[Peace-discuss] Fw: Obama, the Karzai Brothers & the Ghost of Najibullah

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Subject: Obama, the Karzai Brothers & the Ghost of Najibullah


> Obama, the Karzai Brothers & the Ghost of Najibullah
>
> Left Margin
>
> By Carl Bloice
>
> BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
>
> Itâ?Ts said that you can buy photos of Najibullah on the
> streets of Kabul these days and even cassettes of
> speeches he made in the 1980s when he was president of
> Afghanistan. Najibullahâ?Ts name evokes controversy.
> Always cited are the condemnation by some Afghans for
> his ties to the Soviet Union and his previous role as
> chief of the countryâ?Ts internal security apparatus.
> However, it is impossible not to acknowledge the
> country social gains made during his time in
> leadership. As soon as his government was overthrown
> the victors wiped out land reform programs, instituted
> Sharia or Islamic religious law, cut women off from
> education, athletics and the professions and banned
> things like movies, television, videos, dancing, kite
> flying, and beard trimming.
>
> Quiet as itâ?Ts kept, for many in the Afghan capital, the
> Najibullah years were a time of great promise.
>
> But also of great danger. Outside forces were plotting
> and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was spurring
> reactionary groups - trained and equipped by the United
> States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others - to
> overthrow the Afghan government. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
> national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, in
> the words of former CIA analyst Ray McGoverrn, â?othought
> it a good idea to mousetrap the Soviets into their own
> Vietnam debacle by baiting them into invading
> Afghanistan in 1979, the war which was the precursor to
> the great-power Afghan quagmire three decades later.�
> In 1979, Soviet troops entered the country to defend
> the Afghan government and remained there nine years.
> The effort was pre-doomed; the USSR leadership had
> ignored warnings, coming from even its own military
> strategists, that history had shown the fiercely
> independent and resourceful Afghan would never be
> subdued by the military might of foreign forces.
>
> On March 10, 1992, the New York Times reported that
> with the Soviet troops having left the country,
> â?oAfghanistanâ?Ts President made an impassioned appeal to
> the United States today to help his country become a
> bulwark against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in
> Central Asia.� In an interview with correspondent
> Edward A. Gargan, Najibullah â?oalso pleaded for
> immediate economic and humanitarian assistance from
> Washington,� which long backed the Afghan
> fundamentalist guerrillas fighting his Government. He
> also promised that he would release four Afghans who
> worked in the United States Embassy and were convicted
> of espionage in 1983. â?oThe Afghan Presidentâ?Ts praise
> for the United States and his attempt to enlist
> Washington in common cause against fundamentalism
> marked the sharpest departure yet from the open
> hostility that has characterized relations between
> Kabul and Washington since Afghanistanâ?Ts leftist coup
> of 1978,� wrote Gargan.
>
> â?oWe have a common task, Afghanistan, the United States
> of America, and the civilized world, to launch a joint
> struggle against fundamentalism,� Najibullah told the
> Times, and â?odescribed what he thought would happen to
> his country if Islamic extremists took power in Kabul.�
>
> â?oIf fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will
> continue for many more years,� Najibullah said.
> â?oAfghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling
> for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a
> center for terrorism.�
>
> Well, all that has come to pass.
>
> I was in Kabul February 15, 1989 when the final
> withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan took
> place; they had been in the country since December
> 1979. Most of the other reporters traveled to Jalalabad
> for the start of the final retreat, moving with the
> departing forces back to Kabul on their way out of the
> country. I remained in the capital and on that day a
> few of us were taken by our guides from the government
> to a shop that had been demolished by a bomb attack the
> previous day. It wasnâ?Tt a big terrorist attack but the
> message was clear: this is what is in store for Kabul
> now.
>
> That, too, came to pass.
>
> Gargan attributed Najibullahâ?Ts appeal to Washington to
> his having been â?oAbandoned by his former benefactors in
> Moscow and cast somewhat adrift in the new politics of
> the region.â? Thatâ?Ts one way of putting it, but he
> really had no other choice. The USSR couldnâ?Tt restrain
> the Taliban and the various mujahedeen factions and
> besides it was in the midst of a political upheaval
> that would about two years hence bring down the ruling
> Communist Party.
>
> Najibullah had expressed support for a United Nations
> plan to summon â?" in Garganâ?Ts words â?oa wide spectrum of
> Afghans - including the Islamic fundamentalist
> guerrillas - to a gathering that would lead to a
> political accord to end Afghanistanâ?Ts years of civil
> conflict.� There is no question that he persistently
> pursued a campaign for national reconciliation and
> reached out repeatedly to tribal and religious leaders
> across the country and the region. On the eve of the
> final stage of the Soviet withdrawal, Najibullah
> repeated his call for compromise and national unity
> before a large audience of notables and foreigners. But
> the Mujahedeen â?ofreedom fightersâ? (as they were then
> called by the U.S. media and politicians at the time)
> and their benefactors in the region and Washington
> werenâ?Tt interested. The Times noted that the State
> Department refused to even comment on the Gargan
> interview.
>
> And so the attacks continued. Najibullah and his Watan
> (Homeland) Party remained in office until April 1992
> when a major warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum
> decided to switch sides and the government â?" affected
> by severe economic difficulties (made worse by punitive
> sanctions undertaken by the Russian Government of Boris
> Yeltsin) â?" fell to the combined forces of mujahedeen
> and various tribal groups (â?owarlordsâ?). But that hardly
> ended the countryâ?Ts travails. The victorious groups
> soon began to fight each other over the spoils. The
> greatest damage to the countryâ?Ts infrastructure and the
> city of Kabul came not from the Soviet invasion but
> from the internecine rocket attacks following the
> governmentâ?Ts ouster. In 1994, the recently organized
> Taliban made its appearance on the scene.
>
> Last weekâ?Ts attack by the Taliban on targets in Kabul
> carried with them a grave symbolism. After Najibullahâ?Ts
> overthrow his family was able to flee the country but
> he refused to leave, choosing instead to take refuge in
> the United Nations compound where he remained for four
> years. In September 1996 the Taliban took control of
> Kabul from the Mujahedeen and began to bombard the UN
> facility. Najibullah was taken from the compound along
> with his brother, his secretary and his bodyguards.
> They were all hanged. The bloody body of the deposed
> president was hung from a lamp post, his severed
> private parts stuck in his mouth.
>
> One Afghan writer suggested Najibullah deserved his
> fate having been naïve enough to think the Taliban
> would recognize the UN center as out of bounds. Last
> weekâ?Ts attack lay to rest that notion once again.
>
> And so it came to pass that from that time forward to
> the Al Qaeda attack on the United States September 11,
> 2001 and beyond, Afghanistan has been and continues to
> be â?oa center of world smuggling for narcotic drugsâ? and
> â?oa center for terrorism.â?
>
> Over the years, the Left in that part of the world (and
> a lot of other places) has made a many mistakes that
> contributed to the advance of rightwing reactionary
> movements and forces. However, the biggest culprits
> have been the U.S. and its Western allies. In their
> zeal to crush communist, socialist and left movements
> and parties and a desire to control petroleum
> resources, they have anointed and fostered the
> fundamentalists over the secular and democratic, and
> taken advantage of religious, ethnic and sectarian
> divisions, stirring pots where they could find them
> from Central Europe to Iraq.
>
> Oh, and that narcotics thing. What short memories we
> sometime have. Yes, the U.S. Central Intelligence
> Agency sometime cavorts with drug dealers. It did it in
> the war in South East Asia a few decades ago. Remember
> the Golden Triangle? â?oIf it sounds a lot like Vietnam
> when Vietnam started to really come apart, it is â?"
> President Diemâ?Ts grotesquely corrupt brother was a CIA
> source and a noxious agent of influence,� writes Robert
> Baer, a former Middle East CIA field office, in Time
> magazine.
>
> â?oWe came into Afghanistan in October 2001 with the same
> willful blindness. The CIA knew that its ally, the
> Tajik Northern Alliance, was a paid-up proxy of Iran,
> just as it was fully aware that another ally, Uzbek
> General Dostum, was one of Afghanistanâ?Ts great butchers
> (though Dostum has always denied the widespread
> allegations of his brutality). When it came to finding
> crucial partners on the ground, there were simply no
> alternatives.�
>
> According to Time, â?oFrom December 2001 through 2002,
> according to a former Drug Enforcement Administration
> official speaking on condition of anonymity, â?~the CIA
> and the military turned a blind eye to drug traffickers
> if they thought they could help them against Taliban
> and al-Qaeda.â?Tâ?
>
> â?oWe had no problem dealing with Afghan Islamic
> fundamentalists, terrorists, drug dealers and thugs
> when the Carter and Reagan White Houses waged a proxy
> war against the Soviet Union in the â?~80s,â? writes Baer.
> â?oThe CIA and the White House turned a blind eye to our
> proxiesâ?T faults because the fundamentalists were the
> best fighters and happy to take down our Cold War
> enemy.
>
> â?oThe claim that Ahmed Wali Karzai has been on the
> payroll of the CIA for the past eight years, as
> reported in todayâ?Ts New York Times, wonâ?Tt come as a
> surprise to most Afghans, who have long considered his
> brother, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, to be an
> American puppet,� wrote Aryn Baker in Time on October
> 28. â?oThe revamped allegations that Karzai frère is
> deeply involved in Afghanistanâ?Ts annual $4-billion drug
> industry isnâ?Tt much of a shocker either - on the
> streets of Kabul and Kandahar the name â?~Waliâ?T has long
> been synonymous with someone who can get away with a
> crime because he has friends in the right places.
> Diplomats, counter-narcotics officials and commanders
> from the International Security Assistance Force,
> NATOâ?Ts military wing in Afghanistan, have all privately
> (and not so privately) expressed frustration with
> President Karzai for not reining in his brother. In
> fact, the people most likely to be shocked by the
> revelations are Americans back at home, who are already
> wondering why we should be sending more soldiers and
> money to a country whose leadership has rarely proved
> an adequate partner.�
>
> As it turns out there are more than two Karzai
> brothers. Citing recent study published by the Center
> on International Cooperation at New York University,
> investigative reporter Gareth Porter Writes:
>
> â?oThe report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents
> are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually
> on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of
> which are local power brokers guilty of human rights
> abuses.�
>
> â?oIn addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat
> Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid
> Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as
> powerful figures who control private security firms
> that have gotten security contracts without registering
> with the government.�
>
> The allegation of drug dealing and CIA payoff to Ahmed
> Wali Karzai� throws into sharp relief the most crucial
> question the administration now faces in Afghanistan,�
> wrote Mark Sappenfield in the Christian Science Monitor
> last Wednesday. â?oShould America continue its policy of
> working with warlords and disreputable power-brokers in
> an attempt to use their influence to advance US
> interests? Or should it instead focus on protecting the
> Afghan people â?" in many cases from the very warlords
> the US has supported in the past?�
>
> I was sitting around the other day with a group of
> people whose views, one might say, ranged from center
> to left. On Afghanistan they appeared to be of the
> unanimous opinion that U.S. policy had to make a sharp
> departure from the past. The best option for the Obama
> Administration is neither â?ocounterinsurgencyâ? nor
> â?ocounterterrorism.â? Nor is total disengagement desired,
> they agreed. The answer lies in development. A
> â?oMarshall Planâ? sized program to tackle poverty and
> illiteracy in the region could improve the situation.
> Military escalation will only make matters worse.
>
> Of course, launching such en effort would require an
> end to the fighting and the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO
> troops.. A path to that would likely lay in a proposal
> widely broached in Europe and hardly mentioned in this
> country for an international conference involving;
> first and foremost, all Afghanistanâ?Ts neighboring
> states and each of the warring parties in the country
> with the aim of arriving at a security agreement. It
> might come through the United Nations like the plan
> that Najibullah was entertaining back in 1998 â?" long
> before September 11. Only this way can the conditions
> arise for the Afghan people to decide their own destiny
> free of dictates and intrigues from abroad. In any
> case, the proper path for the U.S. must not involve
> continuing to bed down with the feudal warlords and the
> likes of the Karzai brothers. That puts us on the wrong
> side of history and decency.
>
> BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Carl Bloice
> is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National
> Coordinating Committee of the Committees of
> Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly
> worked for a healthcare union.
>
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