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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><h1 class="mb-2" id="node-title">Afghanistan, Another Untold Story</h1><div class="block"><div class="d-flex py-5 align-items-center"><div class="d-flex mr-4 author-images"><div class="overflow-hidden border-white rounded-circle border-2" style="z-index: 0;"><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/author/michael-parenti" style="color: inherit;" class="">Michael Parenti</a></div></div><div class=""> <span class="text-xs"> <time datetime="2008-12-02T15:05:30" class="">December 2, 2008</time> </span></div></div></div><div class="block"><div class="views-article__body prose node__body"><p class=""><strong class="">Barack Obama is on</strong>
record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before
sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn
something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United
States. </p><p class="">Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out
aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama
bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty
years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet
"invasion" of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who
normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US
intervention against the Soviet-supported government as "a good thing."
The actual story is not such a good thing.</p><h3 class=""><b class="">Some Real History</b></h3><p class="">Since
feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained
unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords
who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s,
democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People's
Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the
government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and
unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive
demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army
intervened on the side of the demonstrators. </p><p class="">The military
officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under
the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how
a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office.
"It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the
USSR for it," writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University
of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in
Afghanistan at about that time. </p><p class="">The Taraki government proceeded
to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive
income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people
greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling
peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key
foods were imposed. </p><p class="">The government also continued a campaign
begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage.
It provided public education for girls and for the children of various
tribes.</p><p class="">A report in the <i class="">San Francisco Chronicle</i> (17
November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been "a
cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women
studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city's university.
Afghan women held government jobs--in the 1980s, there were seven female
members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates.
Fifty percent of university students were women." </p><p class="">The Taraki
government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then
Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed
for the world's heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts
owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan
believes that it was a "genuinely popular government and people looked
forward to the future with great hope." </p><p class="">But serious opposition
arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land
reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and
fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government's dedication to
gender equality and the education of women and children. </p><p class="">Because
of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki
government also incurred the opposition of the US national security
state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the
CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale
intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords,
reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers. </p><p class="">A
top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed
by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he
spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized
state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms,
and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he
moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two
months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the
military. </p><p class="">It should be noted that all this happened <i class=""> before</i>
the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the
country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to
Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that
effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against
schools and teachers in rural areas. </p><p class="">In late 1979, the seriously
besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to
help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign
mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The
Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education,
agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a
commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took
repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene
militarily.</p><h3 class=""><b class="">Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style</b></h3><p class="">The Soviet
intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the
tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless
communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi
Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA
and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical
mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the
call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his
cohorts. </p><p class="">After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets
evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the
PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet
departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for
another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year. </p><p class="">Upon
taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among
themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations,
looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women
and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty
International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as "a
method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.'" </p><p class="">Ruling
the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income,
the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a
close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories
across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the
Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in
the world. </p><p class="">Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen
mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned
home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist
attacks in Allah's name against the purveyors of secular "corruption." </p><p class="">In
Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called
the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with
the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way
to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs
into its fold with threats and bribes. </p><p class="">The Taliban promised to
end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen
trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the
sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand
sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of "immorality" that included
premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all
music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much
scientific research. </p><p class="">The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of
terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used
by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed
beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to
toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt
swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled
an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely
whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social
life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of
education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were
deemed "immoral" were stoned to death or buried alive. </p><p class="">None of
this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously
with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the
entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not
until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public
opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the
Taliban's oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight
as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of
the abuses committed against Afghan women. </p><p class="">If anything positive
can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of
the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had
practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also
eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under
their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International
Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the
Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government
reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in
Afghanistan increased dramatically. </p><p class="">The years of war that have
followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those
killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters,
and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of
shelter, and lack of water.</p><h3 class=""><b class="">The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas</b></h3><p class="">While
claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other
compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into
Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A
decade before 9/11, <i class="">Time</i> magazine (18 March 1991) reported that
US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia.
The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR
removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive
interventionist policy in that part of the world. </p><p class="">US oil
companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A
major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked
region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most
direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the
corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline
routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across
China to the Pacific. </p><p class="">The route favored by Unocal, a US based
oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The
intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime
remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing
bid for the pipeline. Bush's war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL's
hopes for getting a major piece of the action. </p><p class="">Interestingly
enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed
Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with
sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin
Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a "rogue state"
designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction
company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central
Asian oil and gas fields. </p><p class="">In sum, well in advance of the 9/11
attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the
Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military
presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus,
stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting
military intervention. </p><p class="">One might agree with John Ryan who argued
that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in
1979, "there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet
intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and
no September 11 tragedy." But it would be asking too much for
Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was
organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather
than private accumulation. </p><p class="">US intervention in Afghanistan has
proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola,
Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had
the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same
effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all
these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into
ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many
innocent lives. </p><p class="">The war against Afghanistan, a battered
impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles
as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has
been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social
order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped
reserves of the earth's dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US
bases and US military power into still another region of the world. </p><p class="">In the face of all this Obama's call for "change" rings hollow.</p></div><hr class=""></div><div class="block"><div class="mb-4 text-tiny">Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.</div></div><div class="block"><div class="views-article__field-author-profile"><div class="field__item"><div role="article" about="/author/michael-parenti" class="align-items-center flex-md-row d-flex flex-column py-2"> <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/author/michael-parenti" class="d-flex overflow-hidden mr-4 rounded-circle align-items-center flex-shrink-0 mb-4"><div class="profile-author__field-profile-img"><div class="article__media--image justify-content-center image__field-media-image d-flex"><br class=""></div></div></a><div class=""><div class=""><div class="profile-author__body"><p class=""><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/author/michael-parenti" class=""><strong class="">Michael Parenti</strong></a> is
an American political scientist and cultural critic who writes on
scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at American and
international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus
and community audiences. His books include: "<a href="https://bookshop.org/a/16708/9781594519185" class=""><em class="">Face of Imperialism</em></a>" (2011), "<em class=""><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/16708/9781616141776" target="_blank" class="">God and His Demons</a></em>" (2010), "<em class=""><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/16708/9780872864825" class="">Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader</a></em>" (2007); "<em class=""><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/16708/9780495911265" class="">Democracy for the Few</a></em>" (2010); "<em class=""><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/16708/9781565849426" target="_blank" class="">The Assassination of Julius Caesar</a></em>" (2004), and "<em class=""><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/16708/9780872864337" target="_blank" class="">Superpatriotism</a></em>" (2004). For further information, visit his website: <a href="http://www.michaelparenti.org/" target="_blank" class="">www.michaelparenti.org</a>.</p></div></div> <span class="text-xs"> </span></div></div></div></div></div><div class="block"><div class="d-print-none"></div></div></body></html>