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NOTE. Send links, commentary and feedback to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-Borzou Daragahi
***
NOBLE’S TOMB. According to legend, Mazar-e-Sharif is the seventh-century
burial site of Ali, cousin and son-in-law of Mohammad, and an important
figure in both Sunni and Shiite cosmologies. After Ali was assassinated
in a squabble over succession following Mohammad’s death, his followers
(the shia, or associates, of Ali) tied his body to the back of a camel
and let it loose. Ali was buried where the camel died, which, according
to the legend, was at Mazar-e-Sharif, or Noble’s Tomb. In all
likelihood, however, Ali was buried back where he was assassinated: in
present-day Iraq.
After heavy bombardment and a ground offensive aided by U.S. advisors
(i.e. spooks, commandos and other unsavory military specialists),
Northern Alliance forces have wrested control of the key northern Afghan
city of Mazar-e-Sharif from the Taliban, with government forces fleeing
the city for Kabul and points south. ``For seven days continuously they
have been bombing Taliban positions,” Taliban news agency chief Abdul
Henan Hemat said. “They used very large bombs.”
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011110/ts/attacks_afghanistan_689.html
If the Northern Alliance, with U.S. air and ground support, is able to
hold onto Mazar-e-Sharif, the U.S. would have an overland route to
funnel troops and toys from Uzbekistan into landlocked Afghanistan. “As
important as Kabul is, taking Mazar-e-Sharif is even more important,”
says a password-protected piece on the website of Strategic Forecasting,
a private intelligence, military and diplomacy think-tank. “It could be
used as an invasion route for U.S. ground forces from Uzbekistan next
spring. Taking the city would also mean cutting the Taliban forces in
the north into two isolate groups, one in western Afghanistan and
another in the northeast. That would make it easier for the opposition
to defeat significant Taliban formations and clear all of northern
Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance would also establish direct
communication and supply lines via Mazar-e-Sharif between its forces in
northwestern and northeastern Afghanistan.”
http://www.stratfor.com
Lest the U.S. and Northern Alliance pat themselves too heartily on the
backs, they should recall that Mazar-e-Sharif was held by the opposition
forces until 1998, when their own blundering, bickering and backstabbing
led to the loss of the city. They should also keep in mind that the
people of Mazar-e-Sharif, mostly ethnic Uzbeks and Turkmen, view the
ethnic Pashtun Taliban as a brutal occupying force. "People are firing
their guns into the air in celebration," Mahmad Azim, 32, a businessman
in town reached by telephone shortly before midnight, told the
Washington Post. "The Taliban have run away."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5126-2001Nov9.html
In fact, once the Northern Alliance broke through Taliban encampments
outside of the city, they traipsed into town without a hitch. "There was
very little fighting inside the city," a Northern Alliance spokesman
conceded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/10/international/10MILI.html
The Northern Alliance will also likely have an easy time taking the
once-cosmopolitan, deeply historical city of Heart, which Lonely Planet
describes as a “green, laze-about” oasis that “sits particularly
uneasily under puritan Taliban rule.”
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/middle_east/afghanistan/attractions.htm
It will be a different story in the Taliban-controlled cities of the
south, where the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance and the U.S. will have
little credibility. An intelligence officer in Kandahar who expressed a
desire to get out of the clutches of the Taliban’s rule and “listen to
music again,” railed against the U.S. when he came upon an American
propaganda leaflet showing a photograph of Taliban religious police
beating a woman. "Who are these Americans to interfere with our
customs?" he told a French reporter held in the city.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=104023
Even Afghans fleeing Kandahar for the refugee camps of Pakistan take a
dim view of the bombing campaign and say support for the Taliban remains
strong. "The Americans said they would only target Osama bin Laden's
bases," Abdul Mohammed, a shop owner from Kandahar, told the Washington
Post. "But now they are killing ordinary Afghan people, so people think
that the Afghan people are America's enemy, not just the Taliban and bin
Laden."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58791-2001Nov7.html
Militarily, too, Mazar was an easy catch. Only about 5,000, or less than
10%, of the Taliban’s soldiers are based in the Mazar-e-Sharif area,
according to Strategic Forecasting. “In the east, 25,000 fighters are
deployed in five loose, brigade-size formations around Khost-Jalalabad
-- between the capital Kabul and the Pakistani border -- in order to
guard the Salang Pass, a strategic supply route. In the south and east,
another 25,000 fighters protect the Taliban headquarters at Kandahar.”
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0111092300.htm
The Northern Alliance has said it can defeat the Taliban on without a
massive U.S. ground force. But the Alliance is known for its
exaggerations. And besides, the aerial bombing campaign reinforces the
view abroad that the U.S. is unwilling to risk its own citizens but more
than willing to cause suffering among innocent Afghans to achieve its
objectives. More practically, military planners in the U.S. are saying
there’s no way to topple the Taliban and root out al Qa’ida forces in
the Afghanistan without a ground invasion. "To have any success in
Afghanistan ... you need conventional forces to secure territory," says
retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Robert Johnston, who commanded U.S. forces
in Somalia in 1993 and was chief of staff to Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf
during the Gulf War. “A common scenario calls for up to 100,000 troops
who would move into Afghanistan by spring or summer to control major
cities, set up bases and hunt down the enemy,” reports the Nov. 9 USA
Today.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2001/11/09/cover.htm#more
***
THE RIFT. Is the U.S. in danger of alienating the U.K.? In a Nov. 9
report based on interviews with unnamed British government sources, the
Guardian writes of a widening disparity of views within the U.S.-U.K.
coalition over the prosecution of the war on terrorism. Especially
irksome to some Brits are U.S. rumblings about bombing Iraq after
finishing up with Afghanistan. “One British minister said that bombing
Iraq would be catastrophic because women and children would be killed
and the consequences for the US and Britain in the Arab world would be
unimaginably dangerous,” the Guardian reports. “He warned that US and
British embassies in the Arab world would have to close and British
civilians would have to be advised to leave the area. He feared that
moderate Arab regimes would be swept away.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,590474,00.html
It’s not just Brits’ support the U.S. is in danger of losing. The
populaces of many countries are openly hostile to the U.S. campaign. "I
think the government of President Bush has gone too far; the war
frightens me," Guadalupe Loaeza, a columnist who helped organize an
altar dedicated to victims of Sept. 11, says in the Nov. 7 Washington
Post. A poll in France showed support has dropped to 51 percent, down
from 66 percent shortly after the bombing bega. In Germany, polls show
more than 65 percent of respondents now want the U.S. attacks to end. In
Spain, a poll showed 69 percent want the bombing to stop. And 46 percent
of Russians are convinced the U.S. will fail. "I think the United States
has been too harsh and unreasonable," said Tong Zhifan, 22, in Beijing.
"It's big and powerful, and it doesn't care how others feel. You can't
behave like that. Isn't that why America was attacked?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51068-2001Nov6.html
Comments like those in the Post article above rarely filter down to
American ears. Television, the main conduit for news in the U.S., mostly
keeps Americans in the dark about how others view the war. “After two
months, American television's cautious approach has turned into
knee-jerk pandering to the public, reflecting a mood of patriotism
rather than informing viewers of the complex, sometimes harsh realities
they need to know,” writes Caryn James in the Nov. 9 New York Times.
“Even as American reporters are expressing frustration at how fiercely
the Pentagon is controlling information, the emphasis is not on getting
better answers but on covering ‘the propaganda war’ in the shallow,
horse-race way elections usually are — who's winning?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/09/national/09CRIT.html
***
CIA-BIN LADEN? French media have reported that Osama bin Laden was
treated for kidney problems July at an American hospital in Dubai, where
he met with CIA agent Larry Mitchell, described by French radio as "a
connoisseur of the Arab world and specialist of the (Arab) peninsula,"
reports UPI. “According to both the radio and
Le Figaro [the prominent French newspaper] Mitchell was recalled to the
CIA's headquarters in McLean, Va., on July 15. The radio also gave the
precise date of Mitchell's supposed encounter with bin Laden -- July 12,
two days before the Saudi dissident reportedly checked out of the
hospital.” Not one major U.S. newspaper carried this report, although
Fox News mentioned it. If you read French, here’s a link report in the
Figaro:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=FutureTense/Apps/Xcelerate/View&c=figArticle&cid=FIGJMSRVETC&live=true&Site=true&gCurChannel=ZZZJTGN6J7C&gCurRubrique=ZZZ4GPM6J7C&gCurSubRubrique
And here’s a link to bad translation of it using the Google translation
tool:
http://translate.google.com/translate_c?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lefigaro.fr%2Fcgi-bin%2Fgx.cgi%2FAppLogic%2BFTContentServer%3Fpagename%3DFutureTense%2FApps%2FXcelerate%2FView%26c%3DfigArticle%26cid%3DFIGJMSRVETC%26live%3Dtrue%26Site%3Dtrue%26gCurChannel%3DZZZJTGN6J7C%26gCurRubrique%3DZZZ4GPM6J7C%26gCurSubRubrique%3D&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=en
***
ENCYLOPEDIA TERROSTICA. Western intelligence agencies have found a
7,000-page guide — circulated as either an 11-volume book or a CD-ROM –
“detailing every aspect of how to fight a guerrilla war, from
biochemical attacks to finding the fatal pressure point during
hand-to-hand combat,” reports the Nov. 4 Times of London. “It offers
guidance on how to inject frozen food with biochemical agents to create
mass panic, rig up a door lock to explode when the handle is turned, and
bring down a plane with a missile.”
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/11/04/stiusausa02024.html
***
WEST CHINA, NEXT? The U.S. government is seeking experienced speakers of
Uyghur, the Turkic language spoken by the 150 million to 200 million
Muslims of western China, currently treated harshly by Beijing as
suspected sympathizers of al Qa’ida cells that have allegedly popped up
in the area. “Successful candidates must be able to translate written
Uyghur into good, idiomatic English, and must be able to read both Latin
and Arabic forms of Uyghur,” says a help wanted ad. Send an email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Turdi Ghoja,of the Uyghur American
Association, summarizes China’s little-noticed treatment of Uyghurs in
(of all places) the National Review, the rightwing American weekly.
“China wants to take advantage of the global war on terrorism to
legitimize its indulgence in killing, torturing and imprisoning
Uyghurs,” he says. “Apparently, China saw the international climate as
an opportunity to make the execution list longer this year, without
causing too much criticism from the international communities."
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-noonanprint110901.html
***
BACK OF THE BOOK. Read poetry, literature and journalism by Afghani
exiles in a classy webzine. In one short story, an Afghan refugee
describes his fellow countrymen as he arrives in Pakistani camp. “They
all seemed tired and worried, head to toe covered with dust under the
hot sun of Peshawar that poured arrowheads of fire at them. They wore
patched and old clothes. Most of them were staring at the ground as if
they had lost some thing very precious and were searching to find it.”
http://www.afghanmagazine.com/2001/2001.html
***
MAILBAG
* Jed in Brooklyn found a Time.com article about the child-warriors of
the Northern Alliance nearly comical. “Time's so out of control and the
situation is so surreal that despite the true horror of it all, this
piece at moments reads like something from the Onion,” writes Jed. "I am
small now," 10-year-old Najibullah, who already knows how to fire a
Kalashnikov, tells Time.com. “But I will be big when I shoot the Taliban
who killed my aunt and uncle.”
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,182805,00.html
* Zora in Queens found a magazine on the newsstands called, "Operation
Enduring Freedom,” probably one of those quickie custom-publishing jobs
in the tradition of the Princess Diana and John Kennedy Jr. tributes. It
features “super-glossy, detailed stories on military hardware--high end
war porn, for the same people who buy mags about WWII bombers. It
certainly looked weird in the supermarket checkout line next to 'Rosie'
and 'Teen People.'”
* Chris in Washington questions the competence of the world’s remaining
superpower. Apparently the U.S. is using Russian intelligence to help
identify caves, tunnels and other command centers used by Afghan forces.
“So, let me get this straight,” writes Chris. “The US is buying
intelligence from the former Soviet Union collected about caves used by
the ‘Afghan forces’ that were funded, trained and given tactical
assistance by the US????”
***
ENDNOTE. The Dallas Morning News reports that Texans are seeking
licenses to carry concealed weapons like never before. Requests for
applications for concealed-weapons licenses have nearly tripled in the
last two months, according to the Texas Department for Public Safety.
"They're buying a gun because they're saying, 'I don't know what's going
to happen. I don't know that there's not going to be civil unrest,' "
said Ken Goldberg, owner of DFW Gun Range and Firing Center in the Love
Field area. Forget Turbans. Beware men sporting cowboy hats.
http://www.dallasnews.com/texas_southwest/STORY.ea0a45ee4c.b0.af.0.a4.aee84.html
###
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