Vrijdag 30 juli 2021 vertelde NRC-opiniemaakster Caroline de Gruyter haar publiek dat het ‘Westerse plan om via Afghanistan de regio te beheersen, een fiasco’ was geworden, en dat als gevolg dat dit ‘slecht nieuws voor Europa,’ was ‘omdat de migratiedruk zal stijgen (dat begint al) en de drugs- en wapenhandel zal floreren, waarmee deze groepen hun geld verdienen.’
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/07/30/europa-wees-een-spin-a4053043
Regarding the landmass of Eurasia as the center of global power, Brzezinski sets out to formulate a Eurasian geostrategy for the United States. In particular, he writes that no Eurasian challenger should emerge that can dominate Eurasia and thus also challenge U.S. global pre-eminence. Much of Brzezinski's analysis is concerned with geostrategy in Central Asia, focusing on the exercise of power on the Eurasian landmass in a post-Soviet environment,
aldus de korte samenvatting van Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
In de ‘Conclusie’ van zijn studie stelt Brzezinski:
a wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve well both the short-term and the longer-term goals of U.S. policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence — and, through the admission of new Central European members, also increase in the European councils the number of states with a pro-American proclivity — without simultaneously creating a Europe politically so integrated that it could soon challenge the United States on geopolitical matters of high importance to America elsewhere, particularly in the Middle East. A politically defined Europe is also essential to the progressive assimilation of Russia into a system of global cooperation.
Admittedly, America cannot on its own generate a more united Europe — that is up to the Europeans, especially the French and the Germans — but America can obstruct the emergence of a more united Europe. And that could prove calamitous for stability in Eurasia and thus also for America’s own interests. Indeed, unless Europe becomes more united, it is likely to become more disunited again. Accordingly, as stated earlier, it is vital that America work closely with both France and Germany in seeking a Europe that is politically viable, a Europe that remains linked to the United States, and a Europe that widens the scope of the cooperative democratic international system. Making a choice between France and Germany is not the issue. Without either France or Germany, there will be no Europe, and without Europe there will be no trans-Eurasian system.
In practical terms, the foregoing will require gradual accommodation to a shared leadership in NATO, greater acceptance of France’s concerns for a European role not only in Africa but also in the Middle East, and continued support for the eastward expansion of the EU, even as the EU becomes a more politically and economically assertive global player. A Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement, already advocated by a number of prominent Atlantic leaders, could also mitigate the risk of growing economic rivalry between a more united EU and the United States. In any case, the EU’s eventual success in burying the centuries-old European nationalist antagonisms, with their globally disruptive effects, would be well worth some gradual diminution in America’s decisive role as Eurasia’s current arbitrator.
It could even reignite currently dormant or dying Russian geopolitical aspirations in Central Europe.
Indeed, the failure of the American-led effort to expand NATO could reawaken even more ambitious Russian desires. It is not yet evident — and the historical record is strongly to the contrary — that the Russian political elite shares Europe’s desire for a strong and enduring American political and military presence. Therefore, while the fostering of an increasingly cooperative relationship with Russia is clearly desirable, it is important for America to send a clear message about its global priorities. If a choice has to be made between a larger Euro-Atlantic system and a better relationship with Russia, the former has to rank incomparably higher to America.
For that reason, any accommodation with Russia on the issue of NATO enlargement should not entail an outcome that has the effect of making Russia a de facto decision-making member of the alliance, thereby diluting NATO’s special Euro-Atlantic character while simultaneously relegating its newly admitted members to second-class status. That would create opportunities for Russia to resume not only the effort to regain a sphere of influence in Central Europe but to use its presence within NATO to play on any American-European disagreements in order to reduce the American role in European affairs.
It is also crucial that, as Central Europe enters NATO, any new security assurances to Russia regarding the region be truly reciprocal and thus mutually reassuring. Restrictions on the deployment of NATO troops and nuclear weapons on the soil of new members can be an important factor in allaying legitimate Russian concerns, but these should be matched by symmetrical Russian assurances regarding the demilitarization of the potentially strategically menacing salient of Kaliningrad and by limits on major troop deployments near the borders of the prospective new members of NATO and the EU. While all of Russia’s newly independent western neighbors are anxious to have a stable and cooperative relationship with Russia, the fact is that they continue to fear it for historically understandable reasons. Hence, the emergence of an equitable NATO/EU accommodation with Russia would be welcomed by all Europeans as a signal that Russia is finally making the much-desired post-imperial choice in favor of Europe.
Kort samengevat: Brzezinski wijst de Amerikaanse financiële elite op Wall Street, en haar beleidsbepalers in het Pentagon en het Congres, en haar opiniemakers in de mainstream-media erop dat ‘een groter Europa en een omvangrijkere NAVO de korte termijn- en de langere termijn doeleinden zullen dienen van het Amerikaanse politieke beleid.’ De VS dient zijn hegemonie politiek en militair na te streven in de hele wereld. Nu de Sovjet Unie uiteen is gevallen moet ‘een omvangrijker Europa de draagwijdte van de Amerikaanse invloed uitbreiden,’ zonder ‘tegelijkertijd op politiek gebied een dermate geïntegreerd Europa te creëren dat het elders de VS in geopolitieke uiterst belangrijke zaken snel kan aanvechten.’ Van vitaal belang is daarom ‘een Europa dat’ als een satelliet ‘gelinkt blijft aan de Verenigde Staten.’ Belangrijk is dat het ‘nieuwe Europa geopolitiek onderdeel blijft van de Euro-Atlantische ruimte’ en dus is ‘de expansie van NATO van doorslaggevend belang,’ en indien er ‘een keuze moet worden gemaakt tussen een groter Euro-Atlantisch systeem en een betere relatie met Rusland, het eerste van onvergelijkbaar hoger belang is voor Amerika.’ Rusland dient ook geen lid te worden van de NAVO, aangezien het land ‘op elke onenigheid tussen Amerika en Europa kan inspelen om zodoende de Amerikaanse rol in Europese zaken te verzwakken.’ Europa moet een bijrol blijven spelen en moet voorkomen dat het, net als Rusland — in de woorden van Geert Mak — weer ‘geschiedenis wil maken.’ De NAVO moet dan ook allereerst de financiële en economische belangen van Washington en Wall Street veilig stellen, waar dan ook ter wereld waar ‘grondstoffen’ en ‘markten’ bedreigd worden door nationalistische groeperingen als bijvoorbeeld de Taliban. Veelzeggend in dit verband is dat in de jaren tachtig de onderhandelingen tussen de Amerikaanse regering onder president Reagan en de Afghaanse verzetsstrijders over het ‘Westerse plan om via Afghanistan de regio te beheersen,’ op een ‘fiasco’ uitliepen. Dat overleg ging over de omvangrijke, veelal nog niet ontgonnen, Afghaanse grondstoffen. Op 27 august 2021 berichtte ClimateChangeDispatch onder de kop ‘Taliban Now Controls One Of The World’s Largest Lithium Deposits’ het volgende:
Taliban fighters not only took control of Kabul and the Afghan government on August 15. They also gained access to a gigantic deposit of minerals essential for renewable energies, possibly giving China an indisputable edge.
A Bloomberg New Energy Finance Limited report in 2020 highlighted China’s global dominance in the lithium-ion battery supply chain market, due to its grip on raw material mining and refining.
In 2019, the US imported 80 percent of its rare earth minerals from China, while the EU states imported 98 percent of these materials from China.
China incidentally also shares a small border with Afghanistan called the Wakhan Corridor – 210 km long. While the length of the border may appear insignificant, its location is crucial.
Afghanistan is believed to have large deposits of gold, iron, copper, zinc, lithium, and other rare earth metals, valued at over $1 trillion.
‘Afghanistan may hold 60 million metric tons of copper, 2,2 billion tons of iron ore, 1,4 million tons of rare earth elements (REEs) such as lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and veins of aluminum, gold, silver, zinc, mercury…’ according to a 2020 report in The Diplomat.
But the Wakhan Corridor has been used by Islamic Uighur militants opposed to Chinese rule in Xinjiang. Chinese officials meeting with the newly installed Taliban are certainly aware of the risk that radical Islamists pose:
‘We hope the Afghan Taliban will make a clean break with all terrorist organizations including ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement) and resolutely and effectively combat them to remove obstacles, play a positive role and create enabling conditions for security, stability, development, and cooperation in the region,’ said a high-ranking Chinese official.
Why is this important?
And these minerals happen to be concentrated in only a small number of pockets around the world…
In 2010, the US Department of Defense called Afghanistan ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium’ after American geologists then discovered that the country’s deposits amounted to at least a trillion dollars.
Lithium is an essential ingredient to produce long-lasting batteries used in electric cars in particular. The battery of a Tesla Model S, for example, has about 12 kilograms of lithium in it.
Ten years later, these metals have not yet been extracted. The Taliban is unlikely to sell the metal to Americans, and the United States views China, the world’s largest lithium producer, as its main rival.
And the US wants at least 40 percent of its cars to be electric by 2030. Thus the previous US-led government in Kabul had hoped that the promise of mineral wealth would entice President Trump into making a commitment to stay in the country.
‘Afghanistan can be an appropriate place for US industry, and specifically the mining sector, to look at opportunities for investment,’ Mohammad Humayon Qayoumi, the former chief adviser to Afghan president on infrastructure, human capital, and technology, once opined.
But Tom Benson, a Ph.D. in the Department of Geological Sciences at Stanford University, has focused his research on a 16.3 million-year-old super-volcano on the Oregon-Nevada border that contains the largest lithium deposit in the United States.
A number of other active volcanoes may hold the same deposits and there is a particularly ‘exciting’ one, called Bogoslof, in Alaska. That may be why the US has lost interest in Afghanistan.
‘The Taliban are now sitting on a stockpile of one of the most strategic minerals in the world,’ said Rob Schoonover, an ecology expert at the US think tank Center for Strategic Risks, in an interview with Quartz. ‘The question of whether they will be able to play this role will be important in the future.’
Deze achtergrond, de bredere context die de drijfveer is van het Amerikaans expansionisme, wordt door Caroline de Gruyter angstvallig verzwegen. Haar propaganda beperkt zich tot een 2 minuten durende NRC-column waarin zij schrijft dat het ‘Westerse plan om via Afghanistan de regio te beheersen, een fiasco’ was geworden, en dat dit daardoor ‘slecht nieuws voor Europa,’was, omdat onder andere ‘de drugs- en wapenhandel zal floreren, waarmee deze groepen hun geld verdienen.’ Welke groeperingen? In elk geval niet de Taliban. Zaterdag 28 augustus 2021 werd bekend dat:
Taliban leaders, seeking international acceptance after seizing power in Afghanistan, have told farmers to stop cultivating opium poppies, residents of some major poppy-growing areas say. This has caused raw opium prices to soar across the country.
In recent days, Taliban representatives began telling gatherings of villagers in the southern province of Kandahar, one of the country’s main opium-producing regions, that the crop — a crucial part of the local economy — would now be banned.
This followed a statement by Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid at an Aug. 18 news conference in Kabul that the country’s new rulers won’t permit the drug trade. Mr. Mujahid at the time didn’t offer details of how the Islamist group intends to enforce the ban.
Local farmers in Kandahar, Uruzgan and Helman provinces said raw opium prices have tripled, from about $70 to about $200 per kilogram, due to uncertainty about future production. In the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, the opium price has doubled, residents there said. Raw opium is processed into heroin…
When the Taliban were in power before the 2001 U.S. invasion, they also initially banned opium production, but later punished only the consumption of drugs, not their cultivation and trading. The Taliban did, however, dramatically crack down on opium cultivation in 2000,
aldus The Wall Street Journal. ’s Werelds best geïnformeerde bron op dit gebied is de Amerikaanse historicus, professor Alfred W. McCoy, die al op 2 juni 1972, toen hij nog aan de Yale Universiteit studeerde:
testified before the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs… and accused American government officials… of covering up drug trafficking in Southeast Asia. Soon after, McCoy reaffirmed these beliefs in a letter to Congressman Les Aspin.
McCoy uncovered drug trafficking methods for heroin and opium throughout Southeast Asia and to American troops stationed there by high-ranking government officials: Commander Ouane Rattikone and General Vang Pao (Laos); and President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and General Đăng Văn Quang (Vietnam). McCoy also cited their ties with the Mafia, namely a visit to Saigon in 1968 by Santo Trafficante Jr.. Senator Gale W. McGee dismissed the allegations and accused McCoy of McCarthyism, which was immediately rebutted (weerlegd. svh). Senator Proxmire requested additional evidence and documentation to which McCoy responded his forthcoming book on the topic would serve as such. In that same year, McCoy's book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, was published by Harper and Row. He restated that the Central Intelligence Agency was knowingly involved in the trade of heroin in the Golden Triangle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_W._McCoy
Politics of Heroin documents CIA complicity and aid to the Southeast Asian opium/heroin trade. The book explained that most of the world's heroin was produced in the Golden Triangle and transported by the United States.
It is transported in the planes, vehicles, and other conveyances supplied by the United States. The profit from the trade has been going into the pockets of some of our best friends in Southeast Asia. The charge concludes with the statement that the traffic is being carried on with the indifference if not the closed-eye compliance of some American officials, and there is no likelihood of its being shut down in the foreseeable future.
Air America, covertly owned and operated by the CIA, was used to transport the illicit drugs.
The heroin supply was partially responsible for the perilous state of US Army morale in Vietnam. 'By mid 1971 Army medical officers were estimating that about 10 to 15 percent of the lower-ranking enlisted men serving in Vietnam were heroin users.'
Having interviewed Maurice Belleux, former head of the French intelligence agency SDECE, McCoy also uncovered parts of the French Connection scheme used by the agency to finance all of its covert operations during the First Indochina War through control of the Indochina drug trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia
Dinsdag 9 januari 2018 zette McCoy onder de kop ‘How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan’ in The Guardian uiteen dat:
Western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.
After fighting the longest war in its history, the US stands at the brink of defeat in Afghanistan. How could this be possible? How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for more than 16 years – deploying more than 100,000 troops at the conflict’s peak, sacrificing the lives of nearly 2,300 soldiers, spending more than $1 trillion on its military operations, lavishing a record $100 billion more on ‘nation-building,’ helping fund and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies — and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations? So dismal is the prospect of stability in Afghanistan that, in 2016, the Obama White House cancelled a planned withdrawal of its forces, ordering more than 8,000 troops to remain in the country indefinitely.
In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower — the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium — and suffered when they failed to complement it.
It was during the cold war that the US first intervened in Afghanistan, backing Muslim militants who were fighting to expel the Soviet Red Army. In December 1979, the Soviets occupied Kabul in order to shore up their failing client regime; Washington, still wounded by the fall of Saigon four years earlier, decided to give Moscow its ‘own Vietnam’ by backing the Islamic resistance. For the next 10 years, the CIA would provide the mujahideen guerrillas with an estimated $3 billion in arms. These funds, along with an expanding opium harvest, would sustain the Afghan resistance for the decade it would take to force a Soviet withdrawal. One reason the US strategy succeeded was that the surrogate war launched by the CIA did not disrupt the way its Afghan allies used the country’s swelling drug traffic to sustain their decade-long struggle.
Despite almost continuous combat since the invasion of October 2001, pacification efforts have failed to curtail the Taliban insurgency, largely because the US simply could not control the swelling surplus from the country’s heroin trade. Its opium production surged from around 180 tonnes in 2001 to more than 3,000 tonnes a year after the invasion, and to more than 8,000 by 2007. Every spring, the opium harvest fills the Taliban’s coffers once again, funding wages for a new crop of guerrilla fighters.
At each stage in its tragic, tumultuous history over the past 40 years — the covert war of the 1980s, the civil war of the 90s and its post-2001 occupation — opium has played a central role in shaping the country’s destiny. In one of history’s bitter ironies, Afghanistan’s unique ecology converged with American military technology to transform this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state — a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices and determine the fate of foreign interventions.
During the 1980s, the CIA’s secret war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan helped transform the Afghani-Pakistani borderlands into a launchpad for the global heroin trade. ‘In the tribal area,’ the US state department reported in 1986, ‘there is no police force. There are no courts. There is no taxation. No weapon is illegal… Hashish and opium are often on display.’ By then, the process of guerrilla mobilization to fight the Soviet occupation was long under way. Instead of forming its own coalition of resistance leaders, the CIA had relied on Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and its Afghan clients, who soon became key players in the burgeoning cross-border opium traffic.
The CIA looked the other way while Afghanistan’s opium production grew from about 100 tonnes annually in the 1970s to 2,000 tonnes by 1991. In 1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer. By 1984, it supplied a staggering 60% of the US market and 80% of the European. Inside Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts surged from near zero (yes, zero) in 1979 to 5,000 in 1980, and 1.3 million by 1985 — a rate of addiction so high the UN termed it ‘particularly shocking.’
According to a 1986 state department report, opium ‘is an ideal crop in a war-torn country since it requires little capital investment, is fast growing and is easily transported and traded.’ Moreover, Afghanistan’s climate was well suited to growing poppies. As relentless warfare between CIA and Soviet surrogates took its toll, Afghan farmers began to turn to opium ‘in desperation,’ since it produced ‘high profits’ that could cover rising food prices. At the same time, the state department reported that resistance elements took up opium production and trafficking ‘to provide staples for [the] population under their control and to fund weapons purchases.’
As the mujahideen guerrillas gained ground against the Soviet occupation and began to create liberated zones inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, the resistance helped fund its operations by collecting taxes from peasants who grew the lucrative opium poppies, particularly in the fertile Helmand valley. Caravans carrying CIA arms into that region for the resistance often returned to Pakistan loaded down with opium — sometimes, reported the New York Times, 'with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.’
Charles Cogan, a former director of the CIA’s Afghan operation, later spoke frankly about the agency’s choices. ‘Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets,’ he told an interviewer in 1995. ‘We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade. I don’t think that we need to apologize for this… There was fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.’
Over the longer term, the US intervention produced a black hole of geopolitical instability that would never again be sealed or healed. Afghanistan could not readily recover from the unprecedented devastation it suffered in the years of the first American intervention. As the Soviet-Afghan war wound down between 1989 and 1992, the Washington-led alliance essentially abandoned the country, failing either to sponsor a peace settlement or finance reconstruction.
While Washington turned away from Afghanistan to other foreign policy hotspots in Africa and the Persian Gulf, a vicious civil war broke out in a country that had already suffered, between 1979 and 1989, some 1.5 million dead, about 10% of the country’s population. During the years of civil strife among the many well-armed warlords the CIA had left primed to fight for power, Afghan farmers raised the only crop that ensured instant profits: the opium poppy. Having multiplied twentyfold during the covert-war era of the 1980s, the opium harvest would more than double again during the civil war of the 1990s.
In this period of turmoil, opium’s ascent is best understood as a response to severe damage from two decades of destructive warfare. With the return of some three million refugees to a war-ravaged land, the opium fields were an employment godsend, requiring nine times as many laborers to cultivate as wheat, the country’s traditional staple. In addition, only opium merchants were capable of accumulating capital rapidly enough to be able to provide poor poppy farmers with much-needed cash advances, which often provided more than half their annual income. That credit would prove critical to the survival of many impoverished villagers.
In the civil war’s first phase, from 1992 to 1994, ruthless local warlords combined arms and opium in a countrywide struggle for power. Later, Pakistan threw its backing behind a newly arisen Pashtun force, the Taliban. After seizing Kabul in 1996 and taking control of much of the country, the Taliban regime encouraged local opium cultivation, offering government protection to the export trade and collecting much-needed taxes on both the opium harvested and the heroin manufactured. UN opium surveys showed that, during the Taliban’s first three years in power, Afghanistan’s opium crop accounted for 75% of world production.
In July 2000, however, as a devastating drought entered its second year and hunger spread across Afghanistan, the Taliban government suddenly ordered a ban on all opium cultivation, in an apparent appeal for international acceptance. A subsequent UN crop survey of 10,030 villages found that this prohibition had reduced the harvest by 94%.
Three months later, in September 2000, the Taliban sent a delegation to UN headquarters in New York to trade upon the country’s continuing drug prohibition in a bid for diplomatic recognition. Instead, the UN imposed new sanctions on the regime for protecting Osama bin Laden. The US, on the other hand, actually rewarded the Taliban with $43 million in humanitarian aid, even as it seconded UN criticism over Bin Laden. Announcing this aid in May 2001, secretary of state Colin Powell praised ‘the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome,’ but still urged the regime to end ‘their support for terrorism; their violation of internationally recognized human rights standards, especially their treatment of women and girls.’
After largely ignoring Afghanistan for a decade, Washington ‘rediscovered’ the country in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In October 2001, the US began bombing the country, and then, with the support of British forces, launched an invasion spearheaded by local warlords. The Taliban regime collapsed with a speed that surprised many government officials. In retrospect, it seems likely that its opium prohibition was a crucial factor.
To an extent not generally appreciated, Afghanistan had, for two full decades, devoted a growing share of its resources — capital, land, water and labor — to the production of opium and heroin. By the time the Taliban banned cultivation, its agriculture had become little more than an opium mono-crop. The drug trade accounted for most of its tax revenues, much of its export income, and a significant share of its employment.
The Taliban’s sudden opium eradication proved to be an act of economic suicide that brought an already weakened society to the brink of collapse. A 2001 UN survey found that the ban had ‘resulted in a severe loss of income for an estimated 3.3 million people,’ about 15% of the population. In this context, it became, according to the UN, ‘easier for western military forces to persuade rural elites and the population to rebel against the regime.’
In little more than a month, the lethal US bombing campaign, combined with ground attacks by its warlord allies, smashed the Taliban’s weakened defenses. But the longer-term US strategy would plant the seeds, quite literally, for the Taliban’s surprising revival just four years later.
While the American bombing campaign raged throughout October 2001, the CIA shipped $70 million in cash into the country to mobilize its old cold war coalition of tribal warlords for the fight against the Taliban, an expenditure President George W. Bush would later hail as one of history’s biggest ‘bargains.’ To capture Kabul and other key cities, the CIA put its money behind the leaders of the Northern Alliance, an ethnic Tajik force that had fought the Soviets in the 1980s and then resisted the Taliban government in the 1990s. They, in turn, had long dominated the drug traffic in the area of north-east Afghanistan that they controlled during the Taliban years. The CIA also turned to a group of rising Pashtun warlords along the Pakistan border who had been active as drug smugglers in the south-eastern part of the country. As a result, when the Taliban collapsed, the groundwork had already been laid for the resumption of opium cultivation and the drug trade on a major scale.
Once Kabul and the provincial capitals were taken, the CIA quickly ceded operational control to allied military forces and civilian officials. In the years to come, those forces’ inept drug-suppression programmes would cede the heroin traffic’s growing profits first to the warlords and, in later years, largely to Taliban guerrillas. In a development without historical precedent, illicit drugs would be responsible for 62% of the country’s 2003 gross domestic product (GDP).
Amerikaanse special forces kijken rustig toe hoe Afghaanse boeren de opium-oogst binnenhalen.
Duidelijk is dat de sociale, economische en politieke ineenstorting van Afghanistan op gang is gebracht door de VS, zoals bleek uit een onthullend interview met president Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski dat het Franse weekblad Le Nouvel Observateur op 15 januari 1998 publiceerde. Op de vraag ‘The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the national securty advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?’ antwoordde Brzezinski:
Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan , nobody believed them . However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q: ‘Some agitated Moslems’? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today…
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West has a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid: There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner, without demagoguery or emotionalism. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there incommon among fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, moderate Morocco, militarist Pakistan, pro-Western Egypt, or secularist Central Asia? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries...
https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview
Zelfs achteraf, twee decennia nadat Brzezinski zijn anti-Sovjet-strategie in Afghanistan was begonnen, begreep Brzezinski nog steeds niet de impact van de rampzalige ontwikkeling die hij met het provoceren van Moskou had veroorzaakt. De National Security Adviser besefte zelfs achteraf niet de consequenties van het feit dat ‘Caravans die CIA-wapens’ naar Afghanistan’s mujaheddin vervoerden en afgeladen met opium terugkeerden, al dan niet ‘met instemming van Pakistaanse- en Amerikaanse functionarissen van inlichtingendiensten.’ Evenmin begreep de meest invloedrijke Nationale Veiligheidsadviseur dat ‘de VS interventie’ ook in deze regio op ‘langere termijn een zwart gat van geopolitieke instabiliteit creëerde, die nooit meer afgedekt of genezen’ kon worden, en een naar schatting anderhalf miljoen doden veroorzaakte, als wel een ‘ongehoorde verwoesting,’ terwijl de opium-oogst vertwintigvoudigde, om tijdens de burgeroorlog nog eens te verdubbelen. Tenslotte wist Pakistan de opkomst van de Taliban mogelijk te maken. Dezelfde Taliban van wie de Verenigde Staten nu verloren heeft, ondanks het feit dat de CIA de ‘warlords’ van de Noordelijke Alliantie, die de drugshandel in het Noord-Oosten in handen hadden, met vele miljarden dollars nog rijker maakten. Maar ook deze werkelijkheid kent de NRC-opiniemaakster Caroline de Gruyter niet, hetgeen haar niet weerhoudt om haar NRC-columns met pedant geklets te vullen. Dit kan allemaal in het gecorrumpeerde en betweterige kleine kikkerland. Meer hierover de volgende keer.
Amerikaanse special forces temidden van opiumvelden, die het Taliban-verzet financierde, op zoek naar de Taliban.
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