MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Mujahideen’

Brzezinski’s Proxy War Playbook

Posted by M. C. on June 27, 2022

by Patrick Macfarlane

In 1998, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbiegnew Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observateur that the CIA “knowingly increased the probability” that the Russians would invade Afghanistan by covertly supporting the Mujahideen before the Soviet invasion.

Mujahideen, sired by Bin Laden and the CIA, evolved into Al Qaeda and ISIS.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/brzezinskis-proxy-war-playbook/

In 1998, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbiegnew Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observateur that the CIA “knowingly increased the probability” that the Russians would invade Afghanistan by covertly supporting the Mujahideen before the Soviet invasion. Later in that same interview, Brzezinski claims that this covert intervention caused the end of the Soviet Union:

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.

In July 2014, almost six months after the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, Brzezinski hinted at a similar plan for Ukraine, although he couched it in defensive terms. He wrote on the Atlantic Council’s blog:

See the rest here

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The Completion Of The Afghanistan Withdrawal Is Nothing To Celebrate – by Caitlin Johnstone – Caitlin’s Newsletter

Posted by M. C. on September 1, 2021

Every single allied soldier who died in Afghanistan died in vain. They died fighting not for national security, freedom, or democracy, but for war industry profit margins and for the idiotic geostrategic agendas of globe-dominating imperialists. This is also the reason every Afghan soldier and Afghan civilian was killed during that time.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-completion-of-the-afghanistan

Caitlin Johnstone

The US has officially announced the completion of its military withdrawal from Afghanistan, minus of course the CIA ops which will continue in that country and the bombs that will likely continue to rain down in the name of fighting terrorism. 

There are a lot of warmongers rending their garments over the termination of a decades-long military occupation which accomplished nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy and killing hundreds of thousands of people. Almost as ridiculous are the countless pundits and politicians hailing this as some kind of major accomplishment that Americans should be proud of.

Pride, praise and celebration are not the appropriate emotional response to the day. The appropriate response to a decades-overdue withdrawal from a war that should never have happened in the first place is rage. Unmitigated rage at an unforgivable atrocity which amassed a mountain of corpses for no legitimate reason, from which the region will probably not recover in our lifetime. Unmitigated rage at those responsible for starting and maintaining this horror all this time.

This is not something that Biden should be applauded for. Nobody deserves praise or credit for ending a twenty-year disaster, especially one they helped start. Nobody applauds the mass shooter for finally setting down the rifle.

Every single allied soldier who died in Afghanistan died in vain. They died fighting not for national security, freedom, or democracy, but for war industry profit margins and for the idiotic geostrategic agendas of globe-dominating imperialists. This is also the reason every Afghan soldier and Afghan civilian was killed during that time.

They all died in vain. We shouldn’t concoct sugary fairy tales about this, we should try to prevent it from happening again.

Who knows where Afghanistan would be if the US and its allies had stayed out of the nation two decades ago? Who knows where they’d have been had the US not begun arming the mujahideen against the Soviet Union four decades ago? We will never know what could have been for those people. The opportunity to find out was taken away from them. Stolen forever.

And of course no lessons were learned from this by anyone who will be making decisions about the actions that will be taken by the most powerful military force in history. America’s bloated military budget will continue to swell, and its arsenal and that of its allies will pivot toward new enemies.

The only sane response to all this is rage, and disgust. And a firm commitment to trying to end this madness.

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Who profits from the Kabul suicide bombing? – Asia Times

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2021

The origin of ISIS is incandescent material. ISIS was spawned in Iraq prison camps, its core made of Iraqis, their military skills derived from ex-officers in Saddam’s army, a wild bunch fired way back in 2003 by Paul Bremmer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/who-profits-from-the-kabul-suicide-bombing/

by Pepe Escobar

The horrific Kabul suicide bombing introduces an extra vector in an already incandescent situation: It aims to prove, to Afghans and to the outside world, that the nascent Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is incapable of securing the capital.

As it stands, at least 103 people – 90 Afghans (including at least 28 Taliban) and 13 American servicemen – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.

Responsibility for the bombing came via a statement on the Telegram channel of Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. This means it came from centralized ISIS command, even as the perpetrators were members of ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.

Presuming to inherit the historical and cultural weight of ancient Central Asian lands that from the time of imperial Persia stretched all the way to the western Himalayas, that spin-off defiles the name of Khorasan.    

The suicide bomber who carried out “the martyrdom operation near Kabul airport” was identified as one Abdul Rahman al-Logari. That would suggest he’s an Afghan, from nearby Logar province. And that would also suggest that the bombing may have been organized by an ISIS-Khorasan sleeper cell. Sophisticated electronic analysis of their communications would be able to prove it – tools that the Taliban don’t have. 

The way social media-savvy ISIS chose to spin the carnage deserves careful scrutiny. The statement on Amaq Media blasts the Taliban for being “in a partnership” with the US military in the evacuation of “spies.”

It mocks the “security measures imposed by the American forces and the Taliban militia in the capital Kabul,” as its “martyr” was able to reach “a distance of no less than five meters from the American forces, who were supervising the procedures.”

So it’s clear that the newly reborn Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the former occupying power are facing the same enemy. ISIS-Khorasan comprises a bunch of fanatics, termed takfiris because they define fellow Muslims – in this case the Taliban – as “apostates.”  

Founded in 2015 by emigré jihadis dispatched to southwest Pakistan, ISIS-K is a dodgy beast. Its current head is one Shahab al-Mujahir, who was a mid-level commander of the Haqqani network headquartered in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal areas, itself a collection of disparate mujahideen and would-be jihadis under the family umbrella.

Washington branded the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization way back in 2010, and treats several members as global terrorists, including Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the family after the death of the founder Jalaluddin. 

Up to now, Sirajuddin was the Taliban deputy leader for the eastern provinces – on the same level with Mullah Baradar, the head of the political office in Doha, who was actually released from Guantanamo in 2014.  

Crucially, Sirajuddin’s uncle, Khalil Haqqani, formerly in charge of the network’s foreign financing,is now in charge of Kabul security and working as a diplomat 24/7.

The previous ISIS-K leaders were snuffed out by US airstrikes in 2015 and 2016. ISIS-K started to become a real destabilizing force in 2020 when the regrouped band attacked Kabul University, a Doctor Without Borders maternity ward, the Presidential palace and the airport.

NATO intel picked up by a UN report attributes a maximum of 2,200 jihadis to ISIS-K, split into small cells. Significantly, the absolute majority are non-Afghans: Iraqis, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Chechens and Uighurs.

The real danger is that ISIS-K works as a sort of magnet for all manners of disgruntled former Taliban or discombobulated regional warlords with nowhere to go.    

The perfect soft target

The civilian commotion these past few days around Kabul airport was the perfect soft target for trademark ISIS carnage. 

Zabihullah Mujahid – the new Taliban minister of information in Kabul, who in that capacity talks to global media every day – is the one who actually warned NATO members about an imminent ISIS-K suicide bombing. Brussels diplomats confirmed it.  

In parallel, it’s no secret among intel circles in Eurasia that ISIS-K has become disproportionally more powerful since 2020 because of a transportation ratline from Idlib, in Syria, to eastern Afghanistan, informally known in spook talk as Daesh Airlines.

Moscow and Tehran, even at very high diplomatic levels, have squarely blamed the US-UK axis as the key facilitators. Even the BBC reported in late 2017 on hundreds of ISIS jihadis given safe passage out of Raqqa, and out of Syria, right in front of the Americans.

The Kabul bombing took place after two very significant events.

The first one was Mujahid’s claim during an American NBC News interview earlier this week that there is “no proof” Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11 – an argument that I had already hinted was coming in this podcast the previous week.

See the rest here

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Never Forget: Smoking Gun Intel Memo From 1990s Warned Of ‘Frankenstein The CIA Created’ | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on September 12, 2020

But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The ‘secret’ document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/never-forget-1993-smoking-gun-intel-memo-warned-frankenstein-cia-created

by Tyler Durden

As Americans pause to remember the tragic events of September 11, 2001 which saw almost 3,000 innocents killed in the worst terror attack in United States history, it might also be worth contemplating the horrific wars and foreign quagmires unleashed during the subsequent ‘war on terror’.

Bush’s so-called Global War on Terror targeted ‘rogue states’ like Saddam’s Iraq, but also consistently had a focus on uprooting and destroying al-Qaeda and other armed Islamist terror organizations (this led to the falsehood that Baathist Saddam and AQ were in cahoots). But the idea that Washington from the start saw al-Qaeda and its affiliates as some kind of eternal enemy is largely a myth. 

Recall that the US covertly supported the Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists throughout the 1980’s Afghan-Soviet War, the very campaign in which hardened al-Qaeda terrorists got their start. In 1999 The Guardian in a rare moment of honest mainstream journalism warned of the Frankenstein the CIA created — among their ranks a terror mastermind named Osama bin Laden.

1998 CNN still of Osama bin Laden, right, along with Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan, CNN/Getty Images

But it was all the way back in 1993 that a then classified intelligence memo warned that the very fighters the CIA previously trained would soon turn their weapons on the US and its allies. The ‘secret’ document was declassified in 2009, but has remained largely obscure in mainstream media reporting, despite being the first to contain a bombshell admission.

A terrorism analyst at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research named Gina Bennett wrote in the 1993 memo “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous,” that—

“support network that funneled money, supplies, and manpower to supplement the Afghan mujahidin” in the war against the Soviets, “is now contributing experienced fighters to militant Islamic groups worldwide.”

The concluding section contains the most revelatory statements, again remembering these words were written nearly a decade before the 9/11 attacks:

US support of the mujahidin during the Afghan war will not necessarily protect US interests from attack.

…Americans will become the targets of radical Muslims’ wrath. Afghan war veterans, scattered throughout the world, could surprise the US with violence in unexpected locales.

There it is in black and white print: the United States government knew and bluntly acknowledged that the very militants it armed and trained to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars would eventually turn that very training and those very weapons back on the American people.

And this was not at all a “small” or insignificant group, instead as The Guardian wrote a mere two years before 9/11:

American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.

But don’t think for a moment that there was ever a “lesson learned” by Washington.

Instead the CIA and other US agencies repeated the 1980s policy of arming jihadists to overthrow US enemy regimes in places like Libya and Syria even long after the “lesson” of 9/11. As War on The Rocks recounted:

Despite the passage of time, the issues Ms. Bennett raised in her 1993 work continue to be relevant today.  This fact is a sign of the persistence of the problem of Sunni jihadism and the “wandering mujahidin.” Today, of course, the problem isn’t Afghanistan but Syria. While the war there is far from over, there is already widespread nervousness, particularly in Europe, about what will happen when the foreign fighters return from that conflict.

On 9/11 we should never forget the innocent lives lost, but we should also never forget the Frankenstein of jihad the CIA created.

* * *

The U.S. State Dept.’s own numbers at the height of the war in Syria: access the full report at STATE.GOV

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Saudi Bases and the Bin Ladens: A Love Story – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2019

Nothing would please the “three Bs” – Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton – more than a US military strike on the Islamic Republic, cost and consequences be damned.

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2019/10/27/saudi-bases-and-the-bin-ladens-a-love-story/

by

What is Trump really up to? It’s almost unknowable. At the same time that the president was pulling (some) troops out of Northeast Syria, giving an antiwar speech, and then sending other troops back into Syria to “secure the oil,” he also quietly sent another 1800 service members into Saudi Arabia. What little Trump did say about it consisted of a peculiar defense of his actions. Faced with the obvious question from a reporter: “Mr. President, why are you sending more troops to Saudi Arabia when you just said it’s a mistake to be in the Middle East?” Trump argued that there was no contradiction in his policy because, well, the Saudis “buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise from us,” and have “agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing to help them.” It seems the U.S. military is going full mercenary in the Gulf.

While I’ve noted that Trump’s recent antiwar remarks were profound – though largely unfulfilled – these words will amount to nothing if followed by a military buildup in Saudi Arabia that leads to a new, far more bloody and destabilizing, war with Iran. Nothing would please the “three Bs” – Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton – more than a US military strike on the Islamic Republic, cost and consequences be damned.

It’s just that an Iran war isn’t the only risk associated with basing majority-Christian, foreign American troops in the land of Islam’s two holiest cities. And a brief historical review of US presence in Saudi Arabia demonstrates quite clearly the potential transnational terrorist “blowback” of Washington’s basing decisions. In fact, Trump’s latest deployment constitutes at least the third time the US military has been stationed on the Arabian peninsula. It’s rarely ended well, and, in a paradox stranger than fiction, often linked Washington and Riyadh’s dollars with the Bin Laden family. It’s almost enough to make one understand the propensity of some Americans to buy into some degree of 9/11 “truth.”

The strange saga began in the 1930s when a US oil conglomerate, Aramco, built a settlement at Dhahran in the desert near the little town of Khobar. Local workers did the construction, including a rather talented Yemeni bricklayer named Mohamed Bin Laden. Though illiterate and with only one eye, he and his brother then started their own construction company: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh bin Laden.” When, in 1945, the US military decided to lease a sizable air base at Dhahran, the Bin Laden brothers got the contract. The firm made a fortune on the American taxpayers’ dime. After that, the Bin Laden’s became the builders of choice for the spendthrift Saudi royal family, by then flush with oil profits.

Nonetheless, the devoutly Muslim Saudi people were horrified by the Western presence and the king ended the first US military lease in 1962. Still, the Bin Laden company continued to do business with the American government and corporate entities, so much so, in fact, that it retained an agent in New York City. After the elder Bin Laden died in 1967, his sons took over the family business. One, Osama, had a particular knack for construction.

He was also devoutly religious, and, despite his family business’ close connections with the Americans, virulently opposed to foreign intervention in the Greater Middle East. So, with tons of his firm’s heavy construction equipment in tow, he headed off to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet Army occupation of that country. Though he and his fellow Arab volunteers played only a small role in the Soviet’s eventual defeat, Osama Bin Laden dug tunnels, built roads, and crafted a genuine mountain base for his fighters in Afghanistan. He even named his new organization to direct the jihad Al Qaeda, or “the base,” and learned a life-altering lesson from the Soviet war. As he reflected, “The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims.”

Thus, when Saddam Hussein’s massive Iraqi Army swallowed up Kuwait and threatened the Saudi Kingdom in 1990, Bin Laden thought he could recruit a new mujahideen army and single-handedly defeat the invaders. He offered his services to the king, but was rebuked, in favor of an invitation to the US military to instead defend Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden never forgave the king or the American “occupiers” of his holy homeland. The American troopers flooded into a reopened base at Dhahran, the Iraqis were swiftly defeated by the US military coalition, Bin Laden later declared war on the United States, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Terror attacks on the Khobar Towers Air Force barracks, two US African embassies, and the Navy’s USS Cole followed, and then New York and Washington were struck in the worst terrorist incident in American History. Bin Laden got the war he sought, lured the US military into countless quagmires in the Mideast and, despite his eventual death at the hands of American Navy SEALs, succeeded beyond probably even his wildest imagination.

All that brief history ought to remind American policymakers and people alike of the inherent dangers of military basing in Saudi Arabia in this, the third, such instance. Washington, as has been proven time and again since the end of the Second World War, reaps what it sows across the world. So, when Trump’s latest addition to the tragic US history of building bases and stationing troops on the Arabian Peninsula backfires, when a new Bin Laden of sorts takes the war to a major American city, I’ll be one of the few voices saying I told you so…

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Trump, Saudis, money … and a murder. We need a new ...

 

 

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30 Years After Soviet Afghan Pull-Out – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on February 18, 2019

The famous Tora Bora underground fortification, located 35 miles southwest of the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, had also been “a CIA-financed complex built for the mujahedeen”, as The New York Times wrote in 2005. Osama Bin Laden father’s construction company, the Saudi Binladin Group, took substantial part in the endeavour, according to the newspaper.

Where Bin Laden brought the US to its knees with VCRs and cell phones.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/02/no_author/30-years-after-soviet-afghan-pull-out-cia-funded-mujahideen-war-backfired-on-us/

Sputnik News

30 Years After Soviet Afghan Pull-Out: CIA-Funded Mujahideen War Backfired on US

CIA’s Operation Cyclone

However, the USSR was not the only party wading into the Afghan conflict as the US took an active part in the covert war on the side of the Mujahideen.

In his memoir titled From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War ex-director of the CIA, Robert Gates, revealed the details of the US intelligence agency’s covert effort, dubbed Operation Cyclone. The secret operation envisaged arming and funding Afghan guerrillas began under then US President Jimmy Carter six months before the Soviet intervention. This was confirmed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, a prominent geopolitical analyst and then national security adviser to Carter in a 15 January 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur’s Vincent Jauvert.

Time Magazine recalled in 2003 that Operation Cyclone had become “one of its longest and most expensive” covert efforts: The US supplied billions of dollars in arms to the Mujahideen with Osama bin Laden, the would-be founder of al-Qaeda*, being one of the rebel recipients, according to the magazine.

How the Reagan Adm. Boosted the Mujahideen’s Military Capability Read the rest of this entry »

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