|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Yoshie Furuhashi
||
||
|| I was forwarded this excerpt from an article on another listserv.
|| The article was published in Le Monde. It claims Hamid Karzai once
|| worked for the US Oil company UNOCOL. Apoligies if it has already
|| been posted here. Makes you wonder - coincidence?
||
|| Atif
||
Yoshie,
Karzai is a long-time CIA operative: http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/03/feature1.shtml Also see Eric Margolis: "America's new war: A progress report" http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1209-02.htm
UNOCAL had the State Dept and CIA in tow for the Centgas consortium project. They even had a bunch of Talibs flown in by State and "educated" at a CIA-run university in Nebraska: http://sns.wb17.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=sns%2Dworldtrade%2Dun iversity%2Dct So Karzai was working for the CIA, not UNOCAL, but he was assigned to the CENTGAS case, which was the be-all-end-all of US interests in Afghanistan.
Maybe you might be interested in some other stuff I'm digging up right now. The staggery waltz between the CIA, the Pakistani ISI, the Afghan warlords, and the Taliban is fascinating. There's a book by a Pakistani ISI General and US "military historian" Mark Adkin (known for his works on the Granada invasion) www.afghanbooks.com/beartrap/index.htm
When the Soviet pullout was announced in 1988, a number of remarkable things happened:
1 - The Mujahedeen arms depot at Ojhri in Pakistan blew up, depriving the Muj of ammo and thus curtailing their offensive capacity during the Sovier pullout. A recent change in logistics had resulted in arms being stockpiled in greater amounts before being shipped to the Muj units. The stockpile was at its peak at the time of the explosion.
2 - The Pakistani military dictator Zia ul-Hak had been using the Muj and the international jihad volunteers for his own expansionist and jihadist agenda. He was enticed to board a plane - something that he very rarely did out of fear of assassination - in order to see a demo of a US Abrams tank, and was promptly assassinated. The plane crashed and the inquiry showed that a technically sophisticated assassination plot was the most likely cause. The US ambassador and a US general had unfortunately boarded the plane at the last minute. Despite this, State OK'd the rapid burial of the bodies without autopsy and refused to send an FBI team. Conclusion: the CIA did it.
3 - Another victim of the plane crash was General Akhtar, who had brilliantly directed the Afghan campaign for the ISI. He had been recently promoted - unwillingly - out of his ISI Afghanistan command. Whoever took his place persuaded the jihadist head of ISI, General Gul, of the merits of an all-out frontal Mujahedeen attack on fortified Jalalabad, which turned out to be a disaster as the Muj were decimated. The disaster also resulted in the removal of General Gul.
Unfortunately, these CIA covert attempts to defuse the jihad after it had done its job of getting rid of the Soviets were either fruitless, or the US changed its mind when oil multinationals came to power with Bush admin Mark 1. The ISI soon sent in Pakistani units dressed like Taliban and rapidly put Omar's puppet regime in place. The US benefited when the Talibs ended the civil war and formed a central government of sorts that could be negotiated with - by UNOCAL. Another benefit was the export of jihadist volunteers to Chechnia, sabotaging Russia's rival pipeline. However, the Talibs would not accept the US terms for the Centgas project and ObL, backed by the profoundly anti-US ISI, continued to attack US targets.
When the US attacked and the Taliban defeat became apparent, Pakistan started repatriating its officers, troops, and pilots that were fighting with the Talibs against the US-backed NA. Journalists coined the term "evil arilift" for the Antonov transports chartered by the Pakis flying from Kunduz airstrip at night loaded with hundreds of escaping Qaeda/Pakistani troops - all this under the watchful eye of US AWACS radars http://www.msnbc.com/news/664935.asp. In the south, while US wonder weapons were blasting the Qaeda rear-guard at Tora Bora, the main force just walked across the border, into the welcoming embrace of its Pakhtoon brethren. The Pakistani army has never been able to enter the Afghan border region (supposing that it ever wanted to), which is the Pashtun-Pakhtoon homeland.
So as long as the core of jihadist terrorism - i.e. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - remain unspoken and untouchable, and the reasons for US and UK intelligence's hands-off policy for jihadist terrorists not unveiled, the "war" against the nebulous "al-Qaeda" can never be anything more than a smokescreen.
Hakki