Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| New evidence of US dealings with the Taliban |
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| NewJehad |
| 12/19/01 at 12:55:18 |
| New evidence of US dealings with the Taliban highlights the role of oil Tony Blair continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with America. In the Middle East, any notion of a separate British interest has been subordinated to unquestioning support for US actions in Afghanistan. The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, suggested recently in the Commons that British military support might also be offered should the war against terrorism be extended beyond Afghanistan. Earlier lofty pronouncements on the rights of the Palestinians have given way to silence, as Israeli gunships pound Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority out of existence. So just how far is Britain prepared to go, as the Pentagon eyes potential new targets in Somalia and Iraq? Now should be the time to put down a marker against the Washington hawks. Dizzied by the success of their Northern Alliance friends against the Taliban, the hawks want to extend military operations - but not to Saudi Arabia, from where much of the money and the fundamentalism flowed. The Bush administration's single-minded drive against al-Qaida suggests that its interest in the long-term welfare of the Afghan people will disappear with the last B52 bomber. And Tony Blair, who has been holding out the prospect of a major British involvement in Afghanistan, is looking isolated. The Bush administration may also harbour some guilty secrets over its determination to put America's economic and strategic interests ahead of tracking down Islamist terrorists - at least before September 11. In a new book, Bin Laden - the Forbidden Truth, two French intelligence analysts, Jean Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, claim that the administration initially blocked US secret service investigations into Islamist terrorism, under the influence of powerful oil corporations, many of whom had stumped up wads of cash for the Bush campaign. O il interests are heavily represented in the Bush administration. Aside from the president himself, the vice-president, Dick Cheney, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the ministers for commerce and energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abrahams, have all worked for US oil companies. Bush's family has a strong oil background. The corporate giants have not only wanted to keep the Saudis on side, but had their eyes fixed on the rich oil fields of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Brisard and Dasquié describe how weeks before the September 11 attacks, the US administration was bargaining with the Taliban for the delivery of Bin Laden, in return for aid and political recognition of a broad-based Afghan government - which would have included the Taliban. That bargaining process had begun in February, almost as soon as Bush was sworn in. John O'Neill, former head of the FBI's counter-terrorism office in New York, left his job earlier this year complaining that his investigations into al-Qaida had been obstructed. He allegedly told the French authors that "the main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were US corporate oil interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia". For their part, the Taliban seem to have taken the US negotiations sufficiently seriously to appoint a public relations expert, Laila Helms, niece of Richard Helms, the CIA director during the Vietnam war. Traffic might have gone both ways. But there can be little doubt that some in the US administration viewed the Taliban as, in Brisard and Dasquié's words, "a source of stability in central Asia", not only for their steely grip on the heroin trade, but also because of the great prize - the oil pipeline that might one day run from the rich fields in former Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan to the Indian ocean. The US government had other ambitions, including a further weakening of Russia's grip on her old satraps. Sheila Heslin, a Clinton-era US national security adviser, believed the Afghan pipeline would "break Russia's monopoly control over the transportation of oil from that region and promote western energy security through energy diversification". But what of Bin Laden? He was originally offered for extradition by Sudan, but then apparently allowed to head for Afghanistan in 1996 with barely a whimper from the US. Here is the world's most wanted man, explaining how he acquired his substantial arsenal during the 1980s: "I settled in Pakistan, in the Afghan border region. There I received volunteers, trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis". As the Middle East slips further towards conflagration and Washington's ultras prepare to extend the war elsewhere, Tony Blair must explain why our government is so happy to help clear up America's mess without asking some awkward questions. Source: The Guardian |
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