Taliban and UNOCAL

In December 1997, the Taliban visited UNOCAL's Houston refinery operations. Interestingly, the chief Taliban leader based in Kandahar, Mullah Mohammed Omar, now on America's international Most Wanted List, was firmly in the UNOCAL camp. UNOCAL had pumped large sums of money to the Taliban hierarchy in Kandahar and its expatriate Afghan supporters in the United States. During the Bush administration, beholden to the oil interests that pumped millions of dollars into the 2000 campaign, various Taliban envoys were received at the State Department, CIA, and National Security Council. The CIA, which appears more than ever to be a virtual extended family of the Bush oil interests, facilitated a renewed approach to the Taliban.

There were even reports that the CIA met with bin Laden in the months before the 11 September 2001 attacks. The French newspaper Le Figaro quoted an Arab specialist named Antoine Sfeir who postulated that the CIA met with bin Laden in July in a failed attempt to bring him back under its fold. Sfeir said the CIA maintained links with bin Laden before the US attacked his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in 1998 and, more astonishingly, kept them going even after the attacks. Sfeir told the paper, "Until the last minute, CIA agents hoped bin Laden would return to US command, as was the case before 1998." Bin Laden actually officially broke with the US in 1991 when US troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. Bin Laden felt this was a violation of the Saudi regime's responsibility to protect the Islamic Holy Shrines of Mecca and Medina from infidels. Bin Laden's anti-American and anti-House of Saud rhetoric soon reached a fever pitch.

Bush and US energy interests

Bush Family's interests in the energy sector and that of Vice President Dick Cheney are quite well known. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on the board of Chevron. Khalilzad, a Pashtun and former US ambassador to Kabul, Baghdad and UN, was besides being a consultant to the RAND Corporation, a special liaison between UNOCAL and the Taliban government. According to Afghan, Iranian, and Turkish government sources, Hamid Karzai was a top adviser to the El Segundo, California-based UNOCAL Corporation which was negotiating with Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Karzai, a leader of the southern Afghan Pashtun Durrani tribe, was a top contact for the CIA and maintained close relations with CIA Director William Casey, Vice President George H.W. Bush, and their Pakistani ISI interlocutors. Later, Karzai and a number of his brothers moved to the United States under the auspices of the CIA and continued to serve the agency's interests, the Bush family and their oil friends.

It is clear that fossil fuels drive American policy in the region and the construction of the trans-Afghan pipeline was a top priority of the Bush administration from the outset. While UNOCAL claims it abandoned the pipeline project in December 1998, a series of meetings held between US, Pakistani, and Taliban officials after 1998, indicates the project was never off the table. Reports suggested that perhaps the US representatives may have recklessly threatened the Taliban prior to the September 11 attack, thereby provoking Al Qaeda into action.

After foreign policy, would India outsource intelligence inputs to USA, UK and Israel?

As part of its 'strategic relationship' with USA, India has modified its foreign policy in tune with that of Washington, voting with USA against Iran in Vienna on Iran's legitimate  nuclear fuel enrichment for power generation. As among the dead in Mumbai were 18 foreigners including Americans, Britons and Israelis: anti-terrorism officers from Scotland Yard, FBI experts and Mossad operators are coming over to India. Strategic affairs expert K Subramaniam, part of pro-US lobby in India, rationalized: "What we have here is an international problem with roots in Pakistan... India's attacks were once just its problem. Now they are problems for the whole world."

The way Scotland Yard handled 7 July 2005 blasts in London was clumsy, with almost Laurel & Hardy type of brutal assassination of a Brazilian youth without any provocation or warning. The Yard may be better than politician-controlled and corrupt Indian police establishment, but it is hardly a shining example. 

The stunning events of 11 September 2001 exposed the incompetence of US intelligence agencies, which are also amenable to tailoring their reports to the US administration's political agenda, such as the illegal ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq. Subsequent reports to improve security by bringing the Patriot Act, have taken away freedoms of US citizens, blacklisting and profiling of US Muslims or those from the Middle East, outsourcing of torture and created-Gulags at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and even on US ships.

Ill informed and ignorant admirers of US intelligence claim that 9/11 has not been repeated. All this required was better airport security. Would Indian political and corporate class and other humpty dumpties agree to security checks which even Senator Ted Kennedy and others go through in USA? The village yokels and criminals in India's political class would beat up the security staff.

Israel's Defense establishment and its generals who occupy key posts in government, security, defense, industry, and intelligence, are a law into themselves with little accountability; blackmailing and terrorizing Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims states with its unconcealed horde of nuclear bombs, with full US support in UN and elsewhere. US presidential candidates must first kowtow to all powerful Israeli organ, AIPAC, before declaring candidature as was done by both President-elect Obama and Hillary Clinton, or for that matter for any electoral post in USA. It is another matter that Lebanese Hezbollah defeated the so-called invincible Israeli Defense Forces on the ground in South Lebanon in 2006, as conceded even by an investigation headed by a senior Israeli judge.

Former US President Jimmy Carter compared Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza and treatment of Palestinians with apartheid in his book. He was blackballed and not even allowed to attend Obama's nomination as its Presidential candidate at the party conference. The Jewish lobby in USA came like a ton of bricks on two respected US university professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, both Jews, on their article “Israel lobby in US."

In an article "Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust" Richard Falk, an American Jew wrote: "Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty."

Most Indian ministers, decision makers, key media persons and others have visited Israel as guests. India's intelligence services maintain close contact with Israeli spy services with many ardent admirers, some of whom were even trained there. The original primer (qaida) for training Indian intelligence operatives was laid down by departing colonial masters and would likely be updated by the US spy establishment. Russians have experience of handling the Chechen insurgency, which is encouraged and supported by the West, and a wealth of experience in handling Mujahideen in Afghanistan. One reads of little contacts between them and the Indian security services or forces.

These converts to the Anglo-Saxon vision must be reminded that in 1990, Washington played around with aerial photographs of Saddam Hussein's military dispositions along the border with Saudi Arabia with  Kuwait, which he had invaded, to hoodwink a reluctant Riyadh to let US troops occupy Arabia. Trusting Western agencies can be dangerous...

Some elements in Indian intelligence and security establishment, along with Hindutva hardcore, would love nothing better than treating Muslims in India like Israel treats Palestinians and other Arabs, without realizing that Pakistan, unlike the Arab States, was allowed to develop its nuclear infrastructure and weapons during the 1980s by the West. After the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan has also become a transit point of gigantic trade in narcotics grown in Afghanistan [Afghans, Pakistani military and ISI are all involved], with more AK-46s in its frontier regions than pencils to write. The trade impinges on India and its security as weapons and RDX can be brought in under the cover of narcotics trading in which Indian criminals, security forces and politicians are involved.

US War on Terror is US war for world's resources

By using words like liberty, freedom and democracy for promoting US interests via Operation Iraqi Freedom for its invasion of Iraq, or Operation Enduring Freedom for bombing of Afghanistan, which often kill civilian and marriage parties rather than terrorists, US leaders have completely prostituted the meaning of these words. 


An arrogant Brzezinski blurted the truth about US support to Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, soon after US invasion of Iraq in 2003, with unproved and false charges about WMDs, Iraq's nuclear programme and Baghdad's linkage with Al Qaeda (twice England's greatest non-cricket spinner of truth, Prime Minister Tony Blair, was told at Moscow media conferences by Russia's President and Foreign Minister that West's allegations and dossiers on Iraq were false). 


Soon after the invasion of Iraq, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted in Singapore that the allegations were mere bureaucratic excuses, the real objective was Iraq's oil. This was also admitted by this years Economics Nobel Prize winner Krugman and many others. So the so-called 'War on terror ' is in truth a non-stop war for control of strategic space and world's energy and other resources.

Failure in Iraq and stirring up of more Muslims

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a monumental failure and a quagmire for America. More than a million Iraqis have been killed, four million refugees are scattered in Syria, Jordan and other countries, and in Iraq itself. It has made millions of widows and orphans and is bringing about destruction worse than what Mongols inflicted. Washington's conscious policies have led to ethnic cleansing by Shias and Sunnis. The Arabs and Kurds in Iraq have been divided with little hope of their coming together again, with unforeseen consequences for the region. US Vice President-elect Joe Biden had even suggested more than a year ago to formalize the partition in Iraq.

Over 4200 US soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq, many tens of thousands injured and maimed for life. It has already cost US taxpayers more than US$ 500 billion. The total cost could reach US$ 3 trillion. Only the Military Industry complex has made fortunes.

The killing fields of Iraq have provided on-the-job training to stirred-up Muslims from all over the world, especially Europe, creating a reservoir of trained Jihadis. This development – the creation of more terrorists – has been admitted by Western think tanks and intelligence agencies. So much for fighting terrorism in Iraq; just the opposite has been accomplished.

State sponsored terrorism

While Muslims all over the world loathe the policies and terror acts of Israel, USA, UK in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and other places, many polls in Europe have graded Israel and US policies and actions as the greatest dangers to world peace and security.

Although Turkey and Israel have very close relations, almost like allies since the creation of the Jewish state, in 2004 Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan publicly described Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's policies in Occupied Territories as "state terrorism." Members of his ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), which has Islamic roots, were much harsher and lambasted US policies in Iraq. An article by Pulitzer Prize winning US journalist Seymour Hersh in New Yorker disclosed that Israel was fishing in Kurdish  north Iraq, south of Turkey's volatile Kurdish region in the south-east. Israeli agents were active in Kurdish areas of Iran, Syria and Iraq, and providing training to commando units for running covert operations, which could further destabilize the region

Chris Hedges, former Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote in Truthdig on 1 December 2008: “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism. These wars defy every ethical and legal code that seek to determine when a nation can wage war, from Just War Theory to the statutes of international law largely put into place by the United States after World War II. These wars are criminal wars of aggression. They have left hundreds of thousands of people, who never took up arms against us, dead and seen millions driven from their homes. We have no right as a nation to debate the terms of these occupations. - The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were our response to feelings of vulnerability and collective humiliation after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. They were a way to exorcise through reciprocal violence what had been done to us.
 

Collective humiliation is also the driving force behind al-Qaeda and most terrorist groups. Osama bin Laden cites the Sykes Picot Agreement, which led to the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, as the beginning of Arab humiliation. He attacks the agreement for dividing the Muslim world into "fragments." He rails against the presence of American troops on the soil of his native Saudi Arabia. The dark motivations of Islamic extremists mirror our own.”

Robert Pape in "Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," found that most suicide bombers are members of communities that feel humiliated by genuine or perceived occupation. Almost every major suicide-terrorist campaign - over 95 percent - carried out attacks to drive out an occupying power. Terrorists, many of whom come from the middle class, support acts of indiscriminate violence not because of direct, personal affronts to their dignity, but more often for lofty, abstract ideas of national, ethnic or religious pride and the establishment of a utopian, harmonious world purged of evil. The longer the United States occupies Afghanistan and Iraq, the more these feelings of collective humiliation are aggravated and the greater the number of jihadists willing to attack American targets.

Pape observed that: "Terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life…

"The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many in the United States with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. It had its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, who invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Gandhi…

"Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb - a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on Sept. 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda in protest over the arrest of the anarchists. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200.

"Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon, during the attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Christians were responsible for three."

Concluded

K. Gajendra Singh, IFS (retd.) served as Indian ambassador to Turkey, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Romania and Senegal, and is currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic Studies