Scahill Understands the Reality

There isn't really much of serious value in this video clip, and there are a couple of things that are variably wrong in what Jeremy Scahill says. One thing that's wrong is that he refers to the three main fighting, variably resisting Afghan groups as all Taliban and they apparently are not. The other thing that's wrong, but while that's not due to Jeremy Scahill, is the part about US special forces wanting to get out of Afghanistan to, instead, go operate in Somalia and/or Yemen. Jeremy Scahill surely did not make up that view US "special" ops forces in Afghanistan, but they are definitely wrong and they definitely must not be sent anywhere except back to the US, and that should happen immediately. I'll say a little more on both of those topics, below; or, might make a separate post about this bs view US special forces have.

Regarding three main Afghan resistance groups, I wonder if Jeremy Scahill really means to use the word "Taliban", or if he means mujahideen, Afghan resistance fighters. If he really means "Taliban", then, and based on what I've gathered from articles by a few or several different people who know a lot about the real Taliban, there is only one real Afghan resistance group called Taliban in Afghanistan and their leader is Mullah Mohammed Omar. The other two Afghan resistance groups are not called "Taliban", except by some western media people and their readers who haven't read from, either, more authoritatively knowledgeable people or sources, or certainly people who know how to be precise.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar leads the "Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin" and Jalaluddin Haqqani leads the "Haqqani Network". Neither lead the "Taliban". And the Afghan resistance group really called "the Taliban" uses the title of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Below are some articles that provide information about these three Afghan resistance groups, but evidently little about "the Taliban", i.e., the IEoA.

"Afghanistan: Charlie Wilson And America's 30-Year War"
by Rick Rozoff, Stop NATO, Feb. 16th, 2010

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17653

(snip)

There is no war without an adversary, and McChrystal identified the targets of the campaign that over 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops will soon be waging: "The major insurgent groups in order of their threat to the mission are: the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network (HQN), and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG)." [4]

The last two groups are named after their founders and leaders, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, respectively.

Haqqani and Hekmatyar lost an old friend and colleague on February 10, former 12-term U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson. The hero of one of the most successful American films of 2007-2008, Charlie Wilson's War, he has been eulogized in the press and by his former partner in arming and training the likes of Haqqani and Hekmatyar - and Osama bin Laden - current U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who was Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from 1986 to 1989 and who said in a 1999 speech, "CIA had important successes in covert action. Perhaps the most consequential of all was Afghanistan where CIA, with its management, funnelled billions of dollars in supplies and weapons to the mujahideen...." [5]

Gates was referring to Operation Cyclone, the largest covert operation conducted by the CIA and indeed by any agency or nation. The full title of the book by George Crile the movie Charlie Wilson's War is based on is Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History.

The bulk of the billions of dollars Gates boasted of supplying to arm the Pakistan-based Mujahideen was directed to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Those two are now identified by the same Pentagon that Gates heads up as two of the three targets of the world's largest and longest war.

(snip)

During the first Afghan war of 1979-1992 Wilson was a guest of Jalaluddin Haqqani in eastern Afghanistan in 1987 and referred to his host as "goodness personified." When after September 11, 2001 Haqqani was named number three on the U.S. most-wanted list after Osama bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar, Wilson said: "That did give me pause for thought. But Haqqani took care of me, and I’ll never forget that. I’d love to see him again. I would try to persuade him that the Taleban was a force for destruction – which he definitely wasn’t.” [7]

(snip)

Osama bin Ladin was on the top most-wanted list, but not for 9/11. People can simply check the FBI's Web site, the top most wanted criminals page and they'll find that OBL has not been charged for 9/11. An FBI official was questioned about this "lacune" by a journalist and the official said that it's not the FBI that makes these decisions, that it's the DoJ that does, and that the DoJ had ruled that there was not sufficient evidence for charging OBL for 9/11.

And I doubt that Haqqani is on the most-wanted list for 9/11. OBL certainly isn't. He's on the list only for the attacks on two US embassies in Africa during the Clinton administration, and possibly for other acts, but all prior to 9/11.

I'll excerpt a little more from Rick Rozoff's article.

(snip)

An Indian news agency wrote at the beginning of the year that "It has now been shockingly admitted that the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees in eastern Afghanistan this week was masterminded by warlord and one-time key CIA ally Jalaluddin Haqqani."

"During the 1980s, Mr Haqqani was a respected commander battling, with Western support, against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After they withdrew, he became a member of the US-approved coalition that formed the post-occupation government." [12]

While the two other groups are allied with the Taliban, according to the Wikipedia page for "Taliban", the Taliban fought to take over and took over the government in 1996. And while they're allies, they're not always allies. The Wikipedia page for "Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin" refers to and provides a link to an article about fighting between this group and the Taliban last March, f.e.

"Hizb-e-Islami militants fight Taliban, defect to Afghan govt"

by AFP, March 8th, 2010

www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\03\08\story_8-3-2010_pg1_3

Excerpting more from Rick Rozoff's article:

(snip)

Even though George Crile's book documents that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani were the main recipients of U.S. military aid secured by Wilson and his counterparts in the CIA - including Robert Gates - neither is mentioned in the film version.

(snip)

An edition of U.S. News & World Report from 2008 provided details on Wilson's relations with both Hekmatyar and Haqqani and the current activities of the last two.

"In recent weeks, Hekmatyar has called upon Pakistani militants to attack U.S. targets, while the Haqqani network is blamed for three large vehicle bombings, along with the attempted assassination of [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai in April....[T]hese two warlords - currently at the top of America's list of most wanted men in Afghanistan - were once among America's most valued allies."

(snip)

As seen above, Wilson, the "extraordinary patriot," adored Jalaluddin Haqqani to his dying day. As The Time's obituary of the former cited above stated, "[I]t is just possible that some of Wilson’s friends might soon be friends of America again." [17]

Wilson's other partner, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, "was...a renowned opium smuggler and warlord, and was alleged to have sprayed acid in the faces of women who did not wear the veil. One of [Hekmatyar's] colleagues referred to him as 'a true monster,' though he allegedly impressed the CIA (revealing something of its character) by wanting to take the war against the Soviets to Central Asia and roll back communism in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

"One CIA officer said, 'We wanted to kill as many Russians as we could, and Hikmatyar seemed like the guy to do it.'" [18]

(snip)

The Taliban were accused of spraying acid into the faces of women, which is something I doubt that the group actually called the Taliban, which refers to itself or to themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, would do. They're strict with religious law, but I doubt that they'd commit such acts of brutality against women for any reason. They might possibly decapitate or kill by other means, any Afghan woman acting with foreign enemy forces, but would have no cause to commit physical violence against other Afghan women. One Afghan woman provided I believe an interview to John Pilger and she referred to the war and drug lords, as well as the Taliban, saying both were definitely bad for Afghan women, but while she described extremely brutal, criminal acts against women by the war and drug lords, she said that women could safely walk outdoors and would be safe in their homes during the Taliban regime.

That article is of the month of January, possibly January 9th, 2008. I just searched for the article at his Web site and it's no longer there, but the following is a Jan. 10th copy.

"The 'Good War' Is a Bad War"
by John Pilger, Jan. 10th, 2008

www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=12182

"To me, I confess, [countries] are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world."
Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, speaking about Afghanistan, 1898

I had suggested to Marina that we meet in the safety of the Intercontinental Hotel, where foreigners stay in Kabul, but she said no. She had been there once and government agents, suspecting she was Rawa, had arrested her. We met instead at a safe house, reached through contours of bombed rubble that was once streets, where people live like earthquake victims awaiting rescue.

Rawa is the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which since 1977 has alerted the world to the suffering of women and girls in that country. There is no organization on earth like it. It is the high bar of feminism, home of the bravest of the brave. Year after year, Rawa agents have traveled secretly through Afghanistan, teaching at clandestine girls' schools, ministering to isolated and brutalized women, recording outrages on cameras concealed beneath their burqas. They were the Taliban regime's implacable foes when the word Taliban was barely heard in the west: when the Clinton administration was secretly courting the mullahs so that the oil company UNOCAL could build a pipeline across Afghanistan from the Caspian.

Indeed, Rawa's understanding of the designs and hypocrisy of western governments informs a truth about Afghanistan excluded from news, now reduced to a drama of British squaddies besieged by a demonic enemy in a "good war." When we met, Marina was veiled to conceal her identity. Marina is her nom de guerre. She said: "We, the women of Afghanistan, only became a cause in the west following 11 September 2001, when the Taliban suddenly became the official enemy of America. Yes, they persecuted women, but they were not unique, and we have resented the silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed warlords, who are no different. They rape and kidnap and terrorize, yet they hold seats in [Hamid] Karzai's government. In some ways, we were more secure under the Taliban. You could cross Afghanistan by road and feel secure. Now, you take your life into your hands." (my emphasis added)

The reason the United States gave for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 was "to destroy the infrastructure of al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11." The women of Rawa say this is false. ...

The truth about the "good war" is to be found in compelling evidence that the 2001 invasion, widely supported in the west as a justifiable response to the 11 September attacks, was actually planned two months prior to 9/11 and that the most pressing problem for Washington was not the Taliban's links with Osama Bin Laden, but the prospect of the Taliban mullahs losing control of Afghanistan to less reliable mujahedin factions, led by warlords who had been funded and armed by the CIA to fight America's proxy war against the Soviet occupiers in the 1980s. Known as the Northern Alliance, these mujahedin had been largely a creation of Washington, which believed the "jihadi card" could be used to bring down the Soviet Union. The Taliban were a product of this and, during the Clinton years, they were admired for their "discipline." Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history."

The "moment in history" was a secret memorandum of understanding the mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal. ...

However, by the late 1990s, the Northern Alliance had encroached further and further on territory controlled by the Taliban, whom, as a result, were deemed in Washington to lack the "stability" required of such an important client. ...

By early 2001, convinced it was the presence of Osama Bin Laden that was souring their relationship with Washington, the Taliban tried to get rid of him. Under a deal negotiated by the leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties, Bin Laden was to be held under house arrest in Peshawar. A tribunal of clerics would then hear evidence against him and decide whether to try him or hand him over to the Americans. Whether or not this would have happened, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf vetoed the plan. According to the then Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik, a senior US diplomat told him on 21 July 2001 that it had been decided to dispense with the Taliban "under a carpet of bombs."

(snip)

Some people have reported that the US told the Taliban that they had better accept the pipeline deal and thereby receive "carpets of gold", or they'd be carpet-bombed, if they refused the "deal". I didn't initially plan to excerpt more than the first part of the article, up to and including where Marina is quoted saying that the Taliban made society safe for Afghan women, just that the Taliban were too religiously strict about wearing the burqa and schooling not being permissible for Afghan women. But the rest of what the article says is definitely not going to become outdated; it's definitely going to remain ongoingly relevant in a very important way. However, I won't quote the whole article and will just recommend reading it in full.

"America's Search for the "Good Taliban""

by Tom Burghardt, AntiFascist-Calling.blogspot.com, March 15th, 2009

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12716

Reminiscent of a casting call for "America's Next Top Model," the Obama administration has embarked on a search for the ever-elusive "good Taliban" with whom it can negotiate a partial military climb-down.

(snip)

After seven years of occupation and the slow bleed-out of a protracted war, the Pashtun populated southern Afghan provinces and Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are effectively controlled by a melange of far-right Islamist Talibs and drug-linked militias loyal to the Hezb-i-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

(snip)

America's Search for the "Good Taliban"

Speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden claimed that "at least 70%" of Islamist Taliban guerrilla fighters were "mercenaries" who could be persuaded -- with what else -- cold, hard cash, to lay down their arms and join the "peace process."

According to Biden, "Five percent of the Taliban is incorrigible, not susceptible to anything other than being defeated. Another 25% or so are not quite sure, in my view, of the intensity of their commitment to the insurgency. Roughly 70% are involved because of the money."

Memo to the Vice President: that "incorrigible" five percent comprise the top leadership of the far-right Islamist movement, including al-Qaeda-linked commanders such as "Mullah Bradar, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Anwarul Haq Mujahid. These three have pledged their allegiance to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who has transformed the Taliban into an ultra-conservative force compared to a few years ago when the Taliban were a Pashtun tribal movement," Asia Times reports.

That Asia Times article, which is not linked in the above article, is the following one.

"Pakistan adds to US's Afghan woes"
by Syed Saleem Shahzad, March 13th, 2009

www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KC13Df02.html

Continuing with Tom Burghardt's article:

In other words, nothing short of a complete U.S./NATO withdrawal from the Central Asian "battlespace" will satisfy Mullah Omar and his minions. And what of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, suddenly everyone's newest "best friend forever"?

Dubbed the "Michael Corleone of jihad" by Asia Times, the sociopathic former Afghan Prime Minister who pulverized Kabul during the post-Soviet fall-out amongst mujahedin thieves in the early 1990s, is positioning himself for whatever he can grab.

(snip)

Tom Burghardt follows the above paragraph with an excerpt of two paragraphs from the following Asia Times article, which is linked in the one by Tom Burghardt.

"Taliban set to burn the Reichstag?"
by Pepe Escobar, March 13th, 2009

www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KC13Df01.html

Tom Burghardt then continued:

Lest we forget, this former darling of the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) during the anti-Soviet jihad received the bulk of CIA-Saudi largesse as America's plan to hand the Soviet Union "its own Vietnam" worked splendidly -- for the international narcotics trade and American-linked terrorist jackals.

As Alfred W. McCoy pointed out, it was none other than Hekmatyar, with Hezb-i-Islami as the "beard" for rather profitable operations on both sides of the "Afpak" border, who pioneered refining heroin inside Afghanistan.

(snip)

And as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime revealed in their 2008 World Drug Report, with Afghanistan currently producing 92% of the world's supply of illicit opium, that would give Hekmatyar literally billions of reasons to "get back into the game" as they say.

(snip)

Excerpt from Pepe Escobar's article:

(snip)

The hunt for the 'good' Taliban

(snip)

"Taliban" of course is a supremely elastic denomination. The motley crew on the prowl for "good" Taliban should at least know who they are looking for.

Number one is the historic Taliban led by Mullah Omar, last seen escaping from American bombs and into legend in Kandahar province in the autumn of 2001 on the back of a 50cc Honda. US counter-intelligence aces know he is now based in Quetta, in Balochistan - Pakistan territory, with access to e-mail. But they haven't even been able to send him an SMS.

Number two is the Hizb-i-Islami (Islamic Party) of former Afghan prime minister and uber-warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; strictly speaking they are not Taliban.

Number three is the group of famous jihad commander Jalaluddin Haqqani - based in the Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan.

Then there are at least three Pakistani Taliban groups - Mehsud, Gul Bahadur and the TNSM.

And finally any group of Pashtun peasants who hate foreign occupation (that's about everybody); had family killed by the Americans, NATO or the Pakistani army (a lot of people); or lost their opium poppy crops, which means their livelihood (many more are candidates for this as soon as Obama's surge troops hit Helmand province).

All these, on the Afghan side, account for no more than 15,000 people, according to the Afghan Ministry of Interior; but they happen to be very active, and reachable, in no less than 17 Afghan provinces. Certainly the more than 60,000 US and NATO troops, not to mention the 17,000 in Obama's surge, could engage them in a little more conversation.

The mullah is not in the coola

A case of Chateau Margaux 1982 can be bet on the fact that no one at NATO's round table knows how to deal with Hekmatyar - the man who chose to destroy Kabul in the civil war in the mid 1990s before the Taliban took power in 1996 (in fact he managed to kill more Afghans than Soviets).

Hekmatyar is the Michael Corleone of jihad. ... He wants a piece of the action in Kabul - preferably the meatiest part.

(snip)

This means that the hunt for the good Taliban will have to be focused on first finding out, and then talking to, the Shadow himself - Mullah Omar.

And what would Mullah Omar tell all these suddenly talkative Westerners? He would tell exactly what Mullah Omar's close friend Mullah Mutassim, a former Taliban finance minister, told al-Samoud magazine two weeks ago: we want the US and NATO out of Afghanistan now, we want sharia law and we want absolutely no Western interference in our country.

Now what does Michael Corleone - oops, Hekmatyar want?

He's not Taliban. He's not al-Qaeda. He was a darling of the US, Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) during the jihad in the 1980s. He's not a fundamentalist - more like Muslim Brotherhood. The US Central Intelligence Agency tried to kill him with - what else - a Hellfire missile. He escaped.

This correspondent almost bumped into him in Kunar province in 2002 - to the astonishment of US troops on the prowl. Then the - who else - ISI helped him to regroup. Karzai offered him a not meaty enough piece of the action in Kabul. Pakistan released his brother from custody. China invited some of his associates to Beijing.

So everybody loves him - Karzai, Zardari, the ISI, the House of Saud, China and, sooner or later, the Obama administration. He may even get an offer he can't refuse. But there's a problem: he also wants the US and NATO out. And he's clever enough to try to fight a united Taliban flush with opium money and ultra- energized against the Petraeus/Gates counter-insurgency tactics. By the way, Hekmatyar was the pioneer of refining heroin inside Afghanistan, instead of just taxing opium.

(snip)

Too many people use "Taliban" as if it generically represents all Afghan resistance groups and precision is what people should practice, instead. False labeling is dis- or certainly mis-info, which should always be avoided. Many Americans flamed against "the Taliban" for throwing acid into the faces of Afghan women and it was not "the Taliban" who did this. And there are other crimes they were accused of and that they did not commit.

We wouldn't accept it if we were all lumped up together. We might all be Americans, but Americans clearly and definitely are not all of the same views and actions.