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October
12, 2001
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombing
the Taliban
October
11, 2001
David
Vest
Bob
Dylan and 9/11
Amb.
Edward Peck
Bush
War Plan "Dumb"
Hani
Shukrallah
West
Is As West Does
Patrick
Cockburn
Looming
Humanitarian Crisis
October
10, 2001
Tom
Turnipseed
Earth
is Our "Homeland"
Steve
Perry
What
Is To Be Done?
Simon
Jenkins
The
Dumbest Weapon
Tariq
Ali
The
Pakistan Maelstrom
Cockburn/St.
Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
October
9, 2001
David
Vest
The
Rout That Wasn't
Michael
Mandel
This
War Is Illegal
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombs
Weaken Taliban
Lenni
Brenner
Powell
the Owl
Zha
Marginalization
and Terror
Steve
Perry
It
Begins
October
8, 2001
Zbigniew
Brzezinski
How
Jimmy Carter and
I Started the Muj
Philip Agee
The
USA and Terrorism
Mahajan
and Jensen
A
War of Lies
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance
Builds an Airport
October
7, 2001
John Pilger
Hitchens'
Slurs
Tariq
Ali
Who
Said History
Stopped Being Ironical?
October
6, 2001
Vijay
Prashad
US
War Aims
Kevin
Gray
The
Trap:
Blacks and 9/11
October
5, 2001
Ronnie
Gilbert
Déjà
Vu: The FBI's War
on Civil Liberties
Patrick
Cockburn
Taliban
Cluster Bombs
Dave
Marsh
John
Brown, Woody Guthrie
and the Secret Music of 9/11
Babak
Nahid
A
Suspect's Perspective
October
4, 2001
David
Vest
Send
in the Cons
Robin
Blackburn
Road
to Armageddon
Noam
Chomsky
Chatting
with Chomsky
Tony
Blair
The
Dossier on bin Laden
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October 12,
2001
The Continent of
Sleaze
War In Passive Voice
By Vijay Prashad
The bombing has begun. Kabul is being
bombed. So say the television anchors and the newspapers - all
in passive voice, all with an air of inevitability.
I can hear whispers from my
neighbors: finally, it is here, and I hope it goes away soon.
We don't want to be burdened by it, for it may force us to make
moral choices that are far too uncomfortable. Better to pretend
that it is has not happened, or else that its inevitability makes
it inconsequential.
There is more activity when
a storm is on the horizon, when most folk rush to the supermarket
to buy provisions and to fill their cars with gas.
Tons of firepower drop from
Herat to Jalalabad - cars line up from Kabul to Peshawar through
the Khyber Pass, like a row of fireflies, unsure if the border
will be open or closed. During the entire Eighteenth Century,
one and a half million people crossed the ocean from England
to the Americas. In three weeks, about this number of Afghans
have made their way to a neighboring country, eager to get out
before the bombardment inevitably begins. That they are in cars
tells us something about their class position. Middle class and
elite Afghans left the country in waves, first the late 1970s
to escape the radical egalitarianism of the Communist regime,
then in the 1980s to escape the ravages of the mujahidin assault
on the cities, again in the 1990s to escape the radical Islamism
of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, and now to escape the
rowdy guns of the US-UK armies.
Good people in cities across
the country have walked out of classes, gathered in small groups
beside religious buildings, and then, in the early evening, amassed
for small, but respectable vigils and rallies against the war.
The media tends to ignore these events, or else to ridicule our
sentiments as idealistic or as a throwback to the '60s.
Meanwhile the powers that be
will pretend that this war is about 9/11 and try to shut down
debate, on the bodies of the dead, and prevent any discussion
of other war aims, of the continent of sleaze. There will be
no mention of a Berlin, Germany Track 2 diplomatic meeting in
July 2001 at which the US State Department's people revealed
to their allies and others the war plans in case the US was to
go after the Taliban (The Guardian, 22 September 2001). That
same playbook is now operational as bombardments are followed
by rations, as the aerial campaign moves from jets to helicopters,
and then finally to flexible ground operations. That the US trained
Uzbek fighters in the mid-west months ago is buried in the back
pages of the European press. On 13 December 1995, the US and
Uzbekistan signed an agreement for the US to train Uzbek troops
and to allow the US access to Central Asian terrain for trainings.
In 1996, the US-Uzbek forces conducted the Balance-Ultra96 training
in the Ferganskya Valley, a perfect place to train for Afghan
warfare. This was followed by other Balance-Ultra trainings,
to allow US troops to be prepared for the terrain and to create
close ties with the Uzbek army.
Meanwhile ground troops are
in Pakistan, and all things look bleak, except on the continent
of sleaze.
On the continent of sleaze,
all buildings have revolving doors. Diplomats, gunrunners, intelligence
chiefs and others sup at the state's table and then, as if by
their pure merits, they join the high table with corporate chieftains,
currency shifters, assorted brigands and others. On the continent
of sleaze the pipelines to the Taliban pretend to be distinguished
professors and royal dignitaries.
Robert Oakley began his State
Department career in 1957 at the United Nations, and ends it
at the National Defense University and at Unocal.
Prince Turki al-Faysal Saud
didn't have to use the entrance because he was always in the
big house. Destined by his birth into the British-installed Saud
dynasty in Arabia, Prince Turki, like Prince Sultan, drew deep
into his various talents to emerge as head of intelligence for
the kingdom, and, on the side, agent for various transnational
enterprises, such as the Argentinean firm Bridas.
Two men of esteem, in the bogs
on the continent of sleaze.
Oakley's real glory begins
when the Reagan administration raised him to the post of Director
of the State Department Office of Combating Terrorism in September
1984. Details of Oakley's work there are not altogether clear,
but cables released through the Freedom of Information Act show
us that he was involved in trying to paint Libya in as bad a
light as possible regardless of the evidence, and, importantly,
he was a point-man in the Iran-Contra scandal. Chapter 18 in
Volume 1 of the Lawrence Walsh authored Report of the Independent
Counsel for Iran Contra Matters (released on 4 August 1993) notes
one incident of Oakley's involvement: In November 1985, Oliver
North had a hard time with clearances for the Israeli effort
to ship US-made HAWK missiles to Iran. Retired Air Force Major
General Richard Secord was unable to get North the clearances
to act, so North went to Oakley, then director of counter-terrorism.
North said that he was "completely up front" with Oakley
that the cargo for the plane was weapons and the transit was
according to the October 1984 Boland Amendment passed by Congress
(to cut off aid to the Contras of Nicaragua). According to Oakley's
testimony to the FBI (302, 11/14/91) "North said he needed
to get a plane into the first European country in order to ship
arms to Iran." Oakley agreed with North and contacted CIA
European chief Duane "Dewey" Clarridge. Clarridge was
informed that the State Department was "aware of the operation
and that Clarridge should contact the foreign minister of the
first European country for assistance."
In 1987 Clarridge was formally
reprimanded for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, and he was
forced out of the CIA. North who was convicted in 1989, but then
pardoned due to his immunity at the hearings, went on for a quixotic
run to become the Senator from Virginia in 1994. He is now another
madcap right-wing talk show host.
Robert Oakley, currently Distinguished
Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National
Defense University, went from strength to strength. He was named
as Ambassador to Pakistan in August 1988 and served as a point
man in the mujahidin jihad against the People's Democratic Republic
of Afghanistan and the Soviet army therein. In fact in the lead-up
to a brutal two month long battle in November 1988 (in which
five thousand died), Oakley sat with senior Pakistani military
officials to plan the battle, as reported by the New York Times,
"Pakistanis Report Ordering Attacks by Afghan Rebels,"
23 April 1989). This was an education in the front-lines: from
illegal gun running to Iran, he moved to the promotion of jihad
in Pakistan, where, according to Kurt Kohbeck's Holy War, Unholy
Victory: Eyewitness to the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan (1993),
Oakley aided the hard line Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and, in addition,
cultivated links with those who would become the Taliban.
Perhaps most crucially, the
Pakistani post allowed Oakley to work with Prince Turki al-Faysal
Saud, head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence from 1977 to 1 September
2001 and point man for his government in the mujahidin jihad
(indeed he knew Osama bin Laden then, since both these men of
the Saudi elite had come to Afghanistan for what they considered
to be a holy war). Prince Turki Faysal, son of the late monarch,
is a very influential player in the Saudi ruling elite and a
major shaper of policy. Like Oakley, Turki Faysal's major links
appeared to have been with the more hard-core jihadis, people
such as the Taliban and the Hikmaytar crew. But, after the war,
in their new line of work, Oakley and Turki Faysal sit on different
sides of the corporate table.
With the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the vast oil and natural gas treasures of Central Asia
came back into the focus of the vast transnational energy monopolies.
The Gulf War of 1991 was about the problem of oil consumption
by the US population (Energy Secretary James Watkins' February
1991 letter made this plain: "as events in the Persian Gulf
have demonstrated so aptly, we must reduce our dependence on
imported oil from unstable regions. This will require both reducing
our overall dependence on oil, particularly in the transportation
sector, and increasing domestic production in an environmentally
sound manner." The game for the 1.5 million acres of the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was already on by then). But
the Afghan War of 2001 is about something else; indeed it is
not about US domestic consumption. It appears that the Afghan
War is about the ability of US-based transnational corporate
power, about its ability to leverage access to deals (here with
the Afghans) to penetrate markets (the natural gas and oil crisis
of South Asia). The Central Asian oil and natural gas fields
are vast (with Kazakhstan now being the fifth largest oil reserve
in the world).
Two weeks after 9/11, Chevron's
subsidiary Tengizchevroil finished an oil pipeline from Tengiz
oil field in western Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossiysk
on the Black Sea. This pipeline will feed western Europe with
oil from what might end up as the fifth largest oil state in
the world (and, crucially, outside OPEC's ambit). The Tengiz
pipeline is only one of many that sully the geopolitics of the
region. Another one, pressing for the Afghan problem, is the
890-mile pipeline from Dauletabad gas fields in eastern Turkmenistan
through Afghanistan into Pakistan. This multi-billion dollar
project has two multinationals on the warpath, Unocal from the
US, and Bridas from Argentina. Both hired Saudis and Americans
to negotiate with the Taliban, who have continuously played one
off against the other to increase their own percentage of the
margins. Unocal, recently denied Myanmar's oil market, is eager
for the project and a US-friendly regime in Afghanistan may help
it clinch the deal. Zahir Shah, former King of Afghanistan, has
lived in Rome since 1973 as a pensioner of a gulf state whose
name he will not reveal; perhaps the investment made in him by
the unnamed state will eventually come to fruition if he comes
to power alongside the notorious Northern Alliance (whose terror
in Kabul in the mid-1990s and assassination of Najibulla offer
a harbinger of what is to come).
Just as no-one is interested
in the Uzbek army regulars who trained in the mid-west, no-one
seems to care about Unocal's project to train Afghan workers
and teachers at the University of Nebraska (in November 1997,
Unocal paid close to a million dollars for the Afghan Studies
Center at the University to train over four hundred Afghans in
various pipeline construction skills). Or, finally, no one seems
interested in the US tours organized by Unocal for the Taliban
(and facilitated by Pakistan's ISI who held up the visas of the
Taliban tour which was to have gone, courtesy of Bridas, to Argentina).
And few of us care that distinguished
professors like Oakley joined with the notorious Henry Kissinger,
and the Saudi Delta Oil Company (whose boss, Badr al Aiban, has
the ear of King Faud) to lobby the Taliban on behalf of Unocal,
just as Prince Turki Faysal was Bridas' point man with the Taliban.
When the Taliban took power in 1996, the head of Unocal was overjoyed,
and he speculated that a stable central government may reduce
the cost of the pipeline by half; indeed, Marty Miller of Unocal
tried to convince the factions that pipeline was a conflict resolution
process. When this did not work, some speculated that Unocal
gave covert support to the Taliban to push what is today the
Northern Alliance away from the area where the pipeline is projected
to run (Ahmed Rashid, "Pipe Dreams," The Herald, Pakistan,
October 1997, p. 50).
We're so sure that Al-Queda's
people killed the Northern Alliance's Ahmed Shah Masood, but
consider that with the pipeline on the horizon, Masood had no
love for Unocal. In 1997, Masood hoped that "the US would
not be duped by Pakistan and that US plans to build a pipeline
with Unocal were unhelpful." With that kind of attitude,
who knows who killed Masood?
When Clinton bombed Afghanistan
on 20 August 1998, the Unocal deal ended. But hope emerged on
29 April 1999 when the energy ministers from Afghanistan, Pakistan
and Turkmenistan met to pledge their commitment to the tripartite
gas pipeline project. It is around this time that King Zahir
Shah comes under pressure to meet with the Northern Alliance
and start talking about a Loya Jigra, an elder's council. The
unnamed Gulf state that pensioned the poor old man for these
three decades perhaps called in its debt. He was put on a fuel's
errand.
Hastily, after 9/11, Unocal
put the following note on their website: "Unocal has received
inquires about a previously proposed pipeline that, if built,
would have crossed a part of Afghanistan. We withdrew from that
project in 1998, and do not have, nor plan to have, any projects
in that country. We do not support the Taliban in any way whatsoever."
Under pressure from 9/11, this
has to be the official position. But we should not forget the
testimony of John Maresca, International head of Unocal, on 12
February 1998. Certainly this is before the US bombed Afghanistan
in August, but it allows us access to the way Unocal has framed
the importance of Afghanistan. Here is Maresca:
"The Caspian region contains
tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves, much of them located
in the Caspian Sea basin itself. Proven natural gas reserves
within Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan equal
more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region's total oil reserves
may reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil -- enough to service
Europe's oil needs for 11 years. Some estimates are as high as
200 billion barrels. In 1995, the region was producing only 870,000
barrels per day (44 million tons per year [Mt/y]). By 2010, Western
companies could increase production to about 4.5 million barrels
a day (Mb/d) -- an increase of more than 500 percent in only
15 years. If this occurs, the region would represent about five
percent of the world's total oil production, and almost 20 percent
of oil produced among non-OPEC countries. One major problem has
yet to be resolved: how to get the region's vast energy resources
to the markets where they are needed. There are few, if any,
other areas of the world where there can be such a dramatic increase
in the supply of oil and gas to the world market. The solution
seems simple: build a "new" Silk Road. Implementing
this solution, however, is far from simple. The risks are high,
but so are the rewards."
Maresca rejects Iran as the
transit terrain for the pipeline and settles on Afghanistan:
"The only other possible
route option is across Afghanistan, which has its own unique
challenges. The country has been involved in bitter warfare for
almost two decades. The territory across which the pipeline would
extend is controlled by the Taliban, an Islamic movement that
is not recognized as a government by most other nations. From
the outset, we have made it clear that construction of our proposed
pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place
that has the confidence of governments, lenders and our company.
In spite of this, a route through Afghanistan appears to be the
best option with the fewest technical obstacles. It is the shortest
route to the sea and has relatively favorable terrain for a pipeline.
The route through Afghanistan is the one that would bring Central
Asian oil closest to Asian markets and thus would be the cheapest
in terms of transporting the oil."
On the continent of sleaze,
the military men and the corporate men spill blood to put a "recognized
government in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders
and our company." Democracy is irrelevant. Distinguished
professors and intelligence heads gather to help feed our addiction
to oil. As the bombs fall in passive voice, the active voices
of corporate greed and military macho have begun to ring in my
ears. The bombs are not retaliation for 9/11; they are a 911
for the continuation of capitalist imperialism against the active
will of most of us on the planet. CP
Vijay Prashad is and Associate Professor and Director
of the International Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford,
CT.
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