Three Lions of the Hindu Kush Mountains
By Eric Margolis
August 21, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
The deaths in Southeast Asia of three of the
West’s ‘Great Satans’ were announced in recent weeks: Mullah Omar
and Jalaluddin Haqqani in Afghanistan; and Pakistan’s Lt. Gen.
Hamid Gul.
I never met Mullah Omar though I was present at
the birth and expansion of his movement, Taliban.
Mullah Omar was a renowned combat veteran of the
1980’s great jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In
1989, the Soviets wisely withdrew. Afghanistan was convulsed by
civil war between the eleven mujahidin factions, many of whom were
supported by CIA through Pakistani intelligence.
The ethnic Pashtun region of southern Afghanistan
was scourged by rampant banditry and rape. A local Muslim preacher,
Mullah Omar, rallied a group of religious seminarians (‘talibs’) and
set out to fight the bandits and still powerful Afghan communists.
Pakistan quickly aided the Taliban as a way of expanding its
influence in next-door Afghanistan and fighting Communist forces.
Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, moved swiftly
to arm and direct the rag-tag Taliban forces. Its head, Lt. Gen.
Hamid Gul, a fierce Pashtun warrior and dedicated
nationalist-Islamist, led the ISI effort. Pashtun Afghanistan
rallied to Taliban, which quickly ended banditry, rape and almost
extinguished the heroin trade.
Mullah Omar, a shadowy Pashtun warrior who had
lost an eye fighting the Soviet occupation in the 1980’s, declared
Afghanistan a state run under Islamic values. Like Pakistan’s
strongman, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, he aspired to overthrow the brutal
Communist Red Sultanates of post-Soviet Central Asia.
But Washington had made a secret deal with Moscow
over Afghanistan and it had other ideas. President Zia and his then
ISI chief, Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rahman (both well known to this
writer), were murdered in August 1988 when their aircraft was
sabotaged.
Their deaths remain a mystery; but many Pakistanis
blame the US. My view is that the Soviet KGB was likely
responsible. Benazir Bhutto told me she believed a senior general,
Mirza Aslam Beg, was responsible. I asked if she was responsible.
With Zia out of the way and the pliant Benazir
installed in power, the US quickly abandoned allies Pakistan and
Taliban.
Then came 9/11. President George W. Bush needed a
target for America’s fury and humiliation. He foolishly chose
Taliban, which had nothing to do with the attacks but which was
hosting Osama bin Laden, a Saudi hero of the anti-Soviet war.
Taliban offered to hand bin Laden over if the US produced evidence
of his guilt for the 9/11 attacks. But no such evidence was ever
produced. US oil firms, who had long-eyed transit routes through
Afghanistan, cheered on the US attacks.
The US invaded Afghanistan and threatened Pakistan
with being bombed back to the stone age if it did not become a
vassal state and cooperate with the US takeover of Afghanistan.
Taliban was demonized by the US media as wife-beating “terrorists,”
then overthrown. The US created a new Afghan government made up of
Taliban’s enemies, the drug-dealing Tajik and Uzbek minorities, and
the criminal Afghan Communists. The new US-backed regime
immediately restored and expanded Afghanistan’s heroin trade.
The fiercely bearded Pashtun tribal chief,
Jalaluddin Haqqani, had been a leading fighter against the Soviet
occupation and a major CIA “asset.” I met Haqqani while covering
the war in Afghanistan. The US hailed him a “freedom figher” when he
battled the Soviets. When he sought to oust the US from Afghanistan
he was branded a “terrorist.” After the US replaced the Soviets as
the foreign occupier of Afghanistan, Haqqani became one of the most
effective and feared leaders of the anti-US resistance. Countless
US efforts to kill or suborn him failed.
After leaving the military, Gen. Hamid Gul
remained a leading supporter of Taliban, so earning Washington’s
wrath. Gul’s relentless anti-Indian feelings led him to back
Kashmiri independence groups and a number of shady Pakistan extreme
Islamist groups. However, Germany rightly asserted Gul had struck
the first blow that brought down the Soviet Union.
Gul was very outspoken. He claimed ISI had proof
that 9/11 was an “inside job” mounted by pro-Israel groups, US
right-wingers and Israel’s Mossad. This claim was widely believed
across the Muslim world, though Gul never produced any evidence
backing this claim. The US claimed he was crazy. But the US also
claims the religious, anti drug, anti-Communist movement Taliban are
terrorists.
Gul claimed Benazir Bhutto was a US stooge. She
had even less generous words for Gul. “Eric, you just love your
Pakistani generals,” she always chided me, ‘specially that SOB Gul.”
Mullah Omar, with millions of dollars of US
bounties on his head, wisely stayed out of sight. It now transpires
that the Taliban leader may have died of natural causes in Karachi
two years ago. Unable to settle on a new leader, Taliban, which is
a loose confederation of tribes, kept silent on his death until
recently when a new, little-knows emir, Mullah Mansour, was
chosen. The same subterfuge was used with the deceased medieval
Spanish leader, El Cid.
Washington was delighted, hoping Taliban would
splinter and cease challenging its latest efforts to keep control of
strategic Afghanistan. But I suspect most of the Pashtun will keep
on fighting until Taliban’s goal of driving out all foreign
occupation troops is achieved.
Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning,
internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in
the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles
Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation –
Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news
sites in Asia.
http://ericmargolis.com/ Via Lewrockwell.com