'Everything we have believed in since the Second World War goes by the board as we pursue our own exclusive war'
We are becoming war criminals in Afghanistan. The US Air Force bombs Mazar-i-Sharif for the Northern Alliance, and our heroic Afghan allies -- who slaughtered 50,000 people in Kabul between 1992 and 1996 -- move into the city and execute up to 300 Taliban fighters. The report is a footnote on the television satellite channels, a "nib" in journalistic parlance. Perfectly normal, it seems. The Afghans have a "tradition" of revenge. So, with the strategic assistance of the USAF, a war crime is committed.
Now we have the Mazar-i-Sharif prison "revolt", in which Taliban inmates opened fire on their Alliance jailers. US Special Forces -- and, it has emerged, British troops -- helped the Alliance to overcome the uprising and, sure enough, CNN tells us some prisoners were "executed" trying to escape. It is an atrocity. British troops are now stained with war crimes. Within days, The Independent's Justin Huggler has found more executed Taliban members in Kunduz.
The Americans have even less excuse for this massacre. For the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, stated quite specifically during the siege of the city that US air raids on the Taliban defenders would stop "if the Northern Alliance requested it". Leaving aside the revelation that the thugs and murderers of the Northern Alliance were now acting as air controllers to the USAF in its battle with the thugs and murderers of the Taliban, Mr Rumsfeld's incriminating remark places Washington in the witness box of any war-crimes trial over Kunduz. The US were acting in full military co-operation with the Northern Alliance militia.
Most television journalists, to their shame, have shown little or no interest in these disgraceful crimes. Cosying up to the Northern Alliance, chatting to the American troops, most have done little more than mention the war crimes against prisoners in the midst of their reports. What on earth has gone wrong with our moral compass since 11 September?
Perhaps I can suggest an answer. After both the First and Second World Wars, we -- the "West" -- grew a forest of legislation to prevent further war crimes. The very first Anglo-French-Russian attempt to formulate such laws was provoked by the Armenian Holocaust at the hands of the Turks in 1915; The Entente said it would hold personally responsible "all members of the (Turkish) Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres". After the Jewish Holocaust and the collapse of Germany in 1945, article 6 (C) of the Nuremberg Charter and the Preamble of the UN Convention on genocide referred to "crimes against humanity". Each new post-1945 war produced a raft of legislation and the creation of evermore human rights groups to lobby the world on liberal, humanistic Western values.
Over the past 50 years, we sat on our moral pedestal and lectured the Chinese and the Soviets, the Arabs and the Africans, about human rights. We pronounced on the human-rights crimes of Bosnians and Croatians and Serbs. We put many of them in the dock, just as we did the Nazis at Nuremberg. Thousands of dossiers were produced, describing -- in nauseous detail -- the secret courts and death squads and torture and extra judicial executions carried out by rogue states and pathological dictators. Quite right too.
Yet suddenly, after 11 September, we went mad. We bombed Afghan villages into rubble, along with their inhabitants -- blaming the insane Taliban and Osama bin Laden for our slaughter -- and now we have allowed our gruesome militia allies to execute their prisoners. President George Bush has signed into law a set of secret military courts to try and then liquidate anyone believed to be a "terrorist murderer" in the eyes of America's awesomely inefficient intelligence services. And make no mistake about it, we are talking here about legally sanctioned American government death squads. They have been created, of course, so that Osama bin Laden and his men should they be caught rather than killed, will have no public defence; just a pseudo trial and a firing squad.
It's quite clear what has happened. When people with yellow or black or brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or Nationalist credentials, murder their prisoners or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and the "civilised" world. We are the masters of human rights, the Liberals, the great and good who can preach to the impoverished masses. But when our people are murdered -- when our glittering buildings are destroyed -- then we tear up every piece of human rights legislation, send off the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses and set out to murder our enemies.
Winston Churchill took the Bush view of his enemies. In 1945, he preferred the straightforward execution of the Nazi leadership. Yet despite the fact that Hitler's monsters were responsible for at least 50 million deaths -- 10,000 times greater than the victims of 11 September -- the Nazi murderers were given a trial at Nuremberg because US President Truman made a remarkable decision. "Undiscriminating executions or punishments," he said, "without definite findings of guilt fairly arrived at, would not fit easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride."
No one should be surprised that Mr Bush -- a small-time Texas Governor-Executioner -- should fail to understand the morality of a statesman in the Whitehouse. What is so shocking is that the Blairs, Schröders, Chiracs and all the television boys should have remained so gutlessly silent in the face of the Afghan executions and East European-style legislation sanctified since 11 September.
There are ghostly shadows around to remind us of the consequences of state murder. In France, a general goes on trial after admitting to torture and murder in the 1954-62 Algerian war, because he referred to his deeds as "justifiable acts of duty performed without pleasure or remorse". And in Brussels, a judge will decide if the Israeli Prime Minister, Arial Sharon, can be prosecuted for his "personal responsibility" for the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Chatila.
Yes, I know the Taliban were a cruel bunch of bastards. They committed most of their massacres outside Mazar-i-Sharif in the late 1990s. They executed women in the Kabul football stadium. And yes, lets remember that 11 September was a crime against humanity.
But I have a problem with all this. George Bush says that "you are either for us or against us" in the war for civilisation against evil. Well, I'm sure not for bin Laden. But I'm not for Bush. I'm actively against the brutal, cynical, lying "war of civilisation" that he has begun so mendaciously in our name and which has now cost as many lives as the World Trade Centre mass murder.
At this moment, I can't help remembering my dad. He was old enough to have fought in the First World War. In the third Battle of Arras. And as great age overwhelmed him near the end of the century, he raged against the waste and murder of the 1914-1918 war. When he died in 1992, I inherited the campaign medal of which he was once so proud, proof that he had survived a war he had come to hate and loathe and despise. On the back, it says: "The Great War for Civilisation." Maybe I should send it to George Bush. (The Independent)
US atrocity against Taliban POWs: Whatever happened to the Geneva Convention?
By Jerry White
Despite the silence in the American media and the lies from Bush administration officials, there is growing international outrage over the systematic massacre of hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war in Mazar-i-Sharif on Sunday and Monday. This act of mass murder was carried out by US warplanes and helicopter gunships, directed by US Special Forces and CIA personnel, and backed by several thousand soldiers of the Northern Alliance. As many as 800 prisoners were killed at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress.
The government of Pakistan, under intense public pressure because hundreds of Pakistani volunteers were among the Taliban troops taken prisoner, strongly condemned the prison massacre and declared that it contravened UN Security Council resolutions urging respect for the Geneva Convention. President Pervez Musharraf, the military strongman who seized power in Pakistan two years ago, has backed the US military onslaught against his former allies in the Taliban, and US forces used Pakistani bases as part of the campaign against the prisoners in Mazar-i-Sharif.
A columnist in the Pakistani newspaper The Nation declared that the killings at Mazar-i-Sharif "can only be quantified as a conspiracy and premeditated genocide." Rejecting the claims that the prisoners caused their own deaths by engaging in a suicidal uprising, he wrote, "it is most unlikely that only recently surrendered captives would rise in sudden and open revolt against their captors--unless their very lives were at stake."
No matter how US officials try to gloss over what happened, there could be no justification, even from a military standpoint, for the wanton slaughter of hundreds of captured soldiers. News accounts acknowledge the 19th century fortress was encircled by thousands of heavily armed Northern Alliance troops, as well as US and British special forces, whose base is located at a military airport just outside of the fort.
Even if some prisoners had seized their guards' weapons, as US officials and the media claim, they did not have the manpower or ammunition to hold out against the tanks, jets and the superior ground forces arrayed against them. The only proper designation for the action taken by the US military is a premeditated war crime.
What was done in Mazar-i-Sharif was entirely in line with the policies advocated by top US officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has repeatedly said that he favors the killing of Taliban soldiers, especially those from outside of Afghanistan, rather than their capture and imprisonment.
Almost as sickening as the massacre itself is the universal silence on the part of the American media, including the so-called liberal press, about the cold-blooded murder of Taliban prisoners. Not a single US newspaper or media outlet--many of which had reporters on the scene who know exactly what happened--has raised any serious questions about the action.
Demonstrating contempt for the lives of hundreds of Afghan and foreign prisoners killed by bombs and bullets, the US news media focused its attention on half a dozen American military and CIA personnel hit by friendly fire when US warplanes bombed the compound. While CNN broadcast pictures of dozens of mutilated corpses strewn around the inside of the prison, as well as earlier scenes of Northern Alliance and US and British forces firing over the walls of the compound at prisoners, there was much more media interest in the possible death of one CIA interrogator. One could only imagine how the US media would have reported the killing of Northern Alliance prisoners by Taliban troops if the sides had been reversed.
The two leading US daily newspapers offered radically different explanations of the massacre. The New York Times quoted a Red Cross official claiming "the prisoners started the fight" and that the Northern Alliance troops had not sought to attack them. It cited the controlling role of American Special Forces and CIA personnel, who "took over the operation," as though this guaranteed that no extrajudicial killings could have taken place.
The Washington Post, on the other hand, essentially admitted that the prisoners were murdered, but attributed the killings to the Northern Alliance: "A precise death toll could not be determined, but the apparently large number of Taliban deaths, compared to the reported killing of about 40 Northern Alliance fighters, raised questions here about the whether the violence was less an uprising than a massacre orchestrated by alliance troops," the Post wrote Tuesday.
These accounts are diametrically opposite presentations of the facts, but they serve an identical political purpose: to deny that the US forces were responsible for a monstrous war crime. This perfectly expresses the role of the American media, which takes as its starting point, not providing objective information to the American people, but justifying, through every manner of lie and distortion, the actions of the American government.
A few important facts did make their way into the Times account, however. The newspaper reports that the presence of CIA interrogators in the prison yard seemed to be the spark to the rebellion:
--By midmorning, some prisoners were being interviewed by the chief of intelligence for the area from the Northern Alliance, Said Kamal, together with two C.I.A. operatives, alliance officials said.
--The presence of the Americans may have caused anger or desperation among some of the foreign Taliban, who may be part of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network or who fear extradition to their home countries.
"One group of Northern Alliance fighters who were inside the compound at the time said the sight of the C.I.A. officials led to the revolt."
And the Times further notes that the rebellion began while the prisoners were being searched on Sunday morning: "About 250 prisoners had been checked, and their arms were tied, said foreign journalists who had been allowed to witness the scene." This strongly suggests that many of those who died--600 to 800 Taliban compared to only a few dozen Northern Alliance troops--were killed while they were bound and unable to defend themselves.
POWs and the laws of war
It is particularly noteworthy that no one in the media or liberal establishment has raised the obvious violation of international law concerning the treatment of prisoners of war, including the Geneva Convention of 1949, on the part of both the Northern Alliance and the American forces.
Article 3 of the Convention states that "members of the armed forces who have laid down their arms ... shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith ... or any other similar criteria."
This article was flagrantly violated by the Northern Alliance forces at the surrender of the Taliban troops in the besieged city of Kunduz. Several thousand Afghan Taliban were immediately paroled upon surrender, and either incorporated into the ranks of the Northern Alliance or allowed to return to their home villages. The foreign-born Taliban, however, were either killed singly, in acts of individual murder, or rounded up in large groups and trucked away for subsequent interrogation, torture and execution.
During the week-long siege of Kunduz, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made repeated statements calling for the killing or imprisonment of all captured foreign Taliban--in other words, he demanded that the Northern Alliance systematically violate the Geneva Convention.
The Convention specifically prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture" and the "passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
The torture of POWs is specifically prohibited in Article 17, which states: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."
Finally, of particular relevance to the events of the last few days, the Geneva Convention states in Article 23 that no prisoner of war may "be sent to, or detained in areas where he may be exposed to fire or the combat zone" and that prisoners of war must be afforded protection against "air bombardment and other hazards of war."
This is not the first time in recent years that US military forces have systematically disregarded these "laws of war." In the final days of the Persian Gulf War US warplanes massacred thousands of retreating Iraqi troops in what one US pilot compared to "shooting fish in a barrel." The road north from Kuwait City was so littered with the charred remains of Iraqi soldiers, trucks, cars and other vehicles that it became known as the "Highway of Death."
The Geneva Convention was drawn up in the aftermath of World War II in an effort to place some restrictions on the murderous proclivities of the great powers. Today the Bush administration brazenly disregards international law and carries out war crimes, with barely a word of protest coming out of the US.
In the absence of any significant international outcry against the massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif, there is the danger that an even bigger bloodbath will be perpetrated at Kandahar, the second largest city of Afghanistan, where several thousand US Marines and US Special Forces and their newly recruited (and well-paid) allies among the Pushtun tribal chiefs are closing in on the last Taliban stronghold.
US war crime in Afghanistan: Hundreds of prisoners of war slaughtered at Mazar-i-Sharif
By the Editorial Board
The killing of as many as 800 captured Taliban prisoners Sunday in Mazar-i-Sharif is a war crime for which the American government and military, right up to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush, are politically responsible. This massacre reveals the real nature of the US attack on Afghanistan. The terrorist attacks of September 11 are but a pretext for a colonial-style war of pillage and mass murder.
In both the savage methods used, and the lies employed to cover up the crime, the butchery at the Qala-i-Janghi fortress recalls the atrocities of the Vietnam War period: the My Lai massacre, the murder of 20,000 Vietnamese in the Phoenix assassination program, the saturation bombing and aerial defoliation with chemical poisons like Agent Orange, the obliteration of the town of Ben Suc, where an American officer declared it was necessary "to destroy the village in order to save it."
According to both press and US government accounts, US Special Forces and CIA personnel were on the spot in Mazar-i-Sharif, calling in air strikes by helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers and directing the actions of Northern Alliance soldiers as they shot down hundreds of prisoners. German television broadcast footage of Northern Alliance soldiers shooting down from the walls of the fortress-prison into a mass of prisoners below.
Most of those killed, however, were annihilated by US air strikes. Warplanes dropped bombs on the fort and AC-130 helicopter gunships, which can fire 1,800 rounds a minute, were called in by Special Forces spotters in the fortress. Tanks and 2,000 Northern Alliance ground troops were also brought in to complete the destructive work. Throughout the one-sided battle, according to Time journalist Alex Perry, who was on the scene, the 40 or so American Special Forces and British SAS operatives were "running the show," directing both the air and ground operations.
The barbarous character of the repression was calculated, as indicated by the comments of Northern Alliance spokesmen on Monday. "They were all killed and very few arrested," said Zaher Wahadat, who confirmed that as many as 800 may have died. Alim Razim, an adviser to Gen. Rashid Dostum, the regional warlord, said that any prisoners still alive wouldn't be alive for long. "Those who are left over will be dead," he said. "None of them can escape."
Northern Alliance and Pentagon officials claimed that the Taliban prisoners had smuggled weapons into the prison under their tunics, then opened fire on the guards and sought to make their escape. But journalists inside the prison at the time said that the prisoners had begun the rebellion by overpowering several guards and seizing their weapons.
It is not even clear that any organized rebellion actually took place. As the British newspaper the Guardian observed, --"Shot while trying to escape" is, after all, one of the oldest fibs in the book.-- Northern Alliance troops may simply have opened fire on the prisoners, provoking a revolt in self-defense.
The anti-Taliban grouping has a long record of human rights violations, especially at Mazar-i-Sharif, the scene of massacres by both sides during the decade-long civil war in Afghanistan. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported last week that it had found 400 to 600 bodies in Mazar-i-Sharif, apparent victims of summary execution after the Northern Alliance captured the city on November 9.
By Alex Perry's account, the revolt began when the prisoners, Islamic fundamentalists from Pakistan, Chechnya and various Arab countries, encountered a journalist who began to question them. "Actually, I think it was probably the British journalist," he wrote on Time's web site. "It's merely the sight of a Western face. They're here to fight a jihad; they see a Western face; they assume that's who they've come to get."
The prisoners had ample reason to react to the presence of Western personnel in the prison. American CIA interrogators were in the facility to sort out the prisoners, separating from the rank-and-file Taliban volunteers the alleged Al Qaeda leaders, who would be subjected to more intensive interrogation, i.e., torture, followed by execution.
The Taliban prisoners unexpectedly surrendered Sunday in the besieged city of Kunduz. They gave themselves up to General Dostum, whose Uzbek-based force was approaching Kunduz from the west, rather than to General Khan Daoud, the head of the largely Tajik force attacking from the east, possibly because Dostum gave them assurances that they would be repatriated to Pakistan.
There were press reports over the weekend that Dostum had made such a deal, and he was denounced by rival Northern Alliance commanders who wanted the so-called "foreign Taliban" to be placed on trial in Islamic courts or killed on the spot. It is quite likely that the appearance of the Americans at Qala-i-Janghi was the first indication to the Taliban prisoners that they had been double-crossed, and they reacted accordingly.
A massacre on Rumsfeld's orders
If the exact chain of events that led up to the slaughter at Qala-i-Janghi is still uncertain, the moral and political responsibility for the bloodbath is not. In the days leading up to the massacre, officials of the UN and humanitarian organizations were warning of an impending bloodbath. US officials, on the contrary, made it clear that they wanted as many of the foreign Taliban killed as possible. Their repeated public statements were undoubtedly accompanied by even more bloodthirsty private directives to the Northern Alliance leaders, who hardly needed any encouragement.
There is far stronger evidence that the US government ordered the massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif than any proof that has been produced to substantiate the charge that Osama bin Laden ordered the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The chronology is as follows:
November 19: Northern Alliance General Khan Daoud suggested that he would be willing to grant foreign Taliban fighters safe passage out of Afghanistan if they would surrender Kunduz, and was negotiating with the Taliban on this proposal.
November 20: US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld vetoed this proposal, declaring, "It would be most unfortunate if the foreigners in Afghanistan--the Al Qaeda and the Chechens and others who have been there working with the Taliban--if those folks were set free and in any way allowed to go to another country and cause the same kind of terrorist acts." Rumsfeld was repeatedly quoted in subsequent days to the effect that all foreign Taliban should be killed or imprisoned.
November 20: The official spokesman for the US and British forces attacking Afghanistan, Kenton Keith, said the US opposed any negotiated settlement at Kunduz, declaring, "As far as we're concerned, the only option is surrender." In a thinly disguised justification for the coming massacre, he claimed, "The coalition has used its best persuasive effort to urge upon the commanders of the Northern Alliance restraint and proper treatment of prisoners," but, he added, "We are not in a position to guarantee anything."
November 21: Rumsfeld, in an interview with the CBS program "60 Minutes II," said he would prefer that Osama bin Laden be killed rather than taken alive. "You bet your life," he said.
November 22: Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf met with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Islamabad, calling for UN intervention to avert a bloodbath. Straw and UN officials issued verbal appeals for both sides to observe "the laws of ", which include the prohibition against killing of prisoners.
November 23: The New York Times cited statements by "a senior Pentagon official" opposing any release of captured foreign Taliban fighters. "What we care about is that Al Qaeda and Taliban are not capable of continuing to do what they've been doing," the official said.
November 23: The Washington Post reported widespread concern in the Middle Eastern press that Rumsfeld's comments amounted to "a --green light-- from the United States to kill so-called Afghan Arabs." One commentator wrote that the Northern Alliance was being "encouraged and incited by the Americans" to wreak vengeance on captured Taliban prisoners.
November 24: The Times cited statements by "an American official" that the US Central Command wanted to interrogate non-Afghans taken prisoner at Kunduz and other locations, to gather intelligence on Al Qaeda. "It's safe to say that CentCom is involved in a lot of aspects, including what they might do if scores of prisoners come out," said the official, referring to the Central Command. "But we're looking for as limited a role as possible, with as much access to the prisoners as we can." This last report indicates that top US military officers were closely monitoring the treatment of the Taliban prisoners. The events in Mazar-i-Sharif did not take them unawares.
The role of the media
The response by the American government and media to Sunday's bloodbath in Afghanistan has been brazen lying and defense of mass murder in a manner that recalls the worst crimes of Nazism.
US military spokesman Kenton Keith denied Monday that Alliance troops had carried out a massacre, saying the "status" of the prisoners as POWs covered by the Geneva Convention had changed once they "engaged in offensive action" (i.e., once they resisted their own execution).
While press reports have described the beating to death of Taliban prisoners in Kunduz, in addition to the Qala-i-Janghi slaughter, Keith claimed that Northern Alliance troops "have been behaving with restraint. We do not know of any atrocities as part of any widespread pattern."
This version of events has gone virtually unchallenged in the American press. At Bush's latest press conference, on Monday morning, the day after the slaughter, there was not a single question on the prison massacre. At Rumsfeld's press conference later the same day, the question came up only tangentially, and no reporter pursued the issue.
One expression of the cynicism in the American press came four days before the massacre, when the Washington Post published a lengthy front-page review of the military situation. The Post likened American actions in Afghanistan to the US role in the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, when "US Special Forces advisers worked with local forces on the ground to hunt down and kill Marxist guerrillas."
The comparison of Afghanistan to El Salvador, made with evident approval, is perhaps unintentionally instructive, confirming that the US intervention in Central Asia has nothing to do with defending "human rights" and little to do with fighting terrorism. The US counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador was one of the great crimes of the 20th century. At least 50,000 people were murdered by US-backed death squads. Among the best known victims of these fascist terrorists were the Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, and four American Maryknoll nuns.
As for the New York Times, its own report on the Mazar-i-Sharif killings not only suggested that the Taliban victims were to blame for their own deaths, but justified future massacres in advance. The Times wrote: "The incident seems certain to deepen the distrust the Northern Alliance feels as it takes control of hundreds, and potentially thousands, of Taliban soldiers."
The American media functions as a direct and willing instrument of the government's campaign of military aggression and political provocation. The television networks and daily newspapers are prepared to cover up and justify any crime committed by US forces anywhere in the world.
Who are the terrorists?
Outside the United States, even some leading establishment newspapers have been compelled to take note of the bloodstained character of the American intervention in Afghanistan. The British-based Guardian published a column November 26 by Brian Whitaker that raised the question of whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was guilty of war crimes.
Whitaker compared the slaughter of Afghan prisoners to another imperialist atrocity, the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps in September 1982, when Lebanese fascist militia entered the camps under the protection of Israeli forces and murdered more than 1,000 men, women and children.
Whitaker wrote: "The link between Sabra/Shatila and many of the killings in Afghanistan is that both are examples of "green light" warfare, where the main protagonists try to escape responsibility by allowing surrogates to do the unspeakable (and politically unacceptable) dirty work while providing discreet encouragement and assistance."
Ariel Sharon, Israeli defense minister at the time of Sabra and Shatila, was the subject of a parliamentary inquiry and ultimately forced to resign. Several European countries have sought to bring war crimes charges against Sharon, now Israeli Prime Minister, over the 1982 events.
Whitaker writes: "Whether the American defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, will face a similar inquiry remains to be seen, but his recent statements have given the green light for a killing spree. Of the non-Afghan fighters in Afghanistan, he said: "My hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner." It does not appear to matter which."
Even while using stooge UN tribunals to prosecute particular enemies like former Yugoslav President Milosevic, the US government has intransigently opposed the establishment an International Criminal Court with jurisdiction over war crimes committed by the government officials of any nation. This is not simply the defense of US sovereignty as a point of abstract doctrine. The top officials of the US government are engaged, day by day, in planning, authorizing and executing actions which, by any objective standard, would put them in the dock as war criminals like Hitler, Göring and Goebbels.
The suicide hijackings that killed nearly 4,000 people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a monstrous crime, although the US government has failed to provide any significant evidence of the direct responsibility of Osama bin Laden, let alone the Taliban regime. The September 11 attacks, however, in no way justify the crimes being committed by American imperialism against the people of Afghanistan, and the new crimes already being planned in the Pentagon and CIA against other nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and elsewhere.
After the events at Qala-i-Janghi, it is preposterous to claim that the American intervention in Afghanistan has as its purpose the defense of human rights, or the punishment of terrorists. The US government, with its vast military arsenal and ruthless determination to work its will by force, is the world’s biggest terrorist.
It is the responsibility of the working people, both internationally and within the United States, to build an independent political mass movement to put an end to the imperialist war machine and the profit system that it defends.
US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11
By Patrick Martin
Insider accounts published in the British, French and Indian media have revealed that US officials threatened war against Afghanistan during the summer of 2001. These reports include the prediction, made in July, that "if the military action went ahead, it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest." The Bush administration began its bombing strikes on the hapless, poverty-stricken country October 7, and ground attacks by US Special Forces began October 19.
It is not an accident that these revelations have appeared overseas, rather than in the US. The ruling classes in these countries have their own economic and political interests to look after, which do not coincide, and in some cases directly clash, with the drive by the American ruling elite to seize control of oil-rich territory in Central Asia.
The American media has conducted a systematic cover-up of the real economic and strategic interests that underlie the war against Afghanistan, in order to sustain the pretense that the war emerged overnight, full-blown, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.
The pundits for the American television networks and major daily newspapers celebrate the rapid military defeat of the Taliban regime as an unexpected stroke of good fortune. They distract public attention from the conclusion that any serious observer would be compelled to draw from the events of the past two weeks: that the speedy victory of the US-backed forces reveals careful planning and preparation by the American military, which must have begun well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The official American myth is that "everything changed" on the day four airliners were hijacked and nearly 5,000 people murdered. The US military intervention in Afghanistan, by this account, was hastily improvised in less than a month. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a television interview November 18, actually claimed that only three weeks went into planning the military onslaught.
This is only one of countless lies emanating from the Pentagon and White House about the war against Afghanistan. The truth is that the US intervention was planned in detail and carefully prepared long before the terrorist attacks provided the pretext for setting it in motion. If history had skipped over September 11, and the events of that day had never happened, it is very likely that the United States would have gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the same schedule.
Afghanistan and the scramble for oil
The United States ruling elite has been contemplating war in Central Asia for at least a decade. As long ago as 1991, following the defeat of Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, Newsweek magazine published an article headlined "Operation Steppe Shield?" It reported that the US military was preparing an operation in Kazakhstan modeled on the Operation Desert Shield deployment in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq.
If the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union provided the opportunity for the projection of American power into Central Asia, the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves provided the incentive. While the Caspian Sea coast of Azerbaijan (Baku) has been an oil production center for a century, it was only in the past decade that huge new reserves were discovered in the northwest Caspian (Kazakhstan) and in Turkmenistan, near the southwest Caspian.
American oil companies have acquired rights to as much as 75 percent of the output of these new fields, and US government officials have hailed the Caspian and Central Asia as a potential alternative to dependence on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region. American troops have followed in the wake of these contracts. US Special Forces began joint operations with Kazakhstan in 1997 and with Uzbekistan a year later, training for intervention especially in the mountainous southern region that includes Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan.
The major problem in exploiting the energy riches of Central Asia is how to get the oil and gas from the landlocked region to the world market. US officials have opposed using either the Russian pipeline system or the easiest available land route, across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, over the past decade, US oil companies and government officials have explored a series of alternative pipeline routes--west through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean; east through Kazakhstan and China to the Pacific; and, most relevant to the current crisis, south from Turkmenistan across western Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.
The Afghanistan pipeline route was pushed by the US-based Unocal oil company, which engaged in intensive negotiations with the Taliban regime. These talks, however, ended in disarray in 1998, as US relations with Afghanistan were inflamed by the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for which Osama bin Laden was held responsible. In August 1998, the Clinton administration launched cruise missile attacks on alleged bin Laden training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The US government demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and imposed economic sanctions. The pipeline talks languished.
Subverting the Taliban
Throughout 1999 the US pressure on Afghanistan increased. On February 3 of that year, Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. Inderfurth and State Department counterterrorism chief Michael Sheehan traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, Abdul Jalil. They warned him that the US would hold the government of Afghanistan responsible for any further terrorist acts by bin Laden.
According to a report in the Washington Post (October 3, 2001), the Clinton administration and Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister of Pakistan, agreed on a joint covert operation to kill Osama bin Laden in 1999. The US would supply satellite intelligence, air support and financing, while Pakistan supplied the Pushtun-speaking operatives who would penetrate southern Afghanistan and carry out the actual killing.
The Pakistani commando team was up and running and ready to strike by October 1999, the Post reported. One former official told the newspaper, "It was an enterprise. It was proceeding." Clinton aides were delighted at the prospect of a successful assassination, with one declaring, "It was like Christmas."
The attack was aborted on October 12, 1999, when Sharif was overthrown in a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf, who halted the proposed covert operation. The Clinton administration had to settle for a UN Security Council resolution that demanded the Taliban turn over bin Laden to "appropriate authorities," but did not require he be handed over to the United States.
McFarlane and Abdul Haq
US subversion against the Taliban continued in 2000, according to an account published November 2 in the Wall Street Journal, written by Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser in the Reagan administration. McFarlane was hired by two wealthy Chicago commodity speculators, Joseph and James Ritchie, to assist them in recruiting and organizing anti-Taliban guerrillas among Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Their principal Afghan contact was Abdul Haq, the former mujahedin leader who was executed by the Taliban last month after an unsuccessful attempt to spark a revolt in his home province.
McFarlane held meetings with Abdul Haq and other former mujahedin in the course of the fall and winter of 2000. After the Bush administration took office, McFarlane parlayed his Republican connections into a series of meetings with State Department, Pentagon and even White House officials. All encouraged the preparation of an anti-Taliban military campaign.
During the summer, long before the United States launched airstrikes on the Taliban, James Ritchie traveled to Tajikistan with Abdul Haq and Peter Tomsen, who had been the US special envoy to the Afghan opposition during the first Bush administration. There they met with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, with the goal of coordinating their Pakistan-based attacks with the only military force still offering resistance to the Taliban.
Finally, according to McFarlane, Abdul Haq "decided in mid-August to go ahead and launch operations in Afghanistan. He returned to Peshawar, Pakistan, to make final preparations." In other words, this phase of the anti-Taliban war was under way well before September 11.
While the Ritchies have been portrayed in the American media as freelance operators motivated by emotional ties to Afghanistan, a country they lived in briefly while their father worked as a civil engineer in the 1950s, at least one report suggests a link to the oil pipeline discussions with the Taliban. In 1998 James Ritchie visited Afghanistan to discuss with the Taliban a plan to sponsor small businesses there. He was accompanied by an official from Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, which was seeking to build a gas pipeline across Afghanistan in partnership with an Argentine firm.
A CIA secret war
McFarlane's revelations come in the course of a bitter diatribe against the CIA for "betraying" Abdul Haq, failing to back his operations in Afghanistan, and leaving him to die at the hands of the Taliban. The CIA evidently regarded both McFarlane and Abdul Haq as less than reliable--and it had its own secret war going on in the same region, the southern half of Afghanistan where the population is predominantly Pushtun-speaking.
According to a front-page article in the Washington Post November 18, the CIA has been mounting paramilitary operations in southern Afghanistan since 1997. The article carries the byline of Bob Woodward, the Post writer made famous by Watergate, who is a frequent conduit for leaks from top-level military and intelligence officials.
Woodward provides details about the CIA's role in the current military conflict, which includes the deployment of a secret paramilitary unit, the Special Activities Division. This force began combat on September 27, using both operatives on the ground and Predator surveillance drones equipped with missiles that could be launched by remote control.
The Special Activities Division, Woodward reports, "consists of teams of about half a dozen men who do not wear military uniforms. The division has about 150 fighters, pilots and specialists, and is made up mostly of hardened veterans who have retired from the US military.
"For the last 18 months, the CIA has been working with tribes and warlords in southern Afghanistan, and the division's units have helped create a significant new network in the region of the Taliban's greatest strength."
This means that the US spy agency was engaged in attacks against the Afghan regime--what under other circumstances the American government would call terrorism--from the spring of 2000, more than a year before the suicide hijackings that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.
War plans take shape
With the installation of George Bush in the White House, the focus of American policy in Afghanistan shifted from a limited incursion to kill or capture bin Laden to preparing a more robust military intervention directed at the Taliban regime as a whole.
The British-based Jane's International Security reported March 15, 2001 that the new American administration was working with India, Iran and Russia "in a concerted front against Afghanistan's Taliban regime." India was supplying the Northern Alliance with military equipment, advisers and helicopter technicians, the magazine said, and both India and Russia were using bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for their operations.
The magazine added: "Several recent meetings between the newly instituted Indo-US and Indo-Russian joint working groups on terrorism led to this effort to tactically and logistically counter the Taliban. Intelligence sources in Delhi said that while India, Russia and Iran were leading the anti-Taliban campaign on the ground, Washington was giving the Northern Alliance information and logistic support."
On May 23, the White House announced the appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad to a position on the National Security Council as special assistant to the president and senior director for Gulf, Southwest Asia and Other Regional Issues. Khalilzad is a former official in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations. After leaving the government, he went to work for Unocal.
On June 26 of this year, the magazine IndiaReacts reported more details of the cooperative efforts of the US, India, Russia and Iran against the Taliban regime. "India and Iran will 'facilitate' US and Russian plans for "limited military action" against the Taliban if the contemplated tough new economic sanctions don't bend Afghanistan's fundamentalist regime," the magazine said.
At this stage of military planning, the US and Russia were to supply direct military assistance to the Northern Alliance, working through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, in order to roll back the Taliban lines toward the city of Mazar-e-Sharif--a scenario strikingly similar to what actually took place over the past two weeks. An unnamed third country supplied the Northern Alliance with anti-tank rockets that had already been put to use against the Taliban in early June.
“Diplomats say that the anti-Taliban move followed a meeting between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and later between Powell and Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh in Washington,” the magazine added. “Russia, Iran and India have also held a series of discussions and more diplomatic activity is expected.”
Unlike the current campaign, the original plan involved the use of military forces from both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as well as Russia itself. IndiaReacts said that in early June Russian President Vladimir Putin told a meeting of the Confederation of Independent States, which includes many of the former Soviet republics, that military action against the Taliban was in the offing. One effect of September 11 was to create the conditions for the United States to intervene on its own, without any direct participation by the military forces of the Soviet successor states, and thus claim an undisputed American right to dictate the shape of a settlement in Afghanistan.
The US threatens war before September 11
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, two reports appeared in the British media indicating that the US government had threatened military action against Afghanistan several months before September 11.
The BBC's George Arney reported September 18 that American officials had told former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik in mid-July of plans for military action against the Taliban regime:
"Mr. Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took place in Berlin.
--Mr. Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.
--The wider objective, according to Mr. Naik, would be to topple the Taliban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place--possibly under the leadership of the former Afghan King Zahir Shah.
--Mr. Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place.
--He was told that Uzbekistan would also participate in the operation and that 17,000 Russian troops were on standby.
--Mr. Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest."
Four days later, on September 22, the Guardian newspaper confirmed this account. The warnings to Afghanistan came out of a four-day meeting of senior US, Russian, Iranian and Pakistani officials at a hotel in Berlin in mid-July, the third in a series of back-channel conferences dubbed "brainstorming on Afghanistan."
The participants included Naik, together with three Pakistani generals; former Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Saeed Rajai Khorassani; Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the Northern Alliance; Nikolai Kozyrev, former Russian special envoy to Afghanistan, and several other Russian officials; and three Americans: Tom Simons, a former US ambassador to Pakistan; Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state for south Asian affairs; and Lee Coldren, who headed the office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh affairs in the State Department until 1997.
The meeting was convened by Francesc Vendrell, then and now the deputy chief UN representative for Afghanistan. While the nominal purpose of the conference was to discuss the possible outline of a political settlement in Afghanistan, the Taliban refused to attend. The Americans discussed the shift in policy toward Afghanistan from Clinton to Bush, and strongly suggested that military action was an option.
While all three American former officials denied making any specific threats, Coldren told the Guardian, "there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action." Naik, however, cited one American declaring that action against bin Laden was imminent: "This time they were very sure. They had all the intelligence and would not miss him this time. It would be aerial action, maybe helicopter gunships, and not only overt, but from very close proximity to Afghanistan."
The Guardian summarized: "The threats of war unless the Taliban surrendered Osama bin Laden were passed to the regime in Afghanistan by the Pakistani government, senior diplomatic sources revealed yesterday. The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature of what they were told raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10 days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats."
Bush, oil and Taliban
Further light on secret contacts between the Bush administration and the Taliban regime is shed by a book released November 15 in France, entitled Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth, written by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Brisard is a former French secret service agent, author of a previous report on bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, and former director of strategy for the French corporation Vivendi, while Dasquie is an investigative journalist.
The two French authors write that the Bush administration was willing to accept the Taliban regime, despite the charges of sponsoring terrorism, if it cooperated with plans for the development of the oil resources of Central Asia.
Until August, they claim, the US government saw the Taliban "as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia." It was only when the Taliban refused to accept US conditions that "this rationale of energy security changed into a military one."
By way of corroboration, one should note the curious fact that neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban regime. Such a designation would have made it impossible for an American oil or construction company to sign a deal with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
Talks between the Bush administration and the Taliban began in February 2001, shortly after Bush's inauguration. A Taliban emissary arrived in Washington in March with presents for the new chief executive, including an expensive Afghan carpet. But the talks themselves were less than cordial. Brisard said, "At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs'."
As long as the possibility of a pipeline deal remained, the White House stalled any further investigation into the activities of Osama bin Laden, Brisard and Dasquie write. They report that John O'Neill, deputy director of the FBI, resigned in July in protest over this obstruction. O'Neill told them in an interview, "the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it." In a strange coincidence, O'Neill accepted a position as security chief of the World Trade Center after leaving the FBI, and was killed on September 11.
Confirming Naiz Naik's account of the secret Berlin meeting, the two French authors add that there was open discussion of the need for the Taliban to facilitate a pipeline from Kazakhstan in order to insure US and international recognition. The increasingly acrimonious US-Taliban talks were broken off August 2, after a final meeting between US envoy Christina Rocca and a Taliban representative in Islamabad. Two months later the United States was bombing Kabul.
The politics of provocation
This account of the preparations for war against Afghanistan brings us to September 11 itself. The terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon was an important link in the chain of causality that produced the US attack on Afghanistan. The US government had planned the war well in advance, but the shock of September 11 made it politically feasible, by stupefying public opinion at home and giving Washington essential leverage on reluctant allies abroad.
Both the American public and dozens of foreign governments were stampeded into supporting military action against Afghanistan, in the name of the fight against terrorism. The Bush administration targeted Kabul without presenting any evidence that either bin Laden or the Taliban regime was responsible for the World Trade Center atrocity. It seized on September 11 as the occasion for advancing longstanding ambitions to assert American power in Central Asia.
There is no reason to think that September 11 was merely a fortuitous occurrence. Every other detail of the war in Afghanistan was carefully prepared. It is unlikely that the American government left to chance the question of providing a suitable pretext for military action.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, there were press reports--again, largely overseas--that US intelligence agencies had received specific warnings about large-scale terrorist attacks, including the use of hijacked airplanes. It is quite possible that a decision was made at the highest levels of the American state to allow such an attack to proceed, perhaps without imagining the actual scale of the damage, in order to provide the necessary spark for war in Afghanistan.
How otherwise to explain such well-established facts as the decision of top officials at the FBI to block an investigation into Zaccarias Massaoui, the Franco-Moroccan immigrant who came under suspicion after he allegedly sought training from a US flight school on how to steer a commercial airliner, but not to take off or land?
The Minneapolis field office had Massaoui arrested in early August, and asked FBI headquarters for permission to conduct further inquiries, including a search of the hard drive of his computer. The FBI tops refused, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence of criminal intent on Massaoui's part--an astonishing decision for an agency not known for its tenderness on the subject of civil liberties.
This is not to say that the American government deliberately planned every detail of the terrorist attacks or anticipated that nearly 5,000 people would be killed. But the least likely explanation of September 11 is the official one: that dozens of Islamic fundamentalists, many with known ties to Osama bin Laden, were able to carry out a wide-ranging conspiracy on three continents, targeting the most prominent symbols of American power, without any US intelligence agency having the slightest idea of what they were doing.
This war is not just
By James Carroll,
IN RECENT DAYS, sage editorial writers, religious leaders, politicians, liberal pundits, and admired columnists have joined in the Donald Rumsfeld-Condoleezza Rice chorus praising the American war in Afghanistan as ''just.''
The Taliban are described as all but defeated. The ''noose'' around bin Laden grows ever tighter. Afghans are seen rejoicing in the streets, and the women among them are liberated. All because the United States turned the full force of its fire power loose on the evil enemy. Anyone still refusing to sign onto this campaign is increasingly regarded as unpatriotic. Next, we will be called ''kooks.''
Not so fast. The broad American consensus that Bush's war is ''just'' represents a shallow assessment of that war, a shallowness that results from three things.
First, ignorance. The United States government has revealed very little of what has happened in the war zone. Journalists impeded by restricted access and blind patriotism have uncovered even less. How many of those outside the military establishment who have blithely deemed this war ''just'' know what it actually involves? It is clear that a massive bombardment has been occurring throughout Afghanistan, but to what effect? And against whom? Is the focus on the readily targeted Taliban, in fact, allowing a far more elusive Al Qaeda to slip away?
The crucial judgment about a war's ''proportionality,'' central to any conclusion about its being ''just,'' simply cannot be made on the basis of information available at present. And how is this war ''just'' if the so far unprovoked war it is bleeding into - against Iraq - is unjust?
Second, narrow context. The celebrated results that have so far followed from the American war - collapse of the Taliban, liberation of women - are welcome indeed, but they are relatively peripheral outcomes, unrelated to the stated American war aim of defeating terrorism.
And these outcomes pale in significance when the conflict is seen in the context of a larger question: Does this intervention break, or at least impede, the cycle of violence in which terrorism is only the latest turn? Or, by affirming the inevitability of violence, does this war prepare the ground for the next one? By unleashing such massive firepower, do we make potential enemies even more likely to try to match it with the very weapons of mass destruction we so dread? Alas, the answer is clear.
This ''overwhelming'' exercise of American power has been a crude reinforcement of the worst impulse of human history - but this is the nuclear age, and that impulse simply must be checked. This old style American war is unwise in the extreme, and if other nations - Pakistan, India, Israel, Russia? - begin to play according to the rules of ''dead or alive,'' will this American model still seem ''just''?
Third, wrongly defined use of force. This war is not ''just'' because it was not necessary. It may be the only kind of force the behemoth Pentagon knows to exercise, but that doesn't make it ''just'' either. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 could have been defined not as acts of war, but as crimes. That was the first mistake, one critics like me flagged as it was happening.
As perhaps the most savage crimes in history, the terrorists' acts should have been met with a swift, forceful response far more targeted than the present war has been. Police action, not war. The criminals, not an impoverished nation, should be on the receiving end of the punishment.
Instead, a massive war against a substitute enemy leaves the sprawling criminal network intact - perhaps in Afghanistan, certainly in major cities elsewhere. Meanwhile, because of the war, the rule of law at home is being undermined. Because of the war-driven pressure to be ''united,'' the shocking incompetence of US domestic security agencies goes unchallenged.
Early in the war, the highest US officials, including the president and vice president, encouraged the idea that the anthrax attacks were originating with the bin Laden network. The understandable paranoia that consequently gripped the public imagination - an enemy that could shut down Congress! - was a crucial aspect of what led both press and politicians to accept the idea that a massive war against an evil enemy would be both necessary and moral.
Now, the operating assumption is that the anthrax cases, unrelated to bin Laden, are domestic crimes, not acts of war. But for a crucial moment, they effectively played the role in this war that the Gulf of Tonkin ''assault'' played in the Vietnam War, as sources of a war hysteria that ''united'' the nation around a mistake. In such a context, the more doubt is labeled disloyal, the more it grows. The more this war is deemed ''just,'' the more it seems wrong.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.