They moved very slowly, not attacking until the bombing had stopped four days before. There was plenty of time for Osama to escape and leave behind a rear guard.

The intelligence chief of Eastern Shura, Pir Baksh Bardiwal, had warned that it was a great mistake to use the two drug lords. They had no interest in seeing the power of Kabul extend to their operations Nangahar Province. U.S. journalist Philip Smucker heard that one of Hazrat Ali’s low level commanders, Ilyas Khel, provided an escort for Bin Laden and showed the Arabs how to escape.

Afghan war lords and poppies

The successful war restored to power brutal war lords whose rule was worse than that of the Taliban. The U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was sharply diminished, and the Bush administration spent very little on nation-building and development. Afghan poppy growing mushroomed, and very little was done about it.

There was talk about eradicating the poppy crop, but some in Washington said that such a step would destabilize the regime in Pakistan. In 2002, a former Indian official offered another reason why the Americans could not move against the Afghan poppy crop:

...this marked lack of success in the heroin front is due to the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops, is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of the Al Qaeda.

The country produces 8,250 metric tons of opium poppies every year, and and it is moved by trucks by refineries. If the trucks were stopped, the refineries would go out of business. There are reports that India supports some refineries which generate money for insurgents in Pakistan. The Israelis did the same for insurgents in Iran.

Authorities in neighboring Tajikistan complain that neither the U.S. nor NATO is moving against the Afghan drug lords. The Tajikistan Drug Control Agency’s Avaz Yuldashov noted: “Our intelligence shows there are 400 labs making heroin there, and 80 of them are situated along our border.” He added that drug money from Afghanistan pays for international terrorism. In addition there are many labs in Pakistan to process Afghan poppies. The drugs are then shipped out of Karachi. Most Afghan drugs end up in Turkey, a NATO member, from whence they are moved to Europe.

Some drug lords are allied with President Karzai, and his half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, head of the Kandahar provincial council, has been accused of being in the drug trade. It is said that he ships drugs to Iran. If so, he would have to pay some Taliban tolls to keep the product moving.

Those drugs could be used in Iran, but much of that cargo goes to Russia via Iran. Much has been written about warlords tied to Wali benefiting from a $2.16 billion U.S. contract for trucking services. Current and former intelligence officials tell reporters that Wali has been on the C.I.A. payroll for eight years.

Has the U.S. been dealing heroin?

It is difficult to establish whether the U.S is benefiting directly and financially from the Afghan drug trade. Political scientist Vladimir Filin, once head of Far West, told an interviewer that this is the case. He noted that, “They control Bagram airfield from where the Air Force transport planes fly to a U.S. base in Germany.” From there, heroin goes to “other U.S. bases and installations in Europe.” Much is shipped to Kosovo where the Kosovo Albanian mafia move it it “back to Germany and other EU countries.”

Afghan poppy fields. Photo from Douglas606 / Flickr.
In time, he predicted, U.S. drug centers will be shifted to Pozan, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria because those host countries tolerate high levels of corruption. He estimated that America was moving between 15 and 20 tons into Europe per year, That is not a huge share of the world drug trade. However, other Russian observers place the tonnage at a much higher level and offer many more details about how the heroin is taken out and where it goes . General Mahmut Gareev, who commanded Soviet troops in Afghanistan, said:

Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan brings them about 50 billion dollars a year -- which fully covers the expenses tied to keeping their troops there. Essentially, they are not going to interfere and stop the production of drugs.

General Khodaidad, the Afghan counternarcotics minister, also said the Americans and British are stockpiling the opium poppies in the provinces they control, and he added that NATO forces often tax the production. Former F.B.I. translator Sybel Edmonds told Congress that some military planes were used to move the heroin, but she was twice silenced by the Bush administration through the state secret privilege.

Dennis Dayle, a former DEA. agent said:

In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the C.I.A.

No one wants to believe that our government is deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Perhaps none of these sources can be believed. However, we do know that the U.S. was selling drugs to its troops in Vietnam and moving some drugs out of Southeast Asia then. At the very least, it was also protecting Nicaraguan Contras who moved drugs into the U.S. to pay for weapons. Maybe there is a pattern here. Conversely, there seems to be a long-standing pattern of mainstream media not looking into these matters.

Two problems

The U.S. used the international heroin network to serve its geopolitical aims in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Peter Dale Scott, upon whose solid work this piece is partially based, has suggested that the drug/arms network may have grown so powerful that it is no longer just a tool to be used by the U.S. government. It may have its own agenda and the ability to bend U.S. policy to serve its objectives.

The present situation is very different from the days when the U.S. relied on private firms run by retired U.S. officials and politicians to carry out illicit weapons transactions or help the Nicaraguan Contras move drugs.

A second problem is that American aims in Afghanistan may have conflicted with those of the local drug lords. The drug industry thrives where state power is weak, where nothing can be done about peasants growing poppies, and the state cannot move against refineries and stockpiles.

The United States claimed that it wanted to expand state power and to bring order and stability to Afghanistan. Order was also needed if headway was to be made on the TAPI pipeline that was critical to U.S.-owned electrical facilities in India. Possibly, American planners thought that these conflicting interests could be reconciled. Clearly, the drug barons thought otherwise. At this moment, it appears that the TAPI venture could be doomed.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. A retired history professor, he also blogs at Sherm Says and on DailyKos.]

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Curbing John O'Neill : The Pipeline and the Saudi-Al Qaeda Connection

The late John P. O'Neill, former assistant director of the FBI, saw threat of bin Laden early on. O'Neill's attempts to investigate connections with Saudis were thwarted.

John O’Neill, the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline:
The Saudis, the Bushes and bin Laden

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / November 13, 2009

The terrorist attack on the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001, was successful in part because of flaws in this nation’s counterinsurgency efforts. There was a deliberate policy of avoiding careful scrutiny of what Saudis were doing in the United States.

Saudi ties to Al Qaeda were not examined closely. Friendship with Saudi Arabia was considered crucial for a number of reasons. One important priority was obtaining Saudi help in advancing an American controlled pipeline to bring Caspian natural gas to Pakistan and India.

Al Qaeda and the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline

The U.S. had obtained a report written by Mohammed Atef, head of military operations for Al Qaeda. It stated that the terrorist organization was alarmed by secret Taliban negotiations with the American oil companies who wanted to build the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline, fearing it would increase U.S. influence in Afghanistan. The August 1998 bombing of the two embassies in Africa was most probably an effort to end the Taliban-U.S. talks about the pipeline. It was clear that Al Qaeda had great influence within the Taliban and that it was working against an American-controlled pipeline.

This made it essential that the U.S. obtain the help of the Saudis, who were pumping money into Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia was in a position to help the United States bring about the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline, The Saudis had a standing interest in moving oil across Afghanistan going back to their funding of the Taliban in the 1970s and 1980s. They were doing this even before the U.S.

Later, the American companies used the Saudi intelligence people to begin talks with the Taliban. Enron served as a consultant for Unocal. Price Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, made several trips to Afghanistan on behalf of the energy firms. He was close to the Bin Laden family and it is said that he promised them the construction contract in return for a kickback for the Saudi royal family. Some link his firing to the breakdown of pipeline talks in August, 2001.

Red Herring magazine reported that George W. Bush and his father were not in agreement on the importance of keeping close ties to Saudi Arabia and that they argued about this at Kennebunkport. After this, the Boston Herald, prompted by friends of the young president, ran an expose of the ties of some White House officials to Saudi Arabia and called it an “obscene conflict of interest.” The expose was part of a debate going on at the highest levels of government. There were also leaks from the White House about Saudi ties to terrorism.

Cheney succeeded in changing the president’s view of the Saudis perhaps by pointing out all his family’s ties to the Saudi royal house. King Abdullah’s visit to the Bushes demonstrates that a shift had occurred. The angered Israelis started leaking information on Saudi ties to terrorism.

George W. Bush with Saudi King Faisal.
'Hands-off' investigating the Saudis

Since the administration of George H.W. Bush, there had been a policy of not looking closely into the activities of Saudis in the United States. In 1998, Clinton backed away from that policy; he permitted the FBI to examine the activities of Saudis in the U.S. and Saudi ties to Al Qaeda. The Bush administration reverted to the “hands off” policy and strengthened it. An American intelligence source told the Guardian that the “hands off” order was necessary to prevent it from becoming public that some Saudis were paying protection money to bin Laden.

According to Greg Palast, an American journalist working in London, “A group of well-placed sources -- not-all-too-savory-spooks and arms dealers -- told my BBC team that before September 11 the U.S. government had turned away evidence of Saudi billionaires funding Osama bin Laden’s network.” He continued, “we got our hands on documents that backed up the story that FBI and CIA investigations had been slowed by the Clinton administration, then killed by Bush Jr. when those inquiries might upset Saudi interests.” Another reason was allegedly “Arbusto” and ”Carlyle,” terms that refer to the Bush’s business ties with Saudis.

John Loftus, a former federal prosecutor who claims to have sources within the intelligence community, claimed that Vice President Cheney ordered the FBI and intelligence agencies not to investigate Al Qaeda from January to August because these probes might endanger efforts to negotiate a pipeline deal with Afghanistan. Loftus also reported that Enron was involved in these investigations. Unfortunately, we only have the former prosecutor’s word for all this. We do know that after the brief U.S. War in Afghanistan the pipeline project was again alive and well and slated to terminate at a Pakistan city not too far from an Enron power plant in India that was in desperate need of cheap fuel.

The Guardian obtained FBI documents that indicated there were restrictions on investigating possible terrorist plots. Shown on the BBC television program NewsNight, the file was coded “199,” which was a designation for national security cases. The material indicated the FBI could not investigate two of bin Laden’s relatives who lived in Falls Church, Virginia. Abdullah and Omar bin Laden were associated with a suspected terrorist organization, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) which had an office there. Abdullah was the director of the U.S. branch of WAMY.

Two of the September 11 hijackers used a false address several blocks away from the office. The public statements of two Chicago-based FBI men indicate that from the late 1990s on there was a policy of not opening criminal investigations of potential Islamic terrorists or the financial networks that supported them. It seems clear that the White House had put counterterrorism planning on the back burner.

John P. O’Neill’s Frustrations

The late John P. O’Neill was the most active FBI agent in investigating Al Qaeda. He eventually rose to the rank of assistant director. Earlier than almost anyone else, he saw Osama bin Laden for what he was -- a great threat to the security of the United States. He was obsessed with Bin Laden and told anyone who would listen about the terrorist and his vile network.

In 1997, O’Neill was special agent in charge of national security programs in the New York office. Working around the clock, he coordinated the effort to catch Ramzi Yousef. When ABC News interviewed Osama bin Laden, the producer formulated questions based on discussions with O’Neill. His messy personal life and tendency to bend the rules slowed his advancement. O’Neill could be brutally honest and his direct ways alienated people. When returning from an unsuccessful trip to Saudi Arabia with Director Louis Freeh, he said, “ They didn’t give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.”’ The director had said it was a successful operation, and did not speak to O’Neill for the next twelve hours of flight.

O’ Neill was aware of the Mohammed Atef document, which made it clear that Al Qaeda did not want a U.S.-dominated dual pipeline crossing Afghanistan. He thought concerns about oil led the administration to prevent investigations of Saudi activities in the U.S. John O’Neill resigned shortly after an article criticizing him appeared in the New York Times. He had already been removed from the fast career advancement track, and he thought that interim director Tom Pickard planted the article because incoming director Robert Mueller wanted to replace O’Neill with a minion of the Bushes. O’Neill became director of security at the World Trade Center and died trying to save lives on September 11. The truth of O’Neill’s claims about the Bush administration’s quashing of anti-terrorist activities may have gone to the grave with him.

John O’Neill’s knowledge of the Mohammed Atef document would have led him to see the connection between oil and terrorism and to focus on the Saudi-Taliban-Al Qaeda connection. He later confided to French investigators that concern for oil was behind the Bush Administration’s reluctance to do much about possible terrorism.

His investigations were continually shut down, and he began seeking information from French intelligence by using two reporters, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Both journalist cutouts were experts on oil and terrorism and were consultants for French intelligence. They later wrote The Forbidden Truth. Perhaps the French government permitted O’Neill to learn more because it had been cut out of the Caspian oil deals. O’Neill and another dissenter Robert Baer of the CIA would be forced into retirement in part due to their efforts to probe Saudi ties to terrorists. Much relevant information in Baer’s book, See No Evil, was blacked out by the CIA.

From 1995, the FBI and CIA operated a computer program called “Alex” that tracked Al Qaeda communications. O’Neill was the chief CIA link to the program and Michael Scheuer, was the key CIA figure in “Station Alex” at Langley. They soon learned that Al Qaeda was involved in the diamond trade, drug and arms smuggling, and teen sex businesses. Scheuer and his CIA people, in the words of an O’Neill associate “despised the FBI and they despised John O’Neill.” A CIA officer added that the working relationship with the flashy O’Neill was often very poor.

Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, with Faisal al-Saud, the Saudi king in the middle of the 20th century. Photo from CNN.
When O’Neill began to learn too much about Al Qaeda, his access to Alex information was lifted. O’Neill took to asking French intelligence to monitor Al Qaeda telephone calls. Scheuer resigned when he decided that the Bush administration was not doing enough about Al Qaeda. Soon the Bush Administration shut down Alex, just as it closed its military counterpart, “Able Danger.”

O’Neill had learned that his own agency continually stymied his investigative leads and he had taken to relying on the DEA and French intelligence for help. His frustrations began to mount when he was sent to Aden in 2000 to investigate the attack on the USS Cole. He received little cooperation there from local authorities and was ordered out of Yemen by the U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who gave him the cold shoulder from the outset. Bodine wanted him to dismiss his bodyguard even though O’Neill thought Mossad might move against him because he was open to the possibility that Israel was behind the Cole incident.

O’Neill foolishly spoke openly about Abu Nidal, leader of Black September, probably being a Mossad operative. She did not back him when the Yemeni authorities refused to let him interview the people who saw the explosion, to see the hat of one of the alleged attackers, or to sample sludge in the area. He wanted an explosives analysis done on the mud beneath the ship and a DNA study of hat of one of the two alleged bombers. One former FBI agent believes O’Neill was removed out of fear that he would discover that the ship had been hit by an Israeli missile. In 2001, he wanted to return to Yemen but Bodine would not give him a clearance. In February, 2001, the Yemeni Minister of the Interior announced that he had found no evidence linking the attack to Al Qaeda.

It was natural for O’Neill to rely upon the French because they had the best information in the West on Arab terrorists. They had concluded that an Arab team of 10 under a Yemeni was trained to assault a ship in 1999 at Al Qaeda’s Darounta, Afghanistan base. However, the team did not use its training and was not responsible for the Cole bombing. O’Neill probably learned this from them.

The French looked into two of their nationals who were at the Darouta training camp and found that these people worked with Muslim rebels in Bosnia. The insurgency was largely supported by western intelligence agencies and many of the funds came from the Riggs Bank account of the Bosnian Defense Fund, which was operated by American Neo-Conservatives. Much of their money came from the Middle East, including the Saudi and Egyptian governments. Some of these funds spilled over to Al Qaeda, which had operative in Bosnia working with the Islamic insurgency.

Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill took steps to dry up Al Qaeda funds and was putting pressure on Middle Eastern governments to provide information on how money from that region reached Al Qaeda. It is likely that these investigative activities generated enough opposition to result in his ouster. David D. Aufhauser, Treasury’s General Counsel, soon followed O’Neill into the private sector. He has spearheaded the effort to look into Al Qaeda financing.

In 2000, John O’Neill joined 150 other FBI agents in attending a retirement seminar in Orlando. His briefcase was stolen there, and it contained classified e-mail and a report on anti-terrorist activities. Ninety minutes after he missed the briefcase, it turned up in another hotel. A cigar cutter, a lighter and pen were missing, but the sensitive material was there. It had to be assumed that this information could have been copied.

The bureau investigated the matter and cleared O’Neill of all charges of negligence. It also said the documents had not been touched, but it is hard to imagine how that could have been established. Still, his reputation had been badly tarnished. The loss of the briefcase was used to force him to go through with retirement, and the story was later leaked when there was a chance that he would replace Richard Clarke as the new Bush administration’s chief anti-terrorism advisor. Clarke and O’Neill were friends and allies, and Clarke wanted O’Neill to be his replacement. The FBI refused to investigate the leak, despite a request to do so from the bureau chief in New York City. As it turned out, Clarke remained at the NSC but with a less important title.

The briefcase also had information that showed that O’Neill knew about Michael Dick’s investigation of Israeli agents, working for a moving company in New York and New Jersey. Dick was also aware of the Israeli agents who came to the United States under the cover of marketing art. They were shriveling all sorts of federal facilities, especially those of the DEA. They were also spying on DEA agents and FBI agents. The “Israeli artists” also followed Arabs who would later be accused of involvement in the 9/11 plot.

By 2000, he was busy trying to find Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States, but he was soon taken out of action and assigned to deskwork. Janet Parker, a Seattle veterinarian and O’Neill friend, said that O’ Neill’s superior, Tom Picard, prevented O’Neill from getting a wire tap on Shadrack Manyathella, who was tied to probably double agent Ali Mohammed and Mohammed Atta, possible ring leader of 9/11. Parker and O’Neill were keeping track of one cell through her foster daughter, who had previous ties with the terrorists.

John O’Neill resigned soon after the second Bush took power. O’Neill told two respected French investigators, “All of the answers, all of the clues allowing us to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia. ” O’Neill was extremely frustrated by the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism, claiming the administration had also made it more difficult to investigate Saudis.

O’Neill retired on August 22, after thirty years of service. He immediately took up his duties as head of security at the World Trade Center on behalf of Kroll Associates and occupied his office on the 34th floor of the North Tower. While trying to rescue people in the South Tire, he lost his life. In November 2001, weapons inspector Richard Butler told TV investigator Paula Zahn, “The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration -- the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil -- an oil pipeline across Afghanistan."

It is now nine years later, and the American mainstream media still has not investigated what Butler called “the most explosive charge.” Were there, and are there restraints on the way intelligence people and the FBI deal with Saudi and Pakistani ties to terrorists? If we knew more about how important the gas pipeline is to the .US., we might be in a better position to understand why so many people in power insist on escalating the present war in Afghanistan.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a retired history teacher. Sherm spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go here.]

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• Sherman DeBrosse : Pipeline Politics and the Afghanistan War by Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / Nov. 6, 2009

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Sherman DeBrosse : Pipeline Politics and the Afghanistan War

Worth all the blood?
The Trans Afghanistan Pipeline

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2009

President Barack Obama recently honored eighteen fallen American soldiers at a midnight ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Let us hope that none of these heroes died in order to pave the way for the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline.

Advocates of the TAP -- sometimes known as TAPI -- see it as a modern-day extension of the ancient Silk Road. Congress has passed two Silk Road Strategy Acts (1999-2006) that essentially voice strong support for projecting U.S. military and economic power into the Eurasian Corridor in Central Asia. Talk about moving natural gas on the TAP does not pass the lips of our politicians or pundits, but has been a big factor in our dealings with Afghanistan since the 1990s.

Operation Enduring Freedom was about terrorism, but much more was involved. Noam Chomsky has reminded us that the pipeline would sharply reduce the region’s dependency upon Iran for energy. There is also the matter of competition with Russia. In September, Zamir Kabulov, Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, said that the “U.S. and its allies are competing with Russia for influence in the energy-rich region… Afghanistan remains a strategic prize because of its location.”

The Clinton and Bush administrations both sought stability in Afghanistan to permit California-based construction of a planned twin pipelines -- Caspian natural gas and oil -- to take Caspian fuels through Afghanistan into Pakistan and India. TAP only briefly involved oil as well as gas; it is now a natural gas venture.

A major benefit is that it would provide Caspian fuel not controlled by Russia’s Gazprom. It would begin in the Daulatabad gas field and bring gas to Pakistan and India. The line would also outflank a proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) line that would probably benefit China and its China National Petroleum Corporation. India has been hedging its bets by using the second line with Iran and China, and there were some breakthroughs in the negotiations with Iran in 2008.

The United States, of course, has been actively opposing the project, in part because it would hasten economic development in Iran. The U.S. is pressuring India to withdraw from discussions of the IPI and not to agree to buy natural gas from the IPI. Iran is pressing India for a definite commitment and is threatening to go it alone, with the help of China. Recent reverses in the Afghan War have given new life to prospects for the IPI.

There is no way of knowing how important the pipeline is as a motive for the Afghan War. All we can do is review the facts.

Bridas vs. U.S. oil

The 1040 mile pipeline was the idea of Carlos A. Budgheroni of Bridas, an Argentine firm. In 1995, he thought he had a secure agreement with Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to develop the project. He invited California-based Unocal to join his consortium, but the American firm soon elbowed out Bridas and launched its own consortium. In March 1995 the governments of Turkmenistan and Pakistan signed a memorandum of agreement to cooperate on the pipeline.

Unocal created the Central Asian Gas and Pipeline Consortium in August 1996, with Unocal holding 46.5 %. The government of Turkmenistan had some involvement and by 2000, Halliburton was in Turkmenistan to provide “integrated drilling services with an estimated value of $30 million for the total package." There were firms from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, and South Korea.

Unocal, which was to be purchased by Chevron, soon began courting the Taliban faction and brought some of its leaders to its headquarters in Sugarland, Texas, in 1997. The delegation, led by Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, visited Unocal headquarters in Sugarland, toured NASA Space Center facilities, and visited the Houston Zoo. The corporation sponsored the training of Afghans in oil technology at the University of Nebraska, but soon backed off and gave the impression it was no longer interested in the Afghan venture It seemed that the desired deal was about to be signed, but the Taliban seemed to lose interest in dealing with the U.S .

The Taliban, which had been created with the help of the U.S. and Pakistan, was seen as a vehicle for providing stability in Afghanistan. It had a bad record on its treatment of women and on human rights, but the U.S. and Unocal still supported it. In 1996, the Taliban gained the upper hand in the civil war when it occupied Kabul. At that time it invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan as a guest.

The Taliban’s honored guest supported Bridas. His engineers had taken the trouble to sip tea with Afghan leaders, and some of the Taliban agreed with Bin Laden that the contract should go to Bridas. He also offered to let Afghanistan tap some of the gas from the line, while the Americans were not promising that. The French newspaper Le Figaro reported that U.S. intelligence people maintained contacts with Bin Laden in hopes that he could find a way to renew his ties with the United States. An agent met with him in July, 2001 but could not restore ties. Bin Laden remained angry that there were U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, which he considered holy soil.

Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai and President George W. Bush.
Unocal employed two influential Pashtuns -- Taliban backer Kalmay Khalizad, a Chicago Ph.D., and Hamid Karzai, leader of the Pashtun Durrani tribe who also had ties to the royal family. Khalizad was to be on the Bush National Security Council, and Karzai would preside over the regime that U.S. would install in Afghanistan. Patrick Martin has written, “If history had skipped over September 11 and the events of that day had never happened, it is very likely that the United States would have gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the same schedule.”

In January, 1998, the Taliban selected CentGas over the Argentine firm to build the pipelines. The Russians pulled out of the deal in June. Due to Al Qaeda’s bombing of two African embassies, the Clinton administration, in 1998, banned further negotiations with Afghanistan.

Enron and the line

Unocal suspended activities in pursuit of the pipeline, in December, 1998, but Enron quietly began to take a leadership role. Enron was facing a financial crisis, and the pipeline would make Enron lands in the Caspian Basin very valuable. Enron had just purchased enormous tracts of land in Turkmenistan and gambled that the pipeline would make the acquisitions very profitable. Construction of the TAP would also make it possible to get cheap natural gas to the Dabhol, India, power plant, which was then a huge financial liability for Enron and General Electric.

Bush policy toward Afghanistan

The Bush administration, in early 2001, lifted the Clinton ban, probably to give Enron one last chance to negotiate a successful pipeline deal and possibly reverse its fortunes. Secretary of State Colin Powell quickly gave the Taliban $43 million for “humanitarian purposes.” It is possible that the younger Bush knew nothing about the pipeline deal. Condoleezza Rice was a former member of the Chevron board, but it should be recalled that she did not see the Phoenix memo on terrorism before 9/11. It was thought essential that relations with Saudi Arabia improve if the pipeline negotiations were to be successful.

The effort to force the Taliban to accept U.S. demands was probably related to attempts to assist Enron Corporation avoid financial shipwreck. If a coalition government emerged quickly in Afghanistan, it was believed conditions would be right for the construction of gas and oil pipelines across that country, a venture in which Enron was heavily involved. The gas pipeline would also place Enron’s $3 billion power plant in Dabhol, India, on a profitable basis. In an unprecedented effort to assist a private concern, the National Security Council was then coordinating a government-wide drive to force India to make payments to the Enron power plant in Dabhol. To assist Enron and other energy wholesalers make the most of the energy crisis in California, the administration resisted calls to reinstate price caps on interstate energy sales. Enron and Ken Lay were permitted to exert great influence in fashioning the Bush energy plan.

The Bush administration sharply reversed U.S. policy with respect to Afghanistan. Whether the new approach to diplomacy with the Taliban was related to the administration’s somewhat relaxed approach to counterterrorism cannot be known. Contacts with the Taliban were reopened and a vigorous carrot and stick approach was pursued in an effort to have Bin Laden turned over and set in motion a coalition government there. A coalition government, which would open the door to the proposed twin pipeline across Afghanistan. The Afghan government would benefit from fees paid for construction rights and later for sending oil and natural gas through the lines.

Laili Helms, niece by marriage to former CIA director Richard Helms and a relative of King Zahir Shah, quickly arranged for Sayed Rahmatullah Hashami, an envoy of Mullah Omar, to visit Washington. Helms, whose two grandfathers had been Afghan officials, was working as a public relations consultant for the Taliban. Hashami brought a carpet for George W. Bush, a gift from his one-eyed leader. According to the Village Voice, he offered to detain Osama bin Laden long enough for U.S. agents to seize the terrorist, but for some reason the U.S. did not accept the offer. Not long after that, bin Laden announced in a written statement that he and Omar had sworn baya or blood brotherhood. At this time, the Voice of America’s Pashtun service broadcasted so much favorable information about Mullah Omar and the Taliban that wags called the woman heading that division “Kandahar Rose.”

Dr. Christina Rocca, who had been a CIA operative in Afghanistan from 1982 to 1997, began working on the Afghanistan problem for the State Department in May, 2001. At the same time, State maintained constant contact with the Taliban diplomatic mission in Queens and remained hostile to the Northern Alliance’s Islamic State of Afghanistan, which was recognized by the United Nations. As late as July, the CIA welcomed Qazi Hussein Ahmed, head of the pro-Bin Laden Jamiaat-i-Islami Party, at the George H. W. Bush Intelligence Center in Langley, Virginia. The policy was clearly to work out a gas deal with the Taliban.

Enron gambled that the pipeline would make their land in the Caspian Basin much more valuable.
Diplomacy rarely discussed in U.S. press

State Department representatives met with counterparts from Iran, Italy, Germany, and in Geneva to devise ways to force the Taliban to enter an oil/gas deal with the United States. The Six plus Two negotiating process was also in motion with Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, making five trips to Kandahar and Kabul between April 19 and August 17, 2001. There was also a stormy UN-sponsored meeting in Brussels on May 15 which the Taliban foreign minister refused to attend because Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, the Northern Alliance representative, was there. Twenty-one nations had representatives at Weston Park in England in July, where a coalition government under the oversight of former King Zahir Shah was tentatively agreed.

There was a March meeting of the UN-sponsored A group of Six plus Two in Berlin. The Six plus Two meetings were “level-2” discussions because they were attended by former government officials. These former officials tried to reflect the policies of their governments, but their lack of official positions gave their governments a large measure of desirability if something went wrong. Nevertheless, they were useful forums for exchanging ideas that clearly represented the positions of the governments involved.

The small U.S. delegation included Tom Simons, former ambassador to Pakistan, and Robert Oakley, a Unocal lobbyist and former ambassador. In a May meeting in Geneva, the U.S. unveiled plans to attack Afghanistan. Representatives of Iran, Germany, and Italy were present. In July, war with Afghanistan was again discussed at the Group of Eight meeting in Genoa. An Indian observer was also present for these discussions and even contributed plans. The U.S. was busy acquiring base rights in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

Another Berlin meeting was held in July. The Taliban was expected to send a spokesman, but he did not appear, probably because the Northern Alliance was represented there. It was later reported in Europe that the U.S. spokesman said that the Taliban could either “accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.'' Simons denied that a direct threat was made in these words but conceded that the subject of force may have come up in connection with a discussion of the investigation of the attack on the USS Cole. He also said, “It is possible that an American participant, acting mischievously, after some glasses, evoked the gold carpets and the carpet bombs.” Whatever Simons’ exact words were, people came away convinced that the U.S. was determined to employ force in Afghanistan if it did not get its way.

A British newspaper later reported that it was said that the bombing could begin as early as October. Niaz Naik, Pakistan’s former foreign minister, reported back to his government in mid-July that the U.S. would resort to force if Pakistan could not persuade the Taliban to come into line. Pakistan passed this information on to the Taliban. It was later reported on French television that “Islamabad and Pakistani military circles were buzzing with rumors of war.” The Indian press reported in October that "Tajikistan and Uzbekistan will lead the ground attack with a strong military back up of the U.S. and Russia. Vital Taliban installations and military assets will be targeted.”

MSNBC reported that the plan to invade Afghanistan was on Bush’s desk before 9/11 and included giving a red light to the Northern Alliance to mount a major campaign against the Taliban. On the afternoon of September 11, General Richard Myers reported at a teleconferenced NSC meeting that the Pentagon had 42 major Taliban bombing targets. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration immediately attributed it to Osama Bin Laden, but he repeatedly denied any involvement for several weeks. Later, a videotape turned up in Afghanistan in which Bin Laden supposedly took credit for the attack; however, some translators deny that is what he said.

Dr. Christina Rocca, represented the U.S. at its last meeting with the Taliban, which occurred on August 2 in Islamabad -- five weeks before September 11. The Taliban, at this point, was in the process of awarding the twin pipeline deal to an Argentine-led consortium. At that meeting Rocca demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden. In an interview, Brisard commented on the Islamabad meeting:

We believe that when [Rocca] went to Pakistan in [August] 2001 she was there to speak about oil, and unfortunately the Osama bin Laden case was just a technical part of the negotiations. He said “ I'm not sure about the pipeline specifically, but we make it clear she was there to speak about oil. There are witnesses, including the Pakistani foreign minister.

Journalists outside the United States have discussed these events in detail and raise the possibility that the threat of military action may have had a direct effect on the timing of Al Qaeda’s attack on America. The last US-Taliban meeting occurred five days before 9/11. The Taliban continued to grant hospitality to Osama bin Laden and refused to turn him over until the U.S. promised him a fair trial and submitted the proper extradition papers. Those papers were not submitted.

After the successful U.S. attack on Afghanistan, the U.S. installed a government led by a former employee of Unocal/Chevron, Hamid Karzai. His regime, on February 8, 2002, agreed with Pakistan to enter into a long-term agreement with a U.S.-led consortium to build a twin pipeline that would bring gas and oil from the Caspian Basin down through Afghanistan and to the coast of Pakistan and to India. Kevin Phillips, a Republican writer, was to note that U.S. troops in Afghanistan were to become “pipeline protection troops.” The value of Caspian oil and gas has been placed at $4 trillion. However, little progress has been made on the pipeline, and Unocal, since 1998, has claimed that it is no longer involved in the consortium.

Recent developments

In December, 2002, the leaders of Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan signed a new agreement to move ahead with the pipelines. Six years later, the governments of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan agreed to purchase gas coming through the pipeline. The Asian Development Bank will finance the $7.6 billion venture. In 2006, the United States assured India that the project would go ahead. In 2008, Afghanistan assured India that land mines would be cleared, making construction possible. Technical experts met in Ashgabat to deal with transit agreements and other details.

It appears that the project will be financed through the Asia Development Bank, whose largest share holders are the U.S. and Japan. The Indian Gas authority has suggested that Russia’s Gazprom be brought in as a consultant and maybe even be the eventual operator of the line. However, the project cannot move forward because southern Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban.

If the TAP is ever built, the Afghan government will receive 8% of the revenue. It may well be that the Afghans, in their failure to resolve their problems, have frittered away the prospect of this windfall There is growing doubt in the region that stability will be restored in Afghanistan, and there is now talk of using the proposed IPI line that would not involve Afghanistan. Two problems are that using this line would benefit Iran and China, not the U.S.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a retired history teacher. Sherm spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go here.]

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