http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0124/ridgeway.shtml
Richard Helms’s Afghani Niece Leads Corps of Taliban Reps
The Accidental Operative
by Camelia Fard & James Ridgeway
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 6—On this muggy afternoon, a group of neatly attired
men and a handful of women gather in a conference room at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies. The guest list includes officials
from the furthest corners of the world—Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan,
and Turkey—and reps from the World Bank, the Uzbekistan chamber of commerce,
the oil industry, and the Russian news agency Tass, along with various
individuals identified only as "U.S. Government," which in times past was
code for spook.
At hand is a low-profile briefing on international narcotics by a top State
Department official, who has recently returned from a United Nations trip to
inspect the poppy fields of Afghanistan, source of 80 percent of the world's
opium and target of a recent eradication campaign by the fundamentalist
Taliban. The lecture begins as every other in Washington: The speaker
politely informs the crowd he has nothing to do with policymaking. And, by
the way, it's all off the record.
Lecture over, the chairman asks for questions. One man after another rises to
describe his own observations while in the foreign service. The moderator
pauses, looks to the back of the room, and says in a scarcely audible voice:
"Laili Helms." The room goes silent.
For the people gathered here, the name brings back memories of Richard Helms,
director of the CIA during the tumultuous 1960s, the era of Cuba and Vietnam.
After he was accused of destroying most of the agency's secret documents
detailing its own crimes, Helms left the CIA and became President Ford's
ambassador to Iran. There, he trained the repressive secret police,
inadvertently sparking the revolution that soon toppled his friend the Shah.
Laili Helms, his niece by marriage, is an operative, too—but of a different
kind. This pleasant young woman who makes her home in New Jersey is the
Taliban rulers' unofficial ambassador in the U.S., and their most active and
best-known advocate elsewhere in the West. As such she not only defends but
promotes a severe regime that has given the White House fits for the past six
years—by throwing women out of jobs and schools, stoning adulterers, forcing
Hindus to wear an identifying yellow patch, and smashing ancient Buddha
statues.
In meetings on Capitol Hill and at the State Department, Helms represents a
theocracy that harbors America's Public Enemy No. 1: Osama bin Laden, the man
who allegedly masterminded the bombing of American embassies in Tanzania and
Kenya and is suspected of blowing up the USS Cole. From his Afghan fortress,
bin Laden operates a terrorist network reaching across the world.
All of which is highly ironic since bin Laden is the progeny of a U.S. policy
that sought to unite Muslims in a jihad against the Soviet Union, but over a
decade eroded the moderate political wing and launched a wave of young
radical fundamentalists. The Taliban, says the author Ahmed Rashid, "is the
hip-hop generation of Islamic militants. They know nothing about nothing.
Their aim is the destruction of the status quo, but they offer nothing to
replace it with."
Now the Bush administration is lowering its sights, viewing the Taliban
within a broader context of an oil-rich central Asia. The chaotic region is
strewn with crooked governments, terrorist brotherhoods, thieving warlords,
and smugglers. Against this backdrop, the Taliban sometimes seems to be the
least of our problems.
The mullahs would like to take advantage of the Bush administration's own
fundamentalist leanings, complete with antidrug, pro-energy, and
feminist-rollback policies. Their often comic efforts to establish
representation in the U.S. took off when they found Helms. For them, she is a
disarming presence, the unassuming woman at the back of the room.
After spending most her life in the States, Helms has impeccable suburban
credentials. She lives in Jersey City and is the mother of a couple of
grade-school kids. Her husband works at Chase Manhattan.
A granddaughter of a former Afghan minister in the last monarchy, she
returned home during the war to work on U.S. aid missions. "Everyone thinks
I'm a spy," she said in a recent Voice interview. "And Uncle Dick thinks I'm
crazy."
Helms's home across the Hudson has become a sort of kitchen-table embassy.
She says she patches together conference calls between the Taliban leadership
and State Department officials. A recent one cost more than $1000, an expense
she covered from her own checking account.
One moment she's packing up a used computer for the foreign ministry in
Kabul, the next driving down to Washington for a briefing or meeting with
members of Congress. Her cell phone rings nonstop. "These guys," she says,
referring to the Taliban leaders, "are on no one else's agenda. They are so
isolated you can't call the country. You can't send letters out. None of
their officials can leave Afghanistan now."
Indeed, the Taliban government is virtually unrecognized by most others. It
has no standing at the UN, where it has come under scathing indictment for
human rights abuses. In February, the U.S. demanded that Taliban offices here
be closed.
Helms may be just another suburban mom in the States, but last year in
Afghanistan she got movie-star treatment, driving around downtown Kabul in a
smart late-model Japanese car, escorted by armed guards waving Kalashnikov
rifles, rattling away in English and Farsi as she shot video footage to prove
that Afghan women are working, free, and happy.
She stands at the public relations hub of a ragtag network of amateur Taliban
advocates in the U.S. At the University of Southern California, economics
professor Nake M. Kamrany arranged last year for the Taliban's Rahmatullah
Hashami, ambassador at large, to bypass the visa block. He even rounded up
enough money for Hashami to lecture at the University of California, both in
Los Angeles and Berkeley. The trip ended at the State Department in D.C.,
with a reported offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to the U.S.
Kamrany hardly looks the part of a foreign emissary, showing up for an
interview recently in Santa Monica dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts,
and insisting on a tuna fish sandwich before getting down to defending the
burqa, the head-to-toe covering required for Afghani women. In addition to
Kamrany, there's the erstwhile official Taliban representative, Abdul Hakim
Mojahed, in Queens, whom Helms dismisses with a wave of her hand as a
do-nothing, not worth talking to. Mojahed's voice line has been disconnected,
and his fax number never picks up.
Dr. Davood Davoodyar, an economics professor at Cal State in San Francisco,
joined the jihad to fight against the Soviets in the early 1980s. Today he
keeps in touch with the elusive Mojahed, who seems to have gone underground
since his office was shuttered. Davoodyar thinks the Taliban is helping to
stabilize Afghanistan, but concedes, "If I asked my wife to wear the burqa,
she'd kill me."
Also in San Francisco, Ghamar Farhad, a bank supervisor, has served as host
to the Taliban's visiting deputy minister of information along with the
ambassador at large. She generally likes the Taliban because she believes
they have cut down on rape, but got very upset when they blew up the Buddha
statues. When the Taliban explained to her that these satanic idols had to
go, Farhad says, she changed her mind.
Led by Helms, these people have answers for all the accusations made against
the Taliban, starting with its treatment of women. To a visitor it might seem
as if women had just disappeared, as if by some sort of massive ethnic
cleansing. Though they made up 40 percent of all the doctors and 70 percent
of teachers in the capital, women were forced to abandon Western clothes and
stay indoors behind windows painted black "for their own good." Ten million
reportedly have been denied education, hospital care, and the right to work.
The Taliban insists that a woman wear a burqa, stifling garb with only tiny
slits for her eyes and no peripheral vision. Even her voice is banned. In
shops or in the market, she must have her brother, husband, or father speak
to the shopkeeper so that she will not excite him with the sound of her
speaking.
Helms argues that foreign observers have forgotten conditions in the country
following the war against the Soviets. "Afghanistan was like a Mad Max
scenario," she says. "Anyone who had a gun and a pickup truck could abduct
your women, rape them. . . . When the Taliban came and established security,
the majority of Afghan women who suffered from the chaotic conditions were
happy, because they could live, their children could live."
But a current Physicians for Human Rights poll taken in Afghanistan reports
that women surveyed in Taliban-controlled areas "almost unanimously expressed
that the Taliban had made their life 'much worse.' " They reported high rates
of depression and suicide.
Last year a group of Afghani women gathered in Tajikistan made a concerted
demand for basic human rights, citing "torture and inhumane and degrading
treatment." Their address noted that "poverty and the lack of freedom of
movement push women into prostitution, involuntary exile, forced marriages,
and the selling and trafficking of their daughters."
The Taliban drew more worldwide criticism for its abuse of other religious
and ethnic minorities. It required that Hindus wear yellow clothing—saris for
women and shirts for men, so they could be distinguished from Muslims—a move
that immediately brought back images of Jews in Nazi Germany wearing the Star
of David. There are 5000 Hindus living in Kabul and thousands more in other
Afghan cities. An Indian external affairs spokesman condemned the new
requirements as "reprehensible" and told The Times of India it was another
example of the Taliban's "obscurantist and racist ideology, which is alien to
Afghan traditions."
Helms argues outsiders don't understand the import of the yellow tags. "We
asked them to identify themselves [to protect] their religious beliefs.
Everyone has identity cards. The intention is to protect people." She shrugs.
"Here you have labels for handicapped people. So you can have special
parking."
Blowing up the ancient statues of Buddhas, hewn from cliffs in the third and
fifth centuries B.C., was another matter. "That was a very big deal," she
says. "That was them thumbing their nose at the international community."
Helms has little regard for Osama bin Laden, whom she sneeringly refers to as
a "tractor driver." She says he was inherited by the Taliban and is widely
viewed as a "hang nail."
In 1999, Helms says, she got a message from the Taliban leadership that they
were willing to turn over all of bin Laden's communications equipment, which
they had seized, to the U.S. When she called the State Department with this
offer, officials were at first interested, but later said, "No. We want him."
In the same year, Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, reputedly came up
with a scheme to capture bin Laden on his own; after consulting with the
Taliban he flew his private plane to Kabul and drove out to see Mullah Omar
at his HQ. The two men sat down, as Helms recounts the story, and the Saudi
said, "There's just one little thing. Will you kill bin Laden before you put
him on the plane?" Mullah Omar called for a bucket of cold water. As the
Saudi delegation fidgeted, he took off his turban, splashed water on his
head, and then washed his hands before sitting back down. "You know why I
asked for the cold water?" he asked Turki. "What you just said made my blood
boil."
Bin Laden was a guest of the Afghanis and there was no way they were going to
kill him, though they might turn him over for a trial. At that the deal
collapsed, and Turki flew home empty-handed.
Early this year, the Taliban's ambassador at large, Hashami, a young man
speaking perfect English, met with CIA operations people and State Department
reps, Helms says. At this final meeting, she says, Hashami proposed that the
Taliban hold bin Laden in one location long enough for the U.S. to locate and
destroy him. The U.S. refused, says Helms, who claims she was the go-between
in this deal between the supreme leader and the feds.
A U.S. government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, made clear
that the U.S. is not trying to kill bin Laden but instead wants him expelled
from Afghanistan so he can be brought to justice. Acknowledging that Laili
Helms does a lot of lobbying on behalf of the Taliban, this source said Helms
does not speak to the Taliban for the U.S.
In the realpolitik of Bush foreign policy, the Taliban may have improved its
chances for an opening of relations with the rest of the world. As it now
stands, there seems little question that Afghanistan has indeed stopped the
production of poppies in the areas under its control. Partly as a result, its
farmers are destitute, their lives made more miserable by drought.
But that's not likely to faze the powers that be in Afghanistan, since most
of the country's real money comes from taxing non-dope trade. Nor will it
bother the drug traffickers, who swarm the region and are shifting production
north and west into such places as Turkmenistan. As of last month, the U.S.
had committed $124 million in aid to Afghanistan, according to the State
Department. Meanwhile, Iran, which harbors some 2 million Afghan refugees and
is fighting massive drug addiction, has sent agricultural engineers north to
help repair Afghanistan's irrigation systems.
Last week Milt Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Sudan,
argued in The Wall Street Journal that the Bush administration should take a
"more restrained approach" to bin Laden. "There may be a realization that the
two years of unrestrained rhetoric of the Clinton administration following
the 1998 attacks in Africa may have done little more than inflate the myth
that has inspired others to harm Americans," he wrote.
None of this has changed the impression most people here have of the Taliban.
Helms and her cohorts have a lot of work to do. As she freely admits, the
Taliban leaders "are considered fascists, tyrants, Pol Pots. They can't do
anything right. We perceive them as monsters no matter what they do."
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