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WSWS : News & Analysis : The US War in Afghanistan
The Taliban, the US and the resources of Central Asia
Part 2
By Peter Symonds
25 October 2001
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The following is the second article in a two-part series on the
history of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The first part was
published yesterday.
Like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the US has repeatedly denied any
support for the Taliban. Given the close involvement of the CIA with
Pakistan and the ISI throughout the 1980s, however, it is highly
implausible that Washington did not know of, and give tacit approval
to, the Bhutto government’s plans for the Taliban. Pakistan’s support
for the Taliban was an open secret, yet it was only in the late 1990s
that the US began to put pressure on Islamabad over its relations
with the regime.
Further indirect evidence of US-Taliban relations comes from the
efforts of US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a member of the House
Foreign Relations Committee, to obtain access to official US
documents related to Afghanistan since the Taliban’s formation.
Rohrabacher, a supporter of the Afghani king, certainly had an axe to
grind with the Clinton administration. But the response to his
demands was significant. After two years of pressure, the State
Department finally handed over nearly one thousand documents covering
the period after 1996, but has stubbornly refused to release any
dealing with the crucial earlier period.
While exact details of early US contacts with the Taliban or its
Pakistani handlers are unavailable, Washington’s attitude was clear.
Author Ahmed Rashid comments: “The Clinton administration was clearly
sympathetic to the Taliban, as they were in line with Washington’s
anti-Iran policy and were important for the success of any southern
pipeline from Central Asia that would avoid Iran. The US Congress had
authorised a covert $20 million budget for the CIA to destabilise
Iran, and Tehran had accused Washington of funnelling some of these
funds to the Taliban—a charge that was always denied by Washington”
[Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, p. 46].
In fact, the period from 1994 to 1997 coincided with a flurry of US
diplomatic activity, aimed at securing support for the Unocal
pipeline. In March 1996, prominent US senator Hank Brown, a supporter
of the Unocal project, visited Kabul and other Afghan cities. He met
with the Taliban and invited them to send delegates to a Unocal-
funded conference on Afghanistan in the US. In the same month, the US
also exerted pressure on the Pakistani government to ditch its
arrangements with Bridas and back the American company.
The following month, US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia
Robin Raphel visited Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, urging a
political solution to the continuing conflict. “We are also concerned
that economic opportunities here will be missed, if political
stability cannot be restored,” she told the media. Raphel did not
hold talks with the Taliban leaders or offer any other indication of
official support. But neither was the US stridently criticising the
Taliban on women’s rights, drugs and terrorism, which were to form
the basis of its ultimatums to the regime in the late 1990s. On all
three issues, there was an abundance of evidence, unless one chose to
deliberately ignore it.
* Ever since the seizure of Kandahar it was obvious that the Taliban
would not countenance even the most basic democratic rights. Girls
were banned from schools and women from working—measures which
created enormous hardships. A strict, even absurd, dress code was
imposed on men and women and virtually all forms of entertainment,
from video and TV to kite flying, were banned. A religious police
enforced the social code, meting out arbitrary justice on the street
to offenders. Public executions were carried out for a wide range of
crimes including adultery and homosexuality. The purpose of the
entire system of repression was to terrorise people into accepting
the Taliban’s theocratic dictatorship in which no one had any say
except the Taliban’s mullahs. Even their decisions were subject to
veto by Mullah Omar in Kandahar.
* In the case of the huge Afghani heroin industry, the US played a
major role in its expansion. Throughout the 1980s, the Mujaheddin
groups and their Pakistani handlers exploited the covert supply
lines, set up with CIA assistance to get arms into Afghanistan, in
order to smuggle large quantities of opium out of the country. The
CIA ignored the drug trade in the interests of prosecuting the war
against the Soviet army. By the early 1990s, Afghanistan rivalled
Burma as the world’s largest producer of opium. The US took much the
same attitude to the Taliban, which initially pledged to outlaw opium
cultivation but quickly reversed its decision after realising that
there were few alternative sources of income in Afghanistan’s ruined
economy. After the Taliban took Kandahar, opium output from the
surrounding province increased by 50 percent. As its forces moved
further north, estimated output for the country as a whole increased
to 2,800 tonnes in 1997—up at least 25 percent from 1995. None of
this provoked public denunciations in Washington at the time.
* The US attitude to the threat of Islamic extremism was just as
hypocritical. In the 1980s, the US not only gave support to the
Mujaheddin generally, but also, in 1986, specifically approved a
Pakistani plan to recruit fighters internationally to demonstrate
that the whole Muslim world supported the anti-Soviet war. Under the
plan, an estimated 35,000 Islamic militants from the Middle East,
Central Asia, Africa and the Philippines were trained and armed to
fight in Afghanistan. Prominent among the Arab Afghans, as they were
dubbed, was Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy Yemeni construction
magnate, who had been in Pakistan building roads and depots for the
Mujaheddin since 1980. He worked with the CIA in 1986 to build the
huge Khost tunnel complex as an arms dump and training facility, then
went on to build his own training camp and, in 1989, established Al
Qaeda (the Base) for Arab Afghans.
The fall of Kabul
In the mid-1990s, the US attitude to the Taliban was not determined
by bin Laden, drugs or democratic rights. If US official Robin Raphel
was ambivalent about officially embracing the Taliban in mid-1996, it
was because Washington was uncertain whether Taliban fighters were
capable of defeating their opponents and providing a stable political
climate for the Unocal project.
After the capture of Herat in 1995, the Taliban shifted the focus of
its attack to Kabul. All sides were involved in arming their proxies
inside Afghanistan for the anticipated showdown. Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia supplied the Taliban, upgraded Kandahar airport, and built a
new telephone and radio network. Russia and Iran flew in arms,
ammunition and fuel to the Rabbani regime and its allies via Bagram
air base, just north of Kabul. India indirectly aided Rabbini by
refurbishing Afghanistan’s national airline and providing money.
Attempts by the UN, the US and other countries to mediate a deal
between Rabbani and the Taliban failed. In August 1996, Taliban
troops seized Jalalabad on the Pakistan border and then finally
forced opposition forces to withdraw from Kabul the following month.
One of its first acts was to brutally torture and murder Najibullah
and his brother, who since 1992 had been living under diplomatic
immunity in the UN compound in the capital, and to hang their
mutilated bodies in the street. Washington’s reaction is described as
follows:
“[W]ithin hours of Kabul’s capture by the Taliban, the US State
Department announced that it would establish diplomatic relations
with the Taliban by sending an official to Kabul—an announcement it
also quickly retracted. State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said
the US found ‘nothing objectionable’ in the steps taken by the
Taliban to impose Islamic law. He described the Taliban as anti-
modern rather than anti-Western. US Congressmen weighed in on the
side of the Taliban. ‘The good part of what has happened is that one
of the factions at last seems capable of developing a government in
Afghanistan,’ said Senator Hank Brown, a supporter of the Unocal
project” [p.166].
Unocal’s response was almost identical. Company spokesman Chris
Taggert welcomed the Taliban’s victory, explaining that it would now
be easier to complete its pipeline project—then quickly retracted the
statement. The meaning was obvious. The US saw the Taliban as the
best means for ensuring the stability required for the Unocal
project, but were not prepared to overtly back the new regime until
its control was unchallenged.
Speaking in a closed-door UN session in November 1996, Raphel bluntly
explained: “The Taliban control more than two-thirds of the country,
they are Afghan, they are indigenous, they have demonstrated staying
power. The real source of their success has been the willingness of
many Afghans, particularly Pashtuns, to tacitly trade unending
fighting and chaos for a measure of peace and security, even with
severe social restrictions. It is not in the interests of Afghanistan
or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.”
Unocal, with the support of Washington, continued to actively woo the
Taliban leaders who, in an effort to obtain the most lucrative deal,
were playing the American company off against Bridas. Unocal provided
nearly $1 million to set up the Centre for Afghanistan Studies at the
University of Omaha as a front for an aid program in Taliban-held
Kandahar. The main outcome of the company’s “aid” was a school to
train the pipefitters, electricians and carpenters needed to
construct its pipelines. In November 1997, a Taliban delegation was
feted by Unocal in Houston, Texas and met with State Department
officials during the visit.
Washington’s political shift
But the political winds were already shifting. The key turning point
came in May 1997 when the Taliban captured the major northern city of
Mazar-e-Sharif and attempted to impose their religious and social
strictures on a hostile and suspicious population of Uzbeks, Tajiks
and Shiite Hazaras. Their actions provoked a revolt in which some 600
Taliban troops were killed in intense fighting in the city. At least
1,000 more were captured as they attempted to escape and were
allegedly massacred. Over the next two months, the Taliban were
driven back along the northern fronts, in what became their worst-
ever military defeat. In 10 weeks of fighting, they suffered more
than 3,000 dead and wounded, and had another 3,600 fighters taken
prisoner.
Mazar-e-Sharif was not simply a military setback. The Taliban
regrouped, seized the city again in August 1998, butchered thousands
of Shiite Hazaras—men, women and children—and almost provoked a war
with Iran by murdering 11 Iranian officials and a journalist.
However, the events of May 1997 revealed the deep animosity among non-
Pashtuns towards the Taliban. It signified that the civil war would
inevitably be a protracted one and, even if the Taliban succeeded in
taking the opposition strongholds in the north, rebellions and
further political instability were likely.
In the immediate aftermath of the Mazar-e-Sharif debacle, several
crucial decisions were taken in Washington. In July 1997, in an
abrupt policy about-face, the Clinton administration ended its
opposition to a Turkmenistan-Turkey gas pipeline running across Iran.
The following month, a consortium of European companies including
Royal Dutch Shell announced plans for such a project. A separate deal
struck by Australia’s BHP Petroleum proposed another gas pipeline
from Iran to Pakistan and eventually India.
In the same period, the US and Turkey jointly sponsored the idea of a
“transportation corridor,” with a major oil pipeline from Baku in
Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey’s Ceyhan port on the
Mediterranean. Washington began to urge Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan
to participate in the plan by constructing gas and oil pipelines,
respectively, under the Caspian Sea, then along the same corridor.
Unocal’s plan for a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan now faced
competition. Moreover, these rival proposals were along routes that
promised to be, at least in the short-term, more politically stable.
Both Bridas and Unocal pushed ahead with their plans in southern
Afghanistan but the prospects looked increasingly distant. In late
1997, Unocal Vice-President Marty Millar commented: “It’s uncertain
when this project will start. It depends on peace in Afghanistan and
a government we can work with. That may be the end of this year, next
year or three years from now, or this may be a dry hole if the
fighting continues.”
A parallel shift in Washington’s political rhetoric also began to
take place. In November 1997, US Secretary of State Madeline Albright
set the new tone during a visit to Pakistan. She took the opportunity
to denounce the Taliban’s policies towards women as “despicable” and
to pointedly warn Pakistan that it risked international isolation.
Washington began to exert pressure on Pakistan over the Taliban’s
involvement in the heroin trade and the dangers of “Islamic
terrorism”.
The change in US policy became complete when, in the aftermath of the
bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the
Clinton administration launched cruise missiles against Osama bin
Laden’s training camps at Khost in Afghanistan. Bin Laden had
returned to Afghanistan in May 1996 after a six-year absence, during
which he had become increasingly bitter over the role of the US in
the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. He began issuing public calls
for a jihad against the US in August 1996. It was only after the
African bombings, however, that Washington began to demand, without
providing any evidence of bin Laden’s involvement, that the Taliban
hand him over.
Unocal suspended its pipeline project and pulled all its staff out of
Kandahar and Islamabad. The final nail in the coffin came at the end
of 1998, when oil prices halved from $25 to $13 a barrel, rendering
Unocal’s pipeline project uneconomic, at least in the short term. At
the same time, the Clinton administration’s demands for the handover
of bin Laden, as well as action on drug control and human rights,
became the basis for a series of punitive UN sanctions imposed on the
Taliban in 1999 and then strengthened earlier this year.
Despite the intense pressure exerted on the Taliban and also on
Pakistan, none of the US demands were met. In 1998 and 1999, the
Taliban launched new military offensives and extended its control,
driving its opponents into pockets of territory in the north east.
But the civil war was no closer to any conclusion, with Russia and
Iran continuing to supply and arm the Taliban’s opponents. The UN
sanctions had the effect of preventing any of Washington’s rivals
from gaining an advantageous position in Afghanistan, but brought the
US no closer to establishing a firm foothold in the region.
The US administration has now seized upon the September 11 attacks on
New York and Washington to press ahead with its long-held designs on
Central Asia. Without providing any evidence, Bush immediately held
bin Laden responsible for the devastation in the US and issued a
series of ultimatums to the Taliban regime: hand over bin Laden, shut
down Al Qaeda installations and give the US access to all “terrorist
training camps”. When the Taliban rejected his open-ended demands,
Bush gave his generals the signal to unleash thousands of bombs and
cruise missiles on Afghanistan, with the openly avowed aim of
bringing down the regime.
If one were to believe the Bush administration and the international
media, the sole purpose of Washington’s extensive and costly war
against one of the world’s most backward countries is to catch bin
Laden and to break up his Al Qaeda network. But as this historical
review demonstrates, Washington’s objectives in Afghanistan are not
determined by fears about terrorism or concerns over human rights.
The US has for the first time established a military presence in the
Central Asian republics with troops in Uzbekistan and its military
campaign ensures that it will dictate the terms for any post-Taliban
regime in Afghanistan. Even if bin Laden were killed tomorrow and his
organisation destroyed, Washington has no intention of retreating
from these first steps towards the domination of this key strategic
region and its vast energy reserves.
References:
1. Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia, Ahmed
Rashid, I.B Tauris, 2000
2. Afghanistan: A New History, Martin Ewers, Curzon, 2001
3. Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan,
Michael Griffin, Pluto Press, 2001
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