Japan had occupied and controlled Vietnam during the World War II. The Vietminh waged a guerilla war against the occupiers, using weapons dropped to them by the Americans. After the Japanese surrender, Ho Chi Minh, a frail-looking figure in his fifties with a thin beard, declared his country’s independence. On September 2, 1945, before a large crowd in the northern city of Hanoi, he delivered a speech that any American would have found familiar.

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Ho looked instinctively to the United States, because partly he had a lifelong admiration for Americans and partly he had few other allies.

Ho’s efforts to attract American support proved fruitless. The French settled back into their old role in Vietnam. Slowly Ho realized that if he wanted to make his county’s independence real, the Vietminh would have to fight another war, this time against the French colonialists. That war was reaching its climax when Dwight Eisenhower assumed the presidency in 1953.

By then, the French had been worn down by years of fighting against Vietnamese guerillas. They concluded, with great pain, that they must give up their splendid colony and sue for peace. Early in 1954, French and Vietminh negotiators met in Geneva. Negotiators from China, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States were also there. Secretary State Dulles headed the American delegation.

The negotiators agreed to a temporary partition of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel. Communists would control the north and have a capital in Hanoi. Former allies of the French would establish a separate government in the south, with their capital in Saigon. There would be nationwide elections in two years, after which north and south would be reunited. In the meantime, no outside power was to send weapons or soldiers into either part of Vietnam.

French Leave Vietnam

On October 5, 1954, France ended its rule over Vietnam with a suitably muted ceremony. In its misbegotten eight-year war, France lost a staggering 44,967 dead and another 79,560 wounded.

The day after the French withdrew, thirty thousand guerilla fighters marched into Hanoi. Their victory was not yet complete, because Vietnam had been divided, but the division was to last only two years. Ho Chi Minh had inflicted a stunning defeat on a far richer and seemingly more powerful enemy. He was the country’s most popular figure.

Dulles had done everything he could to keep the French at their posts in Vietnam, but they were determined to leave. Instead, he set out to undermine the Geneva agreement by making the country’s division permanent. To direct this ambitious project, Dulles chose Colonel Edward Landsdale, the most accomplished American counterinsurgency expert of that era.

U.S. Picks Proxy

When the Americans had to find a Vietnamese to do their bidding in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem was one of the few they knew. He was then a portly fifty-three-year-old bachelor and lay celibate living at a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. Diem was a devout Catholic who came from a long line of Vietnamese mandarins. In 1950, he traveled to the United States, where he spent two years living at Maryknoll seminaries in Lakewood, New Jersey, and Ossing, New York. He made valuable political contacts with influential members of Congress and Catholic politicians, among them Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Landsdale launched the anti-Communist campaign Dulles had sent him to wage. Landsdale’s tactics ranged from sabotaging city buses in Hanoi to paying soothsayers to predict doom under the Communists. One of his biggest projects was helping to set off an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Catholics from north to South, urging them to flee.

Vietnam was supposed to be divided for two years only. That changed after Diem and Dulles decided not to hold the scheduled 1956 election. With no election, there could be no reunification. Instead, two new nations emerged: North Vietnam and South Vietnam. While Ho ruled North Vietnam in traditional Communist fashion, through a politburo made up of trusted comrades, Diem shaped a politburo of his own, made up of close relatives. They ruled the country as a family.

Diem’s eldest brother, Ngo Dinh Can, held no official post but ruled central Vietnam like a feudal warlord. Another brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was a Catholic archbishop and also an avaricious investor who had made a fortune in rubber, timber, and real estate. A third, Ngo Dinh Luyen, became ambassador to Britain.

Ho Launches Campaign Against U.S.

America’s determination to defend an independent South Vietnam led Ho and his comrades to launch their third anti-colonial war. In 1960, they proclaimed a military campaign aimed at the elimination of the U.S. and Diem.

During Kennedy’s presidency, the number of Americans rose from 865 to 16,500. Kennedy sent jet fighters, helicopters, heavy artillery, and all manner of other weaponry, none of which turned the tide of battle. The troops, called “advisors” as a way of maintaining the fiction that they were not fighting, poured in. Between 1961 and 1963, they engaged in hundreds of firefights, and American planes flew thousands of bombing sorties against Vietcong positions.

Vice President Johnson flew to Saigon in May 1961 and came back a believer in “the domino theory,” convinced that if the Communists were allowed to take South Vietnam, they would soon push their war to the beaches of Waikiki. In one of his speeches, he went so far as to praise Diem as “the Churchill of Southeast Asia.” Diem was the American surrogate.

During the spring and summer of 1963, Vietcong had established control over 20 percent of South Vietnam and moved freely in an area twice that large. The South Vietnamese army was proving reluctant to fight. Official corruption, fed by ballooning American aid programs, was rampant. Diem was losing popularity. To keep order, he was forced to rule with increasing repression, much of it directed by his brother and chief advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu.

Kennedy Plots Regime Change

One of Kennedy’s first decisions after the monk’s suicide [Monks’ Burning] was to replace Ambassador Nolting with Henry Cabot Lodge, an aristocratic pillar of the Republican establishment. In Saigon, Ambassador Lodge was enthusiastically preparing the way for “regime change.” He sent signals to dissident generals and dispatched a series of cables to Washington urging quick action against Diem.

The Kennedy administration was choosing between two awful alternatives: supporting a corrupt and unpopular government that was losing the war, or endorsing a coup to overthrow that government. Attorney General Robert Kennedy wondered aloud at a White House meeting whether an eventual Communist victory in Vietnam “could be resisted by any government.” If not, he suggested, perhaps it was “time to get out of Vietnam completely.”

The general who seemed best able to pull off a successful coup was Duong Van Minh, the most prominent and popular officer in the country and President Diem’s military advisor. “Big Minh,” as the Americans called him, was a blunt-spoken veteran of the French colonial army.

Rebel units fanned through the city. They seized the airport, the police station, two radio stations, the naval headquarters, and the post office complex. Some units were sent to block highways along which loyal troops might arrive for the provinces. At four o’clock the next morning, rebel troop launched their assault on the palace. They fired cannon and machine guns, and were met with return fire from loyal troops inside.

Diem finally realized that the end was at hand. He was ready to surrender at the Cha Tam Catholic church in Cholon. General Minh chose a squad of trusted men for the job of picking up Diem and Nhu. One of them was his bodyguard, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, an accomplished assassin. The squad commandeered two jeeps and an M-113 armored troop carrier. When the carrier returned, the door to the M-113 opened and Captain Nhung emerged. Inside, the bodies of Diem and Nhu, riddled with bullets, lay in a pool of blood.

The CIA soon obtained a set of photos showing the mangled bodies of Diem and his bother, with their hands still tied behind their backs. At a White House staff meeting on the morning of November 4, the president’s national security advisor, George Bundy, warned that the pictures would undoubtedly be on the world’s front pages within a day or two. People would draw the obvious conclusion. “This is not the preferred way to commit suicide,” Bundy dryly observed.

A head of state who had been an American ally for years, a man Kennedy had personally known and supported, and a fellow Catholic on top of it all, was dead in the wake of an American-backed coup. Kennedy was shaken and depressed to realize that the first Catholic ever to become a Vietnamese head of state was dead, assassinated as a direct result of a policy authorized by the first American Catholic president.

On November 22, just twenty-two days after Diem was assassinated, Kennedy suffered the same fate.

Aftermath

General Duong Van Minh, who carried out the coup, succeeded Diem as president of South Vietnam, with General Tran Van Don as minister of defense. Their government was torn by internecine feuds, many of them stemming from anger over the executions of Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu. It never managed to consolidate itself. After holding power for just three months, it was overthrown in another coup. After that a succession of military strongmen ruled South Vietnam.

During the 1960s, President Johnson escalated the American commitment to South Vietnam until more than half a million American soldiers were on duty there. The Vietnam War destroyed Johnson’s presidency and profoundly shook American society. It ended on April 30, 1975, with ignominious defeat for the United States. A total of 58,168 Americans lost their lives waging it. The Vietnamese toll was far heavier.

On intriguing question the coup raises is whether it was simply a step toward the inevitable doom of the American project in Vietnam, or whether it cold have been a turning point. With Diem gone, the United States might have encouraged the formation of a broad-based civilian government. Instead, it kept strongmen in power and charged ahead with its war effort.

After propping up Diem for so long and then discarding him so violently, Americans sank into a war that caused incalculable harm to their interests around the world. The coup bound the United States to South Vietnam in an embrace that proved disastrous to them both. In a sense, it was Dulles’s final legacy.

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Tuesday, December 4

Natural Disaster Shock

by mammon on Tue 04 Dec 2007 02:00 PM AKST

Shock Doctrine Series

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts

Guatemala’s foreign minister on a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1999: “Destruction carries with it an opportunity for foreign investment.”

Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money buys survival.

Tsunami - Sri Lanka

Pre-Tsunami

There is now a large enough elite made up on new multimillionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as “superconsumers,” able to carry consumer demand all on their own. There is no question that high-end tourism is a bankable market. The overall revenues for luxury hotels, where rooms cost an average of $405 a night, went up a rather striking 70 percent between 2001 and 2005.

The U.S. was so enthusiastic about Sri Lanka’s potential as a high-end tourism destination, with all its possibilities for resort chains and tour operators, that USAID launched a program to organize the Sri Lankan tourism industry into a powerful Washington-style lobby group.

Since Sri Lanka had driven itself into debt buying weapons, the government could not pay for all these rapid upgrades on its own. The usual deals were on offer: loans from the World Bank and IMF in exchange for agreements to open the economy to privatization and “public-private partnerships.” All these plans and terms were neatly laid out in Regaining Sri Lanka, the country’s World Bank-approved shock therapy program finalized in early 2003.

Like all shock therapy plans, Regaining Sri Lanka demanded many sacrifices in the name of kick-starting rapid economic growth. Millions of people would have to leave traditional villages to free up the beaches for tourists and the land for resorts and highways. What fishing remained would be dominated by large industrial trawlers operating out of deep ports – not wooden boats that launch from the beaches.

Regaining Sri Lank was rejected first through a wave of militant strikes and street protests, then, decisively, at the polls. In April 2004, Sri Lankans defied all the foreign experts and their local partners and voted in a coalition of center-leftists and self-identified Marxists who vowed to scrap the entire Regaining Sri Lanka. 2004 was supposed to have been Year One of the new investor-friendly, privatized Sri Lanka; now all bets were off.

Eight months after those fateful elections, the tsunami hit.

Post-Tsunami

The December 26, 2004 tsunami took the lives of 250,000 people and left 2.5 million people homeless throughout the region. The newly elected government would need billions from foreign creditors to reconstruct the homes, roads, schools and railways destroyed in the storm – and those creditors knew well that when faced with a devastating crisis, even the most omitted economic nationalists suddenly become flexible. As for the militant farmers and fishing people who had blocked roadways and staged mass rallies to derail their previous attempts to clear the land for development, well, Sri Lanka villagers were otherwise occupied at the moment.

Just four days after the wave hit, the Sri Lankan government pushed a bill through that paved the way for water privatization, a plan citizens had been forcefully resisting for years. With the country still swamped with sea water and graves not yet dug, few even knew it had happened. The government also chose this moment of extreme hardship to make life even harder by raising the price of gasoline It also began developing legislation to break up the national electric company, with plans to open it up to the private sector.

Hurricane Mitch - Honduras

In October 1998, for an entire interminable week, Mitch had parked itself over Central America, lashing the coasts and mountains of Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, swallowing villages whole and killing more than nine thousand people. The already impoverished countries could not dig themselves out without generous foreign aid – and it came, but at a steep price.

In the two months after Mitch struck, with the country still knee-deep in rubble, corpses and mud, the Honduran congress passed laws allowing the privatization of airports, seaports and highways and fast-tracked plans to privatize the state telephone company, the national electric company and parts of the water sector. It overturned progressive land-reform laws, making it far easier for foreigners to buy and sell property, and rammed through a radically pro-business mining law that lowered environmental standards and made it easier to evict people from homes that stood in the way of new mines.

Hurricane Katrina

In New Orleans, no opportunity for profit was left untapped. Kenyon, a division of the mega funeral conglomerate Service Corporation International [a major Bush campaign donor], was hired to retrieve the dead from homes and streets. The work was extraordinarily slow, and bodies were left in the broiling sun for days. Emergency workers and local volunteer morticians were forbidden to step in because handling the bodies impinged on Kenyon’s commercial territory. The company charged the state on average $12,500.

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Monday, December 3

Afghanistan and Pakistan – Post 911

by mammon on Mon 03 Dec 2007 02:00 PM AKST

Overthrow Series

Afghanistan and Pakistan – Post 911

[Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006]

On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. In response, President George W. Bush set his sights on Afghanistan.

Exactly how the Americans would fight in Afghanistan, and to what end, was still unclear. Aft first, Bush demanded only that the Taliban oust its leader, Mullah Omar, and cut its ties to Al Qaeda. This was the option that the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, was eagerly pushing. Pakistan had created and nurtured the Taliban and did not want to lose it. Musharraf urged its leaders to turn bin Laden over to the Americans, or at least expel him from Afghanistan. When they refused, he withdrew Pakistan support for the Taliban and gave the United States permission to launch bombing raids on Afghanistan from Pakistani air bases.

By mid-September, Bush had decided to use American military power to overthrow the Taliban regime. He was not willing, however, to send large numbers of troops. Instead he approved a dual strategy. The United States would conduct an air war, and hire the Northern Alliance to fight on the ground.

On October 7, Bush sat down behind a desk in the White House Treaty room, faced a television camera, and told Americans that Operation Enduring Freedom was under way.

On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.

He said the United States was locked in “a momentous struggle between god and evil,” that it was fighting to promote “God-given values” and “defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world.” America’s enemies, he declared on various occasions, “hate us for our freedoms,” “hate us because we love liberty,” and “hate us because we’re good.”

Air strikes on Afghanistan began as Bush was making his televised speech. The first round wiped out the Taliban’s rudimentary air defenses and destroyed its primitive military bases but had little effect beyond that.

Taliban Defeated, but Survive

Taliban leaders had reason to be hopeful. They had managed to withstand the first wave of American bombing. These weeks in preparation and war gave bin Laden plenty of time to escape into the network of caves and tunnels – much of it fortified with CIA money during the 1980s – that lay beneath the rugged border region known as Tora Bora. The fight against the Taliban went more successfully that the hunt for bin Laden.

By late October, bribes from the CIA enticed some warlords who supported the Taliban to change sides, and motivated others to attack Taliban positions. On November 13, Taliban commanders could no longer defend Kabul and led their men out to refuge elsewhere. Guerrillas from the Northern Alliance streamed in to replace them. They were received ecstatically. People dragged out hidden phonographs and played music for the first time in years. Women ran joyously through the streets without burkas.

Whether it was really a victory, however, is debatable. Americans deposed the regime that had given Al Qaeda its protected base, but by refusing to send more than a few hundred troops to fight in Afghanistan, they allowed terrorist leaders to escape punishment for the crimes of September 11.

Just weeks after the Taliban regime fell, at the end of 2001, a group of Afghan leaders assembled in Bonn and agreed to accept America’s handpicked candidate, Hamid Karzai, an English-speaking Pashtun leader who had spent most of the 1990s outside Afghanistan, to head a six month transitional government. To guide Karzai, the Americans named an ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, who had worked for Unocal in its unsuccessful effort to negotiate a pipeline deal with the Taliban.

Outside powers, most notably the United States, proved remarkably stingy when it came to aiding Afghanistan. This ensured that Afghanistan would remain in ruins; that warlords would continue to control much of the country; that remnants of the Taliban would reemerge as a fighting force; that bin Laden and other terrorist leaders would remain at large; and that the drug trade would become a steadily more important mainstay of the country’s economy.

Reflection

This war, and the terror attacks that set if off, would almost certainly never have occurred if the United States had not armed and trained tens of thousands of Islamic radicals during the 1980s, and then failed to act when those radicals began transforming themselves into terrorists.

Fateful misjudgments by five presidents had laid the groundwork not simply for the September 11 attacks but for the emergence of the world wide network from which they sprung. Jimmy Cater launched the covert CIA project in Afghanistan. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan spent billions of dollars to arm and train anti-Western zealots who were fighting the Soviet there. George H. W. Bush further inflamed Muslim radicals by establishing permanent American military bases in Saudi Arabia, home of the holiest sites in Islam. Bill Clinton failed to grasp the scope of the threat his predecessors bequeathed to him, and during his presidency, guerrillas who had been trained and armed by the Untied States a decade earlier completed their transformation into terrorists. George W. Bush ignored repeated warnings that devastating attacks were imminent, including a memorandum from his intelligence advisors, just five weeks before September 11, entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

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Sunday, December 2

Afghanistan and Pakistan – Pre 911

by mammon on Sun 02 Dec 2007 02:00 PM AKST

Overthrow Series

Afghanistan and Pakistan – Pre 911

Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006, Excerpts

For centuries, the name “Afghanistan” has conjured up images of isolation and remoteness. It is a forbidding place, locked in the Asian landmass, cut off from the world by towering mountain ranges and governed more by tribal tradition than by law. Its hostility to invaders is legendary, epitomized by the fate of a British-led column that comprised more than 16,000 soldiers and camp followers when it was forced to flee Kabul in 1842, and was reduced to just a single man by the tie it reached the British garrison at Jalabad, ninety miles away.

During the nineteenth century, Russia and Britain jousted for influence over Afghanistan in a high-stakes rivalry that became know as the Great Game. Rivalries like this usually break out when a poor country has a resource that rich countries covet. Afghanistan has no oil, no mineral wealth, and little fertile land, but it does have one asset that has always attracted outsiders: location. It lies astride routes to India, Iran, Central Asia, and China that have been strategic prizes for centuries.

True to its independent tradition, Afghanistan remained neutral in both World War I and World War II. In the postwar years, its leaders sought with considerable success to remain outside the Cold War confrontation.

Soviet Invasion

On Christmas Eve, 1979, thousands of Soviet troops marched over pontoon bridges across the Amu Darya River into Afghanistan, and others landed at the airport in Kabul. Tanks followed in the morning. A squad of KGB commandos stormed Amin’s palace, killed him, and placed a new strongman in power. Afghanistan was no longer simply ruled by a pro-Soviet regime; it was under Soviet military occupation.

This upheaval came while the region was still recovering from the shock of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which radically reshaped the strategic map of the Middle East and Central Asia. Americans considered the revolution a serious geopolitical setback and feared that the Soviets would take advantage of it, perhaps by using Afghanistan as a base for a thrust toward Persian Gulf oil fields. For the Soviets, it revived the old fear that Muslims in their Central Asian provinces might embrace fundamentalism and use it as a banner for separatist rebellion.

Afghans Revolt Against Soviets

Militants sought out and hacked to death scores of Soviet men, women, and children and jubilantly paraded some of their mangled bodies through the streets on pikes. The government, with Soviet help, took the city back after a ferocious bombing campaign in which twenty thousand people were killed.

Rebellions against pro-Soviet regimes did not break out every day, and when one began in Afghanistan, CIA analysts suggested that the agency give it covert support. The longer this rebellion lasted, they reasoned, the weaker the Soviets would become and the more resources they would have to divert to Afghanistan. The U.S. saw the chance to score a victory by bleeding the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This was the beginning of what would become by far the largest and most expensive operations in CIA history.

In the early 1980s, Reagan and several of his closest advisors believed that with enough money and weaponry, Afghan guerrillas could actually defeat the Red Army and turn their country into the “the Russians’ Vietnam.”

Pakistan

Pakistan, whose border with Afghanistan twists for more than one thousand miles, is the logical sanctuary for Afghan rebels. So if the CIA wished to send clandestine aid to the rebels, it would have to strike a deal with Pakistan. Soon after Reagan took office in 1981, he struck a deal with Pakistan under which the United States embraced it as a strategic ally and turned a blind eye to General Zia’s sins.

Two years earlier, Pakistan’s democratic order had been upset when General Zia al-Huq seized power in a military coup and proceeded with the hanging of the prime minister he overthrew, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Zia fervently dedicated himself to two goals: building a nuclear bomb and imposing what he called a “genuine Islamic order” in Pakistan.

So the man the CIA needed most for its Afghan project was a military dictator who had ordered the execution of his predecessor, was promoting a reactionary form of Islam within his own country, and ran a network of agents around the world trying to buy outlawed nuclear material and technology.

The CIA would deliver no weapons directly to Afghan rebels but send them instead to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, or ISI. The ISI channeled American aid to those warlords who were most responsive to Pakistani influence. It particularly favored those who shared Zia’s commitment to fundamentalist Islam.

Saudi Money

To pay for this campaign, they recruited an unlikely partner: Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were already deeply involved in Pakistan. They had sent Zia large sums of money to open religious schools catering to both impoverished Pakistanis and Afghan refugees. To ensure that these schools taught only the puritanical Wahhabi form of Islam and that students were not exposed to such corrupting subjects as history or science, they also sent hundreds of mullahs, Koran readers, and religious teachers.

Saudi Arabia was intimately tied to the United States because of its role as a vital oil supplier. In 1984, taking advantage of this friendship, President Reagan asked the Saudi royal family for help in Afghanistan. The Saudis saw at once that granting this request would be a way to strengthen their friend Zia in Pakistan, promote groups with Afghanistan that were submissive to Pakistan and its fundamentalist agenda, and at the same time ingratiate themselves to Washington. They agreed to match all American aid to Afghan rebels on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

Despite the huge amounts of money the United States sent to Afghan guerrillas, it never played or even sought to play a role in deciding who received its gifts. That was left to Pakistan, which had objectives far different than Washington’s. The Pakistanis chose to support seven Afghan factions, all of them in varying degrees fundamentalist and anti-Western.

U.S. Trains Jihadiis

One of the most far-reaching decisions the ISI made as it built the Afghan rebel army was to recruit militants from other Muslim countries. Many who volunteered were radicals who believed they could do something holy by coming to Afghanistan and joining a jihad against the infidel Soviet occupier. At CIA-sponsored camps inside Pakistan, they were trained in modern techniques of sabotage, ambush, and assault, and in the use of weapons from sniper rifles to time-delayed bomb detonators.

The Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden was among those who thrived in this milieu. Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, when he was still in his mid-twenties, and served for several months as a guerrilla fighter. After a time he persuaded the ISI to give him a more important assignment. He took up the job of receiving foreign militants who arrived in Afghanistan and channeling them to training camps. It was an ideal post for someone eager to meet jihadis from around the world.

They recruited radical Afghan refugees for the thousands of religious schools in Pakistan, organized them into military units, and trained and armed their leaders. Because each of these recruits had been a talib, or religious student, they called tier movement the Taliban. By the time it began capturing territory in Afghanistan, at the end of 1994, it had twenty thousand troops under arms and impressive amounts of weaponry. The Saudi government sent it millions of dollars, and whenever it needed more fighters, Pakistan recruited them from its Saudi sponsored religious schools.

Soviet Downfall

Slowly and inevitably, given its enormous resources, the insurgency grew stronger. For the Soviets, this adventure had been an unmitigated disaster. It cost them the lives of fifteen thousand soldiers. They also lost incalculable amounts of international prestige and strategic power. Within a few years, the Soviet Union collapsed. The defeat it suffered in Afghanistan played a role in speeding its demise. This outcome produced a giddy round of congratulations in Washington. It took only a short time for American leaders to begin losing interest in Afghanistan.

General Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988 and so did not live to see the victory, but Pakistan emerged from the war with greatly increased power. It had become a partner of the United States and the effective master of Afghanistan. Perhaps most important, it gained a decade of invaluable time to work on its nuclear program without having to worry about complaints from the United States.

Osama Bin Laden

Help from Pakistan and the United State would probably have been enough to lead the Taliban to power, but it had another powerful patron. Early in 1996, Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan after several years in Sudan, bringing his Al Qaeda terror group with him. He recognized the Taliban as a movement perfectly in line with his own beliefs and gave it $3 million to fuel its push to final victory. The Taliban regime embraced bin Laden, and allowed him to establish camps in Afghanistan where militants from around the world could be trained in terror tactics.

Taliban Rule

Immediately after seizing Kabul, Taliban militants went on a rampage. They considered all visual imagery blasphemous, so they smashed televisions, destroyed cameras, and ripped photos from walls. To prevent people from listening to music, they destroyed all radios and stereo equipment. They banned alcohol and tobacco, forbade dancing, and even outlawed kite flying. Most chilling, they withdrew every conceivable right from women, decreeing that they must not work or study outside their homes and that whenever they appeared in public, they had to be covered with a burka more forbidding than anyone in the modern world had ever seen.

By the time the Taliban took power, Afghanistan had been at war for nearly twenty years. Many Afghans welcomed the Taliban despite their excesses, hoping that they would finally bring a measure of peace to the country. This they did. It was a peace of the graveyard, to be sure, enforced by amputations, floggings, and public executions, but for a time, Afghans thought that the Taliban might lead them toward a better future.

U.S., Unocal, and the Taliban

Despite all this, The United States maintained good relations with the Taliban. An American oil company, Unocal, wanted to build a $2 billion pipeline to carry natural gas from the rich fields of Turkmenistan to booming Pakistan, and perhaps on the India. The pipeline would have to run across Afghanistan, and for that reason Unocal was eager to see a government in Kabul – any kind of government – that could pacify the country.

The most prominent American pushing for friendship with the Taliban was Robin Raphel, an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. Her interest was unabashedly commercial, corporate deal-making. During a visit to Kabul in 196, she said she hoped to “facilitate U.S. business interest,” and warned that if the United States did not deal with the Taliban on the pipeline project, “economic opportunities here will be missed.”

Taliban Turns on U.S.

On August 7, 1998, terror squads acting at his direction blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than two hundred people. Two weeks later, President Clinton ordered the bombing of a camp in Afghanistan where bin Laden was thought to be living. More than sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles hit the camp, but although about two dozen militants were killed, the terror leader was not among them.

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Saturday, December 1

Protecting American Interests

by mammon on Sat 01 Dec 2007 08:00 AM AKST

Overthrow Series

Protecting American Interests

Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, Excerpts 2006

Since 1823, U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere had been shaped by the Monroe Doctrine, a unilateral declaration that the United States would not tolerate any attempt by European powers to influence the course of events in the Americas. In 1898 the United States definitively embraced what Senator Henry Cabot Lodge called “the large policy.” Henry Cabot Lod