A few notes on Afghanistan

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 28, 2021 11:57 am

The Never Ending Lies About The War On Afghanistan
The U.S. military has lied for 20 years about the war in Afghanistan. Do not expect it to suddenly tell the truth.

Thursday's suicide bombing in Kabul and the following panic killed more than 150 civilians (some 30 of whom were British-Afghan), 28 Taliban fighters and 13 U.S. troops.

Before the attack happened a Taliban spokesperson had told RT that they had warned the U.S. of an imminent ISPK attack.

Repeating Pentagon claims the New York Times describes the attack:

At 5:48 p.m., the bomber, wearing a 25-pound explosive vest under clothing, walked up to the group of Americans who were frisking people hoping to enter the complex. He waited, officials said, until just before he was about to be searched by the American troops. And then he detonated the bomb, which was unusually large for a suicide vest, killing himself and igniting an attack that would leave dozens of people dead, including 13 American service members.
If the suicide bomber was so close to the inner perimeter checkpoint manned by U.S. forces why were so many Taliban, who manned checkpoints at the outer perimeter, killed in the incident?

The Times writes:

Just after the bomb went off, Defense Department officials said, fighters nearby began firing weapons. The officials said that some of the Americans and Afghans at Abbey Gate might have been hit by that gunfire.
What fighters nearby?

The BBC correspondent in Kabul has asked people who where there:

Secunder Kermani @SecKermani - 7:21 UTC · Aug 28, 2021
Our report from last night on the awful ISIS attack outside Kabul airport as families still search Kabul's morgues for their loved ones..
Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast
Embedded video

The correspondent talks to the brother a London taxi driver who was in Kabul to fetch his family:

A: "Somehow I saw American soldiers, Turkish soldiers and the fire was coming from the bridges, from the towers."
Q: "From the soldiers?"
A: "Yeah, from the soldiers."

(Side note: Some of the towers around the airport were reportedly manned by members of the CIA's Afghan death squads.)

Another witness:

Narrator: "Noor Mohamed had had been deployed alongside American forces."

A man holding up an identity card of a friend talks about his death in English.

A: "The guy has served U.S. army for years. And the reason he lost his life - he wasn't killed by Taliban, he wasn't killed by ISIS, he was (unintelligible)."
Q: "How can you be sure?"
A: "Because of the bullet. The bullet went inside of his head. Right here." (Points to the back of his head.) "He doesn't have any (other) injury."

The Pentagon did not respond to the BBC's request for comments.

Posted by b on August 28, 2021 at 8:59 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/08/t ... l#comments

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FACTS ABOUT THE OPIUM MARKET IN AFGHANISTAN AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE US
23 Aug 2021 , 10:08 am .

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The Taliban have claimed that they will ban opium cultivation in Afghanistan under their rule. This may alarm some sectors that have been interested in increasing their production, this country being where 90% of the world's opium is produced.

There is a connection between the increase in opium cultivation in Afghanistan, the two decades of US military occupation of the Asian country and the government money from Washington spent on the supposed fight against drugs. Let's examine this data.

The United States invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 2001, a mission that still has its remnants at the airport in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Between 2002 and 2021, the United States allocated more than 9 billion dollars to "help stop the expansion" of the opium economy in Afghanistan, as reported by SIGAR , the office of the Special Inspector General for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan created by Congress. from the United States.

But that hasn't stopped crops from growing by as much as 37% last year, according to the United Nations . Afghanistan had just 8 thousand hectares of opium poppy (poppy) cultivated in 2001, 40 times less than the estimated for 2017: 328 thousand. In 2020 there were an estimated 224,000, as reflected in the UN report.

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Since the US military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, poppy cultivation has increased (Photo: Newtral)

*In July 2000, the Taliban banned the cultivation of poppies in the areas under their control, leading to a drop in the number of hectares devoted to it.
*After 2001, the data of the territory dedicated to the cultivation of poppies has progressively increased.
But in addition, it is striking that for 20 years and a little more in the United States there has been an increase in the number of deaths from opioid overdoses, related to the times of the US military occupation.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the United States, "between 1999 and 2019, almost 500 thousand people died from an overdose related to some opioid, either illegal or prescribed by a doctor."

"Synthetic opioids (primarily illicit fentanyl) appear to be the main driver of the rise in overdose deaths," the CDC said in December 2020.

https://misionverdad.com/datos-sobre-el ... n-con-eeuu

Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 30, 2021 12:59 pm

Who profits from the Kabul suicide bombing?
ISIS-Khorasan aims to prove to Afghans and to the outside world that the Taliban cannot secure the capital
By PEPE ESCOBAR
AUGUST 27, 2021

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Medical and hospital staff carry an injured man out of a car for treatment after two blasts, which killed at least five and wounded a dozen, outside the airport in Kabul on August 26, 2021. Photo: AFP / Wakil Kohsar

The horrific Kabul suicide bombing introduces an extra vector in an already incandescent situation: It aims to prove, to Afghans and to the outside world, that the nascent Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is incapable of securing the capital.

As it stands, at least 103 people – 90 Afghans (including at least 28 Taliban) and 13 American servicemen – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.

Responsibility for the bombing came via a statement on the Telegram channel of Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. This means it came from centralized ISIS command, even as the perpetrators were members of ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.

Presuming to inherit the historical and cultural weight of ancient Central Asian lands that from the time of imperial Persia stretched all the way to the western Himalayas, that spin-off defiles the name of Khorasan.

The suicide bomber who carried out “the martyrdom operation near Kabul airport” was identified as one Abdul Rahman al-Logari. That would suggest he’s an Afghan, from nearby Logar province. And that would also suggest that the bombing may have been organized by an ISIS-Khorasan sleeper cell. Sophisticated electronic analysis of their communications would be able to prove it – tools that the Taliban don’t have.


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The suicide bomber Abdul Rahman al-Logari as presented by ISIS propaganda. Photo: Handout / Daesh

The way social media-savvy ISIS chose to spin the carnage deserves careful scrutiny. The statement on Amaq Media blasts the Taliban for being “in a partnership” with the US military in the evacuation of “spies.”

It mocks the “security measures imposed by the American forces and the Taliban militia in the capital Kabul,” as its “martyr” was able to reach “a distance of no less than five meters from the American forces, who were supervising the procedures.”

So it’s clear that the newly reborn Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the former occupying power are facing the same enemy. ISIS-Khorasan comprises a bunch of fanatics, termed takfiris because they define fellow Muslims – in this case the Taliban – as “apostates.”

Founded in 2015 by emigré jihadis dispatched to southwest Pakistan, ISIS-K is a dodgy beast. Its current head is one Shahab al-Mujahir, who was a mid-level commander of the Haqqani network headquartered in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal areas, itself a collection of disparate mujahideen and would-be jihadis under the family umbrella.

Washington branded the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization way back in 2010, and treats several members as global terrorists, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the family after the death of the founder Jalaluddin.

Up to now, Sirajuddin was the Taliban deputy leader for the eastern provinces – on the same level with Mullah Baradar, the head of the political office in Doha, who was actually released from Guantanamo in 2014.

Crucially, Sirajuddin’s uncle, Khalil Haqqani, formerly in charge of the network’s foreign financing, is now in charge of Kabul security and working as a diplomat 24/7.

The previous ISIS-K leaders were snuffed out by US airstrikes in 2015 and 2016. ISIS-K started to become a real destabilizing force in 2020 when the regrouped band attacked Kabul University, a Doctor Without Borders maternity ward, the Presidential palace and the airport.

NATO intel picked up by a UN report attributes a maximum of 2,200 jihadis to ISIS-K, split into small cells. Significantly, the absolute majority are non-Afghans: Iraqis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Chechens and Uighurs.

The real danger is that ISIS-K works as a sort of magnet for all manners of disgruntled former Taliban or discombobulated regional warlords with nowhere to go.


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IS-K fighters in training in Afghanistan. Photo: Facebook

The perfect soft target

The civilian commotion these past few days around Kabul airport was the perfect soft target for trademark ISIS carnage.

Zabihullah Mujahid – the new Taliban minister of information in Kabul, who in that capacity talks to global media every day – is the one who actually warned NATO members about an imminent ISIS-K suicide bombing. Brussels diplomats confirmed it.

In parallel, it’s no secret among intel circles in Eurasia that ISIS-K has become disproportionally more powerful since 2020 because of a transportation ratline from Idlib, in Syria, to eastern Afghanistan, informally known in spook talk as Daesh Airlines.

Moscow and Tehran, even at very high diplomatic levels, have squarely blamed the US-UK axis as the key facilitators. Even the BBC reported in late 2017 on hundreds of ISIS jihadis given safe passage out of Raqqa, and out of Syria, right in front of the Americans.

The Kabul bombing took place after two very significant events.

The first one was Mujahid’s claim during an American NBC News interview earlier this week that there is “no proof” Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11 – an argument that I had already hinted was coming in this podcast the previous week.

This means the Taliban have already started a campaign to disconnect themselves from the “terrorist” label associated with 9/11. The next step may involve arguing that the execution of 9/11 was set up in Hamburg, the operational details coordinated from two apartments in New Jersey.

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Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid holds a press conference in Kabul on Tuesday. Photo: AFP / Haroon Sabawoon / Anadolu Agency

Nothing to do with Afghans. And everything staying within the parameters of the official narrative – but that’s another immensely complicated story.

The Taliban will need to show that “terrorism” has been all about their lethal enemy, ISIS, and way beyond old school al-Qaeda, which they harbored up to 2001. But why should they be shy about making such claims? After all, the United States rehabilitated Jabhat Al-Nusra – or al-Qaeda in Syria – as “moderate rebels.”

The origin of ISIS is incandescent material. ISIS was spawned in Iraq prison camps, its core made of Iraqis, their military skills derived from ex-officers in Saddam’s army, a wild bunch fired way back in 2003 by Paul Bremmer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

ISIS-K duly carries the work of ISIS from Southwest Asia to the crossroads of Central and South Asia in Afghanistan. There’s no credible evidence that ISIS-K has ties with Pakistani military intel.

On the contrary: ISIS-K is loosely aligned with the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP), also known as the Pakistani Taliban, Islamabad’s mortal enemy. TTP’s agenda has nothing to do with the moderate Mullah Baradar-led Afghan Taliban who participated in the Doha process.

SCO to the rescue

The other significant event tied to the Kabul bombing was that it took place only one day after yet another phone call between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

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A June video meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin aand Chinese President Xi Jinping, who do this all the time. Phto: AFP / Aleksey Nikolskyi / Sputnik

The Kremlin stressed the pair’s “readiness to step up efforts to combat threats of terrorism and drug trafficking coming from the territory of Afghanistan”; the “importance of establishing peace”; and “preventing the spread of instability to adjacent regions.”

And that led to the clincher: They jointly committed to “make the most of the potential” of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which was founded 20 years ago as the “Shanghai Five”, even before 9/11, to fight “terrorism, separatism and extremism.”

The SCO summit is next month in Dushanbe – when Iran, most certainly, will be admitted as a full member. The Kabul bombing offers the SCO the opportunity to forcefully step up.

Whichever complex tribal coalition is formed to govern the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, it will be intertwined with the full apparatus of regional economic and security cooperation, led by the three main actors of Eurasia integration: Russia, China and Iran.

The record shows Moscow has all that it takes to help the Islamic Emirate against ISIS-K in Afghanistan. After all, the Russians flushed ISIS out of all significant parts of Syria and confined them to the Idlib cauldron.

In the end, no one aside from ISIS wants a terrorized Afghanistan, just as no one wants a civil war in Afghanistan. So the order of business indicates not only an SCO-led frontal fight against existing ISIS-K terror cells in Afghanistan but also an integrated campaign to drain any potential social base for the takfiris in Central and South Asia.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/who-profi ... e-bombing/

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Blowback: Taliban target US intel's shadow army

The Kabul Airport bombing shows there are shadowy forces in Afghanistan, willing to disrupt a peaceful transition after US troops leave. But what about US intel's own 'shadow army,' amassed over two decades of occupation? Who are they, and what is their agenda?

By Pepe Escobar
August 27 2021

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The Taliban aren't searching and targeting civilians. They're hunting down a CIA-created shadow army, two decades in the making, still underground in Afghanistan. Photo credit: The Cradle

So we have the CIA Director William Burns deploying in haste to Kabul to solicit an audience with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, the new potential ruler of a former satrapy. And he literally begs him to extend a deadline on the evacuation of US assets.

The answer is a resounding “no.” After all, the 31 August deadline was established by Washington itself. Extending it would only mean the extension of an already defeated occupation.

The ‘Mr. Burns goes to Kabul’ caper is by now part of cemetery of empires folklore. The CIA does not confirm or deny Burns met Mullah Baradar; a Taliban spokesman, delightfully diversionist, said he was “not aware” of such a meeting.

We’ll probably never know the exact terms discussed by the two unlikely participants – assuming the meeting ever took place and is not crass intel disinformation.

Meanwhile, Western public hysteria is, of all things, focused on the imperative necessity of extracting all ‘translators’ and other functionaries (who were de facto NATO collaborators) out of Kabul airport. Yet thundering silence envelops what is in fact the real deal: the CIA shadow army left behind.

The shadow army are Afghan militias set up back in the early 2000s to engage in ‘counter-insurgency’ – that lovely euphemism for search and destroy ops against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Along the way, these militias practiced, in droves, that proverbial semantic combo normalizing murder: ‘extrajudicial killings,’ usually a sequel to ‘enhanced interrogations.’ These ops were always secret as per the classic CIA playbook, thus ensuring there was never any accountability.

Now Langley has a problem. The Taliban have kept sleeper cells in Kabul since May, and much earlier than that in selected Afghan government bodies. A source close to the Ministry of Interior has confirmed the Taliban actually managed to get their hands on the full list of operatives of the two top CIA schemes: the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS). These operatives are the prime Taliban targets in checkpoints leading to Kabul airport, not random, helpless ‘Afghan civilians’ trying to escape.

The Taliban have set up quite a complex, targeted operation in Kabul, with plenty of nuance – allowing, for instance, free passage for selected NATO members’ Special Forces, who went into town in search of their nationals.

But access to the airport is now blocked for all Afghan nationals. Yesterday’s double tap suicide-car bombing has introduced an even more complex variable: the Taliban will need to pool all their intel resources, fast, to fight whatever elements are seeking to introduce domestic terror attacks into the country.

The RHIPTO Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses has shown how the Taliban have a “more advanced intelligence system” applied to urban Afghanistan, especially Kabul. The “knocking on people’s doors” fueling Western hysteria means they know exactly where to knock when it comes to finding collaborationist intel networks.

It is no wonder Western think tanks are in tears about how undermined their intel services will be in the intersection of Central and South Asia. Yet the muted official reaction boiled down to G7 Foreign Ministers issuing a mere statement announcing they were “deeply concerned by reports of violent reprisals in parts of Afghanistan.”

Blowback is indeed a bitch. Especially when you cannot fully acknowledge it.

From Phoenix to Omega

The latest chapter of CIA ops in Afghanistan started when the 2001 bombing campaign was not even finished. I saw it for myself in Tora Bora, in December 2001, when Special Forces came out of nowhere equipped with Thuraya satellite phones and suitcases full of cash. Later, the role of ‘irregular’ militias in defeating the Taliban and dismembering al-Qaeda was feted in the US as a huge success.

Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai was, to his credit, initially against US Special Forces setting up local militias, an essential plank of the counter-insurgency strategy. But in the end that cash cow was irresistible.

A central profiteer was the Afghan Ministry of Interior, with the initial scheme coalescing under the auspices of the Afghan Local Police. Yet some key militias were not under the Ministry, but answered directly to the CIA and the US Special Forces Command, later renamed as the infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Inevitably, CIA and JSOC got into a catfight over controlling the top militias. That was solved by the Pentagon lending Special Forces to the CIA under the Omega Program. Under Omega, the CIA was tasked with targeting intel, and Special Ops took control of the muscle on the ground. Omega made steady progress under the reign of former US President Barack Obama: it was eerily similar to the Vietnam-era Operation Phoenix.

Ten years ago, the CIA army, dubbed Counter-terrorist Pursuit Teams (CTPT), was already 3,000 strong, paid and weaponized by the CIA-JSOC combo. There was nothing ‘counter-insurgency’ about it: These were death squads, much like their earlier counterparts in Latin America in the 1970s.

In 2015, the CIA got its Afghan sister unit, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), to establish new paramilitary outfits to, in theory, fight ISIS, which later became locally identified as ISIS-Khorasan. In 2017, then-CIA Chief Mike Pompeo set Langley on an Afghan overdrive, targeting the Taliban but also al-Qaeda, which at the time had dwindled to a few dozen operatives. Pompeo promised the new gig would be “aggressive,” “unforgiving,” and “relentless.”

Those shadowy ‘military actors’

Arguably, the most precise and concise report on the American paramilitaries in Afghanistan is by Antonio de Lauri, Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, and Astrid Suhrke, Senior Researcher Emerita also at the Institute.

The report shows how the CIA army was a two-headed hydra. The older units harked back to 2001 and were very close to the CIA. The most powerful was the Khost Protection Force (KPF), based at the CIA’s Camp Chapman in Khost. KPF operated totally outside Afghan law, not to mention budget. Following an investigation by Seymour Hersh, I have also shown how the CIA financed its black ops via a heroin rat line, which the Taliban have now promised to destroy.

The other head of the hydra were the NDS’s own Afghan Special Forces: four main units, each operating in its own regional area. And that’s about all that was known about them. The NDS was funded by none other than the CIA. For all practical purposes, operatives were trained and weaponized by the CIA.

So, it’s no wonder that no one in Afghanistan or in the region knew anything definitive about their operations and command structure. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), in trademark infuriating bureaucratese, defined the operations of the KPF and the NDS as appearing “to be coordinated with international military actors (emphasis mine); that is, outside the normal government chain of command.”

By 2018, the KPF was estimated to harbor between 3,000 to over 10,000 operatives. What few Afghans really knew is that they were properly weaponized; well paid; worked with people speaking American English, using American vocabulary; engaged in night operations in residential areas; and crucially, were capable of calling air strikes, executed by the US military.

A 2019 UNAMA report stressed that there were “continuing reports of the KPF carrying out human rights abuses, intentionally killing civilians, illegally detaining individuals, and intentionally damaging and burning civilian property during search operations and night raids.”

Call it the Pompeo effect: “aggressive, unforgiving, and relentless” – whether by kill-or-capture raids, or drones with Hellfire missiles.

Woke Westerners, now losing sleep over the ‘loss of civil liberties’ in Afghanistan, may not even be vaguely aware that their NATO-commanded ‘coalition forces’ excelled in preparing their own kill-or-capture lists, known by the semantically-demented denomination: Joint Prioritized Effects List.

The CIA, for its part, couldn’t care less. After all, the agency was always totally outside the jurisdiction of Afghan laws regulating the operations of ‘coalition forces.’

The dronification of violence

In these past few years, the CIA shadow army coalesced into what Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter memorably described as The Dronification of State Violence, a seminal paper published in the Critical Asian Studies journal in 2014 (downloadable here).

Shaw and Akhter define the alarming, ongoing process of dronification as: “the relocation of sovereign power from the uniformed military to the CIA and Special Forces; techno-political transformations performed by the Predator drone; the bureaucratization of the kill chain; and the individualization of the target.”

This amounts to, the authors argue, what Hannah Arendt defined as “rule by nobody.” Or, actually by somebody acting beyond any rules.

The toxic end result in Afghanistan was the marriage between the CIA shadow army and dronification. The Taliban may be willing to extend a general amnesty and not exact revenge. But to forgive those who went on a killing rampage as part of the marriage arrangement may be a step too far for the Pashtunwali code.

The February 2020 Doha agreement between Washington and the Taliban says absolutely nothing about the CIA shadow army.

So, the question now is how the defeated Americans will be able to keep intel assets in Afghanistan for its proverbial ‘counter-terrorism’ ops. A Taliban-led government will inevitably take over the NDS. What happens to the militias is an open question. They could be completely taken over by the Taliban. They could break away and eventually find new sponsors (Saudis, Turks). They could become autonomous and serve the best-positioned warlord paymaster.

The Taliban may be essentially a collection of warlords (jang salar, in Dari). But what’s certain is that a new government will simply not allow a militia wasteland scenario similar to Libya. Thousands of mercenaries of sorts with the potential of becoming an ersatz ISIS-Khorasan, threatening Afghanistan’s entry into the Eurasian integration process, need to be tamed. Burns knows it, Baradar knows it – while Western public opinion knows nothing.

https://thecradle.co/Article/investigations/1401

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How The CIA Used ISIS-K To Keep Its Afghanistan Business
There is a larger story behind the recent terror events in Afghanistan. Here is an attempt to track it down.

Over the years several reports by the Afghan Analyst Network (AAN) about the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP or ISIS-K) show that it had grown out of militant groups from Pakistan. A report from 2016 describes extensively how they were fostered by the Afghan state:

The IS fighters who pioneered the Khorasan franchise of the IS were Pakistani militants who had long been settled in the southeastern districts of Nangarhar, in the Spin Ghar mountains or its foothills, bordering the tribal agencies on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line.
Before choosing to join ISKP, these militants operated under different brands, mainly under the umbrella of the ever-loosening Tehrik-e Taleban Pakistan (TTP). The bulk of these militants had been arriving in Nangarhar since 2010 mainly from the Orakzai, North Waziristan and Khyber tribal agencies.

Pakistan alleges that the TTP is supported by RAW, India's secret services. It may have also helped to finance the ISKP outlet.

Hoping to use them against Pakistan, the Afghan government started to woo some of these fighters, according to influential tribal elders involved in helping relation-building from the districts that sheltered the guest militants.
...
However, efforts by the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), to woo Pakistani militants in Nangarhar have not been confined to Lashkar-e Islam or to militants from Khyber. Tribal elders and ordinary residents of Achin, Nazian and Kot testify that fighters from Orakzai and Mohmand agencies belonging to different factions of the TTP have been allowed free movement across the province, as well as treatment in government hospitals. When moving outside their hub in Nangarhar’s southern districts, they would go unarmed. In off-the-record conversations with AAN, government officials have verified this type of relationship between segments of the Pakistani militants and the NDS, as have pro-government tribal elders and politicians in Jalalabad. They described this state of affairs as a small-scale tit-for-tat reaction to Pakistan’s broader and longer-ranging, institutionalised support to the Afghan Taleban in their fight against the Afghan government.
The Afghan state's NDS was a CIA proxy agency. During the mid 1990s the intelligence chief of the Northern Alliance, Amrullah Saleh, had been trained by the CIA in the United States. After the U.S. overthrew the Taliban government Saleh became the head of the NDS. The NDS also had extensive relations with India's secret service.

While the U.S. pretended to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) consistent reports from various sides alleged that core ISIS personnel were extracted by unmarked U.S. helicopters from Iraq and Syria and transferred to Nangarhar where they reinforced the ISKP militants.

Hadi Nasrallah @HadiNasrallah - 1:18 UTC · Aug 28, 2021
In 2017 and 2020, Syria’s SANA reported that that US helicopters transported between 40 and 75 ISIS militants from Hasakah, North Syria to an “unknown area”. The same thing was reported for years in Iraq by the PMU along with reports that US helicopters dropped aid for ISIS.

As Alex Rubinstein summarizes:

The list of governments, former government officials, and organizations in the region that have accused the US of supporting ISIS-K is expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the group a “tool” of the United States ...
Like in Iraq and Syria the CIA's fostering of ultra-militant Islamists led to a backlash as the militants increasingly attacked the Afghan state. The U.S. military finally found it necessary to intervene against them. But the fighting against them on the ground was mostly done by the Taliban who for that purpose received direct support from the U.S. air force.

The Taliban operations were successful and a further spread of ISKP in east Afghanistan was prevented. Instead of openly taking more land ISKP then resorted to sensational suicide bombings against vulnerable targets in Kabul. In May 2021, for example, a car bomb placed in front of Hazara girl school in Kabul killed more than 90 people most of them children.

The CIA and the NDS had additional militants at hand to fight against the Taliban. They had grown and built special forces organized in several battalions (NDS-01 to -04 and the Khost Protection Force (KPF). These CIA controlled death squads had their own helicopter support:

As of 2018, the CIA is engaged in a program to kill or capture militant leaders, codenamed ANSOF, previously Omega. CIA manpower is supplemented with personnel assigned from United States Army Special Operations Command.
In mid–2019, the NGO Human Rights Watch stated that "CIA-backed Afghan strike forces" have committed "serious abuses, some amounting to war crimes" since late 2017.

The 2019 HRW report noted:

These strike forces have unlawfully killed civilians during night raids, forcibly disappeared detainees, and attacked healthcare facilities for allegedly treating insurgent fighters. Civilian casualties from these raids and air operations have dramatically increased in the last two years.
After the Taliban took Kabul it became clear that the CIA would have to shut down its 'counterterrorism' program and that it would lose control of a major part of its (drug) business in Afghanistan.

As Kabul was falling at least one of its Afghan units, some 600 soldiers, was ordered to help guard the airport of Kabul.

NDS 01 Unit @NDS_Afghanistan - 11:50 UTC · Aug 17, 2021
We will come
We will serve our countrymen as well .
#انشاء_الله #Kabul #ANDSF

The CIA's Afghan forces manned the gates and guard towers:

The Americans have turned to several hundred commandos from the former Afghan government’s National Directorate of Security to limit access through some airport gates, to keep the crowds from overwhelming the airport.
...
The former N.D.S. commandos are due to be among the last to leave the country in the evacuation, serving as a rear guard before being airlifted out, according to U.S. and former Afghan officials.
Some of the trigger happy unit got into a friendly fire incident with German soldiers. The CIA Afghan troops at the airport are set to be evacuated. Other units, including the KPF, were reported to be going to the Panjshir valley where a new 'Northern Alliance' under Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud is supposed to be build. The Taliban are trying to hunt them down.

On Thursday a suicide bomber attacked a gate at the airport in Kabul where many people were trying to get evacuated from Afghanistan. The Islamic State claimed responsibility:

Thursday's suicide bombing in Kabul and the following panic killed more than 150 civilians (some 30 of whom were British-Afghan), 28 Taliban fighters and 13 U.S. troops.

Before the attack happened a Taliban spokesperson had told RT that they had warned the U.S. of an imminent ISPK attack.

It is difficult to understand why the U.S., after it had been warned, did not take more precautions against such an attack.

Most of the casualties of the attack were not caused by the suicide bomber but by guards on the wall and in the guard towers surrounding the airport. "Most victims" had gun wounds to their upper bodies and the bullets had come from above. This has now been confirmed by multiple sources:

Sangar | سنګر پیکار @paykhar - 1:02 PM · Aug 28, 2021
"Most victims of #KabulAirportBlast were not killed by the blast but by bullets fired at them by the Americans."
Faisal of Kabul Lovers channel interviewed aid workers at Emergency Hospital in #Kabul and this is what they have to say:
Embedded video

U.S. media try to ignore those reports. Only deep down in a long New York Times piece one will find these lines:

For the first time, Pentagon officials publicly acknowledged the possibility that some people killed outside the airport on Thursday might have been shot by American service members after the suicide bombing.
Investigators are looking into whether the gunfire came from Americans at the gate, or from the Islamic State.

It were neither the Americans at the gate nor the Islamic State but most likely the CIA's Afghan death squads in the guard towers who caused the massacre.

The Washington Post analysis of the attack is likewise misleading:

Multiple gunmen then opened fire on the civilians and military forces. A local affiliate of the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Two days after the attack the CIA CNN published an interview by Clarissa Ward with an alleged ISKP commander said to have been recorded two weeks ago in a hotel in Kabul. Why the CNN blurred the man's face is left unexplained.

As RT mockingly headlines:

‘CIA tweets CIA interview with CIA’: Viewers react to suddenly-released 'eerily prophetic' CNN interview with ISIS-K commander

Also a day after the airport attack the CIA killed an alleged ISKP 'planner' in Jalalabad who had nothing to do with the airport attack.

Dion Nissenbaum @DionNissenbaum - 10:43 UTC · Aug 29, 2021
Exclusive @WSJ video shows aftermath of US drone strike on Islamic State in Afghanistan, which used a "Flying Ginsu" missile. Pentagon says no civilian casualties. Eyewitness says a woman among the four injured.
Exclusive Video Shows Aftermath of U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan

The claim of a 'Flying Ginsu' missile, which contain no explosives, is inconsistent with the heavy shrapnel damage seen in the above linked video.

Now onto the big question.

If ISKP is, as shown above, a CIA/NDS product and if the guards at the airport who killed the 'most victims' in the attack are CIA led Afghan special forces why did all this happen?

We may find the answer in another New York Times piece headlined:

Amid Afghan Chaos, a C.I.A. Mission That Will Persist for Years

As the Afghanistan war wound down, the C.I.A. had expected to gradually shift its primary focus away from counterterrorism — a mission that transformed the agency over two decades into a paramilitary organization focused on manhunts and killing — toward traditional spycraft against powers like China and Russia.
But a pair of deadly explosions on Thursday were the latest in a series of rapidly unfolding events since the collapse of the Afghan government and the Taliban takeover of the country that have upended that plan. Like a black hole with its own gravitational pull, Afghanistan could draw the C.I.A. back into a complex counterterrorism mission for years to come.

The poor CIA - pulled back into an expensive 'counterterrorism' mission in Afghanistan and elsewhere that was supposed to end until ... well, until a CIA created terrorist outlet sent a suicide bomber to Kabul's airport and until CIA led Afghan forces shot up and killed a large crowd of refugees.

One might also call this the deep state's revenge for President Biden's order to retreat from Afghanistan.

This is the same deep state that had brought us four years of a fake 'Russiagate' when a different president was likewise inclined to call U.S. troops back home and to thereby limit the CIA's fields of operation.

To make their point absolutely clear the NYT's CIA authors in their last paragraph issue this not very subtle threat:

Any terrorist attack originating from Afghanistan would expose Mr. Biden to fierce criticism from his political opponents that it was a result of his decision to pull American troops from the country — yet another factor that is likely to bring intense White House pressure on spy agencies to keep a laser focus on Afghanistan.
White House pressure on the spy agencies? No, CIA pressure on the White House to let it stay in its Afghanistan business.

Posted by b on August 29, 2021 at 15:59 UTC | Permalink

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 01, 2021 1:19 pm

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Afghanistan Redux: Malala Yousafzai, White Feminism and Saving Afghan Women
August 31, 2021
By Fawzia Afzal-Khan – Aug 27, 2021

So the usual “experts” are out and about on airwaves, in newsprint and social media, offering their punditry regarding the situation unfolding in Afghanistan even as the US-backed government crumpled like a house of cards with the advance of the Taliban, once the US troops started their announced pullback in earnest after 20 years of occupation a few weeks ago. The shock-and-awe tactics of the Bush doctrine that dragged the world into a post 9/11 horror picture show euphemistically known as the War on Terror (in truth, it was intended– and has been experienced by its globally-dispersed victims, as a war OF terror)—seemed appropriately reverse-engineered as the world was treated to images of ordinary Afghans, a 17 year old aspiring soccer star amongst them—plunging to spectacularly shocking deaths as they fell from the tail of a US Air Force plane they had clung to as it took off, carrying a few hundred of their “luckier” countryfolk to the putative “safety” of the West.

Whilst I refuse to wear the mantle of expertise here— well cognizant —as Rafia Zakaria has put it well in a recent book[1]–of how, in the West, “the emphasis on expertise becomes a kind of gatekeeping of power that locks out [certain, though not all] people of color, as well as working-class people, migrants” and others (p. 8), I remain equally skeptical of the ways in which the category of “experience” (too often a stand-in for “third world/global south authenticity”)–is mobilized as a counter to expertise. I am not convinced (as Zakariya seems to argue) that claiming your “voice”—in the case of brown and black women for example, even when that process of “voicing” genuinely seeks to interrupt the hegemony of white feminism and its epistemological influence on our world—necessarily and always proffers a more transparent working through, and hence redistribution of, power politics. For this latter progressive political vision to take hold, one needs a clearer understanding of what’s at stake, of who or what the levers of control and domination are, and a willingness to embrace the politics of affiliation over the tribal politics of identity. Only then might a blueprint evolve for challenging structural barriers to a better and more equal world.

The case at hand that prevents me from an unqualified rooting for the category of “experience,” is the exemplary case of Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who has traversed the distance from female “experience” to feminist “expertise”, and who, like others before (and since) that have made that journey from the “margins” to the “center” of imperial power, has now switched from being a “voice of the oppressed” to becoming an “expert” who can speak to us and teach us about those authentic “other” women in the global south—in this case, Afghan women– to whom her prior proximity (“experience”)– renders her an “expert” on today. From experience to expertise then, is a pretty straightforward line, following the predictable path forged also by white feminism in thrall and service to imperial designs past and present. This is the path that was announced with great fanfare shortly after 9/11 by First Lady Laura Bush and enthusiastically supported by the Feminist Majority Foundation, that would “save brown women from brown men” by going in to the “backward” country of Afghanistan overrun by crazy “Moslem” men, in the process unleashing a 20-year war on the population that had had nothing to do with 9/11. The initial military intervention was then followed up over the next two decades with countless “development” schemes that enriched a few at the expense of the many, and when the cost of this unending war became unpopular with the citizenry “back home” in the USA over time—we left the hapless “natives” that included those very women we had been so concerned with “saving,” at the mercy of anarchy and chaos.

It is against this backdrop of “expertise” (represented back then by policy feminists such as those at the helm of the Feminist Majority Foundation who supported the war in Afghanistan ostensibly to “save” those poor brown Muslim women from the Taliban)–that the “voice” of Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan who was shot at by the Pakistani branch of the Taliban for wanting to attend school—needs to be understood and assessed when she speaks today in the aftermath of that war. Obviously, the spill-over effects of the 20-year war into neighboring Pakistan negatively affected Malala herself (she almost died because of the Taliban attack upon her), but those same circumstances also helped her ascend to worldwide fame, leading her to being read/seen as the “voice of experience” (by western feminists and policy makers), whose “voice” could then be mobilized in service of several of the goals of the continuing War on Terror. Because she was “rescued” by the British govt after being shot, one could say she crossed over into the realm of “expertise”—a brown Muslim woman today ostensibly speaking for/on behalf of the Afghan women facing another reign of terror with the Taliban, when she tells her readers (without a hint of irony) in the NYT op-ed essay entitled “I Fear for My Afghan Sisters,” (NYT Aug 22, p 5), that she “cannot help but be grateful for my life now.”

Please don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying anyone should begrudge this brave young woman a second chance at life, for brave she was in defying the Taliban fanatics who would then (and now we presume)—deny women and girls a chance at education and autonomy in leading their lives. What does, however, bear scrutiny is the degree to which the “escape” route permitted to young brown women like Malala can ever enact a politics of feminist solidarity that bypasses the kind of “empowerment” feminism that remains allied to white liberal imperialist formations; that is, can brown women whose experience allows them a leg up into the realm of expertise usually reserved for white women, ever translate into a feminism for the 99%? Or is their “experience” simply another nail to hammer into our heads the state-sponsored feminism celebrating the individualist ethos of success, of “empowerment” which is aimed at further advancing the interests of the top 1%? Do these “voices of the (formerly) oppressed” now just become fodder for advancing the same old stories about breaking glass ceilings and joining old (white) boy networks in the pursuit of “equality”? Thus, when Malala says

After graduating from college last year and starting to carve out my own career path I cannot imagine losing it all—going back to a life defined for me by men with guns.

one has to shake one’s head with a different type of desperation. Whereas her Afghan “sisters” have indeed much to fear at the hands of gun-toting Taliban leaders if the past is any indication, Malala seems to have entirely missed the irony that her “freedom” is now in the hands of another set of gun-toting men: white imperialist invaders/drone attackers of lands like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and so on. Further, her “cure” for the world’s women is to give them access to education in order to enable them—like herself—to lead independent lives whose definition of “freedom” and “success” is measured in carving out individuated “career paths.” Malala Yousafzai, in this instance, becomes the avatar of all those “It” girls of consumer-oriented white western feminism, that Angela Mcrobbie has written about in her book on the Aftermath of Feminism, in which she theorizes the loss of feminist subjectivity in Britain, a feminist sensibility arising out of a socialist ideology that could have served as the basis of solidarity across race, class and cultures, but which, as one reviewer points out is “now entrenched in a post-feminist neo-liberal capitalist global economy.” Unfortunately, Malala’s “voice”– her “experiential” advantage– has been turned into its opposite in this capitalist neocolonial economic model that extracts what is of use to it and puts it to a different purpose to serve its own agendas. In short—she is now serving at the behest of her “handlers”—the white feminists who once again are poised to “save brown women from brown men.” [2]



Notes

[1] Rafia Zakariya, Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption. WW. Norton and Co., 2021.

[2] I have elsewhere argued that the “Malala effect” enables a “politics of pity.” By this I mean– as Wendy Hesford in Spectacular Rhetorics has explained about the role of the kind of rhetoric celebrating Malala’s spectacular “escape” from the clutches of the Taliban in 2012– that this type of “recognition” “activates certain cultural and national narratives and social and political relations” that producedifferential power relations. Such a “recognition of the pitiable/different other” then leads to an argument for the governance of those visibilized through such rhetorical codes as“human rights subjects,” who need “our” help. “Spectacular rhetorics” as theorized by Wendy Hesford (as well as Lillie Chouliarki), thus produces and circulates images of “suffering others” (in this case, Afghan women as victims)—leading western audiences of these images to feel “pity” for these victimized women and hence to allying with the “white savior/rescue” narrative.



Fawzia Afzal-Khan is University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University in NJ. Her latest book is Siren Song:Understanding Pakistan Though it’s Women Singers. She can be reached at: fak0912@yahoo.com

Featured image: Photograph Source: Afghanistan Matters – CC BY 2.0

(Counter Punch)

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U.S. Troops Leave Afghanistan: Is a Geopolitical Strategy Behind This?
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on AUGUST 31, 2021
Yoselina Guevara

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The Taliban celebrate the US departure

The last US military plane left Kabul at 23:59 on August 30, bringing to a close a nearly 20-year invasion by the United States and its allies on Afghan soil. The Taliban immediately took control of the airport, announcing that the Islamic Emirate is now a “free and sovereign nation.” A video, recorded by them and broadcast by several agencies showed the fighters entering the airport after the last U.S. troops had taken off. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, “We have no doubt that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is a free and sovereign nation. The United States has been defeated, and on behalf of my nation we want to have good relations with the rest of the world.” The military operation in Afghanistan has been the longest ever conducted by the United States and claimed the lives of some 240,000 Afghans, at an estimated cost of $2 trillion.

A dishonorable exit, a wise geopolitical move

President Joe Biden, in a statement, defended his decision to maintain the Aug. 31 deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces and added that the world must force the Taliban to respect their commitment to allow safe passage for those who want to leave Afghanistan. Biden, has come under heavy criticism from Republicans and some of his fellow Democrats for his handling of Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power from Kabul on Aug. 15 following a lightning advance and the collapse of the Washington-backed Afghan government.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, referred to the U.S. withdrawal in the terms of “national embarrassment” and called it “the direct result of President Biden’s cowardice and incompetence.” In contrast, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse posted on the social network Twitter “Bravo to our diplomats, military and intelligence agencies. An airlift of 120,000 people in that dangerous and tumultuous situation is something no one else could do.”

The troop withdrawal is not and was not news, Biden has made no secret in his speeches and statements that American strategic priorities have changed. Evidently, Russia and China have moved into first place, to the position of the Middle East and Central Asia, and the Pacific, instead of the Mediterranean. In addition, leaving the country in chaos, which could benefit the United States in the global confrontation with China and Russia, comes into the geopolitical game. In this sense, Washington is moving the geopolitical chessboard by forcing Beijing and Moscow to intervene in this Central Asian gateway country.

It suffices to consider that China and Russia are major powers that share “porous” borders with Afghanistan, through which suicide terrorism could spread, threatening the national security of both. Thus the ISIS advance in Afghanistan becomes an instrument, especially since it is not explicit, to divert Russian and Chinese resources away from global competition with Washington. Domestically, the Taliban are handed a destroyed country, with mineral resources that could not be exploited. The Taliban government must revive an economy dismantled by decades of war, unable to count on the billions of dollars of foreign aid that came to the previous administration. These resources, however, served to fuel the systemic corruption that has dominated the country and which encompasses all levels, including primarily the military sector. In fact, Germany’s foreign minister recently declared that “we will not give you another penny if the Taliban take control of the country and reintroduce Sharia law”. The population living outside the cities now face what UN officials have described as a catastrophic humanitarian situation, exacerbated by a severe drought. Politically and economically, the Taliban government is facing a series of challenges, but it is not known whether they will be able to overcome them. There is no doubt that the chaos theory in US foreign policy is playing a preponderant role, leaving in its wake its imperialist trail of violence and destruction.

Yoselina Guevara Correo del Alba’s Venezuelan Correspondent in Italy

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 06, 2021 1:32 pm

‘Woke’ Imperialism, Women’s Liberation and Afghanistan
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on SEPTEMBER 5, 2021
Sharon Black

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Afghanistan’s socialist Vice President Anahita Ratebzad, standing at right, speaks with a group of activists. Ratebzad said, “Privileges which women, by right, must have are equal education, job security, health services and free time to rear a healthy generation.”

There is no greater hypocrisy than the deceitful lies of imperialist propaganda. One of the most damaging, since it rests on 20 years of destructive war and occupation, is that the U.S. war on Afghanistan was about liberating Afghan women.

U.S. imperialist involvement — a euphemism for war and terror — actually began 42 years ago, when the CIA’s Operation Cyclone launched in 1979 under Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It continues today in the form of sanctions and even bombings, as witnessed by the recent drone strike that killed at least 10 people, eight of them children, as young as two years old.

The real fight for women’s rights

U.S. terror and intrigue began following the 1978 Saur Revolution that brought the socialist and progressive People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) to power, decisively toppling the old Kingdom of Afghanistan.

The April Revolution, led mostly by young women and men of Kabul, ushered in major changes that included women’s rights in education and participation in government. Debts owed to cruel feudal landlords were abolished. Women were trained as teachers and books were published in all of the Indigenous and minority languages.

Brigades of women spread out across the country to teach and provide medical services, similar to the Cuban Revolution’s “literacy brigades” of mostly young women that went into the countryside and mountains to teach the poor.

The marriage age was raised from 8 years to 16. Maternity leave with a three-month’s salary was established. By the end of the 1980s, half of the health and education workers in Afghanistan were women.

The story of Afghanistan’s women and their struggle for liberation is remarkable. But it’s seldom told in the capitalist West, whose propaganda is filled with distortions and bitter lies.

First woman vice president

Dr. Anahita Ratebzad was an Afghan socialist, a founding member of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and a member of the Revolutionary Council. She was also the first woman vice president of Afghanistan from 1980 to 1985 — decades before the United States could boast about the election of Kamala Harris.

In the 1960s, she founded the Democratic Organization of Afghan Women (DOAW), and in 1965, Ratebzad and other Afghan women organized the first International Women’s Day March in Kabul. Earlier in 1963, Dr. Ratebzad graduated as a medical doctor.

There is vast documentation that the imperialist bourgeoisie knew full well that the Soviet Union had not planned, let alone carried out, the April Revolution.

It was Afghans led by the PDPA that requested assistance from the Soviet Union, whose borders bounded with Afghanistan, to help in the growing civil war promulgated by reactionary and corrupt warlords bent on overturning the new government.

What is not well understood is that the U.S. was deeply involved in the Afghan civil war, not on the side of the new government, but on the side of the reactionaries who were bent on the destruction of the progressive gains, which foremost included women’s rights.

In 1979, the CIA began arming and financing the Afghan mujahideen — murderous warlords — and later conspired with both Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. The CIA operation, dubbed “Operation Cyclone,” was the longest and most expensive in U.S. history. It continued after the Soviet army withdrew in 1989.

Later, the CIA ran death squads that terrorized Afghan villagers and murdered children.

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In 1992, three years after the Soviet army withdrew, the PDPA forces continued to resist. Contrast this with the rapid collapse of the U.S. puppet Karzai-Ghani government in Kabul.
U.S. war and occupation

In 1992 the Afghan warlords, backed by the U.S., finally succeeded in overthrowing the PDPA government. At the time, Western governments celebrated this as a “victory against Soviet tyranny.” In 1996 the Taliban movement, a product of infighting among the warlord factions, seized control of the country. Socialist leaders who had been held under house arrest were executed.

In 2001, the Taliban made a convenient first target for the U.S. “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks. In two decades of U.S. war and occupation since then, only a tiny percentage of women and girls were able to advance themselves, inadvertently becoming show pieces for Western NGOs and the media. But the vast majority of Afghan women have remained in the worst possible conditions.

Business Insider, certainly not a revolutionary source, documents Afghanistan among the 25 poorest countries. Afghanistan is listed as the 7th poorest, with a gross domestic product of $499.44 per person, just ahead of war torn Yemen. It was more likely that an Afghan woman or girl would be blown up by a landmine or starve to death than have the opportunity to go to school.

Wherever imperialism goes, it creates misery and backwardness, stunting and distorting the development of the colonized, occupied and even the neocolonial world.

Class roots of women’s oppression

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, advanced a materialist conception of history. Included was the thesis that the development of private property during the period of prehistory led to the first division among humans — the overthrow of matrilineal society and the consequent oppression of women.

While they rested that conclusion on anthropological studies that were available in the 19th century, their conclusions have now been more fully documented. (See Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” and Bob McCubbin’s “The Social Evolution of Humanity.”)

The materialist view of history explained that the development of society was based on changes in the mode of production from slavery (refering to the slavery of antiquity), feudalism and capitalism to socialism and what lies in the future, communism.

It is the struggle of classes that drives this process forward.

Marx and the thinkers that followed him did not view this process as stagnant and linear but rather one that was ruptorous, chaotic and revolutionary. Sometimes different modes of production existed side by side for a period of time before contradictions gave way to change.

The role of religion and culture is a product of the dominant economic system. Ideas do not abstractly exist somewhere in the stratosphere; they are deeply connected to all human society. That includes the ideology of patriarchy.

The modern-day women’s liberation movement in the United States is not exempted. It emerged and was influenced by the great struggles against imperialism, including the Vietnamese liberation struggle, and domestically, the Black liberation movement.

Dorothy Ballan explains in the pamphlet “Feminism and Marxism” how the development of the birth control pill, which gave women some modicum of control over their bodies, buttressed the movement.

Socialist revolutions

The Russian Revolution of 1917, which established the Soviet Union, was the very first revolution that shook off both the chains of capitalism and feudal relations, and others followed.

In 1949, the Chinese Revolution threw off the shackles of feudalism. Chinese women, who “hold up half the sky,” participated in bringing about a new China that abolished child brothels, concubinage and arranged marriages in the revolutionary Marriage Law of 1950. Foot binding, a cruel process of mutilating girls and a product of feudal China, was banished.

What the revolutionary socialist women and men of Afghanistan were able to accomplish from 1978-1992, prior to their revolution’s destruction and losses, was nothing short of heroic.

The grinding poverty and the existence of feudal conditions mitigated against everything they were trying to accomplish. Yet they fought.

Their struggle took place in the shadows, both literally in proximity and figuratively, of the great Bolshevik Revolution that brought innumerable gains to women and all of the Soviet people. The Soviet revolution could not have helped but raise the expectations of the Afghan people.

Ironically, it was the retreat of the Soviet leadership during this period, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, that would also figure negatively into the equation.

While today it is the oppressor’s history that dominates our capitalist culture with slanders and self-righteous criticism, none of it can change the heroic character of those women and men who fought for genuine social change.

Reparations needed for Afghan people

At present the Afghan people are suffering from staggering inflation. It’s not just burqas rising in price, as the media snidely reports, but food and many other necessities. The New York Federal Reserve and other banks are blocking Afghanistan’s nearly $9.5 billion in assets.

U.S. imperialism and its banker rulers owe reparations to the people of Afghanistan who have suffered pillage, death and destruction for the last four decades.

Our role as women in the Western capitalist world is to end imperialist war, occupation and sanctions — the only sure route to the liberation of women worldwide. Regardless of twists and turns, self-determination for the people of Afghanistan will ultimately bring progress.

U.S. out of Afghanistan — reparations now!

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 07, 2021 1:19 pm

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How Elite US Institutions Created Afghanistan’s Neoliberal President Ashraf Ghani, who Stole $169 Million from His Country

September 6, 2021
By Ben Norton – Sep 2, 2021

Before he stole $169 million and fled his failed state in disgrace, Afghanistan’s puppet President Ashraf Ghani was formed in elite American universities, given US citizenship, trained in neoliberal economics by the World Bank, glorified in the media as an “incorruptible” technocrat, coached by powerful DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, and given awards for his book “Fixing Failed States.”

No individual is more emblematic of the corruption, criminality, and moral rot at the heart of the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan than President Ashraf Ghani.

As the Taliban took over his country this August, advancing with the momentum of a bowling ball rolling down a steep hill, seizing many major cities without firing a single bullet, Ghani fled in disgrace.

The US-backed puppet leader allegedly made his escape with $169 million that he stole from the public coffers. Ghani reportedly crammed the cash into four cars and a helicopter, before flying to the United Arab Emirates, which granted him asylum on supposed “humanitarian” grounds.

The president’s corruption had been exposed before. It was known, for instance, that Ghani had brokered shady deals with his brother and US military-linked private companies, letting them tap into Afghanistan’s estimated $1 trillion in mineral reserves. But his last-minute exit represented an entirely new level of treachery.

Ghani’s senior aides and officials promptly turned on him. His defense minister, General Bismillah Mohammadi, wrote on Twitter in disgust, “They tied our hands behind our backs and sold the homeland. Damn the rich man and his gang.”

While Ghani’s dramatic desertion stands out as a stark metaphor for the depravity of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan – and how it made a handful of people very, very rich – the rot goes much deeper. His rise to power was carefully managed by some of the most esteemed and well-heeled think tanks and academic institutions in the United States.

Indeed, Western governments and their stenographers in the corporate media enjoyed a veritable love affair with Ashraf Ghani. He was a poster boy for the exportation of neoliberalism to what had been Taliban territory, their very own Afghan Milton Friedman, a faithful disciple of Francis Fukuyama – who proudly blurbed Ghani’s book.

Washington was thrilled with Ghani’s reign in Afghanistan, because it had finally found a new way to implement Augusto Pinochet’s economic program, but without the PR cost of torturing and massacring droves of dissenters in stadiums. Of course, it was the foreign military occupation that replaced Pinochet’s death squads, concentration camps, and helicopter assassinations. But the distance between Ghani and his neocolonial protectors helped NATO market Afghanistan as a new model for capitalist democracy, one that could be exported to other parts of the Global South.

As South Asia’s version of the Chicago Boys, the US-educated Ghani believed deeply in the power of the free market. To advance his vision, he founded a Washington, DC-based think tank, the “Institute for State Effectiveness,” whose slogan was “Citizen-Centered Approaches to State and Market,” and which was expressly dedicated to proselytizing the wonders of capitalism.

Ghani clearly spelled out his dogmatic neoliberal worldview in an award-winning book rather comically titled “Fixing Failed States.” (The 265-page tome uses the word “market” a staggering 219 times.) It would be impossible to overstate the irony, then, of the state he personally presided over immediately failing mere days after a US military withdrawal.

The instantaneous and disastrous disintegration of the US puppet regime in Kabul sent Western governments and mainstream reporters into a frenzy. As they frantically looked for people to blame, Ghani stood out as a convenient scapegoat.

What went unsaid was that these same NATO member states and media outlets had for two decades lavished praise on Ghani, depicting him as a noble technocrat who was bravely fighting corruption. They had long been the Afghan president’s eager patrons, but threw him under the bus when he outlived his usefulness, finally acknowledging that Ghani was the treacherous crook he had always been.

The case is instructive, for Ashraf Ghani is a textbook example of the neoliberal elites whom the US empire hand picks, cultivates, and installs in power to serve its interests.

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NATO’s 2016 Warsaw Summit, featuring (from left to right) UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, US President Barack Obama, President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani, CEO of Afghanistan Abdullah Abdullah, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

Ashraf Ghani, Made in USA

There is no point at which Ashraf Ghani ends and the United States begins; they are impossible to separate. Ghani was a political product proudly Made in USA.

Ghani was born into a wealthy and influential family in Afghanistan. His father had worked for the country’s monarchy and was well connected politically. But Ghani left his homeland for the West as a young man.

By the time of the US invasion in October 2001, Ghani had lived half of his life in the United States, where he established his career as an academic and imperial bureaucrat.

A US citizen until 2009, Ghani only decided to renounce his citizenship so that he could run for president of US-occupied Afghanistan.

A look at Ghani’s biography shows how he was gestated in a petri dish of elite US institutions.

The US cultivation of Ghani began when he was in high school in Oregon, where he graduated in 1967. From there, he went on to study at the American University in Beirut, where, as The New York Times put it, Ghani “enjoyed the Mediterranean beaches, went to dances and met” his Lebanese-American wife, Rula.

In 1977, Ghani moved back to the United States, where he would spend the next 24 years of his life. He completed a Masters degree and PhD at New York City’s elite Columbia University. His field? Anthropology – a discipline thoroughly infiltrated by US spy agencies and the Pentagon.

In the 1980s, Ghani immediately found jobs at top schools: the University of California, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. He also became a regular fixture on British state media, establishing himself as a leading commentator on the BBC’s intelligence agency-linked Dari and Pashto services. And in 1985, the US government gave Ghani its prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, to study Islamic schools in Pakistan.

By 1991, Ghani decided to leave academia to enter the world of international politics. He joined the main institution enforcing neoliberal orthodoxy around the globe: the World Bank. As political economist Michael Hudson has illustrated, this institution has served as a virtual arm of the US military.

Ghani worked at the World Bank for a decade, overseeing the implementation of devastating structural adjustment programs, austerity measures, and mass privatizations, primarily in the Global South, but also in the former Soviet Union.

After Ghani returned to Afghanistan in December 2001, he was quickly appointed finance minister of the US-created puppet government in Kabul. As finance minister until 2004, and eventually president from 2014 to 2021, he employed the machinations he had developed at the World Bank to impose the Washington Consensus on his homeland.

The regime Ghani helped the United States construct was so cartoonishly neoliberal that it established a position for a top official called the “CEO of Afghanistan.”

In the 2000s, with Washington’s support, Ghani gradually worked his way up the political totem pole. In 2005, he made a technocratic rite of passage and delivered a viral TED talk, promising to teach his audience “How to rebuild a broken state.”

Image

The lecture provided a transparent glimpse into the mind of a World Bank-trained imperial bureaucrat. Ghani echoed the “end of history” argument of his mentor Fukuyama, insisting that capitalism had become the world’s unchallengeable form of social organization. The question was no longer what system a country wanted, he argued, but rather “which form of capitalism and which type of democratic participation.”

In a barely intelligible dialect of neoliberalese, Ghani declared, “we have to rethink the notion of capital,” and invited viewers to discuss “how to mobilize different forms of capital for the project of state building.”

That same year, Ghani delivered a speech at the European Ideas Network Conference, in his capacity as the new president of Kabul University, in which he further explained his vision for the world.

Praising the “center-right,” Ghani declared that imperialist institutions like NATO and the World Bank must be strengthened in order to defend “democracy and capitalism.” He insisted that the US military occupation of Afghanistan was a model that could be exported around the world, as “part of a global effort.”

In the talk, Ghani also reflected fondly on his time carrying out Washington’s neoliberal “shock therapy” in the former Soviet Union: “In the 1990s … Russia was ready to become democratic and capitalist and I think the rest of the world failed it. I had the privilege of working in Russia for five years during that time.”

Ghani was so proud of his work with the World Bank in Moscow that, in his official bio on the Afghan government’s website, he boasted of “working directly on the adjustment program of the Russian coal industry” – in other words, privatizing the Eurasian giant’s massive hydrocarbon reserves.

While Ghani flaunted his accomplishments in post-Soviet Russia, UNICEF published a report in 2001 that found that the decade of mass privatizations imposed on newly capitalist Russia caused a staggering 3.2 million excess deaths, reduced life expectancy by five years, and dragged 18 million children into abject poverty, with “high levels of child malnutrition.” The leading medical journal Lancet likewise found that the US-created economic program increased Russian adult male mortality rates by 12.8%, largely due to the staggering 56.3% male unemployment it unleashed.

Given this odious record, perhaps it is no surprise that Ghani left Afghanistan with skyrocketing rates of poverty and misery.

Scholar Ashok Swain, a professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University and UNESCO chair on international water cooperation, noted that, during the 20 years of US-NATO military occupation, “The number of Afghans living in poverty has doubled, and the areas under poppy cultivation have tripled. More than one-third of Afghans have no food, half no drinking water, two-third no electricity.”


The free market medicine that President Ghani had shoved down Afghanistan’s throat was just as successful as the neoliberal shock therapy he and his World Bank colleagues had imposed on post-Soviet Russia.

But Ghani’s economic snake oil found an eager audience in the so-called international community. And by 2006, his global profile had reached such heights that he was considered a possible replacement for Secretary General Kofi Annan at the United Nations.

Meanwhile, Ghani was being given large sums of money by NATO states and billionaire-backed foundations to set up a think tank whose name will forever be tinged with irony.

The ultimate failed state administrator advises elites on “fixing failed states”
In 2006, Ghani levereaged his experience implementing “pro-business” policies from post-Soviet Russia to his own homeland to co-found a think tank called the Institute for State Effectiveness (ISE).

ISE markets itself in language that could have been lifted from an IMF brochure: “The roots of ISE’s work are in a World Bank program in the late 1990s which aimed to improve country strategies and program implementation. It focused on building coalitions for reform, implementing large-scale policies, and training the next generation of development professionals.”

The think tank’s slogan reads today as a parody of technocratic boilerplate: “Citizen-Centered Approaches to State and Market.”

In addition to its role in pushing neoliberal reforms on Afghanistan, the ISE has run similar programs in 21 countries, including East Timor, Haiti, Kenya, Kosovo, Nepal, Sudan, and Uganda. In these states, the think tank said it created a “framework for understanding state functions and the balance between governments, markets, and people.”

Legally based in Washington, the Institute for State Effectiveness is funded by a Who’s Who of think tank financiers: Western governments (Britain, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway, and Denmark); elite international financial institutions (the World Bank and OECD); and Western intelligence-linked, billionaire-backed corporate foundations (the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Open Society Foundations, Paul Singer Foundation, and Carnegie Corporation of New York).

Ghani’s co-founder was free market enthusiast Clare Lockhart, a former investment banker and fellow World Bank veteran who went on to serve as a UN advisor for the NATO-created Afghan government and a member of the board of trustees of the CIA-backed Asia Foundation.

Ghani and Lockhart’s market-obsessed outlook was encapsulated in a partnership they formed in 2008 between their ISE and the fellow neoliberal think tank the Aspen Institute. Under the agreement, Ghani and Lockhart led Aspen’s “Market Building Initiative,” which they said “creates dialogue, frameworks, and active engagement to support countries in building legitimate market economies,” and “aims to put in place the value chains and underpinning credible institutions and infrastructure to allow citizens to participate in the benefits of a globalizing world.”

Anyone novelist seeking to satirize DC think tanks might have been criticized for being too on the nose if they wrote about such an Institute for State Effectiveness.

The cherry on top of the absurdity came in 2008, when Ghani and Lockhart detailed their technocratic worldview in a book entitled “Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World.”

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The first text that appears inside the front cover is a blurb from Ghani’s ideological guide, Francis Fukuyama, the pundit who infamously declared that, with the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the Socialist Bloc, the world had reached the “End of History,” and human society was perfected under the Washington-led capitalist liberal democratic order.

Following Fukuyama’s praise is a glowing endorsement from right-wing Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, author of the tract “The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else” (spoiler: de Soto insists it is not imperialism). This Chicago Boy crafted the neoliberal shock therapy policies of Peru’s dictatorial Alberto Fujimori regime.

The third blurb in Ghani’s book was composed by the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, Robert Hormats, who insisted that the tome “provides a brilliantly crafted and extraordinarily valuable analysis.”

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Blurbs in Ashraf Ghani’s 2008 book “Fixing Failed States”

“Fixing Failed States” makes for maddeningly boring reading, and essentially amounts to a 265-page-long reiteration of Ghani’s thesis: the solution to practically all of the world’s problems is capitalist markets, and the state exists to manage and protect those markets.

In a typically long-winded bromide, Ghani and Lockhart wrote, “The establishment of functioning markets has led to the victory of capitalism over its competitors as a model of economic organization by harnessing the creative and entrepreneurial energies of large numbers of people as stakeholders in the market economy.”

Readers of the neoliberal snoozer would have learned just as much by flipping through any World Bank pamphlet.

Besides employing some variation on the word “market” 219 times, the book features 159 uses of the words “invest,” “investment,” or “investor.” It is also stuffed with clumsy, robotically repeated passages like the following:

Embarking on these paths of transition has required efforts to overcome the perception that capitalism is necessarily exploitative and that the relationship between government and corporations is inherently confrontational. Successful governments have forged partnerships between the state and the market to create value for their citizens; these partnerships are both profitable financially and sustainable politically and socially.

Highlighting their ideological zealotry, Ghani and Lockhart even went so far as to assert an “incompatibility between capitalism and corruption.” Of course, Ghani would go on to prove just how absurd this statement was by selling off his country to US companies in which his family members had invested, furnishing them with exclusive access to Afghanistan’s mineral reserves, and then bolting to a Gulf monarchy with $169 million in stolen state funds.

But among the Beltway’s class of insular elites, the risible book was celebrated as a masterpiece. In 2010, “Fixing Failed States” earned Ghani and Lockhart a coveted 50th place in Foreign Policy’s list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. The esteemed magazine described their Institute for State Effectiveness as “the world’s most influential state-building think tank.”

Silicon Valley was smitten as well. Google invited the two to its New York office to outline the book’s conclusions.

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Clare Lockhart and Ashraf Ghani present “Fixing Failed States” at Google in 2008

NATO’s Atlantic Council cultivates Ghani

Typing away in their hermetic offices on DC’s K Street, bookish lanyard-wearing pundits helped to provide the political and intellectual justification for pressing ahead with the two-decade foreign military occupation of Afghanistan. The think tanks that employed them seemed to view the war as a neocolonial civilizing mission aimed at promoting democracy and enlightenment to a “backward” people.

It was in this insulated environment of politically connected US think tanks and universities, in his 24 years living in the United States from 1977 to 2001, where Ghani the politician was born.

The powerful Brookings Institution was enamored with him. Writing in the Washington Post in 2012, the liberal-interventionist director of the think tank’s foreign policy research, Michael E. O’Hanlon, lauded Ghani as an “economic wizard.”

But chief among the organizations that fueled Ghani’s rise was the Atlantic Council, NATO’s de facto think tank in DC.

Ghani’s influences and sponsors were clearly evidenced by his official Twitter account, where the Afghan president followed just 16 profiles. Among them were NATO, its Munich Security Conference, and the Atlantic Council.

Ghani’s work with the think tank goes back nearly 20 years. In April 2009, Ghani did a fawning interview with Frederick Kempe, the president and CEO of the Atlantic Council. Kempe revealed that the two had been close friends and colleagues since 2003.

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Ashraf Ghani with his close friend and ally, Atlantic Council President and CEO Frederick Kempe, in 2015

“When I came to the Atlantic Council,” Kempe recalled, “we built an International Advisory Board, of sitting chairmen and CEOs of globally significant companies, and Cabinet members – former Cabinet members of some renown from key countries. At that point it wasn’t so much I was determined to have Afghanistan represented on the International Advisory Board, because not all countries in South Asia are. But I was determined to have Ashraf Ghani.”

Kempe disclosed that Ghani was not only a member of the International Advisory Board, but also part of an influential Atlantic Council working group called the Strategic Advisors Group. Joining Ghani on the committee were former senior Western government and military officials, as well as leaders of major US and European corporations.

As part of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group, Kempe claimed he and Ghani helped create the Barack Obama’s administration’s strategy for Afghanistan.

“It was in that guise that I first talked to Ashraf, and we talked about how the long-term goals weren’t really known. For all the resources we were putting into Afghanistan, the long-term goals weren’t obvious,” Kempe explained.

“At that point, we came up with the idea that there had to be a 10-year framework for Afghanistan. Little did we know that we were developing and implementing strategy – because it was always thought to be an implementing strategy. But, suddenly, we had an Obama plan, behind which to put this implementing strategy.”

Ghani published this strategy at the Atlantic Council in 2009, under the title “A Ten-Year Framework for Afghanistan: Executing the Obama Plan… and Beyond.”

Ashraf Ghani Atlantic Council Obama Plan Afghanistan

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In 2009, Ghani was also a candidate in Afghanistan’s presidential election. To help manage his campaign, Ghani hired the American political consultant James Carville, who was known for his role as a strategist in the Democratic presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton.

At the time, the Financial Times described Ghani favorably as “the most westernised and technocratic of all the candidates standing in the Afghan elections.”

The Afghan people were not so enthusiastic. Ghani was ultimately crushed in the race, coming in a dismal fourth place, with less than 3% of the vote.

When Ghani’s friend Kempe invited him back for an interview that October, after the election, the Atlantic Council president insisted, “Some people would say you ran an unsuccessful campaign; I would say it was a successful campaign but you didn’t win.”

Kempe heaped praise on Ghani, calling him “one of the most capable public servants anywhere on the planet,” and “conceptually brilliant.”

Kampe also noted that Ghani’s talk “should be thought provoking for the Obama administration,” which was relying on the Atlantic Council to help craft its policies.

“You would have come here before the election as a dual passport-holding American and Afghan but one of the sacrifices you made to run for office was to give up your U.S. citizenship, so I’m horrified to hear that you’re here on a single entry U.S.-Afghan visa,” Kempe added. “So the Atlantic Council will go to work on that, but we certainly have to rectify that.”


Ghani continued working closely with the Atlantic Council in the years that followed, constantly doing interviews and events with Kempe, in which the think tank’s president stated, “In the interest of full disclosure, I must declare that Ashraf is a friend, a dear friend.”

Up until 2014, Ghani remained an active member of the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board,alongside numerous former heads of state, US imperial planner Zbigniew Brzezinski, neoliberal economic apostle Lawrence Summers, Lebanese-Saudi billionaire oligarch Bahaa Hariri, right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the CEOs of Coca-Cola, Thomson Reuters, the Blackstone Group, and Lockheed Martin.

But that year, opportunity knocked and Ghani saw his ultimate ambition within reach. He was on the precipice of becoming president of Afghanistan, fulfilling the role elite US institutions had cultivated him for over decades.

Washington’s love affair with the “technocratic reformer”

Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban leader, Hamid Karzai, had initially showed himself to be a loyal Western puppet. By the end of his reign in 2014, however, Karzai had become a “harsh critic” of the US government, as the Washington Post put it, “an ally who became an adversary during the 12 years of his presidency.”

Karzai began to openly criticize US-NATO troops for killing tens of thousands of civilians. He was angry about how controlled he was, and sought to exert more independence, lamenting, “Afghans died in a war that’s not ours.”

Washington and Brussels had a problem. They had invested billions of dollars over a decade in creating a new government in their image in Afghanistan, but their chosen marionette was beginning to bridle at his strings.

From the perspective of NATO governments, Ashraf Ghani provided the perfect replacement for Karzai. He was the portrait of a loyal technocrat, and had only one small downside: Afghans hated him.

When he got less than 3% of the vote in the 2009 election, Ghani had run openly as the candidate of the Washington Consensus. He only had the support of a few elites in Kabul.

So when the 2014 presidential race rolled around, Ghani and his Western handlers took a different tack, dressing Ghani in traditional clothes and filling his speeches with nationalist rhetoric.

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Wearing traditional Afghan clothes, Ashraf Ghani (right) shakes hands with US Secretary of State (middle), and Abdullah Abdullah (left)

The New York Times insisted that he had finally found the sweet spot: “Technocrat to Afghan Populist, Ashraf Ghani Is Transformed.” The paper recounted how Ghani went from a “pro-Western intellectual” who conducted “small talk in a vernacular best described as technocratese (think phrases like ‘consultative processes’ and ‘cooperative frameworks’)” to a bad copy of “populists who cut deals with their enemies, win support from their rivals and appeal to Afghan national pride.”

The rebranding strategy did help get Ghani into second place, but he was still handily defeated in the first round of the 2014 election. His rival, Abdullah Abdullah, garnered 45% to Ghani’s 32%, with nearly 1 million more votes.

In the June run-off, however, the tables suddenly turned. The results were delayed, and when they were finalized three weeks later, they had Ghani up with a stunning 56.4% to Abdullah’s 43.6%.

Abdullah claimed that Ghani had stolen the election through widespread fraud. His accusations were far from baseless, as there was substantial evidence of systematic irregularities.

To settle the dispute, the Obama administration dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to Kabul to broker negotiations between Ghani and Abdullah.

Kerry’s mediation led to the creation of a national unity government in which President Ghani at least initially agreed to share power with Abdullah, who would occupy a newly created role, the name of which transparently reflected Washington’s neoliberal agenda: Chief Executive Officer, or CEO of Afghanistan.

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US Secretary of State John Kerry negotiating with Afghanistan presidential candidates Abdullah Abdullah (left) and Ashraf Ghani (right) in July 2014

A report published that December by European Union electoral observers concluded that there had indeed been rampant fraud in the June election. More than 2 million votes, representing over one-quarter of the total cast, had come from polling stations with overt irregularities.

Whether or not Ghani actually won the run-off was nebulous. But he had managed to get over the finish line, and that was all that mattered. He was president now. And his imperial patrons in Washington were more than happy to sweep the scandal under the rug.

Official Washington lionizes Ghani in the face of fraud and failure
The apparent rigging of the 2014 election did little to tarnish Ashraf Ghani’s image in the Western media. The BBC characterized him with three terms – “reformer,” “technocrat,” and “incorruptible” – that would become the press corps’ favorite descriptions for a president who ultimately abandoned his country with $169 million and his proverbial tail between his legs.

In a puff piece that was emblematic of the media’s portrayal of Ghani, the New Yorker claimed he was “incorruptible,” hailing him as a “visionary technocrat who thinks twenty years ahead.”

In March 2015, Ghani flew to Washington for his moment of ultimate glory. The new Afghan president delivered a speech to a joint session of the US Congress. And he was celebrated as a hero who would unlock the magic of the free market to save Afghanistan once and for all.

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Think tankers and their friends in the press could not get enough of Ghani. That August, the senior director of programs at the US government-funded regime-change organization Democracy International, Jed Ober, published an article in Foreign Policy that reflected the Beltway’s love affair with its man in Kabul.

When Ashraf Ghani was elected president of Afghanistan, many in the international community rejoiced. Surely a former World Bank official with a reputation as a reformer was the right man to fix Afghanistan’s most egregious problems and repair the country’s standing internationally. There was no better candidate to bring Afghanistan into a new age of good governance and begin to expand the rights and freedoms that have too often been denied many of the country’s citizens.

Unperturbed by the documented allegations of electoral fraud, the Atlantic Council honored Ghani in 2015 with its “distinguished international leadership award,” celebrating his putative “selfless and courageous commitment to democracy and human dignity.”


The Atlantic Council excitedly noted that Ghani “personally accepted the award, presented to him by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on March 25 in Washington before an audience of NATO leaders, ambassadors and generals.”

Albright, who once publicly defended the killing of more than half a million Iraqi children by US-led sanctions, glorified Ghani as a “brilliant economist” and claimed “he has offered hope to the Afghan people, and to the world.”

The official Atlantic Council ceremony was later held in April, but Ghani was unable to attend, so his daughter Mariam received the award on his behalf.

Born and raised in the United States, Mariam Ghani is a New York City-based artist who perfectly embodies all the characteristics of a radlib hipster ensconced in a luxury Brooklyn loft apartment. Mariam’s personal Instagram account features a combination of minimalist art and pseudo-radical political expressions.

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With elite status within the milieu of left-identified regime-change activists, Mariam Ghani participated in a 2017 panel discussion at New York University titled “Art & Refugees: Confronting Conflict with Visual Elements,” alongside the illustrator and dirty-war supporter Molly Crabapple. Crabapple is a fellow at the US State Department-funded New America Foundation, where she is sponsored by billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. She and Mariam Ghani also appeared together in a 2019 artist compilation.

At the 2015 Atlantic Council ceremony in Washington, as Mariam Ghani proudly accepted the militaristic NATO think tank’s top award for her father, she stood smiling alongside three fellow honorees: a top US general, the CEO of Lockheed Martin, and right-wing country singer Toby Keith, who made his name screeching out jingoist musical threats against Arabs and Muslims, pledging to “put a boot in your ass,” because “it’s the American way.”


The Atlantic Council’s marketing on behalf of President Ghani kicked into hyperdrive after the ceremony. In June 2015, the think tank published an article under its “New Atlanticist” blog titled, “IMF: Ghani has Shown Afghanistan is ‘Open for Business.’”

The International Monetary Fund’s top official in Afghanistan, Mission Chief Paul Ross, effused to the Atlantic Council that Ghani had “signaled to the world that Afghanistan is open for business and the new administration is determined to proceed with reforms.”

The bureaucrat declared that the IMF was “optimistic about the long term,” under Ghani’s leadership.

Atlantic Council IMF Ashraf Ghani Afghanistan business
Ghani and his US puppet regime had a kind of revolving door with the Atlantic Council, in fact. His ambassador to the UAE, Javid Ahmad, simultaneously served as a senior fellow at the think tank. Ahmad exploited his sinecure there to place op-eds in major media outlets depicting his boss as a moderate reformer who aimed “to restore civil debate in Afghan politics.”


Foreign Policy had lent Ahmad space in its magazine to publish a barely disguised campaign ad for Ghani in June 2014. The article sang his praise as “a highly educated, pro-Western, intellectual alternative to Afghanistan’s age-old system of corruption and warlordism.”

At the time, Ahmad was a program coordinator for Asia at the Western government-funded cold war lobby group the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Foreign Policy’s editors apparently did not notice that Ahmad’s puff piece has passages that are almost a word-for-word copy of Ghani’s official bio.

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At the 2018 NATO Summit, the Atlantic Council hosted yet another fawning interview with Ghani. Flaunting his supposed “reform efforts,” the Afghan president insisted, “the security sector is being transformed completely, in the efforts against corruption.” He added, “There is a generational change that is taking place in our security forces, and across the board, that I think is really transformational.”

These boastful claims have not exactly aged well.

The journalist hosting the softball interview was Kevin Baron, the executive editor of the weapons industry-backed website Defense One. Though the systemic corruption and ineffectual and abusive nature of the Afghan army was well-known, Baron offered no pushback.

At the event, Ghani paid homage to the think tank that had served as his personal propaganda mill for so long. Celebrating the Atlantic Council’s CEO, Fred Kempe, Ghani gushed, “You’ve been a great friend. I have great admiration for both your scholarship and your management.”


The Atlantic Council’s love affair with Ghani continued right up until the ignominious end of his presidency.

Ghani was an honored guest at the Atlantic Council-backed, German government-sponsored Munich Security Conference (MSC) in 2019. There, the aristocratic Afghan president gave a speech that would make even the most cynical pseudo-populist blush, declaring, “Peace needs to be citizen-centered, not elite-centered.”


The Atlantic Council hosted Ghani a final time in June 2020, at an event co-sponsored by the CIA-linked United States Institute of Peace and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Following praise from Kempe as a “leading voice for democracy, freedom, and inclusion,” former CIA Director David Petraeus lauded Ghani by emphasizing “what a privilege it was to work with [him] as the commander in Afghanistan.”

Hear from President @ashrafghani TODAY at 10am EST as he discusses Afghanistan’s vision for peace hosted by @ACSouthAsia and moderated by @USIP’s Stephen Hadley. #ACFrontPage #AfghanPeaceProcess

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) June 11, 2020
It was not until Ghani openly robbed and fled his country in disgrace in August 2021 that the Atlantic Council finally turned on him. After nearly two decades of promoting, cultivating, and lionizing him, the think tank ultimately acknowledged that he was a “villain in hiding.”

It was a dramatic turnabout by a think tank that knew Ghani better than perhaps any other institution in Washington. But it also echoed the desperate attempts at face-saving by many of the same elite US institutions that had shaped Ghani into the neoliberal economic hit man he was.

In Ghani’s infamous final days, Washington remained confident
The illusion that Ashraf Ghani was a technocratic genius continued right up until the end of his disastrous term.

This June 25, just weeks before his government collapsed, Ghani met with Joe Biden in the White House, where the US president reassured his Afghan counterpart of Washington’s steadfast support.

“We’re going to stick with you,” Biden reassured Ghani. “And we’re going to do our best to see to it you have the tools you need.”

A month later, on July 23, Biden reiterated to Ghani on a phone call that Washington would continue propping him up. But without thousands of NATO troops protecting his hollow regime, the Taliban was rapidly advancing – and it all came down in a matter of days, like a sand castle hit by a wave.

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Ashraf Ghani meets with President Joe Biden in the White House on June 25, 2021

By August 15, Ghani had fled the country with sacks of stolen money. It was a surreal rebuttal to the narrative, repeated ad nauseam by the press, that Ghani was, as Reuters put it in 2019, “incorruptible and erudite.”

Elites in Washington couldn’t believe what was happening, denying what they were seeing right before their eyes.

Even the legendary progressive anti-corruption activist Ralph Nader was in denial, referring to Ghani in fond terms as an “incorruptible former U.S. citizen.”


Few figures encapsulated the moral and political rot of the 20-year US war on Afghanistan better than Ashraf Ghani. But his record should not be taken as an isolated example.

It was official Washington, its apparatus of think tanks, and its army of sycophantic reporters that made Ghani who he was. This was a fact he himself acknowledged in a June 2020 interview with the Atlantic Council, in which Ghani expressed his utmost gratitude to his patrons: “Let me first pay tribute to the American people, to the American administrations, and Congress of the United States, and particularly, the American taxpayer for the sacrifices in blood and treasure.”

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Sat Sep 11, 2021 1:53 pm

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Afghanistan a Military and an ‘Aid’ Failure
September 10, 2021
By Yves Engler – Aug 30, 2021

While recent events have destroyed the credibility of militarists who pushed for the invasion and 20-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, the moral bankruptcy of their supporters in the aid industry has also been stunningly revealed.

A quick Taliban victory over the foreign trained “Afghan army” at least (momentarily) embarrassed Canadian militarists. But what about their camp followers in the NGO universe?

Over the past two decades Ottawa has plowed over $3.6 billion in “aid” into Afghanistan. During this period the central Asian country has been the top recipient of official assistance, receiving about twice the next biggest destination, another victim of Canadian foreign policy, Haiti.

While Afghanistan is undoubtedly deserving of aid, 10 countries have a lower GDP per capita and 20 countries have a lower life expectancy. So why the focus on Afghanistan? Because it was the place where policymakers thought aid was most likely to have positive results? Of course not. The aid was delivered to support the Canadian, US, and NATO military occupation.

Canadian personnel repeatedly linked development work in Afghanistan to the counterinsurgency effort. “It’s a useful counterinsurgency tool,” is how Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Doucette, commander of Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, described the Canadian International Development Agency’s work in Afghanistan. Development assistance, for instance, was sometimes given to communities in exchange for information on combatants. After a roadside bomb hit his convoy in September 2009, Canadian General Jonathan Vance spent 50 minutes berating village elders for not preventing the attack. “If we keep blowing up on the roads,” he told them, “I’m going to stop doing development.”

The CF worked closely with NGOs in Afghanistan. A 2007 parliamentary report explained that some NGOs “work intimately with military support already in the field.” Another government report noted that the “Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) platoon made up of Army Reserve soldiers organizes meetings with local decision-makers and international NGOs to determine whether they need help with security.”

The aid was also a public relations exercise. At politically sensitive moments in the war Canadian officials sought to showcase newly built schools or dams to divert attention from more unsavory sides of military conflict. Alarmed about a growing casualty list and other negative news, in fall 2006, the Prime Minister’s Office directed the military to “push” reconstruction stories on journalists embedded with the military. Through an access to information request the Globe and Mail obtained an email from Major Norbert Cyr saying, “the major concern [at Privy Council Office] is whether we are pushing development issues with embeds.” In an interview with Jane’s Defence Weekly’s Canadian correspondent, a journalist described what this meant on the ground. “We’ve been invited on countless village medical outreach visits, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and similar events.” The hope was that reporters embedded at the Canadian base in Kandahar would file more stories about development projects and fewer negative subjects.

At a broader level aid was used to reinforce the foreign occupation. The aim was to support the Afghan forces allied with the US-led occupation. Canada’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan led to a drop in aid, and now that US forces have withdrawn, Canadian aid will likely dry up.

Historically, military intervention elicits aid. Call it the ‘intervention-equals-aid’ principle or ‘wherever Canadian or US troops kill, Ottawa provides aid’ principle.

Ottawa delivered $7.25 million to South Korea during the early 1950s Korean War. Tens of millions of dollars in Canadian aid supported US policy in South Vietnam in the 1960s and during the 1990-91 Iraq war Canada provided $75 million in assistance to people in countries affected by the Gulf crisis. Amidst the NATO bombing in 1999-2000 the former Yugoslavia was the top recipient of Canadian assistance. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq Canada announced a $300 million aid package to that country.

As mentioned above, Haiti has been the second largest recipient of Canadian aid over the past two decades. While an elected, pro-poor government was in place between 2001 and 2004 Canadian aid to Haiti was reduced to a trickle. But after the US, French and Canadian invasion ousted thousands of elected officials in 2004, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti. Throughout the 15-year UN occupation, Canadian aid continued to flow.

In the years after invasions by foreign troops, Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti were the top recipients of Canadian “aid”. The thread that connected those three countries was the presence of Canadian or US troops.

Should it even be called aid when it comes along with foreign soldiers? A better description would be the “break it and you pay for it” principle.

Where is the discussion of all this in the NGO world? Canada’s international assistance policy get a free ride — of course we’re a force for good — in the mainstream media. But does anyone really believe it’s good for “aid” to be tied to military occupation?

Will those who uncritically promote increased Canadian “aid” discuss its ties to the disaster in Afghanistan? Are any of the NGOs that followed foreign troops to Afghanistan speaking out about their error?



Featured image: Canada in Afghanistan/Flickr

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The Uyghur Narrative’s Goal: Proxy Destabilization of Afghanistan
September 10, 2021
By Rainer Shea – Sep 4, 2021

The events following the Afghanistan pullout are revealing the long-term goal of Washington’s rhetorical focus on the Uyghurs during recent years: to manufacture consent for a new U.S.-backed jihadist movement within Afghanistan, one that can be used to strike against China like how the Mujahideen struck against the Soviet Union.

The conditions surrounding this new anti-communist Afghanistan proxy war differ from those of the previous one. China isn’t stretched unsustainably thin, like the USSR was during the final decade of its existence. And China has no reason to get militarily involved in Afghanistan. But the Mujahideen war provided a template for what the imperialists can do within the country now that their utterly unsustainable occupation project has collapsed, and now that Washington has consequently experienced an international loss of perceived military credibility similar to the fall of imperialism’s hold over Saigon. The empire is increasingly desperate, and left with one option: to try to deepen Afghanistan’s instability through proxy terrorist organizations and intensified economic strangulation.

As Washington freezes Afghanistan’s wealth by applying its Taliban sanctions to the entire country, the empire and its proxy reactionaries throughout Eurasia are scheming about how to inflame fresh conflicts. In an article from last month, the right-wing Indian-centered publication Hindustan Times wrote about one of Washington’s Afghanistan proxies the East Turkestan Islamic Movement:

While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) unlike the US and Soviets is not expected cross the Rubicon by becoming political or militarily active in Afghanistan, it will surely use its new friend, the Taliban, for taking action against some 500 East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) fighters whose goal is to liberate Xinjiang Uighurs from the yoke of Beijing. The ETIM fighters are mostly located in Badakshan province in north Afghanistan which links with Xinjiang in China via the Wakhan corridor. Even though the Taliban have traditionally a close relationship with the ETIM, the Pashtuns are concentrated in south and its is the minority Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Uighur and Chechen who comprise the bulk of Taliban cadre in north Afghanistan. If the Taliban start harassing the Afghan minorities, it is these non-Pashtun elements who will join the core of Panjshir resistance in future. Already, intelligence reports from Afghanistan and Turkey indicate that the ETIM group will shift its allegiance to Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP) as they fear Taliban will act against them and hand them over to the MSS, the Chinese secret service. It is for this very reason that China wants US to redesignate ETIM as a global terrorist group.

How do we know Washington is backing the ETIM? Because last year, the Trump administration took it off the U.S. terrorist group list, falsely claiming that there was no longer evidence for it engaging in terrorist activities. And since then, the group has undergone a massive increase in its financial resources, manpower, logistics, and firepower. Another red flag for U.S. support is the fact that the ETIM is a Uyghur ethnic nationalist organization, one whose goal is to fulfill the U.S. State Department’s vision of a Balkanized China where Xinjiang has become an ethno-state called East Turkestan.

The growing terrorist threat that the ETIM has been posing to China—a country Afghanistan borders—is no accident. Washington wants greater ethnic tensions and threats of violence within central Eurasia at all costs, because this is instrumental to Washington’s hybrid asymmetrical war against the PRC. Washington also seeks to keep the Taliban from providing stability to Afghanistan, which would allow China to expand the BRI into the country.

This rant by one of India’s Sinophobic fascists has revealed the way the imperialists hope the ETIM’s role in this plan will develop: the Taliban starts pushing back against the ETIM’s anti-China actions, then this results in ethnic tensions that likely get exacerbated by CIA propaganda (perhaps one which exaggerates the Taliban’s uses of force against the Uyghur militants), then the ETIM can get paraded in the imperialist media as a heroic group of freedom fighters. “Freedom fighters” who are doing nothing more than resisting the repression of the Taliban, and of the Taliban’s geopolitical partner China. Which has itself been accused (based on faulty research from biased far-right sources) of violating the rights of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs.

It’s how Washington has made Al-Qaeda and ISIS forces into being seen as heroic liberators within the Syrian conflict: cheer for the jihadists throughout the imperialist media, glorifying their acts of terrorism as righteous defiance against the bogeyman Assad. The Syria war propaganda campaign has required numerous false flag chemical attacks that have been blamed on Assad, and a sophisticated network of “humanitarian” NATO-backed terrorism assistants like the White Helmets. The equivalent approach will be applied to the proxy war against China.

Already, the imperialist media has been manufacturing consent for the ETIM’s accompanying proxy groups: the new generation of the Mujahideen, and ISIS. Last month, the CIA-tied Washington Post put out the headline “The Mujahideen resistance to the Taliban begins now. But we need help.” It was written by Ahmad Massoud, the leader of this anti-Taliban insurgency. Massoud’s rhetoric about seeking to advance human rights is suspect; he’s the son of the leader of the original Mujahideen, the anti-communist terrorist organization that turned into the Taliban. And he received his military training from Sandhurst, the U.K. imperialist academy that’s equivalent to West Point. Beneath the columns and interviews that this spokesman for Washington’s continued subversion efforts has been making in U.S. media outlets, a more clearly ominous movement is brewing.

To advance their effort to activate ISIS as a proxy force in keeping Afghanistan unstable, the imperialists have been simultaneously painting ISIS as an ally of the Taliban and avoiding opportunities to help the Taliban in fighting ISIS. As the anti-imperialist blog The Failed Revolution assessed this week, the media’s obfuscation of Washington’s role in giving rise to ISIS throughout the Syria regime change proxy war has been instrumental to this current stage in the propaganda campaign.

Observes the blog: “The Western propaganda in most cases equalized Taliban with ISIS. And even worse, continued to blame the Taliban for all the bad outcomes in Afghanistan, almost ignoring the presence of ISIS and its consequences. This is the result of a certain US strategy to make Taliban and ISIS appear as if they are close allies. And this is very far from truth and the real, very complicated situation in Afghanistan.”

This strategy of denouncing and working against ISIS only when geopolitically convenient just reached a new level of wishy-washiness. Even amid the chaotic current situation surrounding the withdrawal, the U.S. military has been wary of working with the Taliban to counter ISIS-K, citing those same disingenuous concerns about the Taliban somehow representing an equivalent amount of threat towards stability compared to the Islamic State. Washington’s present position on collaborating with the Taliban against ISIS is that it’s “possible.” Not a word choice that inspires confidence in Washington’s commitment to fighting ISIS following Washington’s immediate efforts to blame Afghanistan for last month’s attack at the Kabul airport—a charge that came in spite of the Taliban’s consistent cooperation in countering ISIS.

The Failed Revolution writes regarding this imperialist media narrative:

The whole thing resembles the alleged attack with chemical weapons by the Syrian army. The US and its allies rushed to blame Assad for such an attack against civilians to find a pretext to start the bombings. Why would Assad do such a thing when he was already winning the war against ISIS with the help of the Russians? And it has been proved that there were no chemical attacks. Plenty of evidence that the Western propaganda machine tried to bury. Even when the narrative of the alleged Taliban-ISIS coalition collapsed rather quickly, as it seems, the US military still hesitates to cooperate with Taliban against ISIS. That’s because it doesn’t want to…The US deep state will continue pushing Biden to stay in Afghanistan perhaps by changing the nature of the war. A proxy war against Taliban, frequent drone strikes and mercenaries of private armies will make sure that the country will never find peace and stability. The US empire and its war machine have lost many wars, but they are undoubtedly unbeatable in one thing: establishing permanent chaos and destruction wherever they go.

Purely in its last point, the article is wrong. Since 2017, the Communist Party of China has been able to keep Xinjiang from experiencing any Uyghur separatist terrorist attacks, contrasting the decades of acts of violence that Washington’s subversion efforts used to be able to frequently incite. China’s achievements in jihadist deradicalization, and in fostering the economic prosperity necessary for Xinjiang’s Uyghurs to not listen to Washington’s calls for violent anti-government revolution, have shown the U.S. empire is able to be stopped from perpetuating its chaos campaigns. This redoubled Afghanistan destabilization effort is a reaction to the success of the Uyghur deradicalization program, and to the recent shrinking of Washington’s territorial control over Afghanistan.



Featured image: A propaganda meme from the armed U.S. right-wing Uyghur organization Altay Defense

https://orinocotribune.com/the-uyghur-n ... ghanistan/
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Sun Sep 12, 2021 2:37 pm

Last U.S. Drone Strike in Kabul Reportedly Targeted Aid Worker Who Didn’t Have Explosives
BY DANIEL POLITI
SEPT 11, 20217:48 PM

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Afghan residents and family members of the victims gather next to a damaged vehicle inside a house, day after a U.S. drone airstrike in Kabul on August 30, 2021. WAKIL KOHSAR/Getty Images

U.S. officials called it a “righteous strike.” It was the last drone strike before the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and American officials claimed they stopped an ISIS bomb that posed an imminent threat to the Kabul airport. Turns out though that the strike appears to have killed a worker for a U.S. aid group and there are indications there were no explosives in the vehicle that was hit, according to investigations by the New York Times and Washington Post. In all, 10 civilians appeared to have been killed in the Aug. 29 strike, including seven children. They were all members of the same extended family.

At the time of the strike, tensions were high in Kabul. The United States was rushing to finish evacuations days after a suicide bombing killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and more than 170 Afghans. The military had been warning that there was a risk of another imminent attack at the airport. So it at first appeared to be good intelligence work when the military said it had carried out a drone strike on a suspected terrorist driving a car that appeared filled with explosives. The supposed terrorist had been tracked for hours and military officials said he had been acting suspiciously. To support the case, U.S. officials said there was a large secondary blast after the drone strike that suggested there were bombs inside the vehicle. But the Times and Post both say they found no evidence of a large secondary blast. Two experts the Post talked to said the evidence suggests that if there was a second blast it had to do with “an ignition of fuel tank vapors.”

Beyond the issue of the secondary blast, military officials said they didn’t know the identity of the driver of the car but said his activities that day were suspicious. The driver was identified by reporters as Zamari Ahmadi, a technical engineer at Nutrition and Education International, a California-based aid group. His co-workers said the U.S. military may have confused his everyday job as something suspicious since he transported lots of colleagues to and from work. Analysis of video evidence also suggests that what the U.S. military may have interpreted as loading explosives into the car was actually Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into the vehicle so he could take them home. Ahmadi and another member of his family had applied to be resettled as refugees in the United States.

When U.S. officials decided to strike they saw only one other man near the vehicle. What they missed though is that when Ahmadi arrived home “several of his children and his brothers’ children came out, excited to see him, and sat in the car as he backed it inside,” according to the Times. Ahmadi’s relatives said that besides the 43-year-old Ahmadi, the others who were killed in the strike included three of his children, aged 20, 16, and 10. In addition, a 30-year-old was also killed along with five other children: a seven-year-old, a six-year-old, two three-year-old girls, and a two-year-old. “All of them were innocent,” said Ahmadi’s brother. “You say he was ISIS, but he worked for the Americans.” So far, the U.S. military has only acknowledged three civilian casualties.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... sives.html

War crimes from start to finish.....

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The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on SEPTEMBER 11, 2021
Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott

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[Source: boottheglobalperspectives.com]

Part 1: How the U.S. Used Radical Islam and 9/11 to Advance Imperialism and Override the Constitution

This is Part One of a three-part re-evaluation of 9/11 in light of startling new evidence that may change many minds about the so-called “craziness” of those who have refused to accept the “official” government story of this traumatic and defining event, which has so tragically misdirected U.S. policy for the past 20 years

Domestically, the attacks led to substantial changes in the federal government, the most obvious being the creation of a new cabinet-level department with the grave charge of securing “the homeland.”

Perhaps of greater consequence were the ways in which 9/11 further accelerated the abrogation of civil rights and the rule of law in the U.S.

Beginning with the Cold War and previously justified by the “global communist conspiracy,” the security organizations of the federal government had a long and prolific history of operations and episodes that appear straightforwardly illegal. On U.S. soil, these include McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, propaganda campaigns, and the surveillance and infiltration of groups engaging in constitutionally protected political activity.

Internationally, the U.S., since the end of World War II, has repeatedly violated the UN Charter which outlaws even the threat of aggression against other nations. Having been ratified by Congress, the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause establishes that the treaty is “the highest law in the land.”

Therefore, the post-World War II U.S. government has violated not just international law, but its own Constitution as a matter of course in the daily execution of its foreign policy.

On the basis of this domestic and international lawlessness, it has been argued by one of our co-authors, Aaron Good, that the maintenance of U.S. hegemony since World War II has entailed exceptionism—the institutionalization of a “state of exception” whereby the state exercises prerogative to override legal restraints on the basis of this or that emergency.[1]

Following 9/11, these trends worsened dramatically.

Introduced after 9/11 and passed by Congress in the wake of the still-unsolved anthrax attacks,[2] the United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act) kicked off a period in which U.S. civil liberties were drastically eroded.

The NSA launched a massive campaign of warrantless surveillance. Foreign nationals deemed “unlawful enemy combatants” were detained indefinitely. State and local police forces became militarized to an historically unprecedented extent.

In 2012, the U.S. assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son was killed by a U.S. strike.

In 2017, al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter was killed in a U.S. raid. All three were U.S. citizens.

The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gave the government the power to detain American citizens indefinitely. In the wake of the controversial 2012 NDAA, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) inquired as to whether “the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial.”

After responding by asserting that such has not happened and is not intended to happen, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder added that a U.S. President could “authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”[3]

The 9/11 Wars

Outside of the U.S., the consequences of the 2001 terror attacks were even more dramatic.

Most notably, the U.S. launched the two “9/11 Wars.” The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have killed over a million people, displaced tens of millions, and cost trillions of dollars—all with no discernible improvement to U.S. national security.

Furthermore, both wars were launched on very dubious grounds.

None of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers were Afghan nationals; most of them were from Saudi Arabia.

The invasion of Afghanistan was launched following the NATO invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but eventually it emerged that the report presented to NATO by U.S. Ambassador Frank Taylor contained no actual forensic evidence to support the assertion that the terror attacks had been orchestrated in Afghanistan.[4]

In mid-October of 2001, President Bush refused a Taliban offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to the moderate, Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference in order to stand trial for the attacks.[5]

The deceptions that led to the Iraq War are so infamous that they need not be restated here in any detail. The Bush administration relied on tendentious, erroneous, and even fabricated[6] intelligence to argue that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda.

As mentioned at the outset, it has often been asserted that 9/11 “changed everything.” Over time, even mainstream commentators eventually had to acknowledge that the U.S. overreacted to the attacks in harmful ways.

In this context, it should be noted that both of the 9/11 Wars were long in planning within the deep state—or if one prefers, within the U.S. foreign policy establishment or foreign policy blob.

Beginning in 1997, the CIA and Pentagon were working with the Uzbek security services to prepare for operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.[7] Getting closer to September 2001, that year had seen a series of negotiations between the Taliban and a U.S.-led coalition regarding the creation of a new unity government in Afghanistan.

According to attendee Niaz Naik, former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs, “If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid … And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come.”

Naik also stated that Tom Simons, a U.S. representative at the talks, told them that “‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation.’”[8]

Such would apparently come to pass after the negotiations broke down. On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet authorized the drafting of a new National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). This document, NSDP-9, called for a sizable covert action initiative which included U.S. ground troops and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was dead set against U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan but, on September 9, 2001, he was conveniently assassinated, likely with U.S. complicity on some level.[9]

The next day, on September 10, a second NSDP-9 related meeting was held, focusing on various details of the U.S. military and political plans for Afghanistan.[10]

The long-running campaign for regime change in Iraq was even more visible. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, asserting that “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”[11]

While Clinton apparently bowed to neoconservative pressure in signing the Iraq Liberation Act, those forces were in the driver’s seat of the incoming George W. Bush administration. According to Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, Bush was set on invading Iraq from the earliest days of his presidency. Said O’Neill, “It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”[12]

Afghanistan, Iraq, and the U.S. Grand Strategy

In truth, the 9/11 Wars were both prescribed by the U.S. hegemonic grand strategy consensus that was emerging throughout the 1990s. The energy heartlands of Western and Central Asia were very much on the minds of key figures ranging from Establishment realists like Zbigniew Brzezinski to the neoconservative imperialists most famously represented by the notorious Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

In 1997, Brzezinski wrote The Grand Chessboard in which he stated that for the U.S., “the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.” Since the non-Eurasian U.S. was preeminent in the region, he argued that “[American] global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”[13] His book even included a helpful map of the proposed Unocal pipeline through Afghanistan.[14]

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[Source: iakal.wordpress.com]

Meanwhile, Iraq is mentioned 25 times in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the imperial manifesto published by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century.[15]

It is also worth noting that in years prior to 9/11, these Establishment realists and the neoconservatives were bemoaning the fact that it would be difficult to mobilize public opinion for the militarism that would be needed to maintain American primacy well into the 21st century.

Brzezinski wrote that the U.S. was likely to “find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”[16] He also wrote that “The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”[17]

This is congruous with the infamous and oft-cited passage in PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses which stated, “[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”[18]

Islamist Terror and Anglo-U.S. Geopolitics

The modern phenomenon of Islamist terror derives in large part from Western imperialism—most significantly, British and American interventions. For example, Britain supported the reactionary Wahhabist Saudi monarchy and, in 1928, essentially created the Muslim Brotherhood (via the British Suez Canal Company) for the express purpose of countering Egyptian nationalists and leftists.[19]

In the 1930s, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna created the organization’s “Secret Apparatus,” described by Robert Dreyfuss as “an underground intelligence and paramilitary arm with a terrorist wing.” The Muslim Brotherhood worked against the political enemies of Egypt’s (British puppet) King Farouk and was even a major presence at the King’s 1937 coronation where its members provided “order and security.”[20]

After World War II, the most prominent Middle Eastern statesmen were nationalists of a secular bent—Nasser and Mossadegh. Thus, it was no coincidence that Egypt and Iran experienced paramilitary violence from Islamist terror groups backed by the West.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood tried at least twice to assassinate Nasser. The main international leader of the Brotherhood in the 1950s was Said Ramadan, a man who visited Eisenhower in the White House.

Ramadan was likely recruited by the CIA prior to—or shortly after—that visit.[21] A writer in the New York Review of Books flatly stated, “By the end of the decade, the CIA was overtly backing Ramadan.”[22]

In Iran, the CIA bankrolled the militant Warriors of Islam, an outfit described as a “terrorist gang” in an official CIA history. In 1953, various street thugs organized by the CIA created chaos in Tehran, even pretending to be communists whilst attacking mullahs and blowing up a mosque.[23]

Led by the U.S. and aided by various Islamists in the decades after World War II, the West largely succeeded in undermining nationalist governments in the Middle East—Iran and Egypt most notably.

Fundamentalist Islam, Petrodollars, and the Evolution of the Deep State

Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. deepened its relationship with fundamentalist Islam. In 1972, the CIA-founded Asia Foundation began to fund Afghan Islamists at Kabul University, including a young Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [24]

Interestingly, 1972 was also the year that the Center for Afghanistan Studies was founded at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO). Its website boasts that the Center’s “initial partnership with Kabul University would give UNO the experience necessary to establish many other collaborations around the world. At the time [of its founding], Afghanistan was a peaceful country. . . . [T]here was no war and the future looked bright. No one could foresee the history-making events that Afghans and Nebraskans would share.“[25]

The Center helped shape that future, in part by creating textbooks for Afghan children. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the CIA cut-out USAID paid the Center $51 million to produce the books in Afghan languages. As described by historian Peter Kuznick,

Page after page was filled with militant Islamic teaching and violent images. Children learned to count using pictures of missiles, tanks, land mines, Kalashnikovs, and dead Soviet soldiers. [One passage] shows a soldier adorned with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov. Above him is a verse from the Koran. Below is a statement about the mujahideen, who, in obedience to Allah, willingly sacrifice their lives and fortunes to impose Sharia law on the government. Students learned to read by studying stories about jihad. When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, they continued using the same violent jihadist texts, simply removing the human images, which they considered blasphemous.[26]

But let us return to the obscure early 1970’s. In 1973, Sardar Daoud overthrew the Afghan monarchy. Soon after, the U.S. began funding opposition figures in the country, including the radical Islamic Party. Beginning in September, the CIA, regional allies (Iran and Pakistan), and Islamist Afghan groups staged a series of raids and failed coups against Daoud. Subsequently, the U.S. State Department identified Muslim Brotherhood members as leaders of a failed rebellion in Afghanistan against Daoud. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the Brotherhood members, fled to Pakistan where he was received by the ISI (Pakistani intelligence). In 1978 and 1979, U.S. state department memos acknowledged that the Muslim Brotherhood were beneficiaries of U.S. anti-communist ventures in Afghanistan.[27]

Around this time, Zbigniew Brzezinski began pressing his “arc of crisis” strategy, asserting that the U.S. could dominate the Middle East by using political Islamism against leftist and nationalist movements.[28]

This led to President Carter’s fateful July 3, 1979, decision to authorize direct CIA funding of the Afghan mujahideen. As a result, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December.[29]

Meanwhile, economic and political events were bringing about major changes to the international monetary system and the American deep state.

When Vietnam War spending led to the end of the Bretton Woods gold-backed dollar, the U.S. was rescued from a difficult financial situation in large part by the “oil shocks”—unprecedented skyrocketing oil prices. The oil shocks were in all likelihood orchestrated by the U.S.

As Yanis Varoufakis summarizes:

[The notion] that the OPEC countries pushed the dollar price of oil sky high against the will of the United States … runs counter to logic and evidence. [How else to explain that America’s] closest allies, the Shah of Iran, President Suharto of Indonesia and the Venezuelan government, not only backed the increases but led the campaign to bring them about? [How do we explain the U.S.] scuttling of the Tehran negotiations between the oil companies and OPEC just before an agreement was reached that would have depressed prices? … Indeed, the Saudis have consistently claimed that Henry Kissinger, keener to manage the flow of petrodollars to America than to prevent the rise of energy prices, was encouraging them all the way to push the price of oil up by a factor of between two and four. So long as oil sales were denominated in dollars, the U.S. administration had no quarrel with the oil price increases.[30]

With the resulting massive accumulation of petrodollars by Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Middle East became an even more essential pillar of U.S. hegemony. Major oil producers like the Saudis and Iran used these dollars to buy U.S. Treasuries, invest in Western (especially U.S.) banks, and purchase arms from U.S. and British companies.

Beyond shoring up the dollar-dominated post-Bretton Woods monetary system, the wealth of these countries—along with their ties to U.S. economic elites and to the U.S. national security state—allowed them to play important roles in the evolution of a supranational American deep state. Powerful actors associated with the CIA needed to ensure that the post-Watergate intelligence investigations in Congress could not derail U.S. covert-operation capabilities.

To this end, the CIA-connected Saudi arms tycoon Adnan Khashoggi—along with intelligence officials from France, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, and Morocco—established the Safari Club. Prince Turki Al Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, explained it thusly:

In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.[31]

Another former head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham, was an early insider with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a bank that came to play an important role in the financial side of the U.S.-dominated covert netherworld.

This milieu—which included the Safari Club, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi’s enterprises—was described by our co-author Peter Dale Scott as being

part of a supranational deep state, whose organic links to the CIA may have helped consolidate it. It is clear however that decisions taken at this level by the Safari Club and BCCI were in no way guided by the political determinations of those elected to power in Washington [and were instead] expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions in Washington.[32]

In the latter half of the 1970s and in the 1980s, BCCI would play a key role in facilitating the financing of various covert operations and illicit enterprises. This institutional evolution represented by BCCI and the Safari Club should be placed in the context of key U.S. intelligence creations.

In his dissertation, Aaron Good wrote,

The embryonic [i.e., early-Cold War] deep state had seminal parapolitical institutions including banks (e.g., Castle Bank and Nugan Hand) or privatized paramilitary / intelligence outfits like the World Commerce Corporation and the various Anti-Communist Leagues. The late 1970s saw more powerful iterations, most notably the BCCI-Safari Club milieu which brought together right-wing Republicans, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and networks of wayward and disaffected spooks. With Reagan’s victory, many of these players were brought in from the cold.[33]

This is all to say that while Vietnam, Watergate, and the post-Watergate intelligence revelations all may have appeared as setbacks for U.S. imperialism and its covert apparatus, the outcome was quite opposite. The U.S. became even more dominant with the emergence of the post-Bretton Woods dollar and oil-dominated system. The clandestine realm, dominated by the U.S., became even more powerful and less accountable.

“Reaganism” and Beyond: America’s Deniable Islamist Proxies

With the right-wing Ronald Reagan in the White House, those scattered deep state elements were brought back into the fold. To employ a hyperbolic metaphor: It was as if Sauron and the One Ring had finally been reunited.

In 1981, after twisting some arms in the Senate, President Reagan secured the $8.5 billion sale of Boeing AWACS to Saudi Arabia. A number of sources reported that the deal included a promise from the Saudis to fund Reagan’s covert operations in such a way as to avoid congressional oversight.[34]

The Saudis would go on to play key roles in the creation and funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and in the Iran-Contra scandal. To summarize: In the wake of Watergate and the intelligence scandals of the 1970s, the end result was essentially an evolved deep-state system that was even more opaque and less accountable to any lawful public authority.

As referenced above, the Saudis would play a key role in the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, the funding of Islamist militants in Afghanistan to inflict a costly blow against the Soviet Union. Repeating a pattern from the war in Southeast Asia, the U.S. allies in this conflict became the world’s top heroin traffickers—Gulbuddin Hekmatyar first and foremost among them. Sometimes called the “Arab Afghans,” the fighters and their Saudi-led logistical support networks would evolve into al-Qaeda in the 1990s.

It was in this post-Cold War era that the U.S. began to use Arab Afghan / mujahideen assets in a number of conflicts in regions that had previously been under Soviet influence. An example was an early 1990s operation in Azerbaijan.

The murky Azerbaijan affair involved the U.S. oil majors, military / intelligence veterans like Richard Secord, and Islamist Arab Afghans—some of whom were recruited by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The dénouement was the installation of a regime in Baku that broke with

Russia and brought in Western oil companies.[35]

Islamist militants were also used to advance U.S. aims in Bosnia. Some of these fighters were trained by an Egyptian, Ali Mohamed, from the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. The Egyptian terrorist leader Omar Abdel-Rahman (aka the “blind sheikh”) played a lead role from his headquarters in Brooklyn, with Saudi and U.S. assistance.[36]

In North Africa, another notable U.S. adversary was a recurrent target of Islamist violence in the 1990s. Specifically, al-Qaeda assets were directed against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. A whistleblower from Britain’s MI5 revealed that, in 1996, MI6 officers attempted to use Islamist militants to assassinate the Libyan head of state. The operation failed, with Qaddafi unharmed and a number of militants killed in the process.[37]

The Crucial Pre-9/11 Years

Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, there was disagreement over Central Asia in the mid-to-late 1990s. A relatively dovish side was represented by Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott. In a July 1997 speech, Talbott explicitly warned against any sort of Central Asian “Great Game,” proposing instead the promotion of mutually beneficial cooperative arrangements in the region.[38]

Also in that same year, Pentagon and CIA elements were using NATO to effect, contra-Talbott and the State Department, a “forward strategy” in Central Asia. Under the auspices of the NATO Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, the U.S. military nurtured “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region” by launching a series of training exercises with Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz military forces.[39]

As we wrote in December 2020,

These CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment of U.S. combat forces. A deputy assistant secretary of defense, Catherine Kelleher, cited “the presence of enormous energy resources” as a justification for American military involvement.[40] Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard singled out for its geopolitical importance,[41] became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises.[42]

While the energy angle is clearly discernible in these operations, counterterror was also a pretext for U.S. intelligence activities in the region. Building from the foundational 1997 arrangement, the CIA had been working with the U.S. military and Uzbek military/intelligence forces with the ostensible aim of apprehending Osama bin Laden in neighboring Afghanistan.[43]

In hindsight, 1998 was the year when matters became even stranger. To put a finer point on the energy angle: Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney that year declared that he “[could] not think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”[44]

The U.S. fixation on Central Asia transcended partisanship. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated before an audience in Tashkent, “While you are geographically distant from the United States, you are very closely connected to our most vital national interests.” Presumably, Albright was obliquely referring to the $8 billion that U.S. oil majors had invested in Central Asian oil and gas.[45]

However, the U.S. military and intelligence presence in the region increasingly came to be overtly predicated on counter terror operations. Yet, at the same time—similar to the U.S. operations in Bosnia a few years earlier—the ostensible Arab Afghan/al-Qaeda arch-enemies of the U.S. were in the Balkans acting in ways that furthered U.S. geopolitical goals.

Specifically, al-Qaeda forces were working in concert with the U.S.-backed terrorist/mafia organization known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). U.S. military intervention in Kosovo took place through most of 1998 and the first half of 1999. Interpol in 1999 reported that an elite KLA unit in Kosovo was being led by Muhammad al-Zawahiri—a top al Qaeda lieutenant and the brother of current al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.[46]

The Zawahiri-KLA issue is something that the 9/11 Commission should have investigated and explained. Besides the Kosovo-al-Qaeda angle, an honest investigation would have looked into the U.S.-Azeri-al-Qaeda connections. The links represent important historical background, given that Baku, Azerbaijan, was one of the main hubs for al-Qaeda around the time of the August 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.[47]

While all of this was taking place in the years preceding 9/11, the U.S. and its oil majors were trying to strike a deal for a pipeline through Afghanistan. Notably—and as we detailed in our previous article—the Taliban failure to arrive at a workable pipeline deal acceptable to the U.S. coincided with further U.S. military and intelligence operations geared toward Afghanistan.

In 1999, two CIA counterterrorism officials—Cofer Black and Richard Blee—negotiated a deal with Uzbekistan.[48] This new liaison agreement apparently expanded upon the 1997 arrangement and expanded the targets to include not just bin Laden, but the Taliban government as well.[49]

Also, in 1999, CIA’s Richard Blee met with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and agreed to lobby Washington for increased support for Massoud. Massoud’s remote mountain redoubt of Panjshir was vital to American planning, because by this time it was the only major area not yet dominated by the Taliban. But Massoud himself presented problems to many in Washington.

According to journalist Ahmed Rashid, Massoud was “intensely disliked by the State Department for his … closeness to Iran.”[50] Most significantly, Massoud was dead set against U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.[51] Yet in 2000, the preparations against Afghanistan rolled on, ramping up as U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) began working directly with the military of Uzbekistan.[52]

October of 2000 saw the bombing of the USS Cole by al-Qaeda forces off the coast of Yemen. In response, Richard Blee pressed the lame duck President Clinton to authorize expanding the Uzbek venture into a joint attack force that would include the Northern Alliance. Clinton refused. Under the new Bush administration, U.S.-led talks with the Taliban resumed. Despite open threats to the Taliban made by U.S. representatives at the talks, no political and/or pipeline deal was struck.

On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet held a meeting on NSPD-9, a plan for military action against Afghanistan. On September 9th, the main obstacle for any U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was removed when Northern Alliance chief Ahmed Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda suicide bombers.

The murder was ordered by the “blind sheik” Abdel-Rahman, a prisoner in U.S. custody. Abdel-Rahman was under close U.S. surveillance; so was his contact with Muslim radicals abroad, a New York postal worker named Ahmed Abdel-Sattar. Thus, the U.S. government almost certainly knew about the order and apparently allowed the assassination to happen.[53]

The next day, September 10th, Bush officials held another meeting to discuss the NSPD-9 plans for military action against Afghanistan. On the following day, the world witnessed the terror spectacle of September 11, 2001.

Notes

Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” Administration and Society 50, no. 1 (2018): 4–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399715581042. ↑
In the wake of 9/11, many letters containing weaponized anthrax were mailed to a number of Americans, including media figures and elected officials. Several people were killed and many more were injured. The attacks were erroneously linked to Iraq and contributed to the campaign for the launching of the Iraq War. They also served to hasten the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act since two of the targets were U.S. senators who were holding up passage of the bill. Though the letters were deceptively drafted to look like they were drafted by Islamist terrorists, the source of the Anthrax was later determined to be the U.S. government. The U.S. attempted to pin the blame for the false flag anthrax letter attacks on a “lone nut” U.S. scientist named Steven Hatfill. When he succeeded in proving his innocence, another “lone nut” U.S. scientist, Bruce Ivins, was identified as the culprit. The case was brought to an end when Ivins died as the result of an apparent suicide, but many observers do not believe that Ivins could have done what the government was accusing him of. See Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2014). ↑
Eric Holder, “Response to Senator Rand Paul” (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Attorney General, March 4, 2013), https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/B ... sponse.pdf. ↑
Niels Harrit, “The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report: The 9/11 Document That Launched US-NATO’s ‘War on Terrorism’ in the Middle East,” Global Research, March 21, 2018, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-myste ... st/5632874. ↑
Gareth Porter, “U.S. Refusal of 2001 Taliban Offer Gave Bin Laden a Free Pass,” Inter Press Service (Washington, D.C., May 3, 2011), http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/05/us-refus ... free-pass/. ↑
Most infamous was the use of a document about uranium from Niger that had already been deemed a forgery before being cited by the president in a speech during the run-up to the Iraq War. ↑
Nasser Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” in Europe and Asia: Perspectives on the Emerging International Order, V.P. Malik and Erhard Crome, eds. (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers & Distributors, 2006), 153. ↑
Julio Godoy, “U.S. Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil – Authors,” Inter Press Service (Paris, November 15, 2001), http://www.ipsnews.net/2001/11/politics ... l-authors/. ↑
Peter Dale Scott and Aaron Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” CovertAction Magazine, December 9, 2020, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/1 ... -for-9-11/. ↑
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States” (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 214, https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/rep ... rt_Ch5.htm. ↑
105th Congress, “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998” (1998), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLA ... ubl338.pdf. ↑
“O’Neill: Bush Planned Iraq Invasion before 9/11,” CNN, January 14, 2004, https://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/10/oneill.bush/. ↑
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 30. ↑
Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 146. ↑
Thomas Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century” (Washington D.C.: PNAC, 2000), https://archive.org/details/RebuildingA ... s/mode/2up. ↑
Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 211. ↑
Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 24-25. ↑
Donnelly, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” 51. ↑
Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (New York: Owl Books, 2005), 51. ↑
Robert Dreyfuss, “What Is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Will It Take Over Egypt?” Mother Jones, February 11, 2011, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... otherhood/. ↑
Dreyfuss, “What Is the Muslim Brotherhood, and Will It Take Over Egypt?” ↑
Ian Johnson, “Our Secret Connections with the Muslim Brotherhood,” The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/0 ... id=1265108. ↑
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Gallery Books, 2019), 260. ↑
Melanie Colburn, “America’s Devil’s Game with Extremist Islam,” Mother Jones, 2006, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... ist-islam/. ↑
“Mission and History,” Center for Afghanistan Studies (Omaha, NE, n.d.), https://www.unomaha.edu/international-s ... istory.php. ↑
Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 486-487. ↑
Colburn, “America’s Devil’s Game with Extremist Islam.” ↑
Colburn, “America’s Devil’s Game with Extremist Islam”; Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 240-241. ↑
Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 264-266. ↑
Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2015), 97-98. ↑
Jon Schwarz, “A New Biography Traces the Pathology of Allen Dulles and His Appalling Cabal,” The Intercept, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/11/02/the ... hessboard/. ↑
Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 30. ↑
Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Tripartite State” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020), 165-166, https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/521. ↑
Jonathan Marshall, “Saudi Arabia and the Reagan Doctrine,” Middle East Report, no. 155 (November 1988): 12–17, https://doi.org/10.2307/3012078. ↑
Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 163-165. ↑
Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149-150, 151-152. ↑
Martin Bright, “MI6 ‘Halted Bid to Arrest Bin Laden,’” The Guardian, November 9, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... vidshayler. ↑
James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.-Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia 5, no. 11 (1997), https://www.ca-c.org/dataeng/st_04_dougall.shtml. ↑
Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” 153. ↑
Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36, citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” The Washington Post, September 15, 1997. ↑
Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 121. ↑
Scott and Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” ↑
Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 69. ↑
“The Great Gas Game,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 25, 2001, https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p8s1-comv.html. ↑
Ahmed Rashid, “Epicentre of Terror,” Far Eastern Economic Review 163, no. 19 (2000), 18. ↑
Scott, The Road to 9/11, 131. ↑
Phil Hirschkorn, “Trial Reveals a Conspiracy of Calls, But Only Tidbits about Bin Laden,” CNN, April 16, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20010808073 ... index.html. ↑
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 459. ↑
Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2001, https://web.archive.org/web/20080821044 ... -2001Oct13. ↑
Rashid, “Epicentre of Terror,” 17. Massoud also had strong supporters at State, notably former U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Peter Tomsen. The real split was over Pakistan, and over the pro-Pakistan CIA. Massoud was taking aid from India, while Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, partly to develop a strong Muslim radical presence against Karimov in Uzbekistan. When the DOD came in, this split was subordinated to the goal of bringing in U.S. troops. But what to do about Pakistan divided Washington then and still does. ↑
Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 597-598, 796 n25. Journalist Pepe Escobar also confirmed this to our coauthor Aaron Good in personal correspondence. ↑
Ricks and Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan.” ↑
Scott and Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” ↑

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 22, 2021 2:46 pm

Media Forget Afghan Plight as US Sanctions Drive Mass Famine Risk
JULIE HOLLAR

As the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan in August, US TV news interest in the plight of the country’s citizens spiked, often focusing on “the horror awaiting women and girls” (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21) to argue against withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21).

Four months later, as those same citizens have been plunged into a humanitarian crisis due in no small part to US sanctions, where is the outrage?
Afghanistan on ‘countdown to catastrophe’ without urgent humanitarian relief
Image
UN News (10/25/21) quoted the head of the World Food Programme: “Afghanistan is now among the world’s worst humanitarian crises – if not the worst – and food security has all but collapsed.”
Experts warned of an impending humanitarian crisis in the wake of the US withdrawal (IRC, 8/20/21). In recent months, the messages have become more urgent. A UN report (10/25/21) warned that “combined shocks of drought, conflict, Covid-19 and an economic crisis in Afghanistan have left more than half the population facing a record level of acute hunger.” One million children are so malnourished they are at risk of dying in the coming months (IRC, 12/3/21).

Decades of conflict, invasion and occupation left Afghanistan with a highly precarious economy. In 2019, well before withdrawal, a record 50% of Afghans reported finding it “very difficult” to get by on their household income (Gallup, 9/23/21). While drought and the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to the current humanitarian crisis, it is largely driven by the imploding economy. The entire banking system is collapsing, with government employees going unpaid, and citizens unable to access their money or receive funds from relatives abroad.

As many have pointed out, the Taliban shoulder some blame, having banned women from most paid jobs outside of teaching and healthcare, costing the economy up to 5% of its GDP (UNDP, 12/1/21). But a much bigger driver of the crisis has been the US-led sanctions on the Taliban. The US occupation left Afghanistan dependent on aid for 40% of its GDP and 80% of its budget. After withdrawal, the US froze some $9 billion of the country’s central bank reserves, and US and UN sanctions cut off the central bank from the international banking system and drastically limited the aid flowing into the country (UNDP, 12/2/21).

Despite pleas from around the globe, even, most recently, from former US military commanders in Afghanistan and dozens of members of Congress (Washington Post, 12/20/21), the Biden administration has made only slight tweaks to its policies, which are ostensibly meant to punish and provide leverage over the Taliban, but, like other supposedly targeted sanctions, have the effect of putting millions of civilian lives in peril.

Vanishing interest

Since November 1, well into the worsening crisis, FAIR identified only 37 TV news segments from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC that mentioned “humanitarian” in the same sentence as Afghanistan. That’s 37 segments in seven weeks.

For perspective, as the US withdrew in August, journalists from those shows mentioned “women’s rights” in the same sentence as Afghanistan more often—42 times—in just seven days. Today, as those women and girls face starvation, the deeply concerned TV reporters are virtually nowhere to be seen.

Even when reports did mention the crisis, they rarely highlighted the US role. Of the 37 mentions, FAIR was able to find only four that named sanctions as a factor.

MSNBC twice (11/23/21, 12/16/21) brought on spokespeople from the International Rescue Committee to discuss the crisis, and CBS did so once (12/12/21); all three of these guests named the role sanctions play in Afghanistan’s economic collapse.
Country in Crisis
Image
“One Million Children at Risk of Dying of Starvation” was the secondary point of ABC‘s report (12/15/21); the main focus of the story was “Taliban Authority Being Challenged by ISIS Terrorists.”
ABC World News Tonight‘s Ian Pannell (12/15/21), in a report from Afghanistan, made the only other mention of sanctions, in a vague and brief reference that named no names: “A mix of sanctions and drought has brought the country to the brink of catastrophe.” After showing an emaciated two-year-old and telling the child’s mother, “You must feel very hopeless, very helpless,” Pannell wrapped up his report by noting:

$280 million in emergency aid has been OKed by the United States and others, but it’s likely not enough. It won’t reach hungry mouths until the end of the year. And the situation right now in Afghanistan seems as bad as I can remember it in 20 years of reporting here.

With no mention of what was causing the crisis, or what kind of help was actually needed, Pannell’s report had the effect of painting the US as a benevolent actor that just wasn’t doing quite enough to address a largely inevitable situation. The segment and its top-of-the-show preview were the only two mentions FAIR’s study found of Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis on ABC during the study period.

More often, the crisis was covered with a brief soundbite that emphasized women’s rights over the broader humanitarian crisis, as on CNN Newsroom (11/28/21):

A group of female Afghan students graduated from a private university in Kandahar on Saturday. They were forced to wear veils, due to a rule imposed by the Taliban. Before the Taliban takeover, an estimated 100,000 girls were attending universities. The graduates fear finding jobs might be difficult, because of both the Taliban rule and the country’s worsening humanitarian crisis.

Finding jobs is also difficult when a powerful enemy has frozen the funds of your nation’s central bank—but that’s not the kind of problem US corporate media is likely to dwell on.

https://fair.org/home/media-forget-afgh ... mine-risk/

'No defiance of US imperialism goes unpunished'. Such has been the case for Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela... And the punishment meted out is suffered by the people of those nations:deprived of trade, of food, medicine, threatened with assassination, subversion, destruction of the infrastructure civilized people rely upon. These people suffer yet they continue to defy the hegemon. They have pride, honor. What about us?

Those women graduates did graduate, did they not? Yes, the veil was imposed upon them, but relatively speaking that's small change compared to their purpose that day. But never mind that, superficiality will serve Western chauvinism as always, drumming home the lesson that US imperialism is the salvation of humanity and those who defy are beyond the pall and all human consideration.
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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 12, 2022 3:50 pm

When Cruelty Is The Point - U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People

Last summer, after decades of killing Afghans in Afghanistan, the U.S. government decides to move its occupation forces out of that country.

The operation was badly prepared, (or intentionally sabotaged by the Pentagon), and ended in chaos. More than 120,000 Afghans, most of them higher educated ones, were also taken abroad. This alone was severely damaging to Afghanistan.

The U.S. also froze the $7+ billion reserve funds of the central bank of Afghanistan which have been held in New York. This is the Afghan peoples money. Part of the total funds are reserves that private Afghan banks had deposited with the central bank. It is money that ordinary Afghan people had deposited at those private banks.

Now the Biden administration, ignoring the various owners of those funds, has decided to steal all of them.

This is vengefulness at the most inhuman level:

President Biden will start to clear a legal path for certain relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion from assets that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York before the Taliban takeover, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.

At the same time, Mr. Biden will issue an executive order invoking emergency powers to consolidate and freeze all $7 billion of the total assets the Afghan central bank kept in New York and ask a judge for permission to move the other $3.5 billion to a trust fund to pay for immediate humanitarian relief efforts and other needs in Afghanistan, the officials said.


Afghanistan is in dire need of those reserve funds.

As its central bank had no access to the funds it could not intervene when the Afghan currency devaluated after the U.S. and its minions had fled. It has made it impossible for the government and the people to acquire food from abroad. The United Nations and many other organization have warned that millions of people in Afghanistan are in imminent danger of dying for lack of food. A new huge wave of refugees is fleeing the country and is likely to destabilize its neighbors.

It was a bad move to freeze that money. It is unscrupulous to steal it. It also illegal under U.S. law which is why the Biden administration decided to fudge it:

It is highly unusual for the United States government to commandeer a foreign country’s assets on domestic soil. Officials are said to have discussed a two-part legal process for Mr. Biden to engineer that outcome.
First, he would use emergency powers under a provision of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to “direct and compel” that a foreign country’s assets in the United States be moved to a segregated account. That would block them, but the Afghanistan central bank would still own them.

Second, officials have discussed then using a provision of the Federal Reserve Act that permits disposing of property belonging to the central bank of a foreign nation — so long as it has the blessing of someone the secretary of state has recognized as being “the accredited representative” of that foreign country.

But deciding who qualifies as such a person, at a time when Afghanistan’s former government no longer exists, has raised significant complications. It remained unclear what solution Biden administration officials had settled on and whether the name of any person or people they deem as such would be disclosed for security reasons, like possibly endangering family members still in Afghanistan.


The 'accredited representative' will simply be claimed to exist and to have given 'the blessing' but will never be named.

To give money that is owned by Afghanistan's central bank and is needed to help Afghan people to relatives of people who died in 9/11 is completely unjustified. The Taliban who are now ruling Afghanistan are not the same ones who ruled the country previously. Moreover no Taliban ever knew beforehand that 9/11 was planned by some people who at that time lived in Afghanistan. They are not responsible for 9/11.

Moreover the money is simply not theirs. Central bank assets are owned by the central bank not by a ruling government of whatever kind. The U.S. Federal Reserve is not holding Democrats or Republican money nor is the Afghan central bank holding Taliban money.

In an interview, Dr. Mehrabi — who is also an economics professor at Montgomery College in Maryland [and a longtime member of the Afghan central bank board] — contended that the central bank should be seen as independent of the now Taliban-led Afghan government. He said that many civil servants there knew how to run the bank, and that depriving the bank of the funds it needed to maintain price stability would lead to runs on commercial banks, mass defaulting on loans and ultimately broader disaster.
“You’re talking about moving toward a total collapse of the banking system,” he said. “I think it’s a shortsighted view.”

But an administration official familiar with the government deliberations argued that the “sad reality” was that even if the central bank regained access to the assets in New York and moved them all into Afghanistan for one last injection of capital, it would not solve the deeper structural problems that have sent the country’s economy spiraling into ruin.


The Afghan people shall just die from the 'structural problems' that have been caused by the U.S. occupation, its abrupt end, and are now caused by the theft of their money.

Posted by b on February 11, 2022 at 15:53 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/02/w ... .html#more

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The terrible fate facing the Afghan people
February 12, 2022 Struggle - La Lucha

Image
Families are still reeling after twin-earthquakes struck a remote village in Badghis Province, Afghanistan last month amid a dire economic crisis. Photo: UNICEF

On February 8, 2022, UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) Afghanistan sent out a bleak set of tweets. One of the tweets, which included a photograph of a child lying in a hospital bed with her mother seated beside her, said: “Having recently recovered from acute watery diarrhea, two years old Soria is back in hospital, this time suffering from edema and wasting. Her mother has been by her bedside for the past two weeks anxiously waiting for Soria to recover.” The series of tweets by UNICEF Afghanistan show that Soria is not alone in her suffering. “One in three adolescent girls suffers from anemia” in Afghanistan, with the country struggling with “one of the world’s highest rates of stunting in children under five: 41 percent,” according to UNICEF.

The story of Soria is one among millions; in Uruzgan Province, in southern Afghanistan, measles cases are rising due to lack of vaccines. The thread to the tweet about Soria from UNICEF Afghanistan was a further bleak reminder about the severity of the situation in the country and its impact on the lives of the children: “without urgent action, 1 million children could die from severe acute malnutrition.” UNICEF is now distributing “high energy peanut paste” to stave off catastrophe.

The United Nations has, meanwhile, warned that approximately 23 million Afghans—about half the total population of the country—are “facing a record level of acute hunger.” In early September, not even a month after the Taliban came to power in Kabul, the UN Development Program noted that “A 10-13 percent reduction in GDP could, in the worst-case scenario, bring Afghanistan to the precipice of near universal poverty—a 97 percent poverty rate by mid-2022.”

The World Bank has not provided a firm calculation of how much of Afghanistan’s GDP has declined, but other indicators show that the threshold of the “worst-case scenario” has likely already passed.

When the West fled the country at the end of August 2021, a large part of the foreign funding, which Afghanistan’s GDP is dependent on, also vanished with the troops: 43 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP and 75 percent of its public funding, which came from aid agencies, dried up overnight.

Ahmad Raza Khan, the chief collector (customs) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, says that exports from his country to Afghanistan have dropped by 25 percent; the State Bank of Pakistan, he says, “introduced a new policy of exports to Afghanistan on December 13” that requires Afghan traders to show that they have U.S. dollars on them to buy goods from Pakistan before entering the country, which is near impossible to show for many of the traders since the Taliban has banned the “use of foreign currency” in the country. It is likely that Afghanistan is not very far away from near universal poverty with the way things stand there presently.

On January 26, 2022, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that “Afghanistan is hanging by a thread,” while pointing to the 30 percent “contraction” of its GDP.

Sanctions and dollars

On February 7, 2022, Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen told Sky News that this perilous situation, which is leading to starvation and illness among children in Afghanistan, “is not the result of our [Taliban] activities. It is the result of the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan.”

On this point, Shaheen is correct. In August 2021, the U.S. government froze the $9.5 billion that Afghanistan’s central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank) held in the New York Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, family members of the victims who died in the 9/11 attacks had sued “a list of targets,” including the Taliban, for their losses and a U.S. court later ruled that the plaintiffs be paid “damages” that now amount to $7 billion. Now that the Taliban is in power in Afghanistan, the Biden administration seems to be moving forward “to clear a legal path” to stake a claim on $3.5 billion out of the money deposited in the Federal Reserve for the families of the September 11 victims.

The European Union followed suit, cutting off $1.4 billion in government assistance and development aid to Afghanistan, which was supposed to have been paid between 2021 and 2025. Because of the loss of this funding from Europe, Afghanistan had to shut down “at least 2,000 health facilities serving around 30 million Afghans.” It should be noted here that the total population of Afghanistan is approximately 40 million, which means that most Afghans have lost access to health care due to that decision.

During the entire 20-year period of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, the Ministry of Public Health had come to rely on a combination of donor funds and assistance from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It was as a result of these funds that Afghanistan saw a decline in infant mortality and maternal mortality rates during the Afghanistan Mortality Survey 2010. Nonetheless, the entire public health care system, particularly outside Kabul, struggled during the U.S. occupation. “Many primary healthcare facilities were non-functional due to insecurity, lack of infrastructure, shortages of staff, severe weather, migrations and poor patient flow,” wrote health care professionals from Afghanistan and Pakistan, based on their analysis of how the conflict in Afghanistan affected the “maternal and child health service delivery.”

Walk along Shaheed Mazari Road

On February 8, 2022, an Afghan friend who works along Shaheed Mazari Road in Kabul took me for a virtual walk—using the video option on his phone—to this busy part of the city. He wanted to show me that in the capital at least the shops had goods in them, but that the people simply did not have money to make purchases. We had been discussing how the International Labor Organization now estimates that nearly a million people will be pushed out of their jobs by the middle of the year, many of them women who are suffering from the Taliban’s restrictions on women working. Afghanistan, he tells me, is being destroyed by a combination of the lack of employment and the lack of cash in the country due to the sanctions imposed by the West.

We discuss the Taliban personnel in charge of finances, people such as Finance Minister Mullah Hidayatullah Badri and the governor of the Afghanistan central bank Shakir Jalali. Badri (or Gul Agha) is the money man for the Taliban, while Jalali is an expert in Islamic banking. There is no doubt that Badri is a resourceful person, who developed the Taliban’s financial infrastructure and learned about international finance in the illicit markets. “Even the smartest and most knowledgeable person would not be able to do anything if the sanctions remain,” my friend said. He would know. He used to work in Da Afghanistan Bank.

“Why can’t the World Bank’s Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) be used to rush money to the banks?” he asked. This fund, a partnership between the World Bank and other donors, which was created in 2002, has $1.5 billion in funds. If you visit the ARTF website, you will receive a bleak update: “The World Bank has paused disbursements in our operations in Afghanistan.” I tell my friend that I don’t think the World Bank will unfreeze these assets soon. “Well, then we will starve,” he says, as he walks past children sitting on the side of the street.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... an-people/

Just when you thought that imperialism couldn't get more vile...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: A few notes on Afghanistan

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 14, 2022 3:01 pm

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Afghan people staging a protest in demand of the release billions of dollars in central bank reserves blocked outside Afghanistan by United States, in Kabul, Afghanistan on September 24, 2021. (Photo: Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Afghan Central Bank Calls US Theft of $7 Billion 'Injustice to People of Afghanistan'

"The real owners of these reserves are people of Afghanistan," the bank declared in response to the seizure of over $7 billion by the U.S. government.

JON QUEALLY

February 12, 2022
The central bank of Afghanistan pushed back firmly Saturday against an executive order issued a day earlier by U.S. President Joe Biden to seize over $7 billion in foreign exchange assets—a move that humanitarians have denounced as unbelievably cruel given the suffering of the Afghan people as its economy and healthcare systems teeter on the brink of collapse with millions facing starvation and freezing winter temperatures.

In a statement posted online, Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) rejected the White House's claim that the seizure of billions in Foreign Exchange Reserves (FX) was done in the name of humanitarian assistance, instead calling it an "injustice to the people of Afghanistan."

The DAB said it "will never accept if the FX reserves of Afghanistan is paid under the name of compensation or humanitarian assistance to others" and demanded the reversal of Biden's decision and that all seized funds be returned. "The real owners of these reserves are people of Afghanistan," said the bank.


As Common Dreams reported Friday, condemnation of Biden's plan—which includes making half of the funds, approximately $3.5 billion, available to settle legal claims by families who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—was swift and widespread.

Human Rights Watch was among those who said the Biden plan is deeply misguided. In a Friday statement, the group said the move is likely to bring more devastation to the innocent people of Afghanistan who had nothing to with the 9/11 attacks and should not be punished because the U.S. government despises the Taliban government that now rules the country.

"If implemented," said John Sifton, HRW's Asia advocacy director, "the decision would create a problematic precedent for commandeering sovereign wealth and do little to address underlying factors driving Afghanistan’s massive humanitarian crisis."

While Biden's plan to direct $3.5 billion of the seized fund to humanitarian assistance for Afghans "may sound generous," added Sifton, "it should be remembered that the entire $7 billion already legally belonged to the Afghan people. And yet, even if the U.S. gave it to a humanitarian trust fund, current restrictions on Afghanistan’s banking sector make it virtually impossible to send or spend the money inside the country."


Speaking with Al-Jazeera, Afghan-American activist Bilal Askaryar said the "people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9/11; that is an undeniable fact."

What Biden is doing, said Askaryar "is not justice for 9/11 families," but rather the "theft of public funds from an impoverished nation already on the brink of famine and starvation brought on by the United States' disastrous withdrawal" in 2021.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/ ... fghanistan

Theft, plain and simple, and motivated not primarily by desire for the funds themselves but rather to punish a people who defied the US Empire. Shameful but unsurprising, the US has often inflicted death and suffering upon those who resist. It is the same with Venezuela, it's gold reserves confiscated by the Bank of England and it's state owned corporation CITGO stolen from the state and given to a phony alternative-universe pimple-faced geek and his government recognized by less than 20 countries.

All in our names, are ya sick of that yet?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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