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US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11
By Patrick Martin -20 November 2001
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/afgh-n20.shtml
Insider accounts published in the British, French and
Indian media have
revealed that US officials threatened war against
Afghanistan during
the summer of 2001. These reports include the
prediction, made in July,
that “if the military action went ahead, it would take
place before the
snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of
October at the
latest.” The Bush administration began its bombing
strikes on the
hapless, poverty-stricken country October 7, and
ground attacks by US
Special Forces began October 19.
It is not an accident that these revelations have
appeared overseas,
rather than in the US. The ruling classes in these
countries have their
own economic and political interests to look after,
which do not
coincide, and in some cases directly clash, with the
drive by the
American ruling elite to seize control of oil-rich
territory in Central
Asia.
The American media has conducted a systematic cover-up
of the real
economic and strategic interests that underlie the war
against
Afghanistan, in order to sustain the pretense that the
war emerged
overnight, full-blown, in response to the terrorist
attacks of
September 11.
The pundits for the American television networks and
major daily
newspapers celebrate the rapid military defeat of the
Taliban regime as
an unexpected stroke of good fortune. They distract
public attention
from the conclusion that any serious observer would be
compelled to
draw from the events of the past two weeks: that the
speedy victory of
the US-backed forces reveals careful planning and
preparation by the
American military, which must have begun well before
the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The official American myth is that “everything
changed” on the day four
airliners were hijacked and nearly 5,000 people
murdered. The US
military intervention in Afghanistan, by this account,
was hastily
improvised in less than a month. Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, in a television interview November 18,
actually claimed that
only three weeks went into planning the military
onslaught.
This is only one of countless lies emanating from the
Pentagon and
White House about the war against Afghanistan. The
truth is that the US
intervention was planned in detail and carefully
prepared long before
the terrorist attacks provided the pretext for setting
it in motion. If
history had skipped over September 11, and the events
of that day had
never happened, it is very likely that the United
States would have
gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the
same schedule.
Afghanistan and the scramble for oil
The United States ruling elite has been contemplating
war in Central
Asia for at least a decade. As long ago as 1991,
following the defeat
of Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, Newsweek magazine
published an article
headlined “Operation Steppe Shield?” It reported that
the US military
was preparing an operation in Kazakhstan modeled on
the Operation
Desert Shield deployment in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
Iraq.
If the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union provided
the opportunity
for the projection of American power into Central
Asia, the discovery
of vast oil and gas reserves provided the incentive.
While the Caspian
Sea coast of Azerbaijan (Baku) has been an oil
production center for a
century, it was only in the past decade that huge new
reserves were
discovered in the northwest Caspian (Kazakhstan) and
in Turkmenistan,
near the southwest Caspian.
American oil companies have acquired rights to as much
as 75 percent of
the output of these new fields, and US government
officials have hailed
the Caspian and Central Asia as a potential
alternative to dependence
on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region. American
troops have
followed in the wake of these contracts. US Special
Forces began joint
operations with Kazakhstan in 1997 and with Uzbekistan
a year later,
training for intervention especially in the
mountainous southern region
that includes Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern
Afghanistan.
The major problem in exploiting the energy riches of
Central Asia is
how to get the oil and gas from the landlocked region
to the world
market. US officials have opposed using either the
Russian pipeline
system or the easiest available land route, across
Iran to the Persian
Gulf. Instead, over the past decade, US oil companies
and government
officials have explored a series of alternative
pipeline routes—west
through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the
Mediterranean; east
through Kazakhstan and China to the Pacific; and, most
relevant to the
current crisis, south from Turkmenistan across western
Afghanistan and
Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.
The Afghanistan pipeline route was pushed by the
US-based Unocal oil
company, which engaged in intensive negotiations with
the Taliban
regime. These talks, however, ended in disarray in
1998, as US
relations with Afghanistan were inflamed by the
bombing of US embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania, for which Osama bin Laden was
held responsible.
In August 1998, the Clinton administration launched
cruise missile
attacks on alleged bin Laden training camps in eastern
Afghanistan. The
US government demanded that the Taliban hand over bin
Laden and imposed
economic sanctions. The pipeline talks languished.
Subverting the Taliban
Throughout 1999 the US pressure on Afghanistan
increased. On February 3
of that year, Assistant Secretary of State Karl E.
Inderfurth and State
Department counterterrorism chief Michael Sheehan
traveled to
Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet the Taliban’s deputy
foreign minister,
Abdul Jalil. They warned him that the US would hold
the government of
Afghanistan responsible for any further terrorist acts
by bin Laden.
According to a report in the Washington Post (October
3, 2001), the
Clinton administration and Nawaz Sharif, then
president of Pakistan,
agreed on a joint covert operation to kill Osama bin
Laden in 1999. The
US would supply satellite intelligence, air support
and financing,
while Pakistan supplied the Pushtun-speaking
operatives who would
penetrate southern Afghanistan and carry out the
actual killing.
The Pakistani commando team was up and running and
ready to strike by
October 1999, the Post reported. One former official
told the
newspaper, “It was an enterprise. It was proceeding.”
Clinton aides
were delighted at the prospect of a successful
assassination, with one
declaring, “It was like Christmas.”
The attack was aborted on October 12, 1999, when
Sharif was overthrown
in a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf, who
halted the proposed
covert operation. The Clinton administration had to
settle for a UN
Security Council resolution that demanded the Taliban
turn over bin
Laden to “appropriate authorities,” but did not
require he be handed
over to the United States.
McFarlane and Abdul Haq
US subversion against the Taliban continued in 2000,
according to an
account published November 2 in the Wall Street
Journal, written by
Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser in
the Reagan
administration. McFarlane was hired by two wealthy
Chicago commodity
speculators, Joseph and James Ritchie, to assist them
in recruiting and
organizing anti-Taliban guerrillas among Afghan
refugees in Pakistan.
Their principal Afghan contact was Abdul Haq, the
former mujahedin
leader who was executed by the Taliban last month
after an unsuccessful
attempt to spark a revolt in his home province.
McFarlane held meetings with Abdul Haq and other
former mujahedin in
the course of the fall and winter of 2000. After the
Bush
administration took office, McFarlane parlayed his
Republican
connections into a series of meetings with State
Department, Pentagon
and even White House officials. All encouraged the
preparation of an
anti-Taliban military campaign.
During the summer, long before the United States
launched airstrikes on
the Taliban, James Ritchie traveled to Tajikistan with
Abdul Haq and
Peter Tomsen, who had been the US special envoy to the
Afghan
opposition during the first Bush administration. There
they met with
Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern
Alliance, with the goal
of coordinating their Pakistan-based attacks with the
only military
force still offering resistance to the Taliban.
Finally, according to McFarlane, Abdul Haq “decided in
mid-August to go
ahead and launch operations in Afghanistan. He
returned to Peshawar,
Pakistan, to make final preparations.” In other words,
this phase of
the anti-Taliban war was under way well before
September 11.
While the Ritchies have been portrayed in the American
media as
freelance operators motivated by emotional ties to
Afghanistan, a
country they lived in briefly while their father
worked as a civil
engineer in the 1950s, at least one report suggests a
link to the oil
pipeline discussions with the Taliban. In 1998 James
Ritchie visited
Afghanistan to discuss with the Taliban a plan to
sponsor small
businesses there. He was accompanied by an official
from Delta Oil of
Saudi Arabia, which was seeking to build a gas
pipeline across
Afghanistan in partnership with an Argentine firm.
A CIA secret war
McFarlane’s revelations come in the course of a bitter
diatribe against
the CIA for “betraying” Abdul Haq, failing to back his
operations in
Afghanistan, and leaving him to die at the hands of
the Taliban. The
CIA evidently regarded both McFarlane and Abdul Haq as
less than
reliable—and it had its own secret war going on in the
same region, the
southern half of Afghanistan where the population is
predominantly
Pushtun-speaking.
According to a front-page article in the Washington
Post November 18,
the CIA has been mounting paramilitary operations in
southern
Afghanistan since 1997. The article carries the byline
of Bob Woodward,
the Post writer made famous by Watergate, who is a
frequent conduit for
leaks from top-level military and intelligence
officials.
Woodward provides details about the CIA’s role in the
current military
conflict, which includes the deployment of a secret
paramilitary unit,
the Special Activities Division. This force began
combat on September
27, using both operatives on the ground and Predator
surveillance
drones equipped with missiles that could be launched
by remote control.
The Special Activities Division, Woodward reports,
“consists of teams
of about half a dozen men who do not wear military
uniforms. The
division has about 150 fighters, pilots and
specialists, and is made up
mostly of hardened veterans who have retired from the
US military.
“For the last 18 months, the CIA has been working with
tribes and
warlords in southern Afghanistan, and the division’s
units have helped
create a significant new network in the region of the
Taliban’s
greatest strength.”
This means that the US spy agency was engaged in
attacks against the
Afghan regime—what under other circumstances the
American government
would call terrorism—from the spring of 2000, more
than a year before
the suicide hijackings that destroyed the World Trade
Center and
damaged the Pentagon.
War plans take shape
With the installation of George Bush in the White
House, the focus of
American policy in Afghanistan shifted from a limited
incursion to kill
or capture bin Laden to preparing a more robust
military intervention
directed at the Taliban regime as a whole.
The British-based Jane’s International Security
reported March 15, 2001
that the new American administration was working with
India, Iran and
Russia “in a concerted front against Afghanistan’s
Taliban regime.”
India was supplying the Northern Alliance with
military equipment,
advisers and helicopter technicians, the magazine
said, and both India
and Russia were using bases in Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan for their
operations.
The magazine added: “Several recent meetings between
the newly
instituted Indo-US and Indo-Russian joint working
groups on terrorism
led to this effort to tactically and logistically
counter the Taliban.
Intelligence sources in Delhi said that while India,
Russia and Iran
were leading the anti-Taliban campaign on the ground,
Washington was
giving the Northern Alliance information and logistic
support.”
On May 23, the White House announced the appointment
of Zalmay
Khalilzad to a position on the National Security
Council as special
assistant to the president and senior director for
Gulf, Southwest Asia
and Other Regional Issues. Khalilzad is a former
official in the Reagan
and the first Bush administrations. After leaving the
government, he
went to work for Unocal.
On June 26 of this year, the magazine IndiaReacts
reported more details
of the cooperative efforts of the US, India, Russia
and Iran against
the Taliban regime. “India and Iran will ‘facilitate’
US and Russian
plans for ‘limited military action’ against the
Taliban if the
contemplated tough new economic sanctions don’t bend
Afghanistan’s
fundamentalist regime,” the magazine said.
At this stage of military planning, the US and Russia
were to supply
direct military assistance to the Northern Alliance,
working through
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, in order to roll back the
Taliban lines
toward the city of Mazar-e-Sharif—a scenario
strikingly similar to what
actually took place over the past two weeks. An
unnamed third country
supplied the Northern Alliance with anti-tank rockets
that had already
been put to use against the Taliban in early June.
“Diplomats say that the anti-Taliban move followed a
meeting between US
Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign
Minister Igor
Ivanov and later between Powell and Indian Foreign
Minister Jaswant
Singh in Washington,” the magazine added. “Russia,
Iran and India have
also held a series of discussions and more diplomatic
activity is
expected.”
Unlike the current campaign, the original plan
involved the use of
military forces from both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan,
as well as Russia
itself. IndiaReacts said that in early June Russian
President Vladimir
Putin told a meeting of the Confederation of
Independent States, which
includes many of the former Soviet republics, that
military action
against the Taliban was in the offing. One effect of
September 11 was
to create the conditions for the United States to
intervene on its own,
without any direct participation by the military
forces of the Soviet
successor states, and thus claim an undisputed
American right to
dictate the shape of a settlement in Afghanistan.
The US threatens war—before September 11
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on
the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, two reports appeared in the
British media
indicating that the US government had threatened
military action
against Afghanistan several months before September
11.
The BBC’s George Arney reported September 18 that
American officials
had told former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik
in mid-July of
plans for military action against the Taliban regime:
“Mr. Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a
UN-sponsored
international contact group on Afghanistan which took
place in Berlin.
“Mr. Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US
representatives told
him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly
America would take
military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden and
the Taliban
leader, Mullah Omar.
“The wider objective, according to Mr. Naik, would be
to topple the
Taliban regime and install a transitional government
of moderate
Afghans in its place—possibly under the leadership of
the former Afghan
King Zahir Shah.
“Mr. Naik was told that Washington would launch its
operation from
bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were
already in place.
“He was told that Uzbekistan would also participate in
the operation
and that 17,000 Russian troops were on standby.
“Mr. Naik was told that if the military action went
ahead it would take
place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan,
by the middle of
October at the latest.”
Four days later, on September 22, the Guardian
newspaper confirmed this
account. The warnings to Afghanistan came out of a
four-day meeting of
senior US, Russian, Iranian and Pakistani officials at
a hotel in
Berlin in mid-July, the third in a series of
back-channel conferences
dubbed “brainstorming on Afghanistan.”
The participants included Naik, together with three
Pakistani generals;
former Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Saeed
Rajai Khorassani;
Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the Northern
Alliance; Nikolai
Kozyrev, former Russian special envoy to Afghanistan,
and several other
Russian officials; and three Americans: Tom Simons, a
former US
ambassador to Pakistan; Karl Inderfurth, a former
assistant secretary
of state for south Asian affairs; and Lee Coldren, who
headed the
office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh affairs in
the State
Department until 1997.
The meeting was convened by Francesc Vendrell, then
and now the chief
UN representative for Afghanistan. While the nominal
purpose of the
conference was to discuss the possible outline of a
political
settlement in Afghanistan, the Taliban refused to
attend. The Americans
discussed the shift in policy toward Afghanistan from
Clinton to Bush,
and strongly suggested that military action was an
option.
While all three American former officials denied
making any specific
threats, Coldren told the Guardian, “there was some
discussion of the
fact that the United States was so disgusted with the
Taliban that they
might be considering some military action.” Naik,
however, cited one
American declaring that action against bin Laden was
imminent: “This
time they were very sure. They had all the
intelligence and would not
miss him this time. It would be aerial action, maybe
helicopter
gunships, and not only overt, but from very close
proximity to
Afghanistan.”
The Guardian summarized: “The threats of war unless
the Taliban
surrendered Osama bin Laden were passed to the regime
in Afghanistan by
the Pakistani government, senior diplomatic sources
revealed yesterday.
The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature
of what they were
told raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from
launching the
attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the
Pentagon out of
the blue 10 days ago, was launching a pre-emptive
strike in response to
what he saw as US threats.”
Bush, oil and Taliban
Further light on secret contacts between the Bush
administration and
the Taliban regime is shed by a book released November
15 in France,
entitled Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth, written by
Jean-Charles
Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Brisard is a former
French secret
service agent, author of a previous report on bin
Laden’s Al Qaeda
network, and former director of strategy for the
French corporation
Vivendi, while Dasquie is an investigative journalist.
The two French authors write that the Bush
administration was willing
to accept the Taliban regime, despite the charges of
sponsoring
terrorism, if it cooperated with plans for the
development of the oil
resources of Central Asia.
Until August, they claim, the US government saw the
Taliban “as a
source of stability in Central Asia that would enable
the construction
of an oil pipeline across Central Asia.” It was only
when the Taliban
refused to accept US conditions that “this rationale
of energy security
changed into a military one.”
By way of corroboration, one should note the curious
fact that neither
the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration
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 regime. Such a
designation would
have made it impossible for an American oil or
construction company to
sign a deal with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central
Asian oil and gas
fields.
Talks between the Bush administration and the Taliban
began in February
2001, shortly after Bush’s inauguration. A Taliban
emissary arrived in
Washington in March with presents for the new chief
executive,
including an expensive Afghan carpet. But the talks
themselves were
less than cordial. Brisard said, “At one moment during
the
negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban,
‘either you
accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you
under a carpet of
bombs’.”
As long as the possibility of a pipeline deal
remained, the White House
stalled any further investigation into the activities
of Osama bin
Laden, Brisard and Dasquie write. They report that
John O’Neill, deputy
director of the FBI, resigned in July in protest over
this obstruction.
O’Neill told them in an interview, “the main obstacles
to investigate
Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and
the role played
by Saudi Arabia in it.” In a strange coincidence,
O’Neill accepted a
position as security chief of the World Trade Center
after leaving the
FBI, and was killed on September 11.
Confirming Naiz Naik’s account of the secret Berlin
meeting, the two
French authors add that there was open discussion of
the need for the
Taliban to facilitate a pipeline from Kazakhstan in
order to insure US
and international recognition. The increasingly
acrimonious US-Taliban
talks were broken off August 2, after a final meeting
between US envoy
Christina Rocca and a Taliban representative in
Islamabad. Two months
later the United States was bombing Kabul.
The politics of provocation
This account of the preparations for war against
Afghanistan brings us
to September 11 itself. The terrorist attack that
destroyed the World
Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon was an important
link in the
chain of causality that produced the US attack on
Afghanistan. The US
government had planned the war well in advance, but
the shock of
September 11 made it politically feasible, by
stupefying public opinion
at home and giving Washington essential leverage on
reluctant allies
abroad.
Both the American public and dozens of foreign
governments were
stampeded into supporting military action against
Afghanistan, in the
name of the fight against terrorism. The Bush
administration targeted
Kabul without presenting any evidence that either bin
Laden or the
Taliban regime was responsible for the World Trade
Center atrocity. It
seized on September 11 as the occasion for advancing
longstanding
ambitions to assert American power in Central Asia.
There is no reason to think that September 11 was
merely a fortuitous
occurrence. Every other detail of the war in
Afghanistan was carefully
prepared. It is unlikely that the American government
left to chance
the question of providing a suitable pretext for
military action.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, there were
press reports—
again, largely overseas—that US intelligence agencies
had received
specific warnings about large-scale terrorist attacks,
including the
use of hijacked airplanes. It is quite possible that a
decision was
made at the highest levels of the American state to
allow such an
attack to proceed, perhaps without imagining the
actual scale of the
damage, in order to provide the necessary spark for
war in Afghanistan.
How otherwise to explain such well-established facts
as the decision of
top officials at the FBI to block an investigation
into Zaccarias
Massaoui, the Franco-Moroccan immigrant who came under
suspicion after
he allegedly sought training from a US flight school
on how to steer a
commercial airliner, but not to take off or land?
The Minneapolis field office had Massaoui arrested in
early August, and
asked FBI headquarters for permission to conduct
further inquiries,
including a search of the hard drive of his computer.
The FBI tops
refused, on the grounds that there was insufficient
evidence of
criminal intent on Massaoui’s part—an astonishing
decision for an
agency not known for its tenderness on the subject of
civil liberties.
This is not to say that the American government
deliberately planned
every detail of the terrorist attacks or anticipated
that nearly 5,000
people would be killed. But the least likely
explanation of September
11 is the official one: that dozens of Islamic
fundamentalists, many
with known ties to Osama bin Laden, were able to carry
out a wide-
ranging conspiracy on three continents, targeting the
most prominent
symbols of American power, without any US intelligence
agency having
the slightest idea of what they were doing.
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