July-August 2008 
Year 15    No.133
CIA


Creating a monster

The Taliban: A product of the West

The CIA’s shenanigans
By Sanjay Suri

London: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked in tandem with Pakistan to create the "monster" that is today Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, a leading US expert on South Asia said here.

"I warned them that we were creating a monster," Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars said at the conference here last week on "Terrorism and Regional Security: Managing the Challenges in Asia."

Harrison said: "The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan." The US provided $3 billion for building up these Islamic groups and it accepted Pakistan’s demand that they should decide how this money should be spent, Harrison said.

Harrison, who spoke before the Taliban assault on the Buddha statues was launched, told the gathering of security experts that he had meetings with CIA leaders at the time when Islamic forces were being strengthened in Afghanistan. "They told me these people were fanatical and the more fierce they were, the more fiercely they would fight the Soviets," he said. "I warned them that we were creating a monster."

Harrison, who has written five books on Asian affairs and US relations with Asia, has had extensive contact with the CIA and political leaders in South Asia. Harrison was a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between 1974 and 1996.

Harrison, who is now senior fellow with The Century Foundation, recalled a conversation he had with the late Gen. Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan. "Gen. Zia spoke to me about expanding Pakistan’s sphere of influence to control Afghanistan, then Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and then Iran and Turkey," Harrison said. That design continues, he said. Gen. Mohammed Aziz, who was involved in that Zia plan, has been elevated now to a key position by chief executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Harrison said.

The old associations between the intelligence agencies continue, Harrison said. "The CIA still has close links with the ISI."

Today that money and those weapons have helped build up the Taliban, Harrison said. "The Taliban are not just recruits from ‘madrassas’ but are on the payroll of the ISI." The Taliban are now "making a living out of terrorism."

Harrison said the UN Security Council resolution number 1333 calls for an embargo on arms to the Taliban. "But it is a resolution without teeth because it does not provide sanctions for non-compliance," he said. "The US is not backing the Russians who want to give more teeth to the resolution."

Now it is Pakistan that "holds the key to the future of Afghanistan," Harrison said. The creation of the Taliban was central to Pakistan’s "pan-Islamic vision," Harrison said.

It came after "the CIA made the historic mistake of encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan," he said. The creation of the Taliban had been "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," he said. "Pakistan has been building up Afghan collaborators who will sustain Pakistan," he said.

Commenting on the article which was also posted on the website, Emperor’s Clothes, site editor Jared Israel wrote:

The above article includes some useful information but is misleading. It appears to strongly underestimate US ‘help’ to the Taliban, suggests more Pakistani control than may have been the case and views Washington’s aid merely as a mistake. A New York Times article that appeared in 1998 (see: http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/camps.htm) suggests the CIA/NATO was directly involved. This, of course, makes it harder to suggest, as Mr Harrison does, that "encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan" was simply a mistake, something sold by Pakistan and stupidly bought by Washington. Washington’s relations with and various uses of Islamist terrorism (or, as Washington sometimes likes to say, ‘freedom fighters’) is discussed in ‘Credible Deception’ at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/sudan.html#s

March 6, 2001
India Abroad News Service

Friends turn foes
By Tim Weiner

Washington: Throughout the 1980s, the Soviet Union threw almost every weapon it had, short of nuclear bombs, at the Afghan camps attacked by the United States last week.

During their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan the Soviets attacked the camps outside the town of Khost with Scud missiles, 500-pound bombs dropped from jets, barrages of artillery, flights of helicopter gunships and their crack special forces. The toughest Soviet commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov, personally led the last assault.

But neither carpet bombing nor commandos drove the Afghan holy warriors from the mountains. Afghanistan has a long history of repelling superpowers. Its terrain favours defenders as well as any in the world whether their opponents, like the Soviets, are trying to defeat them on the ground or whether, like the United States, they are trying to disperse, deter and disrupt them. It is uncertain that the United States, which fired dozens of million-dollar cruise missiles at those same camps on Thursday, can do better than the Soviets.

The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep valleys of Paktia province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan resistance leaders maintained underground headquarters, mountain redoubts and clandestine weapons stocks during their bitter and ultimately successful war against Soviet troops from December 1979 to February 1989, according to American intelligence veterans.

The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist university", in the words of a senior United States intelligence official, is well known to the CIA.

The CIA’s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same warriors who fought the Soviets with the CIA’s help are now fighting under Mr bin Laden’s banner.

From those same camps the Afghan rebels, known as mujahideen or holy warriors, kept up a decade-long siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town of Khost.

Thousands of mujahideen were dug into the mountains around Khost. Soviet accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the rebel camps as "the last word in NATO engineering techniques". After a decade of fighting during which each side claimed to have killed thousands of the enemy, the Afghan rebels poured out of their encampments and took Khost.

"This was the most fiercely contested piece of real estate in the 10-year Afghan war," said Milt Bearden, who ran the CIA’s side of the war from 1986 to 1989.

United States officials said their attack was intended to deter Mr bin Laden, whom they call the financier and intellectual author of this month’s bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which killed 263 people, including 12 Americans. They said the damage inflicted on the Khost camps was moderate to heavy.

But the communications infrastructure used by Mr bin Laden is based on portable satellite telephones, not a centralised command and control system that can be destroyed with a missile, intelligence officials said. The strongest power that binds his loose-knit network of confederates is his money, which is hidden inside a thus far impenetrable global maze.

And history does not favour superpowers trying to subdue men dug into the mountains of Afghanistan.

Mr bin Laden has said he spent the 1980s supporting the mujahideen from their political base in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the foot of the Khyber Pass. He was most strongly allied with the most fundamentalist leaders of the Afghan resistance, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of the group called the Islamic Party. After the fall of the Soviet-backed government, Mr Hekmatyar spent most of his brief tenure as prime minister hurling missiles and mortars at Kabul, trying to dislodge more moderate rebel leaders from power.

The more militant Afghan rebels, like Mr Hekmatyar, denounced the United States and backed Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, as did Mr bin Laden. A year after the Persian Gulf war, posters throughout eastern Afghanistan displayed heroic if imaginary portraits of Saddam Hussein and Mr Hekmatyar standing side by side.

No amount of money or moral support could keep the veterans of the Afghan resistance from killing one another after the fall of Kabul. The chaos that their infighting created led to the rise of the Taliban, the militant armed religious party that now controls most of Afghanistan and harbours Mr bin Laden.

In the nine years since the Soviet withdrawal, Afghan resistance veterans have hoarded the remaining weapons sent by the CIA and set up military training centres at resistance camps like the one near Khost, according to United States officials. In those years thousands of Islamic outcasts, radicals and visionaries from around the world came to the borderlands of Afghanistan to learn the lessons of war from the mujahideen. Mr bin Laden sponsored many of those foreigners.

In a 1994 interview a commander loyal to Mr Hekmatyar, Noor Amin said that "the whole country is a university for jihad" or holy war.

"There are many formal training centres," Mr Amin said. "We have had Egyptians, Sudanese, Arabs and other foreigners trained here as assassins." United States officials said the former mujahideen camps it attacked on Thursday were precisely that kind of "university for jihad".

Mr bin Laden, stripped of his Saudi citizenship and formally stateless, returned to the anarchy of Afghanistan in 1996 from the Sudan where United States intelligence analysts believe he built at least three training camps for veterans of the Afghan war.

He said in an interview with CNN last year that one of his main missions during the war, which he helped finance with millions of dollars of his own money, was to transport bulldozers, front end loaders and other heavy equipment to Pakistan to help build tunnels, military depots and roads inside Afghanistan for the mujahideen.

It is unclear whether Mr bin Laden, who inherited about $250 million from a fortune his father made building mosques, palaces and public works for the Saudi royal family, personally helped build the Khost camps during the war against the Soviets, or has substantially upgraded them since returning to the mountains of Afghanistan. n

August 24, 1998
The New York Times


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