Ad un giorno dalle denunce di WikiLeaks dei crimini di guerra Usa – Il Congresso ratifica l’escalation di Obama della guerra in Afghanistan
– A poco più di 24 ore dalla pubblicazione di 91mila documenti che denunciano le atrocità americane in Afghanistan,(gennaio 2004-dicembre 2009, da parte di WikiLeaks)
– la Camera Usa, a controllo democratico, ha approvato, 308 SÍ contro 114 NO, finanziamenti aggiuntivi per $60MD., già approvati dal senato, per la guerra in Afghanistan,
– Il nuovo finanziamento non sarebbe passato, con la necessaria maggioranza di 2/3, se vi si fossero opposti gli stessi 162 Democratici che ad inizio mese avevano votato per una risoluzione che impegna l’Amministrazione Obama ad iniziare il ritiro delle truppe per il luglio 2011.
– In questa occasione oltre la metà dei Democratici si è allineata alla minoranza repubblicana, quasi tutta unanime.
– La disposizione approvata comprende $33,5 MD per altri 30mila soldati per l’Afghanistan e per altre spese operative del Pentagono,
o $5,1MD per l’Agenzia federale per le emergenze da disastri;
o $6,2 MD per i programmi di aiuti ad Afghanistan, Pakistan, Irak, e Haiti;
o $13,4MD per i veterani del Vietnam, esposti all’Agente Orange.
– Non sono state approvate iniziative di spesa domestica, tra cui $10 MD per consentire a i governi degli Stati di evitare licenziamenti di massa di insegnanti.
– Obama si è occupato per la prima volta dei documenti pubblicati da WikiLeaks dichiarando che non contengono nulla di nuovo, seguendo la stessa linea adottata da NYT, WP, e varie reti TV.
– In realtà i documenti WikiLeaks comprendono rapporti di centinaia di episodi in cui le forze Usa hanno ucciso civili afghani, molti dei quali nascosti o censurati dai media americani, ma di certo ben noti a Obama, ai suoi alti collaboratori alla Casa Bianca e al Pentagono, e agli circoli dominanti nei media.
– Le atrocità pubblicate evidenziano ancora di più l’escalation criminale decisa da Obama (“… dobbiamo andare fino in fondo alla nuova strategia sviluppata”:
o 47mila nuovi soldati inviati negli ultimi 18 mesi;
o autorizzato l’aumento del livello di violenza, con migliaia di nuove vittime civili a seguito dell’offensiva Usa nelle roccaforti talebane del Sud e dell’Est.
– Come l’Amministrazione Bush, quella Obama fornisce come pretesto alla guerra in Afghanistan gli attacchi terroristici dell’11 settembre; i funzionari americani hanno ammesso che in Afghanistan ci sono meno di 100 guerriglieri di al-Qaeda,
o contro più di 100mila soldati americani; come per Bush, anche per Obama l’utilizzo della potenza militare americana serve in realtà all’obiettivo di conquistare il controllo di regioni strategiche … e per difendere le posizioni acquisite dall’imperialismo americano contro i suoi maggiori rivali.
– L’opinione negli Usa e nella maggior parte dei paesi che intervengono nel quadro Nato è divenuta contraria alla guerra in Afghanistan,
o ma i due maggiori partiti Usa non ne tengono conto, che appoggiano entrambi sostanzialmente la guerra. Qualche riserva sull’inizio del ritiro delle truppe nel 2011 (meglio il 2014, prima una vittoria tattica sui talebani, secondo il consigliere speciale del generale Petraeus e il senatore R. Lugar), per la preoccupazione che venga a mancare l’appoggio popolare, cosa su cui contano i nemici (alla Commissione Relazioni Estere, ex ambasciatore in Irak, Ryan Crocker).
o Il democratico Kerry, ex attivista anti-bellico, ha minimizzato il significato delle denuince di WikiLeaks.
o La cosiddetta fazione anti-guerra dei Democratici della Camera ha pubblicato una lettera aperta in cui condanna la cancellazione della spesa sociale dalla legge, si oppone ai nuovi finanziamenti alla guerra in Afghanistan, adducendo a giustificazione i documenti WikiLeaks,
o che stanno a dimostrare che questa guerra è un fallimento in una giusta causa, non un’atrocità in una cattiva causa. La lettera non chiede il ritiro delle truppe americane, ma un ritiro graduale prima che l’operazione diventi una debacle stile Vietnam; non si oppone alla guerra imperialista, ma cerca di salvare da una sconfitta umiliante l’imperialismo americano.
o E al contempo questi “critici” forniscono una copertura di “sinistra” al Partito Democratico e all’Amministrazione Obama.
● I documenti WikiLeaks – che sono solo una piccola selezione di milioni di file acquisiti nei database WikiLeaks – confermano la violenta repressione Nato;
● secondo la stessa classificazione dei militari americani la documentazione comprende 13 734 rapporti di “azioni amiche” delle forze Usa-Nato;
● il numero degli attacchi afghani – riferite 27 078 “azioni nemiche” e 23 082 “incidenti esplosivi” – contraddicono le pretese per cui la resistenza afghana sarebbe il frutto di alcuni terroristi al-Qaeda.
● Riferite 237 manifestazioni popolari contro l’occupazione Usa, o contro le autorità afghane fantoccio.
● Frazioni dell’establishment politico Usa premono per utilizzare il materiale WikiLeaks per attuare un cambiamento tattico nella politica bellica Usa-Nato verso Afghanistan e Pakistan.
● La pubblicazione dei documenti è stata accompagnata da una campagna della stampa americana di denuncia dell’appoggio dato dal governo pakistano alle fazioni afghane dei signori della guerra oppositori del regime.
o Le accuse al Pakistan, riconosciuto come uno dei principali alleati, rivelano come per gli Usa la guerra non è contro l’islamismo radicale o il terrorismo, ma per la difesa dei propri interessi strategici e il mantenimento dell’equilibrio di potenza in Asia.
● Gli Usa non sono riusciti a raggiungere un accordo tra le fazioni appoggiate dai pakistani attorno a Hekmatyar, Haqqani e i talebani da una parte, e dall’altra le forze della Alleanza del Nord che sostengono il regime di Karzai,
o quest’ultime storicamente appoggiate dai rivali regionali del Pakistan, India e Russia.
● Una giravolta dell’imperialismo Usa contro il Pakistan comporta rischi enormi, in particolare uno scontro con la Cina, il più potente alleato del Pakistan nella regione.
– Il consigliere alla Sicurezza della Casa Bianca, L. Jones, condanna la pubblicazione dei documenti, informazioni segrete che potrebbero mettere a rischio la vita di americani e alleati, o minacciare la sicurezza nazionale.
– Il governo Usa è il più direttamente denunciato dai documenti finora pubblicati, ma WikiLeaks disporrebbe di numerosi documenti sulla posizione in Afghanistan di “tutti i paesi con più di 1 milione di abitanti”.
– Da quanto pubblicato risulta evidente che i militari americani considerano senza importanza le vittime afghane; in ogni caso occorre nascondere la dimensione delle uccisioni alla popolazione dei paesi Nato e di tutto il mondo.
o Il Guardian: Washington teme di aver perso materiale ancora più sensibile, compreso un archivio di decine di migliaia di messaggi telefonici inviati dalle ambasciate Usa nel mondo, che trattando di commercio di armi, negoziati commerciali, incontri segreti, posizioni esplicite di altri governi.
o Il fondatore di WikiLeaks si è dato alla macchia dopo l’arresto a 22 miglia da Baghdad di Bradley Manning, 22enne analista dei servizi segreti militari americani; Manning è detenuto in un carcere militare americano in Kuwait.
– I documenti, stilati dal punto di vista dei militari americani nel pieno degli eventi, spesso sottostimano le vittime afghane.
– Ci sono innumerevoli rapporti di civili uccisi perché si avvicinano ai veicoli Nato, o perché non si fermano nei checkpoint; resoconti ripetuti di forze Nato che reprimono manifestazioni, spesso in coordinamento con le autorità afghane, con la copertura di forze aeree.
– Rivelata l’esistenza della Task Force 373, una squadra della morte composta da forze speciali segrete, con armamenti pesanti, che conduce operazioni in tutto il paese, per assassinare leader talebani.
– Rivelata le perdite crescenti della Nato in aria, …
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One day after WikiLeaks exposures of US war crimes – Congress ratifies Obama escalation of Afghanistan war
– Little more than 24 hours after the release of 91,000 documents detailing US military atrocities in Afghanistan, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives gave final approval to a funding bill to pay for the escalation of the war.
– By a margin of 308-114, well over the two-thirds majority required under an expedited procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” the House backed a $60 billion supplemental funding bill passed by the Senate last week.
– More than half the Democratic caucus joined forces with a near-unanimous Republican minority to pass the bill. The comfortable two-thirds majority was significant since 162 Democrats voted earlier this month for a resolution to require the Obama administration to begin significant troop withdrawals by July 2011. If that many Democrats had opposed the funding bill, it would have failed to win a two-thirds vote, but as always in such parliamentary maneuvering, just enough Democrats switched their votes to provide the margin required to sustain the war policies of American imperialism.
– The bill includes more than $33.5 billion for the additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan and to pay for other Pentagon operational expenses,
– $5.1 billion to replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief fund, $6.2 billion for State Department aid programs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Haiti and $13.4 billion in benefits for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent Orange.
– Domestic spending initiatives added to the supplemental bill to win passage through the House earlier this month were removed in the Senate after they failed to win even majority support, let alone 60 votes. Among these were $10 billion for state governments to avert mass teacher layoffs.
In a public statement in the White House rose garden, after a morning meeting with congressional leaders of both parties, President Barack Obama appealed for the House to pass the emergency funding bill.
– Obama addressed the release of documents by WikiLeaks for the first time, while deliberately evading the evidence of war crimes by US forces in Afghanistan. Instead, he joined in the pretense that there was “nothing new” in the leaked documents, the line peddled by the White House to the American media and adopted by newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as the television networks.
– “While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations,” Obama said, “the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan; indeed, they point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall.”
– Given that the WikiLeaks documents include reports on hundreds of incidents in which US forces killed innocent Afghan civilians, many of which were covered up or censored in the US media, Obama’s claim is a flat-out lie. These atrocities have not “already informed our public debate on Afghanistan,” since the public was not allowed to know about them.
– There is no doubt that Obama himself, his top aides in the White House and Pentagon and the leading circles in the media were well aware of these atrocities.
– That makes all the more criminal the president’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, pouring in 47,000 troops over the past year and a half and authorizing a major increase in the level of violence—knowing that thousands more innocent lives will be destroyed.
– Obama reiterated his determination to stay the course in Afghanistan, declaring, “We’ve substantially increased our commitment there, insisted upon greater accountability from our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan, developed a new strategy that can work and put in place a team, including one of our finest generals, to execute that plan. Now we have to see that strategy through.”
– He described Afghanistan as “the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned.” This repeats the hoary mythology of the Bush administration, which sought to use 9/11 as an all-purpose pretext for US military aggression around the world.
– US officials have conceded that the total number of Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan is less than 100, an estimate that makes nonsense of the claim that the war is being waged to avenge the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
– There are more than 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan because Obama, like Bush, is pursuing an agenda of using American military power to seize control of key strategic regions, particularly in the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia, to uphold the world position of American imperialism against its major rivals.
– Public opinion in the United States and in most of the countries participating in the NATO intervention has turned decisively against the war in Afghanistan. But this shift in mass sentiment finds no reflection within the two parties of big business that control Capitol Hill.
– The so-called antiwar faction of the House Democrats issued an open letter Monday decrying the removal of social spending from the bill and citing the WikiLeaks material as a reason to oppose the funding bill—but only because the leaked documents show the difficulties facing the U.S. occupation, not because they provide evidence of war crimes.
– The open letter of the “antiwar” Democrats—signed by, among others, former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, eight members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Raul Grijalva, chairman of the House Progressive Caucus—criticizes the war as a failure in a good cause, not an atrocity in a bad one.
– The letter does not call for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Instead it credits the US military and the Obama administration with “trying to build a modern, democratic state in an area divided by tribal and ethnic identities,” only expressing regret that this mission is unlikely to succeed. This is not genuine opposition to imperialist war, but rather an effort to save American imperialism from a humiliating defeat.
– Kucinich & Co. want a gradual pullback of US forces before the entire operation culminates in a Vietnam-style debacle, with American helicopters plucking the frightened remnants of a US puppet regime from rooftops in Kabul. In the meantime, their participation in the congressional charade gives a “left” cover for the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.
– Two Senate committee hearings Tuesday demonstrated the all-out support for the Afghanistan war in both the Democratic and Republican parties. The Senate Armed Services Committee rubber-stamped the nomination of Marine General James Mattis to succeed General David Petraeus as the head of the US Central Command, which oversees military operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
– The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on the question of whether and under what circumstances it would be possible for the US to negotiate with the insurgents in Afghanistan. Committee chairman John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 and an erstwhile antiwar activist during the Vietnam War, dismissed the significance of the WikiLeaks exposure of US atrocities in Afghanistan.
It was “important not to over-hype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents,” he said. “To those of us who lived through the Pentagon Papers, there’s no relation to that event or these documents. People need to be very careful in evaluating what they read there.”
– The lead witness at the hearing, former US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, warned that US public opinion was turning against the war. “Impatience is on the rise again in this country,” he told the committee, warning that a collapse of domestic political support for the war was “what our adversaries are counting on now.” In that context, he expressed reservations about the July 2011 date set by Obama for beginning a limited drawdown of US troops from Afghanistan.
– Australian counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen, a key adviser of US General David Petraeus during the Iraq “surge,” called for the Obama administration to “stop talking about 2011, start talking about 2014.” He added that the main necessity is “a big tactical hit on the Taliban,” inflicting “very significant damage.” The bloodshed would be “unpleasant, but unavoidable.”
– This view was echoed by Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the senior Republican on the committee. “For the negotiating to be successful, we have to demonstrate strength,” he said. “As bloody as this sounds, it’s critical that we kill a lot of Taliban.” He called for inflicting “a rather significant casualty toll, observed by all parties including the Taliban and those we’re negotiating with.”
The leading Democrat in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, came to Obama’s defense over the WikiLeaks documents, saying, “they do not address current circumstances. A lot of it predates the president’s new policy.”
– Actually, of course, Obama’s “new policy” calls for much more killing, not less. The after-action reports of the slaughter of civilians through bombing, missiles, artillery and small arms have no doubt doubled and tripled as the US military has gone on the offensive in the Taliban strongholds in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
– Another House Democratic supporter of the war, Adam Smith of Washington state, openly defended the operations of Task Force 373, the military death squad whose brutal activities caused much of the devastation detailed in the WikiLeaks documents.
“This is a war. The enemy is shooting at us, and we’re shooting at them,” Smith told the Associated Press. U.S. troops are “aggressively targeting” the insurgents, he said, but “condemnation of our troops is completely wrong and brutally unfair.”
The bloody-minded consensus in official Washington was summed up in an editorial Tuesday in the Washington Post, which denounced claims that the WikiLeaks documents constituted “evidence for war crimes prosecution.” The newspaper dismissed the tally of 144 cases where US and NATO forces killed civilians, concluding “the 195 deaths it counts in those episodes, though regrettable, do not constitute a shocking total for a four-year period.”
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Leaked documents expose imperialist war in Afghanistan
By Alex Lantier
– On Sunday, the WikiLeaks web site posted 91,731 American military documents on the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2009. The release was timed to coincide with articles on these revelations in the New York Times, the British Guardian and the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, all of which had received the documents several weeks ago.
The documents make clear that the occupation of Afghanistan is a filthy imperialist war. Popular resistance and protest demonstrations are drowned in blood, US death squads operate at will under a media blackout, and Washington and NATO collaborate with a narrow elite of corrupt warlords and Afghan officers.
– The documents were released as the Afghan government confirmed that NATO rocket fire last week killed more than 50 civilians, largely women and children, in the Sangin district of Helmand Province. The attack was one of the worst since the May 2009 Gerani air strike, in neighboring Farah province, which killed 140 civilians, including 93 children and 28 women.
– The WikiLeaks documents confirm the massive scale of US-NATO repression. By the American military’s own classification, which downplays the role of US and NATO troops, the release includes 13,734 reports of “friendly action” by US-NATO forces.
– The number of Afghan attacks—there are 27,078 reports of “enemy action” and 23,082 of “explosive hazards”—shatters claims that the Afghan resistance is the product of a few Al Qaeda terrorists. There are 237 reports of popular demonstrations against the US occupation or US-controlled Afghan authorities.
– These documents themselves are reportedly only a small selection of millions of US files uploaded to WikiLeaks databases. What has already been released, however, makes clear that the US military sees Afghan casualties as unimportant, to be dealt with primarily by relying on the Western media to conceal the scope of the killing from the populations in NATO countries and internationally.
– According to one report, on March 28, 2007, Dutch forces fired on Chanartu, a village in Kandahar province that was reportedly under Taliban attack. They killed four and wounded seven Afghan villagers in an operation the report called “justified.” It said the Dutch government had “engaged in a proactive public relations campaign to prevent political fallout here and in the Netherlands,” explaining that otherwise Dutch soldiers might “hesitate” to fire on Afghans in the future. The killings were classified as the result of action by “enemy” forces.
– Written from the standpoint of the US military in the heat of events, the documents often understate Afghan casualties. For example, the September 2009 Kunduz bombing—when German officers called in a US air raid on two fuel trucks, killing 142 Afghans, overwhelmingly civilians—is listed as having caused 56 insurgent deaths.
– The documents contain countless reports of civilians shot for approaching NATO vehicles, or for failing to stop at checkpoints. This includes two instances in 2008 where NATO forces machine-gunned a bus—once by French troops, wounding eight, and once by US forces, with 15 casualties.
– There are also repeated accounts of NATO forces repressing demonstrations, often in close coordination with local Afghan authorities. On May 11, 2005 a unit of Marines reported demonstrations in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. After requests for help from the regional governor, Din Mohammed, the Marines called in “AH-64s [Apache attack helicopters] for a show of force.”
– Under cover of air support, Afghan and UN forces moved against the demonstrators. Though the US military reported 37 Afghan civilians were killed and 10 wounded, it classified the Jalalabad demonstration as a “non-combat event” by “neutral” forces.
– The documents also reveal the existence of Task Force 373—a covert, heavily-armed Special Forces death squad that mounts operations throughout Afghanistan, seeking to assassinate Taliban leaders. On the night of June 11, 2007, while trying to capture Taliban commander Qarl Ur-Rahman near Jalalabad, Task Force 373 was surprised by a friendly Afghan police patrol which shone a light on them in the darkness. The task force called in an air raid by an AC-130 gunship which blasted the policemen with cannon fire. Seven Afghan police were killed and four wounded.
– One week later, Task Force 373 launched another mission, against Abu Laith al-Libi in Paktika province. The plan was to fire a salvo of six missiles at the village of Nangar Khel, where al-Libi was suspected of hiding, then send in troops to attack the village. Though they did not find al-Libi, they discovered that the missile strike had killed six adults, whom they described as Taliban fighters, and eight Afghan children in a madrasa.
– On October 4, 2007, the task force attacked Taliban forces in the village of Laswanday, only 6 miles from Nangar Khel. During a pause in the fighting the Taliban slipped away. However, Task Force 373 called in an air raid, killing four civilian men, one woman, and one girl. Two teenage girls and a boy, as well as 12 US soldiers, were wounded. There are suspicions that some of the Afghan villagers were executed, as one of the men was found with his hands tied behind his back.
Coalition forces initially put out a statement claiming US forces had killed several Taliban militants. A US contingent visited the village and sought to blame the deaths on the villagers. According to the leaked reports, they “stressed that the fault of the deaths of the innocent lies on the villagers, who did not resist the insurgents and their anti-government activities.”
– The documents also reveal growing NATO losses in the air, including numerous drones and even manned aircraft, with at least one F-15 fighter being lost over Afghanistan. In an April 2007 report, the US military cited reports that the Iranian government had purchased portable anti-aircraft missiles from the Algerian government and given them to Afghan insurgents. This has not been previously reported.
– White House National Security Advisor James L. Jones denounced WikiLeaks’ publication of the documents, saying Washington “strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.”
He continued, “WikiLeaks made no effort to contact as about these documents—the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted.”
– While the US government is most directly exposed by the documents released so far, many more countries must be concerned over further material that might be released. Assange claims that WikiLeaks has extensive documents on the positions on Afghanistan of every country whose population is over 1 million—that is to say, all of the world’s major powers.
The occupation of Afghanistan is broadly unpopular in countries throughout the world.
– At a Monday press conference in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said he had recently received more “high quality material” from military sources. The Guardian notes: “Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material, including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings, and uncensored opinions of other governments.”
– Assange has come under intense pressure from the US and allied governments. The Pentagon proposed to send investigators to meet him on “neutral territory” and discuss his sources, but Assange refused. After the May 26 arrest of 22-year-old US military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning at US Forward Operating Base Hammer 22 miles outside of Baghdad, Assange went into hiding.
– Manning is currently locked up in a US military prison in Kuwait.
The Australian government had briefly taken Assange’s passport earlier that month, telling him it might be cancelled. Assange is Australian.
– The Guardian writes that journalist “Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said he thought Assange could be in some physical danger; Ellsberg and two other former whistleblowers warned that US agencies would ‘do all possible to make an example’ of the WikiLeaks founder.”
– The Guardian claims that, after a manhunt, it found Assange in a café in Brussels, where he had traveled to speak to the European parliament. He agreed that a team of Guardian reporters could access the reports, which were also sent to the New York Times and to Der Spiegel.
– Asked about his security at a press conference at the Frontline club in London, Assange said: “As we all know, the United Kingdom is a surveillance state.” He continued by saying he believed he had political support in the UK, so that it would be difficult “for me to be arrested or detained. I can’t imagine that happening in this country, unless there was a miscommunication from the bureaucracy to the political leadership”—i.e., a decision by the British police or military to violate the authority of the government.
– In fact, the main division is not so much between the pro-war Cameron government in Britain and the state machine, but between masses of working people internationally who oppose the war and governments and security forces who are determined to wage it.
– Significantly, none of the publications who broke the story called for opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Guardian editorial called for its indefinite extension. It wrote that the revelations in WikiLeaks’ documents meant that “this is not an Afghanistan that either the US or Britain is about to hand over gift-wrapped with pink ribbons to a sovereign national government in Kabul.”
– Sections of the US political establishment are pressing to use the WikiLeaks material to carry out a tactical shift in US-NATO war policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan. US Senator John Kerry published a statement, writing: “However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”
Kerry is holding hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Afghanistan war today.
– The leaking of the documents has been accompanied by a campaign in the US press, denouncing the Pakistani government’s support for Afghan warlord factions opposed to the Karzai regime in Kabul.
o Discussion has centered on the role of Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former chief of Pakistani military intelligence—the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).
– The New York Times wrote: “Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistani spies and the CIA joined forces to run guns to Afghan militias who were battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the fighting stopped, he maintained his contacts with the former mujahedin, who would eventually transform themselves into the Taliban.”
– The Times continues, “more than two decades later, it appears that General Gul is still at work. The documents indicate that he has worked tirelessly to reactivate his old networks, employing familiar allies like Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.”
– The US government is now accusing Pakistan, whom it publicly recognizes as one of its main allies, of supporting Afghan forces fighting the US. These accusations underscore the basic hypocrisy of the US intervention in Afghanistan. It is not about fighting right-wing Islamism or terrorism, but defending major US strategic interests and controlling the balance of power in the fast-developing Asian continent.
– Amid mass popular opposition to the US occupation in Afghanistan, Washington has been unable to shape an agreement between Pakistani-backed factions around Hekmatyar, Haqqani, and the Taliban, on the one side, and the Northern Alliance forces that prop up the Karzai regime in Kabul, on the other. These latter forces have historically been backed by Pakistan’s regional rival, India, as well as Russia. However, a turn by US imperialism to confront Pakistan carries immense dangers—notably, a confrontation with China, Pakistan’s most powerful ally in the region.
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