Source: The Intel HubDean Henderson
(Part one of a three-part series excerpted from Chapter 8: Project Frankenstein: Afghanistan: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the Syrian
government reversed a ban on women teachers wearing Islamic face cover
in the classroom. The concession to Western-backed Islamist protestors
is instructive, since the secular socialist Assad government is clearly
in the crosshairs of City of London bankers attempting to redraw the
political map of the Middle East. As in Libya and Afghanistan, the
banksters are counting on fundamentalists to carry out their
counter-revolutionary agenda.
Though Western intelligence had earlier cavorted with Islamists in
attacking nationalist movements in Iraq, Indonesia and Iran; it was in
Afghanistan where they unleashed the full force of their young
Frankensteins.
This disastrous experiment came to a head last week when 2,000
Afghans attacked a UN compound in usually sedate Mazar-e-Sharif, killing
7 staffers. Though set off by the burning of a Quran by our own
Florida version of the Taliban (see my Left Hook article “Pastor Jones
& Mohammed Atta”), one must understand this nation’s history to
fully comprehend Afghan anger towards their Western occupiers.
Afghanistan was founded in 1747 and ruled by a bloodline monarchy with rumored ties to the legendary Roshaniya-
the all-seeing ones. In 1933 King Mohammed Zaher Shah took the throne,
ruling the country in feudalistic fashion until deposed by his cousin
Mohammed Daoud in 1973. [1]
In April 1978 Daoud was killed in a popular revolution led by
socialist leader Nor Mohammed Taraki, who became President and embarked
on an ambitious land reform program to help poor Afghan sharecroppers,
who were traditionally forced to work land owned by the king and his
cronies.
Taraki built schools for women who were banned from education under
the monarchy. He opened Afghan universities to the poor and introduced
free health care. When counter-revolutionary bandits began to burn down
universities and girl’s schools, many Afghan’s saw the hand of the
CIA. As the campaign of sabotage intensified, Kabul revolutionaries
called on Soviet leader Leonid Brezynev to send troops to repel the
bandits. Brezynev refused.
In 1979 pro-Taraki militants, convinced of a CIA destabilization
plot, assassinated CIA Kabul Chief of Station Spike Dubbs. Indeed, in
April 1979, a full seven months before the much-ballyhooed Soviet
“invasion” of Afghanistan occurred, US officials met with Afghan
warlords bent on overthrowing Taraki. On July 3, 1979 President Carter
signed the first national security directive authorizing secret aid to
Afghan warlords. Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
said he convinced Carter that in his “…opinion this aid was going to
induce a Soviet military intervention.”[2]
Taraki appointed Tabizullah Amin as Cabinet Minister in charge of
land reform. Amin, who Soviet KGB Chief Yuri Andropov came to believe
was a CIA deep cover agent provocateur, launched a brutal
campaign of terror against political opponents. This turned world
opinion against the Tariki government. Andropov believes the CIA had
Amin infiltrate the Kabul government intent on discrediting the
revolutionaries.
Taraki traveled to Moscow to consult with the Soviets on a strategy
to get rid of Amin. The day he returned to Kabul, Amin had Taraki
executed and seized power. A few weeks later CIA-backed warlords
massacred dozens of Afghan government officials in the western city of
Herat. The combination of these two events finally convinced Brezynev
to send troops into Afghanistan. [3]
In December 1979 Soviet tanks rolled across the Panshir Valley, while
KGB operatives stormed the Royal Palace in Kabul. They assassinated
Tabizullah Amin and installed Babrak Karmal as the new leader of
Afghanistan. Brzezinski now had the justification he’d been looking for
to begin overtly arming counter-revolutionaries in Afghanistan. Though
the Afghan conflict killed two million people, Brzezinski later
boasted, “That (Carter’s secret directive) was an excellent idea. It
had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.”[4]
CIA agents streamed into Peshawar in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier
Province. The city lay at the foot of Khyber Pass, the gateway to
Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees had flooded into
Peshawar to escape the looming war. With help from the Pakistani
Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), the CIA scoured the refugee camps
looking for modern-day Islamic fundamentalist Assassins who were
prepared to intensify the guerrilla war on Kabul’s socialist government
and now, to repel the Soviets from Afghanistan.
The Company found what it needed in Hezbi-i Isbmi, a force
of feudal-minded Islamist fighters assembled and trained by the
Pakistani military with CIA oversight. Their leader was Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, a fanatic who in the early 1970’s had ordered his followers
to throw acid into the faces of Afghan women who refused to wear their burkhas. In 1972 Hezbi-i Isbmi murdered
hundreds of left-wing students in Afghanistan then fled to Peshawar,
where they escaped prosecution under the protection of the US-allied
Pakistan military government. [5] The group was feared and despised by
Afghans and Pakistanis alike, who viewed them as a terrorist
organization.
Pakistan became the third largest recipient of US military aid in the
world, behind only Israel and Egypt. Much of that aid was going to arm
the mujahadeen who launched raids into Afghanistan, seizing large chunks of real estate. A pattern emerged.
Each time the Hezbi-i Isbmi secured land, they immediately
planted it to poppies. Between 1982-1983 opium harvests along the
Afghan/Pakistani border doubled in size and by 1984 Pakistan was
exporting 70% of the world’s heroin. [6] During that time the CIA
Station in Islamabad – Pakistan’s capital – became the largest spook den
in the world. Golden Crescent heroin output surpassed that of the
Golden Triangle just as the CIA began its biggest operation since
Vietnam.
While Hekmatyar’s troops planted poppies, mujahadeen leader
Sayed Ahmed Gailani was supplying the Turkish Gray Wolves syndicate with
Pathan opium. The Gray Wolves’ Iranian supply had dried up when their
good friend the Shah was deposed and Iranian revolutionaries cracked
down on the country’s heroin epidemic.
Gailani was a wealthy Afghan aristocrat with ties to former King
Zaher Shah. He owned the Peugeot dealership in Kabul and his drug
smuggling was underwritten by the Saudis. [7] A 1989 State Department
report admitted that Afghanistan had become the world’s leading source
of heroin.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar followed squarely in the footsteps of Vang Pao, Phoumi Nosavan and Khun Sa – the CIA heroin lords of the Golden Triangle. Soon Hekmatyar was recognized as the world’s heroin kingpin. Alfred McCoy, in his excellent book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, first exposed the CIA’s role in facilitating the guns-for-drugs quid pro quo. He terms the CIA approach “radical pragmatism”.
This same approach would seem to belie the CIA’s penchant for backing Islamic extremists.
In 1978 Lieutenant General Fazle Haq was appointed governor of
Northwest Frontier Province where Peshawar became an arms supermarket
for the mujahadeen and home to hundreds of heroin refineries.
Haq was one of the largest depositors at the CIA’s Bank of Credit &
Commerce International (BCCI). He was President Zia’s closest confidant
and a good friend of Zia’s son, who ran the BCCI Karachi branch.
Haq became de facto overlord for mujahadeen operations
and provided protection for the heroin labs. Hekmatyar himself ran six
labs further south in Baluchistan Province. A State Department
Narcotics Suppression Officer based in Islamabad accused US Ambassador
to Pakistan Ronald Spiers of refusing to forward any evidence of
Pakistani military officials’ involvement in the heroin trade to DEA,
though it was widely known that Haq and others were key players. [8]
In the 1980’s Pakistan became the world’s poster child for political corruption. The Islamabad junta’s unflagging support for Reagan’s mujahadeen was
at the root of the corruption. A senior US official stated that, “key
Hekmatyar commanders close to the ISI run heroin laboratories in
southwest Pakistan and the ISI cooperates in heroin operations”. [9]
In September 1985 the Pakistan Herald reported that military
trucks belonging to the National Logistics Cell of the Pakistan Army
were being used to transport arms from the Port of Karachi to Peshawar
on behalf of the CIA, and that those same trucks were returning to
Karachi sealed by the Pakistani military and loaded with heroin. The
practice, according to the Herald, had been going on since 1981, just as Hekmatyar’s forces began planting poppies.
Two high-ranking Pakistani military officers were caught with 220
kilos of heroin, but were never prosecuted. The US had seventeen DEA
agents stationed in Pakistan. During their tenure they made zero
arrests. Golden Crescent heroin captured 60% of the US market, where
bricks of hashish appeared stamped with a logo of two crossed AK-47
assault rifles circled by the words, “Smoke out the Soviets”. From
1982-1992, roughly the period of US involvement in Afghanistan, heroin
addiction in the US rose by 50%. [10]
There was evidence that President Zia himself was involved in the
heroin trade. In 1984 a Pakistani national named Hamid Hashain was
caught smuggling heroin into Norway. During a routine search of
Hashain, customs officials found original copies of President Zia’s
personal bank statements. The incident caused a major scandal in
Pakistan, where allegations of Zia’s corruption grew louder. The US
increasingly saw him as a liability.
In 1988 Zia’s helicopter went down in a ball of fire. Both he and US
Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphael were killed. The crash bore an
eerie resemblance to the one that killed Panama’s President Omar
Torrijos in 1981, which even General Noriega, who rose to power because
of Torrijos’ death, later claimed was a CIA assassination. The US
blamed the Soviets and US Air Force officials cordoned off the wreckage,
barring Pakistani authorities from investigating the crash. Reagan
offered his condolences, citing Zia as, “a strong supporter of
anti-narcotics activities in Pakistan”.
It is no coincidence that virtually all Arab nations which the West
considers allies embrace Islamic fundamentalism, a repressive belief
system which is quite congruent with global monopoly capitalism. Both
are based on a return to rule by feudalistic monarchy and a diminished
role for government and thus democracy.
Most US Arab enemies embrace secular socialism, which aims to stop
the exploitation of oil resources by the Four Horsemen and their
Rockefeller/Rothschild owners. Great Arab leaders including the
Egyptian Nasser, the Algerian Boumedienne, the Libyan Qaddafi, the
Syrian Assad and the Iraqi al-Bakr support(ed) a secular socialism
(though Qaddafi proclaims himself precisely to be anarcho-syndicalist),
which poses a very real threat to the neo-liberal globalization agenda.
Interventions in Libya and Syria follow the same
counter-revolutionary template employed by the City of London banksters
in Afghanistan.
Next week: Part II: ISI, bin Laden and Chevron
[1] “Nation Endures History of Turbulence”. Greg Myre. Springfield News Leader. 11-10-01. p.9A
[2] “War Criminals, Real and Imagined”. Gregory Elich. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.23
[3] “Soldiers of God”. CNN Presents. 12-23-01
[4] Washington’s Secret War Against Afghanistan. Philip Bonosky. International Publishers. New York. 1984.
[5] Convergence. Christic Institute. Washington, DC. Fall 1991
[6] Ibid
[7] The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism. Henrik Kruger. South End Press. Boston. 1980. p.222
[8] The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Heart of BCCI. Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne. Random House. New York. 1993. p.49
[9] Convergence
[10] Beaty and Gwynne. p.303
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