The Afghan invasion was
successfully sold to the Western public on the basis that the
9/11 attacks were orchestrated from Afghanistan, where Osama Bin
Laden enjoyed the hospitality of its Taliban government under
the Pashtun code of honor. The Taliban offered to hand over the
terrorist mastermind for a trial in a third country operating
under Sharia law, if proof of his responsibility for the attack
were provided.
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The hawkish Bush
administration rejected the face-saving arrangement and invaded
with full force. It later refused to accept a deal that
Washington’s handpicked new ruler of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai,
negotiated with Taliban leaders. The Islamists offered to retire
and distance themselves from politics in exchange for an
amnesty. Denied, they went into exile or hiding, only to emerge
several years later leading an increasingly powerful insurgency
against the government in Kabul and its Western sponsors.
Ironically, the
Clinton administration reportedly courted the Taliban government
in the mid-1990s, seeking their cooperation in an ambitious
project to construct a pipeline
from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. Turkmen gas could then
be sold to consumers in Europe, competing with fuel from Iran
and Russia.
“[Afghanistan
under] the Taliban had been a client state of the US,”
Pilger insisted. “The Taliban
leadership, including some of the people we are seeing now, were
invited to the United States.”
ust like the invasion
itself was justified as a crackdown on terrorism, the continued
military presence was sold to the Western audience by the need
to preserve the progressive achievements of the US-backed
government. It’s true that in some places, like Kabul itself,
life became safer and much more liberating than under the rule
of the Taliban. But Afghanistan’s hinterlands, where most of the
country’s population lived, remained a medieval patchwork of
fiefdoms ruled by warlords who preserved their oppressive
habits, Pilger pointed out.
“They traded
in women and young boys, they ran the heroin trade. And of
course the CIA, which were their principal backers followed very
closely by MI6, knew all about this,”
he said.
A few decades
earlier, he added, the US had no qualms about hurting Afghan
civilians when it backed Islamist forces against the government
of the Soviet-supported People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA). Some of its policies were extraordinarily progressive
for Afghanistan, like equal rights for women and literacy
programs. A 1979 cable from the US embassy in Kabul
cited by Pilger said that the
broader US interest
“would be served by the demise of the PDPA
government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future
social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”
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