In a major article in The Guardian magazine, John Pilger describes
Afghanistan since its liberation from the Taliban, which he filmed for
his latest documentary, ‘Breaking the Silence’. Apart from notional
freedoms, little has changed.
At the Labour party conference following the September 11 attacks,
Tony Blair said memorably: “To the Afghan people, we make this
commitment. We will not walk away… If the Taliban regime changes, we
will work with you to make sure its successor is one that is broadbased,
that unites all ethnic groups and offers some way out of the poverty
that is your miserable existence.” He was echoing George Bush, who had
said a few days earlier: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know
the generosity of America and its allies. As we strike military targets,
we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and
suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan. The US is a friend
of the Afghan people.”
Almost every word they spoke was false. Their declarations of concern
were cruel illusions that prepared the way for the conquest of both
Afghanistan and Iraq. As the illegal Anglo-American occupation of Iraq
now unravels, the forgotten disaster in Afghanistan, the first “victory”
in the “war on terror”, is perhaps an even more shocking testament to
power.
It was my first visit. In a lifetime of making my way through places
of upheaval, I had not seen anything like it. Kabul is a glimpse of
Dresden post-1945, with contours of rubble rather than streets, where
people live in collapsed buildings, like earthquake victims waiting for
rescue. They have no light and heat; their apocalyptic fires burn
through the night. Hardly a wall stands that does not bear the
pock-marks of almost every calibre of weapon. Cars lie upended at
roundabouts. Power poles built for a modern fleet of trolley buses are
twisted like paperclips. The buses are stacked on top of each other,
reminiscent of the pyramids of machines erected by the Khmer Rouge to
mark Year Zero.
There is a sense of Year Zero in Afghanistan. My footsteps echoed
through the once grand Dilkusha Palace, built in 1910 to a design by a
British architect, whose circular staircase and Corinthian columns and
stone frescoes of biplanes were celebrated. It is now a cavernous ruin
from which reed-thin children emerge like small phantoms, offering
yellowing postcards of what it looked like 30 years ago: a vainglorious
pile at the end of what might have been a replica of the Mall, with
flags and trees. Beneath the sweep of the staircase were the blood and
flesh of two people blown up by a bomb the day before. Who were they?
Who planted the bomb? In a country in thrall to warlords, many of them
conniving in terrorism, the question itself is surreal.
A hundred yards away, men in blue move stiffly in single file:
mine-clearers. Mines are like litter here, killing and maiming, it is
calculated, every hour of every day. Opposite what was Kabul’s main
cinema and is today an art deco shell, there is a busy roundabout with
posters warning that unexploded cluster bombs “yellow and from USA” are
in the vicinity. Children play here, chasing each other into the
shadows. They are watched by a teenage boy with a stump and part of his
face missing. In the countryside, people still confuse the cluster
canisters with the yellow relief packages that were dropped by American
planes almost two years ago, during the war, after Bush had prevented
international relief convoys crossing from Pakistan.
More than $10bn has been spent on Afghanistan since October 7 2001,
most of it by the US. More than 80% of this has paid for bombing the
country and paying the warlords, the former mojahedin who called
themselves the “Northern Alliance”. The Americans gave each warlord tens
of thousands of dollars in cash and truckloads of weapons. “We were
reaching out to every commander that we could,” a CIA official told the
Wall Street Journal during the war. In other words, they bribed them to
stop fighting each other and fight the Taliban.
These were the same warlords who, vying for control of Kabul after
the Russians left in 1989, pulverised the city, killing 50,000
civilians, half of them in one year, 1994, according to Human Rights
Watch. Thanks to the Americans, effective control of Afghanistan has
been ceded to most of the same mafiosi and their private armies, who
rule by fear, extortion and monopolising the opium poppy trade that
supplies Britain with 90% of its street heroin. The post-Taliban
government is a facade; it has no money and its writ barely runs to the
gates of Kabul, in spite of democratic pretensions such as the election
planned for next year. Omar Zakhilwal, an official in the ministry of
rural affairs, told me that the government gets less than 20% of the aid
that is delivered to Afghanistan – “We don’t even have enough money to
pay wages, let alone plan reconstruction,” he said. President Harmid
Karzai is a placeman of Washington who goes nowhere without his posse of
US Special Forces bodyguards.
In a series of extraordinary reports, the latest published in July,
Human Rights Watch has documented atrocities “committed by gunmen and
warlords who were propelled into power by the United States and its
coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001” and who have
“essentially hijacked the country”. The report describes army and police
troops controlled by the warlords kidnapping villagers with impunity
and holding them for ransom in unofficial prisons; the widespread rape
of women, girls and boys; routine extortion, robbery and arbitrary
murder. Girls’ schools are burned down. “Because the soldiers are
targeting women and girls,” the report says, “many are staying indoors,
making it impossible for them to attend school [or] go to work.”
In the western city of Herat, for example, women are arrested if they
drive; they are prohibited from travelling with an unrelated man, even
an unrelated taxi driver. If they are caught, they are subjected to a
“chastity test”, squandering precious medical services to which, says
Human Rights Watch, “women and girls have almost no access, particularly
in Herat, where fewer than one per cent of women give birth with a
trained attendant”. The death rate of mothers giving birth is the
highest in the world, according to Unicef. Herat is ruled by the warlord
Ismail Khan, whom US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld endorsed as “an
appealing man… thoughtful, measured and self-confident”.
“The last time we met in this chamber,” said George Bush in his state
of the union speech last year, “the mothers and daughters of
Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or
going to school. Today, women are free, and are part of Afghanistan’s
new government. And we welcome the new minister of women’s affairs, Dr
Sima Samar.” A slight, middle-aged woman in a headscarf stood and
received the choreographed ovation. A physician who refused to deny
treatment to women during the Taliban years, Samar is a true symbol of
resistance, whose appropriation by the unctuous Bush was short-lived. In
December 2001, Samar attended the Washington-sponsored “peace
conference” in Bonn where Karzai was installed as president and three of
the most brutal warlords as vice-presidents. (The Uzbek warlord General
Rashid Dostum, accused of torturing and slaughtering prisoners, is
currently defence minister.) Samar was one of two women in Karzai’s
cabinet.
No sooner had the applause in Congress died away than Samar was
smeared with a false charge of blasphemy and forced out. The warlords,
different from the Taliban only in their tribal allegiances and
religious pieties, were not tolerating even a gesture of female
emancipation.
Today, Samar lives in constant fear for her life. She has two
fearsome bodyguards with automatic weapons. One is at her office door,
the other at her gate. She travels in a blacked-out van. “For the past
23 years, I was not safe,” she told me, “but I was never in hiding or
travelling with gunmen, which I must do now… There is no more official
law to stop women from going to school and work; there is no law about
dress code. But the reality is that even under the Taliban there was not
the pressure on women in the rural areas there is now.”
The apartheid might have legally ended, but for as many as 90% of the
women of Afghanistan, these “reforms” – such as the setting up of a
women’s ministry in Kabul – are little more than a technicality. The
burka is still ubiquitous. As Samar says, the plight of rural women is
often more desperate now because the ultra-puritanical Taliban dealt
harshly with rape, murder and banditry. Unlike today, it was possible to
travel safely across much of the country.
At a bombed-out shoe factory in west Kabul, I found the population of
two villages huddled on exposed floors without light and with one
trickling tap. Small children squatted around open fires on crumbling
parapets: the day before, a child had fallen to his death; on the day I
arrived, another child fell and was badly injured. A meal for them is
bread dipped in tea. Their owl eyes are those of terrified refugees.
They had fled there, they explained, because warlords routinely robbed
them and kidnapped their wives and daughters and sons, whom they would
rape and ransom back to them.
“During the Taliban we were living in a graveyard, but we were
secure,” a campaigner, Marina, told me. “Some people even say they were
better. That’s how desperate the situation is today. The laws may have
changed, but women dare not leave their homes without the burka, which
we wear as much for our protection.”
Marina is a leading member of Rawa, the Revolutionary Association of
the Women of Afghanistan, a heroic organisation that for years tried to
alert the outside world to the suffering of the women of Afghanistan.
Rawa women travelled secretly throughout the country, with cameras
concealed beneath their burkas. They filmed a Taliban execution and
other abuses, and smuggled their videotape to the west. “We took it to
different media groups,” said Marina. “Reuters, ABC Australia, for
example, and they said, yes, it’s very nice, but we can’t show it
because it’s too shocking for people in the west.” In fact, the
execution was shown finally in a documentary broadcast by Channel 4.
That was before September 11 2001, when Bush and the US media
discovered the issue of women in Afghanistan. She says that the current
silence in the west over the atrocious nature of the western-backed
warlord regime is no different. We met clandestinely and she wore a veil
to disguise her identity. Marina is not her real name.
“Two girls who went to school without their burkas were killed and
their dead bodies were put in front of their houses,” she said. “Last
month, 35 women jumped into a river along with their children and died,
just to save themselves from commanders on a rampage of rape. That is
Afghanistan today; the Taliban and the warlords of the Northern Alliance
are two faces of the same coin. For America, it’s a Frankenstein story –
you make a monster and the monster goes against you. If America had not
built up these warlords, Osama bin Laden and all the fundamentalist
forces in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, they would not have
attacked the master on September 11 2001.”
Afghanistan’s tragedy exemplifies the maxim of western power – that
third world countries are regarded and dealt with strictly in terms of
their usefulness to “us”. The ruthlessness and hypocrisy this requires
is imprinted on Afghanistan’s modern history. One of the most closely
guarded secrets of the cold war was America’s and Britain’s collusion
with the warlords, the mojahedin, and the critical part they played in
stimulating the jihad that produced the Taliban, al-Qaida and September
11.
“According to the official view of history,” Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Carter’s national security adviser, admitted in an interview
in 1998, “CIA aid to the mojahedin began during 1980, that is, after the
Soviet army invaded Afghanistan… But the reality, secretly guarded
until now, is completely otherwise.” At Brzezinski’s urging, in July
1979 Carter authorised $500m to help set up what was basically a
terrorist organisation. The goal was to lure Moscow, then deeply
troubled by the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the Soviet central
Asian republics, into the “trap” of Afghanistan, a source of the
contagion.
For 17 years, Washington poured $4bn into the pockets of some of the
most brutal men on earth – with the overall aim of exhausting and
ultimately destroying the Soviet Union in a futile war. One of them,
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord particularly favoured by the CIA,
received tens of millions of dollars. His speciality was trafficking
opium and throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the
veil. In 1994, he agreed to stop attacking Kabul on condition that he
was made primeminister – which he was.
Eight years earlier, CIA director William Casey had given his backing
to a plan put forward by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, to
recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than
100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and
1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future
al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb- making and other black arts.
Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called
Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in
1989.
“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord
Curzon, viceroy of India in 1898, “upon which is being played out a
great game for the domination of the world.” Brzezinski, adviser to
several presidents and a guru admired by the Bush gang, has written
virtually those same words. In his book The Grand Chessboard: American
Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, he writes that the key to
dominating the world is central Asia, with its strategic position
between competing powers and immense oil and gas wealth. “To put it in
terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient
empires,” he writes, one of “the grand imperatives of imperial
geostrategy” is “to keep the barbarians from coming together”.
Surveying the ashes of the Soviet Union he helped destroy, the guru
mused more than once: so what if all this had created “a few stirred up
Muslims”? On September 11 2001, “a few stirred up Muslims” provided the
answer. I recently interviewed Brzezinski in Washington and he
vehemently denied that his strategy precipitated the rise of al-Qaida:
he blamed terrorism on the Russians.
When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, the chessboard was passed to
the Clinton administration. The latest mutation of the mojahedin, the
Taliban, now ruled Afghanistan. In 1997, US state department officials
and executives of the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal)
discreetly entertained Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas.
They were entertained lavishly, with dinner parties at luxurious homes
in Houston. They asked to be taken shopping at a Walmart and flown to
tourist attractions, including the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and
Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where they gazed upon the faces of
American presidents chiselled in the rockface. The Wall Street Journal,
bulletin of US power, effused, “The Taliban are the players most capable
of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history.”
In January 1997, a state department official told journalists in a
private briefing that it was hoped Afghanistan would become an oil
protectorate, “like Saudi Arabia”. It was pointed out to him that Saudi
Arabia had no democracy and persecuted women. “We can live with that,”
he said.
The American goal was now the realisation of a 60-year “dream” of
building a pipeline from the former Soviet Caspian across Afghanistan to
a deep-water port. The Taliban were offered 15 cents for every 1,000
cubic feet of gas that passed through Afghanistan. Although these were
the Clinton years, pushing the deal were the “oil and gas junta” that
was soon to dominate George W Bush’s regime. They included three former
members of George Bush senior’s cabinet, such as the present
vice-president, Dick Cheney, representing nine oil companies, and
Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser, then a director of
Chevron-Texaco with special responsibility for Pakistan and Central
Asia.
Peel the onion of this and you find Bush senior as a paid consultant
of the huge Carlyle Group, whose 164 companies specialise in oil and gas
and pipelines and weapons. His clients included a super-wealthy Saudi
family, the Bin Ladens. (Within days of the September 11 attacks, the
Bin Laden family was allowed to leave the US in high secrecy.)
The pipeline “dream” faded when two US embassies in east Africa were
bombed and al-Qaida was blamed and the connection with Afghanistan was
made. The usefulness of the Taliban was over; they had become an
embarrassment and expendable. In October 2001, the Americans bombed back
into power their old warlord friends, the “Northern Alliance”. Today,
with Afghanistan “liberated”, the pipeline is finally going ahead,
watched over by the US ambassador to Afghanistan, John J Maresca,
formerly of Unocal.
Since it overthrew the Taliban, the US has established 13 bases in
the nine former Soviet central Asian countries that are Afghanistan’s
resource-rich neighbours. Across the world, there is now an American
military presence at the gateway to every major source of fossil fuel.
Lord Curzon would never recognise his great game. It’s what the US Space
Command calls “full spectrum dominance”.
It is from the vast, Soviet-built base at Bagram, near Kabul, that
the US controls the land route to the riches of the Caspian Basin. But,
as in that other conquest, Iraq, all is not going smoothly. “We get shot
at every time we go off base,” said Colonel Rod Davis. “For us, that’s a
combat zone out there.”
I said to him, “But President Bush says you liberated Afghanistan. Why should people shoot at you?”
“Hostile elements are everywhere, my friend.”
“Is that surprising, when you support murderous warlords?” I replied.
“We call them regional governors.” (As “regional governors”, warlords
such as Ismail Khan in Herat are deemed part of Karzai’s national
government – an uneasy juxtaposition. Karzai has pleaded with Khan to
release millions of dollars of customs duty.)
The war that expelled the Taliban never stopped. Ten thousand US
troops are stationed there; they go out in their helicopter gunships and
Humvees and blow up caves in the mountains or they target a village,
usually in the south-east. The Taliban are coming back in the Pashtun
heartland and on the border with Pakistan. The level of the war is not
independently known; US spokesmen such as Colonel Davis are the sources
of news reports that say “50 Taliban fighters were killed by US forces”.
Afghanistan is now so dangerous that it is virtually impossible for
reporters to find out.
The centre of US operations is now the “holding facility” at Bagram,
where suspects are taken and interrogated. Two former prisoners, Abdul
Jabar and Hakkim Shah, told the New York Times in March how as many as
100 prisoners were “made to stand hooded, their arms raised and chained
to the ceiling, their feet shackled, unable to move for hours at a time,
day and night”. From here, many are shipped to the concentration camp
at Guantanamo Bay.
They are denied all rights. The Red Cross has been allowed to inspect
only part of the “holding facility”; Amnesty has been refused access
altogether. In April last year, a Kabul taxi driver, Wasir Mohammad,
whose family I interviewed, “dis-appeared” into Bagram after he inquired
at a roadblock about the whereabouts of a friend who had been arrested.
The friend has since been released, but Mohammad is now in a cage in
Guantanamo Bay. A former minister of the interior in the Karzai
government told me that Mohammad was in the wrong place at the wrong
time: “He is innocent.” Moreover, he had a record of standing up to the
Taliban. It is likely that many of those incarcerated at Bagram and
Guantanamo Bay were kidnapped for ransoms the Americans pay for
suspects.
Why, I asked Colonel Davis, were the people in the “holding facility”
not given the basic rights he would expect as an American taken
prisoner by a foreign army. He replied: “The issue of prisoners of war
is way off to the far left or the right depending on your perspective.”
This is the Kafkaesque world that Bush’s America has imprinted on the
recently acquired additions to its empire, real and virtual, rising on
new rubble in places where human life is not given the same value as
those who perished at Ground Zero in New York. One such place is a
village called Bibi Mahru, which was attacked by an American F16 almost
two years ago during the war. The pilot dropped a MK82 “precision” 500lb
bomb on a mud and stone house, where Orifa and her husband, Gul Ahmed, a
carpet weaver, lived. The bomb killed all but Orifa and one son – eight
members of her family, including six children. Two children in the next
house were killed, too.
Her face engraved with grief and anger, Orifa told me how the bodies
were laid out in front of the mosque, and the horrific state in which
she found them. She spent the afternoon collecting body parts, “then
bagging and naming them so they could be buried later on”. She said a
team of 11 Americans came and surveyed the crater where her home had
stood. They noted the numbers on shrapnel and each interviewed her.
Their translator gave her an envelope with $15 in dollar bills. Later,
she was taken to the US embassy in Kabul by Rita Lasar, a New Yorker who
had lost her brother in the Twin Towers and had gone to Afghanistan to
protest about the bombing and comfort its victims. When Orifa tried to
hand in a letter through the embassy gate, she was told, “Go away, you
beggar.”
In May last year, the Guardian published the result of an
investigation by Jonathan Steele. He concluded that, in addition to up
to 8,000 Afghans killed by American bombs, as many as 20,000 more may
have died as an indirect consequence of Bush’s invasion, including those
who fled their homes and were denied emergency relief in the middle of a
drought. Of all the great humanitarian crises of recent years, no
country has been helped less than Afghanistan. Bosnia, with a quarter of
the population, received $356 per person; Afghanistan gets $42 per
person. Only 3% of all international aid spent in Afghanistan has been
for reconstruction; the US-led military “coalition” accounts for 84%,
the rest is emergency aid. Last March, Karzai flew to Washington to beg
for more money. He was promised extra money from private US investors.
Of this, $35m will finance a proposed five-star hotel. As Bush said,
“The Afghan people will know the generosity of America and its allies.”
