History and Origins of Recent Wave of Terrorism
History and Origins of Recent Wave of Terrorism
By Mamnoon Ahmad Khan
Introduction
I clearly remember that thirty years back I haven’t heard the word terrorism or terrorist. There was only one term in use which was Israel’s aggression on Arabs and Palestinians. But after the Russian (formerly USSR) invasion on Afghanistan, the scenario changed. Russian brutalities were not hidden from the world. They not only destroy this independent country but they destroy its future generations. On many villages after killing their inhabitants they crushed the whole village with bulldozers. Even they did not forgive innocent children. Russians threw toy bombs in towns and villages from helicopters and when a child found it and started to play with it blew up. As a result so many Afghan children died or became handicapped.
Soviet Aggression in Soviet-Afghan War
Over 1 million Afghans were killed.15 million Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran, 1/3 of the prewar population of the country. Another 2 million Afghans were displaced within the country. In the 1980s, one out of two refugees in the world was an Afghan.2 Along with fatalities were 1.2 million Afghans disabled with the blessings of the Russian landmines (mujahedeen, government soldiers and noncombatants) and 3 million maimed or wounded (primarily noncombatants).3
Irrigation systems, crucial to agriculture in Afghanistan’s arid climate were destroyed by aerial bombing and strafing by Soviet or government forces. In the worst year of the war, 1985, well over half of all the farmers who remained in Afghanistan had their fields bombed, and over one quarter had their irrigation systems destroyed and their livestock shot by Soviet or government troops, according to a survey conducted by Swedish relief experts 4
The population of Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, was reduced from 200,000 before the war to no more than 25,000 inhabitants, following a months-long campaign of carpet bombing and bulldozing by the Soviets and Afghan communist soldiers in 1987.5Land mines had killed 25,000 Afghans during the war and another 10-15 million land mines, most planted by Soviet and government forces, were left scattered throughout the countryside to kill and maim.6 A great deal of damage was done to the civilian children population by land mines. A 2005 report estimated 3-4% of the Afghan population was disabled due to Soviet and government land mines. In the city of Quetta, a survey of refugee women and children taken shortly after the Soviet withdrawal found over 80% of the children refugees unregistered and child mortality at 31%. Of children who survived, 67% were severely malnourished, with malnutrition increasing with age.7
Critics of Soviet and Afghan government forces describe their effect on Afghan culture as working in three stages: first, the center of customary Afghan culture, Islam, was pushed aside; second, Soviet patterns of life, especially amongst the young, were imported; third, shared Afghan cultural characteristics were destroyed by the emphasis on so-called nationalities, with the outcome that the country was split into different ethnic groups, with no language, religion, or culture in common.8
The Geneva Accords of 1988, which ultimately led to the withdrawal of the Soviet forces in early 1989, left the Afghan government in ruins. The accords had failed to address adequately the issue of the post-occupation period and the future governance of Afghanistan. The assumption among most Western diplomats was that the Soviet-backed government in Kabul would soon collapse; however, this was not to happen for another three years. During this time the Interim Islamic Government of Afghanistan (IIGA) was established in exile. The exclusion of key groups such as refugees and Shias, combined with major disagreements between the different mujahedeen factions, meant that the IIGA never succeeded in acting as a functional government.9
Before the war, Afghanistan was already one of the world’s poorest nations. The prolonged conflict left Afghanistan ranked 170 out of 174 in the UNDP’s Human Development Index, making Afghanistan one of the least developed countries in the world.10
Once the Soviets withdrew, US interest in Afghanistan ceased. The US decided not to help with reconstruction of the country and instead they handed over the interests of the country to US allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Pakistan quickly took advantage of this opportunity and forged relations with warlords and later theTaliban, to secure trade interests and routes. From wiping out the country’s trees through logging practices, which has destroyed all but 2% of forest cover country-wide, to substantial uprooting of wild pistachio trees for the exportation of their roots for therapeutic uses, to opium agriculture, the past ten years have caused much ecological and agrarian destruction.11
Captain Tarlan Eyvazov, a soldier in the Soviet forces during the war, stated that the Afghan children’s future is destined for war. Eyvazov said, “Children born in Afghanistan at the start of the war… have been brought up in war conditions, this is their way of life.” Eyvazov’s theory was later strengthened when the Taliban movement developed and formed from orphans or refugee children who were forced by the Soviets to flee their homes and relocate their lives in Pakistan. The swift rise to power, from the young Taliban in 1994, was the result of the disorder and civil war that had warlords running wild because of the complete breakdown of law and order in Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviets.12
Israeli Brutalities since the Arab-Isreal War 1967
According to eyewitness accounts by Israeli officers and journalists, the Israeli Army – the army that claims to hold itself to a higher moral standard than other armies – executed as many as 1,000 Arab prisoners during the 1967 war.
Historian Gabby Bron wrote in the Yediot Ahronot in Israel that he witnessed Israeli troops executing Egyptian prisoners on the morning of June 8, 1967, in the Sinai town of El Arish.
Bron reported that he saw about 150 Egyptian POWs being held at the El Arish airport where they were sitting on the ground, densely crowded together with their hands held on the back of their necks. Every few minutes, Bron writes, Israeli soldiers would escort an Egyptian POW from the group to a hearing conducted by two men in Israeli army uniforms. Then the man would be taken away, given a spade, and forced to dig his own grave.
I watched as (one) man dug a hole for about 15 minutes, Bron wrote. Afterwards, the (Israeli military) policeman told him to throw the shovel away, and then one of them leveled an Uzi at him and shot two short bursts, each of three or four bullets.
Bron says he witnessed about ten such executions, until the grave was filled. Then an Israeli Colonel threatened him with a revolver, forcing him to leave the area.
The reality is that Israel encouraged and then took advantage of that war for many political, economic, and territorial reasons. To grab these advantages, Israel attacked on Syria and captured the Golan in the last days of the war.
Sabra and Shatila Massacre Sep.16, 1982
Today, 27 years later, Israeli aggression against Palestinians continues.
The scars left by the Sabra and Shatila massacres are indescribable.
Photo courtesy: Piotr_360
On Sept. 16, 1982, members of the Lebanese Christian Phalange militia – with direct approval and support of then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon – entered Sabra and Shatila and initiated a 36-hour long assault, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of unarmed Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
Journalist Robert Fisk, who was on the scene on September 19, 1982, reported seeing the “blackened bodies of babies tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded U.S. army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.”
The infants had been shot in the head. Some had had their throats slit. Scores of men had been shot in the back of the head or mutilated by axes. Women had been raped. Pregnant women had fetuses torn from their bodies.
The United Nations, which issued a formal declaration of genocide in 1982, also calls the Sabra and Shatila massacre one of the most heinous events in the 20th century.
How many died is not known, but figures range from about 1,000 to at least 3,500, a number estimated by the late Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk.
“The exact figure (of victims) can never be determined because, in addition to the approximately 1,000 people who were buried in communal graves by the International Committee of the Red Cross or in the cemeteries of Beirut by members of their families, a large number of corpses were buried beneath bulldozed buildings by the militia members themselves,” wrote Dr. Laurie King-Irani, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. “Also, particularly on 17 and 18 September, hundreds of people were carried away alive in trucks towards unknown destinations, never to return.”
Dr. King-Irani also was the North American Coordinator of the International Campaign for Justice for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila, which hosted the Web site indictsharon.net.
Yet the perpetrators of the massacre were never brought to justice. An internal Israeli investigation called the Kahan Commission – which was political and not judicial – found Sharon to be indirectly but personally responsible. He resigned as defense minister but retained a government cabinet position. He served as prime minister from 2001 to 2006. A case that had been filed in November 2001 on behalf of some survivors against Sharon and others for committing war crimes under Belgium’s universal jurisdiction law was later rejected by a Belgian appeals court.
Sharon told the Israeli Knesset that the decision to send in the Phalangists had been made at 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 15. The Israeli Command received the instructions that the “mopping up of the camps will be carried out by the Phalanges or the Lebanese army,” Dr. King-Irani writes, citing the Kahan Commission report, page 125.
Today, 27 years later, Israeli aggression against Palestinians continues. Operation Cast Lead in December and January killed more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded more than 5,300. Israel’s continuing siege has squeezed the 1.5 million residents there into an inhumane and unthinkable crisis.
All the Muslims of the world should honor the victims and survivors of Sabra and Shatila by keeping their memories alive. Where their voices have been silenced, we must raise our voices loudly and clearly and call for an end to the brutal occupation of Palestine and for the right of refugees to return to their homeland.
The Jenin Massacre of April 2002
A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. Its troops have caused devastation in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, reached yesterday by The Independent, where thousands of people are still living amid the ruins.
A residential area roughly 160,000 square yards about a third of a mile wide has been reduced to dust. Rubble has been shovelled by bulldozers into 30ft piles. The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.
In one nearby half-wrecked building, gutted by fire, lies the fly-blown corpse of a man covered by a tartan rug. In another we found the remains of 23-year-old Ashraf Abu Hejar beneath the ruins of a fire-blackened room that collapsed on him after being hit by a rocket. His head is shrunken and blackened. In a third, five long-dead men lay under blankets.
A quiet. sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children’s toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing.
We stared at a mound of debris. Here, he said, he saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank. We could not see the bodies. But we could smell them.
A few days ago, we might not have believed Kamal Anis. But the descriptions given by the many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations. Their stories had not prepared me for what I saw yesterday. I believe them now.
Until two weeks ago, there were several hundred tightly-packed homes in this neighbourhood called Hanat al-Hawashim. They no longer exist.
Around the central ruins, there are many hundreds of half-wrecked homes. Much of the camp — once home to 15,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war — is falling down. Every wall is speckled and torn with bullet holes and shrapnel, testimony of the awesome, random firepower of Cobra and Apache helicopters that hovered over the camp.
Building after building has been torn apart, their contents of cheap fake furnishings, mattresses, white plastic chairs spewed out into the road. Every other building bears the giant, charred, impact mark of a helicopter missile. Last night there were still many families and weeping children still living amid the ruins, cut off from the humanitarian aid. Ominously, we found no wounded, although there was a report of a man being rescued from beneath ruins only an hour before we arrived.
Those who did not flee the camp, or not detained by the army, have spent the bombardment in basements, enduring day after day of terror. Some were forced into rooms by the soldiers, who smashed their way into houses through the walls. The UN says half of the camp’s 15,000 residents were under 18. As the evening hush fell over these killing fields, we could suddenly hear the children chattering. The mosques, once so noisy at prayer time, were silent.
Israel was still trying to conceal these scenes yesterday. It had refused entry to Red Cross ambulances for nearly a week, in violation of the Geneva Convention. Yesterday it continued to try to keep us out.
Jenin, in the northern end of the occupied West Bank, remained a closed military zone, was ringed Merkava tanks, army Jeep patrols, and armoured personnel carriers. Reporters caught trying to get in were escorted out. A day earlier the Israeli armed forces took in a few selected journalists to see sanitised parts of the camp. We simply walked across the fields, flitted through an olive orchard overlooked by two Israeli tanks, and into the camp itself.
We were led in by hands gesturing at windows. Hidden, whispering people directed us through narrow alleys they thought were clear. When there were soldiers about, a finger would rise in warning, or a hand waved us back. We were welcomed by people desperate to tell what had occurred. They spoke of executions, and bulldozers wrecking homes with people inside. This is mass murder committed by Ariel Sharon, Jamel Saleh, 43, said. We feel more hate for Israel now than ever. Look at this boy. He placed his hand on the tousled head of a little boy, Mohammed, the eight-year-old son of a friend. He saw all this evil. He will remember it all. So will everyone else who saw the horror of Jenin refugee camp. Palestinians who entered the camp yesterday were almost speechless.
Rajib Ahmed, from the Palestinian Energy Authority, came to try to repair the power lines. He was trembling with fury and shock. This is mass murder. I have come here to help by I have found nothing but devastation. Just look for yourself. All had the same message: tell the world.
Recent Israeli aggression in Gaza
Israel has perpetrated an unprecedented barbaric slaughter on defenseless civil Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel’s intent seems to have been not only the destruction of some locations in the Gaza Strip, but the annihilation of Gaza and the burial of its population under piles of rubbles and blood lakes.
The time chosen by Israel to launch its aggression mounts anxiety amongst Arabs.
Worldwide concerns about the deep financial crisis, the transitional period in the White House, and Hamas’s declaration of the end of its truce with Israel without any Palestinian or Arab support that may halt Israel’s hostile intentions, all trigger anxiety that Israel is preparing for the worst to terrorize the entire Arab region.
Israel launched its aggression on Saturday, Dec. 27, 2008 on three stages:
Stage One: Air bombardment as of Dec. 27, 2008 to Jan. 2, 2009.
Stage Two: Ground attack as of Jan. 3 to 10, 2009.
Stage Three: Starting on Jan. 10 with advance inside large cities, occupying more territories and setting a buffer zone along the borders of the Strip, which finally ended on Jan. 18.
Throughout the three stages, more than 1300 people have been killed and more than 5300 injured of which more than a half are women, children, and aged persons.
Blame the Victim, Not the Aggressor
US Foreign Minister, Condoleeza Rice accused Hamas for the violence. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon could only express “deep alarm,” and where was Barack Obama? An AP photo showed him on vacation “working out” at the Semper Fit Center at the Marine Corp Base Hawaii in Kailua, Hawaii on Saturday, and CBS News reported that he’s “closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza, but there is one president at a time,” according to Brooke Anderson, his chief national security spokesperson.
In a July 2008 interview, The New York Times asked Obama if Israel should negotiate with Hamas in Gaza. He replied that “I don’t think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens….I expect Israelis to do (all they can to stop them)….In terms of negotiating with Hamas, it is very hard to negotiate with a group that is not representative of a nation state, does not recognize your right to exist, (and) has consistently used terror as a weapon. Hamas is a terrorist organization….it’s hard for Israel to negotiate with a country like that.”
Hamas was democratically elected. It’s the legitimate Palestinian government. It’s falsely called a terrorist organization, and it has every right to resist an illegal occupation under international law. It observed a unilateral ceasefire for months and extended peace overtures numerous times in the past. Israel spurned them by dividing Gaza and the West Bank, co-opting Mamoud Abbas, inciting Fatah against Hamas, isolating Gaza, and pursuing a policy of aggression, killings, targeted assassinations, mass incarcerations, and torture with full support from Washington, the West, and (from his comments above) the incoming Obama administration.
The UN Refugee Works Relief Agency’s (UNWRA) operations head for Palestinian refugees, John Ging, expressed outraged on what’s happening. Earlier he said: Gazans got nothing from the months of ceasefire. There was no “restoration of a dignified existence. We had our supplies restricted (during the period) to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position” with very little food left until it ran out.
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) campaigns for Palestinian justice in areas of civil, human and political rights according to international law. Along with the Palestine Return Centre (PRC), the Palestinian Forum of Britain (PFB), the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), Stop the War, Friends of al Aqsa, the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), and Respect, Islamic Human Rights Commission it organized emergency protests opposite Israel’s London Embassy on December 28 and 29 to demand an end of the Gaza siege and ongoing aggression. The urgency was highlighted by saying: Israel’s Cynicism (Is) Supported by the West’s Complicity” as it called for public solidarity to end it.
For her part, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni ordered the Ministry to “take emergency measures (to) open an aggressive and diplomatic international public relations campaign,” according to Haaretz. In other words, Israel will spin its wanton aggression into justifiable self-defense and get dominant media help to sell it.
On December 27, The New York Times took the lead. It reported that “Israeli airstrikes hit Hamas security facilities in Gaza on Saturday in a crushing response to the group’s rocket fire….Israeli military officials (called the attack) an effort to force Hamas to end its rocket barrages into southern Israel. Thousands of Israelis hurried into bomb shelters amid the hail of rockets,” making it seem like Israel resembled London during the blitz when, in fact, Hamas attacks are mere pin pricks and only respond to first-strike Israeli attacks.
The Times and dominant media are silent on this. They continue spreading spurious lies about Hamas being “officially committed to Israel’s destruction, and when it won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 and then ‘forcibly’ took over Gaza in 2007, it said it would not recognize Israel, honor previous Palestinian Authority commitments to it, or end its violence against Israelis.”
All of the above is untrue. The Times continues to report falsely. Hamas wants peace, has repeatedly been conciliatory, and its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said earlier that armed struggle would end “if the Zionists ended (their) occupation of Palestinian territories and stopped killing Palestinian women, children and innocent civilians.”
Israel rejects all overtures. More recently, Hamas offered peace and Israeli recognition in return for a Palestinian state inside pre-1967 borders – its Occupied Territories that it’s entitled to under international law.
As early as 1988, the PLO under Yasser Arafat accepted a two-state solution with Palestinians willing to settle for only 22% of their pre-1948 homeland – a generous offer that, if accepted, would have had two sovereign states living peacefully alongside each other as neighbors.
Israel rejects this out of hand. It chooses dominance over peace, violence over reconciliation, and imperial conquest above the rule of law. It’s colonizing the West Bank, ethnically cleansing the population, and continues to terrorize Gaza. “The newspaper of record” is selective about “fit news to print,” so uncomfortable truths are suppressed. It reported that one Israeli was killed Saturday and another four wounded, one seriously, but didn’t explain that previous rocket attacks caused no deaths or injuries.
After many months of siege compounded by ongoing attacks, Gaza is gravely affected, but so is the West Bank. Under the Fatah government, no rockets are launched, yet Israel maintains a violent occupation, continues to seize Palestinian land, expand its illegal settlements, and lets its residents terrorize Palestinians with impunity, even in cases of wanton killings and destruction of property.
US administration supports Israeli aggression against Gaza
On 31 December, Associated Press reported that the UN Security Council had held an emergency meeting on an Arab request for a legally binding and enforceable UN resolution that would condemn Israel and seek to force the Zionist state to stop its military attacks on Gaza.
The draft resolution also called for the immediate protection of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the opening of border crossings for humanitarian aid.
But the draft, which was presented by Libya on behalf of the 22-member Arab League, was immediately rejected by the United States as “unbalanced”. Despite this US veto, Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN observer, told Associated Press that Arab nations would be working “day and night” to get the UN Security Council’s approval for a binding resolution in the announced terms.
As with the 2006 war in Lebanon, the government of President George W. Bush has strongly supported the Israeli attack on Gaza. White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe even called Hamas “nothing but thugs”. Moreover, the US administration has been working to block all diplomatic proposals for a cease-fire in order to give Israel the green light to increase its attacks on Gaza.
While Israeli fighters, warships and artillery continued to destroy civilian buildings, bridges and mosques, US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice did not hesitate to blame Hamas for the Israeli aggression and showed US backing for Israel’s rejection of cease-fire initiatives from the European Union and several Arab capitals.
Washington and Israel did not accept the victory of Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary election.
In June 2007, they promoted a coup d’état to bring down the national unity government that Fatah and Hamas had previously set up during their negotiations in Jeddah. The coup failed and from then on, the Bush administration backed the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, which has often prevented 1.5 million Palestinians from receiving food, fuel, medicines and so forth.
The goal of this blockade is to make life for the people of Gaza so intolerable that the Hamas administration will fall.
The United States is not only protecting Israel in the diplomatic front but it has also given Israel some weapons that have been used on the Palestinians, including the GBU-39 missile — a new bunker-buster weapon.
Israel received 1,000 missiles of this type in early December in addition to the 3 billion dollars a year in US military aid, including F-16 fighters and Apache helicopters and the fuel and spare parts needed to keep them in operation.
Israeli attacks have killed hundreds of Palestinians (scores of them children), while the US Administration continues to insist that Hamas is “responsible” for the fighting.
US President Barack Obama’s Senior Adviser, David Axelrod repeated the same lies as President George W. Bush: that Hamas had been the first to break the ceasefire agreement. Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi agreed. She issued a statement concerning the Israeli aggression on Gaza in which she wrote, “When Israel is attacked, the US must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally.”
On the night of November 4, the day of the US election, Israel fired missiles on Gaza. It then continued to bomb Gaza over the following six weeks killing dozens of Palestinians. “The escalation towards war could, and should, have been avoided. It was the State of Israel which broke the truce, in the tunnel raid … two months ago,” the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom wrote in a press release.
The army continued its calculated raids and killings. The truth is that the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is a crime against humanity for which not only the Israeli government but also the American one bears full responsibility.
In fact, for the US to support and be an accomplice in Israeli war crimes is serving a far more strategic purpose. What it is actually doing is setting up a “new order” in the Middle East which will ensure continued US domination in the region and control over its oil resources.
Israel is but a small partner in this bloody effort. The US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, threats against Iran and Syria and the Israeli war against Lebanon in 2006 are all part of this US application of the Israeli doctrine to dominate and divide the Arab and Muslim worlds.
In spite of all this military and diplomatic support, the officials of the US Administration fear a possible Israeli failure, similar to what happened in Lebanon in 2006 and have urged Israel to settle a timetable and exit strategy, foreign diplomats told the Los Angeles Times.
“US officials are concerned that the campaign could drag on without destroying Hamas, and might even bolster support for the militant group – just as the Israeli campaign in Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah. You are not hearing that same confidence you did in 2006 that the Israeli military can impose a new strategic reality,” said one Arab diplomat in Washington.
According to numerous observers, the war will weaken the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas and strengthen his Hamas rivals, even though Israel will continue its Gaza invasion.
The fighting has also ruined the already damaged reputation of the US-backed regimes of Egypt and Jordan, both of which have diplomatic relations with Israel and are regarded by the Arab people as corrupt and accomplices in the Israeli aggression. The stability of these regimes is seriously threatened.
Some observers believe that Israel wanted to create an international crisis at a time when Obama was on the verge of becoming the US President, in order to gauge the new Obama government’s sensibilities to the killing of Palestinians.
Israel wanted to determine Obama’s policies even before they are decided by his administration in order to make it complicit in its crimes against the Palestinians.
Obama’s submission to Israel has been put in doubt by the Israeli media. In March 2007 Obama told a small gathering of Democratic activists in Iowa: “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” The comment made headlines and earned him the outrage of pro-Israel groups.
As a candidate in the recent presidential election, Obama changed his tone and said that Israel had the “right” to full sovereignty over all of Al Quds (Jerusalem), a position that guarantees that there will not be a lasting peace in the region, as Arabs and Muslims will never renounce their legitimate rights to the city.
Obama’s right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, is a rabid Zionist who worked for the Israeli army during the 1991 [Persian] Gulf War.
Now, these measures were seen as a means to avoid criticism by the influential pro-Israeli lobby in Washington, which has deeply infiltrated both the US Republican and the Democratic parties.
Obama’s initial reaction to the Gaza massacre was “no comment”. This has led many people to start wondering if his self-declared principles of safety and dignity are also going to be applied to the Palestinian people.
There is no doubt that the United States will pay a high price for its support of Israel’s state terrorism.
Many protesters from all over the world are burning US flags and showing their complete rejection of US policies that promote Zionist terror.
Although US mainstream media, which are under Zionist or corporate control, continue to falsify the reality regarding the extent of Israeli aggression and occupation, the internet and satellite channels of the Muslim world are offering professional coverage of the developments in Palestine.
Washington’s continued support for Israeli crimes will lead any initiative aimed at recovering its destroyed credibility in the Muslim and Arab worlds to failure.
How the CIA created Taliban and Osama bin Laden
Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?
In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the “evil empire”, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The “evil empire” was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.
How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities — the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 — bin Laden the “freedom fighter” is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a “terrorist mastermind” and an “evil-doer”.
Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt — and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.
The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
Mujaheddeen
In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a crackdown against the party by that country’s repressive government.
The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also supported strengthening Afghanistan’s relationship with the Soviet Union.
Such policies enraged the wealthy semi-feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government’s progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.
Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government’s radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan mujahedeen, as the “contra” force was known.
Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan’s leader, thousands of Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government’s fall. This only galvanised the disparate fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a “national liberation” struggle in the eyes of many Afghans.
The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the mujahedeen captured the capital, Kabul, in 1992.
Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujahedeen factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.
Washington’s policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread religious fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski’s grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul-Haq’s own ambitions to dominate the region. US-run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the “Islamic revolution” that toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran in 1979).
Washington’s favoured mujahedeen faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West’s distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury “freedom fighter”. Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
After the mujahedeen took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar’s forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that city — killing at least 2000 civilians — until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.
Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the mujahedeen from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world’s single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.
In 1995, the former director of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the flow of drugs: “Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets… There was a fall out in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.”
Made in the USA
According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA Chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).
John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujahidin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American “black Muslims” were taught “sabotage skills”.
The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained “bin Laden’s operatives” in 1989.
These “operatives” were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar’s forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army’s elite Green Berets.
The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called “Operation Cyclone”.
In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujahedeen factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services — MAK).
MAK was a front for Pakistan’s CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.
Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.
The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA’s approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was “partly culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.
Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan mercenaries who joined the mujahidin.
The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country’s pro-US royal family.
Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia’s minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam’s holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world’s largest private construction company.
Osama bin Laden’s father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill-gotten business empire.
(Bin Laden junior’s oft-quoted personal fortune of US$200-300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today’s value of the bin Laden family net worth — estimated to be US$5 billion — by the number of bin Laden senior’s sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)
Osama’s military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.
Milt Bearden, the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, “Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did … [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It’s an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did.”
In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built “training camps”, some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.
These camps, now dubbed “terrorist universities” by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.
Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujahedeen told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, “The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism — car bombing and so on — so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns … Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.”
Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden’s organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company — albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with “legitimate” business operations.
Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.
Bin Laden only became a “terrorist” in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.
When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden’s anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes — such as Egypt — in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.
He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf States. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.
After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services — and thousands of his mercenaries — to the Taliban, which took power that September.
Today, bin Laden’s private army of non-Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.
Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.
In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the mujahedeen, as saying he would make “the same call again”, even knowing what bin Laden would become.
“It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.”
Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation.
Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of “counter-terrorism operations”.
Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their “work”. He was in charge of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan mujahedeen for the US National Security Council.
The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: “What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Conclusion
A moment’s thought would show that any invasion that replaced the Taliban with a western puppet in Kabul would merely restore the Taliban as champions of Afghan sovereignty. The Americans sponsored them to be just such a puppet in the 1980s, funding some 60,000 foreign mercenaries to join them against the Russians. Intervention reaps what it sows.
Americans don’t want to acknowledge their mistakes but this is realty that [currently] Americans have made Taliban look like illegitimate child. It was the Pakistani ISI with the blessing of CIA, who brainwashed Taliban when they were small kids living in the Tents in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, next to Afghanistan. They taught them to hate Russians. They taught them to fight, and they didn’t teach them anything else. Then they were just children growing up in Pakistan. And they are the ones who made them very religious and they are the ones who made them terrorists. They are the ones to teach them kill people and they did not teach them anything else.
Now America is savagely killing her own made Taliban without any mercy as they are non living things. These killings comprised of Taliban and a large number of Pakistani and Afghani civilians.
America has spread the circle of its drone attacks to Pakistan Administered Tribal Areas in the doubt of Taliban hideouts. Resulting a heavy loss of civilian lives consisting of innocent women and children while no or few Taliban causalities. The remaining members of these ill-fated families bearing fire of revenge in their hearts became suicide bombers. These suicide bobbers commonly known as terrorists, attack Pakistani forces and civilians causing heavy loss of life and property. Pakistan is paying an unbearable price for killing her own people (American made Taliban) in the so called War against Terror. America has injected terrorism in the form of Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan in an effort to defeat Russia. Now this jinni of Aladdin (Taliban) is out of the lamp while American and Pakistani forces are not capable enough to put this jinni back into the lamp. If military operations against Taliban succeeded in restoring law and order in the region it would not be durable. Dialogue and a policy of tolerance is the only way to win the hearts of these Pukhtoons, otherwise the history showed us that they are born fighters and no military might is capable to subdue them. In the light of all historical facts I come to this conclusion that Israel, Russia and America are equally responsible of recent wave of terrorism which has engulfed the major portion of Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. If American policy makers don’t react on time then these acts of terrorism can happen any where around the globe!!
Notes
^ Death Tolls for the Major Wars … Kaplan, Soldiers of God (2001) (p.11) Hilali, A. (2005). US-Pakistan relationship: Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co. (p.198) Kaplan, Soldiers of God (2001) p.188 ”MINES PUT AFGHANS IN PERIL ON RETURN,” By ROBERT PEAR, New York Times, Aug 14, 1988. p. 9 (1 page) Zulfiqar Ahmed Bhutta, H. (2002). Children of War: The Real Causalities of Afghan conflict. Ferozesons, Lahore, December 11, 2007,(p.89) Hauner, M. (1989). Afghanistan and the Soviet Union: Collision and transformation. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. (p.40) Barakat, S. (2004). Reconstructing war-torn societies: Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (p.5) Barakat, S. (2004). Reconstructing war-torn societies: Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (p.7)
10. Panetta L. (2002) Collateral Damage and the uncertainty of Afghanistan. Daily Dawn Karachi August 17, 2002.
11. Kirby, A. (2003). War ‘has ruined Afghan environment.’ National Journal of Environment, Fall 2007edition,(p.75)
12. Hauner, M. (1989). Afghanistan and the Soviet Union: Collision and transformation. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. (p.51)