FRFI 163 October / November 2001
‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,’
US newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst in 1897, before the US duly acquired Cuba.
‘Afghanistan is the place where the Reagan doctrine paid off…The unravelling of the cold war began there,’
US ambassador to Pakistan 1988-91.
Within one week of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre and the attack on the Pentagon, the US Navy despatched two aircraft carrier battle groups towards Afghanistan. The British Royal Navy readied over twenty vessels scheduled for exercises off Oman to join the US fleet. For over 200 years British armed forces have paved the way for ‘free trade and civilisation’ in the Middle East and Central Asia. The result has been an arena of constant war. Now the US and British governments intend to demonstrate that the problems of the world can be solved by mass destruction from the air. Instead of four hijacked airliners there will be tens of thousands of bombers, jets, missiles, shells and helicopter gun-ships.
Afghanistan has been selected as the first target for harbouring the suspect Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan, its Taliban rulers and Bin Laden are direct products of US and British foreign policy, of US and British governments’ anti-communism, and US and British corporations’ pursuit of profits and power. There are other factors, but it is primarily these that have blazed the trail towards inferno.
The Great Game
‘We have long declined to meddle with the Afghans and have purposely left them independent, but if the Russians try to make them Russian, we must take care they become British,’
Lord Palmerston 1838
Britain has fought three British-Afghan wars: 1839-1842, 1878-1880 and at the end of the First Imperialist War. Afghanistan’s government was the first to recognise the revolutionary state in the Soviet Union. The ‘Great Game’ was played out between Britain and Russia across Central Asia, focussing on Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan during the nineteenth century. Turkestan, Afghanistan, Persia and Transcaspia were, ‘pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world’, said Lord Curzon. Afghanistan was critical to British imperialism’s rule in India by control over the approaches to it. Possession of India made Britain the pre-eminent imperial power of the nineteenth century.
In the twentieth century the discovery of oil in Persia in 1908 transformed the strategic significance of the Middle East, the Caspian Basin and Central Asia to imperialism. Control of oil was key to ‘dominion of the world’; this region has most of the world’s oil reserves.
The 1978 transformation in Afghanistan that placed a pro-Soviet government in power and the 1979 Iranian revolution threatened US and British imperialism. The US and British governments’ response was swift: within a year they had established military bases across the border from Afghanistan in Pakistan from which to send counter-revolutionary bands to attack the new Afghan government. US and British troops took part in both training these mujahedin and accompanying them on missions inside Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union was invited by the Afghan government to send its army into Afghanistan. They entered in December 1979. Stories were circulated in the US and British press that Soviet troops were poised to take control of Iran’s oilfields, that they were using napalm and chemical weapons, committing mass slaughter of Afghan civilians etc. The US CIA operated through the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to recruit Muslims from around the world to fight a jihad (holy war) against the Afghan government and the Soviet forces. Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates joined the USA, Britain and Pakistan in supplying funds. Some $6 billion worth of weapons were supplied, including US Stinger missiles. On some estimates 35,000 people from 40 Islamic countries were recruited into the fight between 1982 and 1992. It was the CIA’s biggest covert operation. The US state believed that the route to Moscow lay through Kabul.
Opium and heroin production was used to provide additional funds for the counter-revolutionary war. As the mujahedin seized territory in Afghanistan they ordered peasants to grow opium. Heroin refineries were built in north west Pakistan, protected by the Pakistan military and ISI. Within two years of the CIA implementing its operation Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied 60% of US heroin consumption, and in Pakistan heroin addiction went from near zero in 1979 to 1.2 million in 1985. (Alfred McCoy cited in Michel Chossudovsky, Who is Osama bin Laden?). This strategy of using opium to fund counter-revolution had been used before by the French and US in Vietnam and Indochina.
The CIA and mujahedin deliberately targeted achievements of the Afghan government: between 1981 and 1985 nearly 2,000 schools, 30 hospitals and 100 health clinics were destroyed. The purpose was to undermine support for the government among the people. As the mujahedin advanced they removed legal protections for women and their right to education. Approximately 1.5 million people were killed in the US and British intelligence inspired war.
Osama bin Laden was among those recruited from Saudi Arabia into the mujahedin. He says he did not receive training from US forces – the US operated through Pakistani agencies that they supervised. The CIA encouraged the notion that what was being fought was a Soviet violation of Islam.
In 1989 the Soviet forces departed from Afghanistan. President Najibullah took refuge in the UN headquarters in Kabul in April 1991 – later to be brutally murdered by the mujahedin. In 1992 the Islamic Jihad Council took power. The Taliban, trained in Pakistan and funded by that country as well as by Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates, occupied Kabul in 1994, was repulsed, then re-occupied the Afghan capital in 1996 to take power. Over the past year the USA has been the biggest source of aid to Afghanistan. Afghanistan was treated as a victory for the USA and a strategic asset to it. Britain and the US share responsibility for the benighted medieval theocracy foisted on the Afghan people.
In the name of civilisation
There is no economic and social data about Afghanistan published by the UN since 1995. There are approximately 25 million Afghanis, including six million refugees, mostly in Iran and Pakistan. In 1995 life expectancy was 44 years for women and 43 years for men. Twelve per cent of the population had access to safe water. Sixty nine per cent of people were illiterate. Infant mortality was 257 per 1,000 live births. Since these appalling conditions were recorded life has deteriorated. Perhaps six million people depend on food aid which the USA has demanded is cut off. Mass starvation will be inflicted on the people.
Afghanistan served as a US strategic asset under the Taliban. Its drug trade was used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim army and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in former Yugoslavia. Now there is evidence that mujahedin from Afghanistan have been fighting for the KLA in Macedonia. In Chechnya, rebel leaders were trained in CIA sponsored camps in Pakistan and bin Laden is among those who planned the war in Chechnya. This war serves the interests of the US and British oil multinationals that are competing with Russia for control of the Caspian Basin oil reserves. While the US draws up its lists of targets noticably absent from it are the countries that financed the Taliban: Saudi Arabia, the United Emirates, Pakistan and the USA itself.
It is the destruction of the Soviet Union that has encouraged reaction to flourish so viciously. NATO presses on Russia’s western borders in Eastern Europe and is now entering its southern flank in Central Asia. It is reaching to China’s western frontier. The current US and British war moves are an overt extension and escalation of the covert policy they have operated for over 20 years.
Trevor Rayne
