By Reason Wafawarova January 17, 2008

Analysts, commentators and some world leaders have repeatedly pointed out on the double standards and hypocrisy of Washington on the reality surrounding the emergence, nurturing, establishment and subsequent denouncement of Afghanistan’s Taliban and the arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden.

This view emanates from the growing global consensus that Bin Laden only became a “terrorist” in the US propaganda lexicon when he fell out with the pro-US Saudi royal family and called for the overthrow of Washington’s Middle Eastern client states, which in Bin Laden’s words were “puppet regimes”. This was after Bin Laden openly denounced the Gulf War of 1991, particularly the decision by the royal family to allow more than 540 000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil as a rear base from which offensive attacks would be launched on Baghdad; in a war where another US created monster, Saddam Hussein was being tamed after his “arrogant” invasion of Kuwait.

Equally there is overwhelming global consensus that the Taliban, a term that literally means “students” only became a “rogue regime” and subsequently “a terrorist group” after it decided not to heed Washington’s order to put a brake on the movement Islamic fanatics, outstandingly headed by Osama bin Laden; and of course created by the CIA on behalf of Washington’s imperialist interests. The movement of Islamic religious fanatics has always been there in Afghanistan since 1978, when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan seized power against Washington’s interests and at that time, the fanatics served Washington so well that on March 8, 1985, US President Ronald Reagan had this to say, “Throughout the world….its (freedom) agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive- on the moral defensive, the political defensive, the intellectual and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They are doing so on almost every continent populated by man- in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America, in Mozambique….(They are) freedom fighters.”

Then the rebellious religious fanatics calling themselves the mujaheddin were, in Washington’s eyes, freedom fighters, so were the anti-people rebels in socialist central America, for example the Contras of Nicaragua; so were the notorious bandits led by Jonasi Savimbi in Angola and so were the murderous Renamo bandits of Mozambique led by Andreas Matsangaise and later Alphoso Dhlakama.

The big question is why were all these subversive and uncivilised groups of people hailed as freedom fighters by Washington? This was because the US was in the middle of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which in Reagan’s own words was the “evil empire”. Equally “evil” was the Third World movements fighting US backed colonialism, imperialism, apartheid and dictatorships.

It has become the same old story, one unethical, brutal, evil natured US-created puppet rises to power or prominence, outlives its usefulness, falls out with Washington, is painted in the blackest colours (goodness me, I am black) and Washington preaches fire and brimstone against the evil nature of their old ally, puppet or insidious partner. This is the American legacy, a legacy of double standards, a legacy of brute force, sponsoring murderers, fanatics and economic fundamentalists. America’s ruling elite calls it a fight for freedom and democracy; freedom only limited to the free flow of their capital for the maximisation of profits and democracy only limited to the offices of their lap-dog politicians presiding over all the puppet regimes dotted in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Too many examples may just destroy the point. Why not just pursue the genesis and history of the Taliban, that brand of “students” from the “training camps” created by Washington and Pakistan in Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviet Union’s influence in international political and economic affairs.

Since the appalling acts of mass murder in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, US President George W. Bush has at times sounded like a fire-and-brimstone evangelist. In typical convenient Jesuit posturing, Bush warned that the “evildoers”- Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime that sheltered him would pay for their “sins”. He went on to tell primary school kids at a school in the United States that, “the terrorists hate us because we are so good”.

As if this was not enough, President Bush stood majestically on a podium juts before the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and declared a command to the whole world. He, inspired by biblical language, said, “To all the leaders and members of the regional communities and blocs. It is time to make a choice. You are either for us or against us”. This effectively meant that everyone of us had to choose what we wanted between the two solid and only options of being either “terrorists” or Americans. All because the CIA-created Taliban had decided to turn against its master – all because the US-created Osama bin Laden was using his strength to fight US interests! What cheek is that?

Well, if President Bush wanted to take a Biblical approach to the misfortune that befell America on September 11, 2001, then he perhaps should not have deliberately avoided the most pertinent and illuminating Biblical verse to explain those terrible attacks: Galatians 6 vs 7; “Whatsoever a man soweth, so shall he reap.”
Washington, in the rugged mountains and deep valleys of Afghanistan and the rough badlands of the Afghanistan- Pakistan border region sowed indeed the seeds of what was to be the Taliban.

As mentioned earlier on, the PDPA, a secular left wing party, seized power in Afghanistan in 1978. They embarked on radical people-oriented reforms like land reforms, establishing co-education schools, declaring equality between man and women, increasing women freedoms and liberties, expanding the education system and nationalising essential services. Panicking and fearing that the radical reforms would inspire similar demands from the peoples of the region, Washington stepped up its counter strategy by arming and training counter-revolutionaries- the mujaheddin -organised by the equally threatened and panicking wealthy landlords and Muslim religious leaders of Afghanistan.

The landlords were naturally opposed to the land reforms as it threatened their wealth and power and the religious leaders were fiercely opposed to the new liberties awarded to women by the new government and they also vehemently opposed co-education schools which they viewed as “sinful” because of what they perceived to be strict religious rules separating man and women in terms of gatherings of any nature.
The US took advantage of this conflict between the PDPA government and sections of the Afghanistan community as well as the entering of thousands of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 (to defend the “besieged” PDPA government) as a good pretext to push for their own cause by stepping up support for the “freedom fighters” if Ronald Reagan’s own words were to be borrowed.

The US showed undeterred resolve to escalate and fund fundamentalism by pouring US$6 billion into the mujaheddin factions between 1978 and 1992, according to Norm Dixon, writing in the Australian Green Left Weekly of October 10, 2001.
The faction that emerged as the biggest beneficiary of these CIA funds was the one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, notorious in the 1970s for reportedly spraying toxic acid in the faces of women who were found not wearing the veil on their faces. The US imperialist interests did not only make them fund the religious fanatics but they blatantly paid a blind eye to the rights of women who fell victim to the excesses of the very fundamentalists that the US backed both financially and materially, perhaps at worst sharing their extremist ideologies and at best ignoring them in the process.

Other governments like Britain, China, France and Iran, in funding and arming the mujaheddin, joined the US in its quest to bring the downfall of the Soviet Union. Israel even decided to send over all its captured rifles, tanks and artillery guns; captured during its frequent and endless wars against its neighbouring Arab states as they reckoned dumping the captured arms in the hands of Afghans was probably the most profitable route to take.

According to the same article by Norm Dixon, by 1987, 65 000 tonnes of weaponry were supplied by the US each year. Not to be outdone the Saudi monarchy matched the Americans dollar for dollar as they sought to establish and assert their Wahhabism brand of conservative Islam.

Other than Saudi Arabia, Pakistan also enthusiastically embraced the US plan and General Zia ul Haq, the US installed dictator was at his best promoting state sponsored Islamic fundamentalism. For his efforts, Zia got the US blind eye as he progressed with his development of nuclear weapons in this period. Pervez Musharaff is currently enjoying the same blind eye to his excesses because of his similar lap-dog support for Washington in their fallout war with the Taliban.

While Washington and Saudi Arabia played the funding role, Zia’s secret police, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISI) played the coordinating and implementation role strategically selecting the most fanatic and extremist of the mujaheddin as the major beneficiaries to the funds, pretty much the same way the most vocal and violent groups stand to benefit from Washington’s funds in the media focused-Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. This is exactly the context in which Washington announced its resolve to fund “democratic forces” in Zimbabwe, where the pre-occupation is to stop a land revolution that threatens to overflow into nearby South Africa and other African countries with colonial imbalances over the agrarian regime.

The US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia came up with a 1986 plan to expand an international network for the recruitment of foreign Muslim fanatics to join the mujaheddin. The recruits came from as far as Somalia, Algeria, Egypt, Morroco, South-East Asia, down to Pakistan itself.
Pakistan through its ISI directorate, which in turn worked through Maktab al Khidamat (Office of Services), operated by non other than Osama bin Laden, now the arch-terrorist in the eyes of the US, coordinated and facilitated the recruitment, training and logistical upkeep of the international recruits.

The plan was simple. Washington provided funding through the CIA, Pakistan, through ISI built camps for the “trainees” in Afghanistan, the religious sects from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia provided “ideological orientation” while the CIA and the British SAS provided training in urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare. The ISI instructors did provide training inside Afghanistan through their own instructors who had received their training in Washington and from various US army and navy elite forces in US training facilities dotted around the world.

This is the plan whose seed gave us the Taliban, bin Laden and the menace that terrorism is in this day.

According to the July 19, 1992 issue of the Washington Post, a “ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists had travelled to the Head Office of ISI in Pakistan to coordinate the training and operations of the mujaheddin.

The effort attracted an estimated 100 000 foreign Islamic militants between 1982 and 1992. They joined another 120 000 Pakistan anti-communist religious fanatics and desperate Afghan refugees who were immediately enrolled in the 2 500 Saudi-funded madrassahs (mosque schools), all controlled by Pakistan’s state sponsored Islamic parties bent on spreading the indoctrination of the Wahhabi sect, a brainchild of the Saudi rulers.
It is from these madrassahs that some 35 000 foreigners and tens of thousands of Pakistanis and Afghans were selected for training by the CIA and ISI to fight in various factions of the mujaheddin.

Mullah Mohammed Omar’s faction was one of the beneficiaries of this allocation and he later emerged as the supreme leader of the Taliban.

On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan but the mujaheddin was unable to dislodge the PDPA government for another three years until April 1992 when Moscow stopped providing military aid to PDPA, in a bargain deal with Washington.

With the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of the PDPA, Washington had no good reason to keep an interest in the affairs of Afghanistan. For the first time Washington began to see the brutality of the mujaheddin and the CIA left the dirty job of cleaning up the mess in the mujaheddin to the ISI of Pakistan.
The US overlooked the fact that they had only stopped their funding of the brute rebels in 1992 but the mujaheddin still retained huge stockpiles of US supplied ammunition-including hundreds of US and British supplied surface to air missiles.

Neither were the quislings short of funds. Not with the massive CIA promoted opium trafficking and smuggling rackets, which were unstoppable now because they involved senior officers in the Pakistan military, the ISI and Pakistan based mafia.

The monster that the CIA and ISI created continued to leave and the training camps these two organizations set up continued to operate. Nothing about the camps or its operations changed, nothing about Osama bin Laden changed. All that changed was the customer for their “service”, that is, the client for whose interests they fought.

Now instead of standing to benefit the imperialist interests of the US and its allies the camps were churning out fighters for the demise of the same capitalist interests at the service of such regimes as was the Taliban. For this reason the camps were no longer legitimate in the eyes of Washington, they all became terrorist camps and their occupants were all rashly demoted from freedom fighters to terrorists.

Western parliaments shifted from debating budgets for the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan to debating laws that ensure that the very people they created cease to exist, the so called anti-terrorism wars. That is what happens when thieves fall out.

Anyway, this is about the rise of the Taliban and more will come about the camps in Afghanistan. The mujaheddin finally took over Kabul in 1992 and immediately carved the whole of Afghanistan into waring fiefdoms. Kabul was ruled by a succession of mujaheddin factions, each time their opponents raining mortar bombs and rockets on the city in an apparent show of a perfection of US-instilled skills which they however, had dismally failed to showcase against the PDPA government for many years.

Frustrated by the endless squabbles of the US created mujaheddin Washington ordered Pakistan to come up with a plan to stop the embarrassing nonsense and Pakistan created the Taliban (Students) in 1994.

They were initially a very popular movement as about everyone was getting sick and tired of the mujaheddin, Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.” With Islamabad’s assistance the Taliban rapidly acquired an army of 25 000 troops, mostly foreign militants and was equipped with sophisticated weaponry. The name Taliban (students) was chosen because most of the recruits were from the madrassahs, those mosque schools funded by the Saudis.

Washington publicly welcomed the victory of the Taliban in 1996 and they subsequently romanced with the Taliban regime as US economic interests clearly took precedence over human rights concerns, something very consistent with US politics. This is the philosophy behind the congratulatory message recently send by Washington to Kenya’s Kibaki for emerging as a winner in “a dignified electoral process” claiming not less than 300 lives within a week.

As they did with Saddam Hussein’s alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1987 and his alleged killing of 182 villagers in 1982 the US was deafeningly silent when the Taliban was institutionalising brutality against women; when it was massacring ethnic Shiites minorities and they were mum if not complicit to the massive drug dealing operations of the Taliban.

They were quiet because Washington still hoped that its long shelved plan for oil and gas pipelines worth US$4.5 billion from Turkmenia to the Arabian Sea via Afghanistan and Pakistan would now materialise through the cooperation of the Taliban.

Unocal, the US oil company, had already concluded a US$2 billion deal with the Taliban but they were to later pull out in 1998 citing “turmoil”. Yet again, US capitalist interests are superior to anything under the sun, except of course, the elite class running the capitalist system.

The second reason for the US’s romancing with the Taliban was Washington’s mistaken belief that the Taliban, was a “convenient foil for Iranian influence in Central Asia,” as the Far Eastern Economic Review writer and author, Ahmed Rashid would put it.

The US also surprisingly hoped that the Taliban would help tame the monstrous creatures the CIA had created in the camps still occupied by lethal religious fanatics whose usefulness had ended with the demise of the Soviet Union. Now most of these fanatics were more than dedicated to overthrowing strategic oil-rich Arab and Central Asia states loyal to the US whom they viewed as outright puppets.

In 1998, Washington realised that the Taliban was not going to serve its bidding on the politics of the Middle-East and Central Asia. They immediately turned against the Taliban regime and they signalled their displeasure by the dispatching of about 70 cruise missiles; all because the Taliban had voiced its unwillingness to control the Islamic fundamentalists it was allegedly sheltering within Afghanistan borders, the most notorious being Osama bin Laden.

Clearly, the sudden demotion of Osama bin Laden from “freedom fighter” in the eighties to a “terrorist mastermind” in the late nineties had nothing to do with the rash of terrorist deeds he began to be accused of at that time. No, not at all; it all had to do with Washington’s need to demonise its Islamic fundamentalist Frankenstein monster, which had become a serious threat to its interests in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Now that the Taliban got the boot from the US in 2001, this time not via proxy but very directly and now that the Taliban has shown some resolve to stand direct heat from the grandmaster, what is next? We now see the West beginning to lose faith in Karzai’s puppet regime they installed after the 2001 invasion and Gordon Brown has already started talking to the Taliban, a sign that Karzai’s pay back time may just be around the corner. That is how they do it in Western politics.

The US and its allies are reaffirming their presence in Afghanistan in order to “safeguard the flow of vital oil supplies” as John C. Gannon, the former CIA deputy director for intelligence put it at a conference in 1996.
It is about what the US strategists call “energy security”, a term used by the US ruling class pundits when they are talking about the US control of the world’s oil supply.
So far this interest is bolstered by the US political domination of the Middle East; a domination centred on the existence of the imperialist colonial-settler of Israel-Washington’s key ally in the region-and the pro US regimes in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt and Jordan.
However that interest is not as safe in Latin America where Hugo Chavez is accused of building a leftist club of populist leaders. It is not any much safer in the Middle East as Iraqis and the Taliban are giving the Americans and their allies a war of their lifetime.

The capitalist economic interest is not any safer in agriculturally and mineral-rich Africa where the likes of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe have upset the capitalist system by redistributing land to landless poor blacks, nationalising the same land and now taking over mining rights. For his efforts, Robert Mugabe is currently Washington’s worst dictator, a human rights violator, an evildoer and a tyrant.

This writer is certain that President Mugabe knows pretty well what to do and what not to do if he is to earn Washington’s blind eye if he had anything to hide, or how to earn America’s outright respect if he so wished. He knows the course of action to take and that course of action has nothing to do with human rights in general and the rights of MDC activists in particular. After all when his government evicted the Svosve villagers who had invaded some white owned farm in the late nineties he was never labelled a dictator, tyrant or a repressive leader, was he?

Some in the troubled Southern African country of Zimbabwe also know pretty much as President Mugabe does what course of action to take in order to win the hearts of the Americans and their western allies. It is a course of self-betrayal, subjugation, servile loyalty and misery for the masses. Yet so many are tempted to take this route; many, not only the insidious opposition Movement for Democratic Party (MDC) but also some in sections of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front).

The course of action is to safeguard capitalist rights through racist property rights, skewed foreign direct investment deals, provision of cheap labour and the creation of a mildly comfortable middle class providing a base for a filthy rich upper class which in turn serves as a buffer to thwart any resistance to the rule of imperial authority.

The stinging sanctions and high inflation brings the people of Zimbabwe at crossroads with the reality of what the US led capitalist imperial crusade can do. There is no foreign backing except for the opposition MDC, whom Washington and some of her western allies publicly boasted of funding in March 2007.

It is up to Zimbabwe to go the long route to total freedom or abandon the fight for the crumbs of neo-colonialism. The Afghan cycle was here given as an example of how imperial wars can be endless cycles of suffering for the poor, never bringing any form of happiness.

Zimbabwe, together we will overcome. Its homeland or death.