Afghan hounds of war By Zvi Bar'el - Ha'aretz, September 28, 2001
It takes a month to weave an Afghan rug three meters square. Three members of a family will work for more than 16 hours a day, every day, almost nonstop, in order to complete the rug. For its work, the family will receive, at the end of the month, a sum of money which is the equivalent of $60. The work is hard, and above all, painful. The joints of the fingers and the hands suffer from a shortage of blood, the knees grow stiff and the back is twisted. To help overcome these pains, the Afghan weavers take opium, which both assuages the pain and relieves their exhaustion. In the refugee cities that sprang up in Pakistan during the years of the war in Afghanistan, from the Soviet occupation in 1979 to the Taleban's conquests and effectively to this day, millions of Afghan refugees continue to make their living from this refugee economy - which includes the carpet industry, the supply of opium and the smuggling of goods along a trail that begins in Dubai in the Persian Gulf, via Iran to Afghanistan, and from there to Pakistan. This economy is structured, with an internal order of its own, along with officials, inspectors, a transportation network, drug refiners, escorts, security providers and arms manufacturers. Each person, or more accurately each tribe in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan - an area that stretches across more than 1,500 kilometers - has its "area of responsibility" and living area. Each tribal chieftain and the head of every large family in these territories has a small army of bodyguards and escorts whose job it is to ensure that the economy is running properly. It's an area in which neither the Pakistan government nor the Afghan government has any control. Here the law of the tribe rules, and particularly the law of the Pashtun tribe, or as it's known, the "Pashtun Way." Under this law, executions are carried out at the mere rumor of an affront to someone's dignity, betrayal, or desecration of the family honor, even without clear-cut proof. The Pashtun Way is not just the way of these tribespeople, it is also the way of the Taleban: young people who grew up in orphanages in the refugee cities just across the border in Pakistan, which became Afghan cities to all intents and purposes. These young people adopted the religious interpretation based on the extreme school of Abd al-Ala al-Mawdudi, known as the Deobandi school, a rigorous doctrine named for the city of Deoband, north of New Delhi in India. At the same time, they also grew accustomed to the lifestyle of the refugee cities and the orphanages. They were a group of men who had no acquaintance with women, according to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. Women were not seen even in their houses: hence the rules of deportment toward women that they introduced. Theirs is a male society that resembles that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or the United Revolutionary Front in Sierra Leone. In the cities where they grew up, the Taleban also observed the arrangements of the "trade and economy" that were introduced by the drug lords; they implemented the system in Afghanistan when they began their victory campaign from Kandahar to Kabul and from there to the west of the country and northward. In the first years of the Taleban's consolidation of their rule, and particularly after they took Kabul in 1996, the Americans believed that Taleban rule was the best option for Afghanistan, as the country would at last know order and proper government. Meanwhile, the heads of the Pakistani mafia were able to continue operating freely, drawing on the relationships they had developed in the Taleban's formative years. Mafia connections The Americans wanted to eradicate the drug trade in Afghanistan, while the Pakistani mafia desired "only" to ensure the movement of the drugs from Afghanistan to Pakistan. The government of Pakistan wanted to stop the mass smuggling, which was causing the country losses of billions of dollars a year, but the Pakistani mafia was not impressed. According to data of Pakistan's state revenues authority (the counterpart of the income tax department), Pakistan lost about $87.5 million in customs duties in 1992-93, the years in which the Taleban launched the campaign of conquest. Three years later, when the Taleban had established itself in Afghanistan, Pakistan lost more than $2.5 billion in customs levies. The Pakistani-Afghan transportation mafia dictated not only the type of goods that were smuggled and the country of destination, but also the route of the Taleban's conquests. At one stage, for example, the mafia barons urged the Taleban to capture the city of Herat, which is not far from Turkmenistan, in order to gain total control of the trade route. The route begins on one side in the city of Kwetta, in Pakistan, goes through Kandahar and then winds northwest through Herat to Turkmenistan; while on the other side it stretches from Iran into Afghanistan and from there, again through Herat, to Turkmenistan and then into the rest of the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. So it was vital to take Herat, particularly after the ruler there, Ismail Khan, began taking a fee of $250 for every truck that passed through the city on the way to Turkmenistan. The Taleban, according to unauthoritative sources, demanded and received more than $1.5 million to conduct that campaign. Pakistani intelligence, which trained, advised and funded most of the Taleban's activity from the time the movement was founded, urged the Taleban not to try to take Herat because it didn't yet have the military capability to capture the city, and especially because the intelligence officials hoped that Ismail Khan would be able to serve as a commander on their behalf to capture Kabul. The Taleban, hoping to seize control of the entire smuggling and drug trail, ignored the Pakistanis' advice, launched an assault on Herat and suffered a stinging defeat, the first in their history. At a later stage, the Taleban themselves took over the transportation industry in Afghanistan, acquiring a fleet of trucks, and with the smuggling routes under their exclusive control, they were in a position to forgo the economic aid offered by Pakistan. In any event, that aid had been dwindling in the wake of Pakistan's realization that the Taleban did not intend to carry out their orders any longer. Moreover, the Taleban began employing top bureaucrats in Pakistan, granting important liaison personnel in Islamabad franchises to supply oil and other basic commodities. One of the key liaison people was the husband of Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, whose confidants were given franchises to supply oil to Afghanistan. Such franchises, which enriched the leaders of the government in Pakistan - and the Taleban leadership, too - became an important means of financing for the Taleban to continue their campaigns of conquest. But the Taleban and their Pakistani partners are also teaching the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf, the current leader of Pakistan, a lesson. Earlier this year the merchants of the border towns declared a strike and announced that they were ready to go to war against the Musharraf regime if it persisted in its demand to impose taxes on the trade in smuggled goods. The implications of that announcement were not lost on Musharraf. The merchants in the border regions are also tribal chieftains and allies of the Taleban, and had the ability to set in motion a wave of violent protests throughout Pakistan. Musharraf decided to spare himself that confrontation. Dream world American firms also wanted to get a slice of the dream world that Afghanistan promised under the rule of the Taleban. If the U.S. administration had hoped that a single, united force would be able to impose order in the country; create a buffer state between Russian influence and Iranian influence; and make Pakistan, America's ally, the effective ruler of Afghanistan even from afar, that was nothing compared to the bonanza Afghanistan held out for the American oil companies. In hearings on Afghanistan held by the U.S. Senate in 1996, the most impressive speaker was not a representative of Afghanistan but Martin Miller, the vice president of Unocal, the Texas-based oil conglomerate. Miller was in charge of the oil pipeline that was supposed to be installed from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. According to his testimony, the pipeline would be able to carry a million barrels of oil a day, and within a few years, after a few more oil producing countries hooked in, the supply could total five million barrels a day. At the time, the State Department had not formulated a coherent policy toward the Taleban. The Central Intelligence Agency didn't want to get involved with Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, and all the U.S. administration had to say after the Taleban took Kabul was that it was in favor of a broad-based government in Afghanistan. A meaningless concept. Richard Mackenzie, a journalist who has covered Afghanistan, says he was told by a State Department official that "when you get to know them [the Taleban], you discover that they have a wonderful sense of humor." It would take two more years before the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, came out with a vigorous statement concerning human rights as practiced by the Taleban. Until then, Unocal believed it had a mandate to go on with its oil pipeline project. Unocal recruited everyone it could to promote the project and to get accurate analyses of the situation in Afghanistan. One of those on its payroll, for example, was Robert Oakley, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan, while the payroll of the Saudi firm Delta, a partner of Unocal, included Charles Santos, the former head of a United Nations mission to Afghanistan. In 1997, the Omaha World-Herald ran a report on the Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska. According to the paper, Thomas Gouttierre, a former Peace Corps volunteer and currently the director of the center and the university's dean of international studies, had received about $1.8 million in order to provide assistance to Unocal in Afghanistan. That assistance included hiring Afghans in professions connected with the building of an oil pipeline. Gouttierre was quoted as saying that the Taleban do not suppress anyone. The idea of an oil pipeline running through Afghanistan was attractive to the administration, too, which saw it as an opportunity to anchor even more strongly its policy of double containment that was intended to neutralize Iraq and Iran. An oil pipeline from countries in the Caucasus to Pakistan that did not pass through Iran would be a proper economic punishment for Iran, administration experts thought. In the end, the pipeline was not built, the administration changed its policy toward the Taleban, Turkmenistan pipes gas through Iran, and Iran sells gas to Turkey and may even be part of the international coalition the United States is trying to create against Afghanistan. "The United States has a policy toward bin Laden, but it has no policy toward Afghanistan," the journalist Ahmed Rashid noted. To that conclusion we can add that the United States may know something about bin Laden, but it no longer knows what is going on in Afghanistan. It's possible that if the Americans hadn't abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet Union got out of the country, and hadn't allowed Pakistan, or all kinds of agents on its behalf, to run the affairs of that wild country for it - thus engendering the Taleban and ending Pakistan's grip on Afghanistan, there would be no need today for an international coalition to bomb a few remote targets there. ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
