Coming Soon To An 'Anti-War' Placard Near You.
It wasn't Pakistan but the CIA that created the savage Haqqani Taliban network that US Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen has been belatedly fingering as the chief culprit in Afghanistan's agonies, the hideously corrupt gasbag Rehman Malik, Pakistan's Interior Minister, declared on Sunday.
It is an outrageous lie, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the terrorist savageries visited upon the people of South Asia over the past three decades will know. But I don't expect that this will matter in the least to fashionable "left-wing" opinion among the world's rich white people, where the consensus has for some long while served with remarkable precision as an echo of the lumpen view incited by right-wing Pakistani chauvinists.
After al Qaida’s July 7, 2005 suicide bombings in London claimed the lives of 52 innocents, London Mayor Ken Livingstone declared: “The Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan.” That was a lie, and a lie of the most elaborate kind, and a lie specifically manufactured by hard-right Pakistani propagandists. When a U.S. Navy SEALs team killed Bin Laden in Abottabad, Pakistan, American documentary film huckster Michael Moore, that darling of rich white pseuds, typed the news into his Twitter account this way: "The monster we created-yes, WE-in the 1980s by ARMING, FUNDING, &TRAINING him in the art of terror agnst the USSR, finally had 2 b put down." That was a particularly spectacular propaganda lie, of the most self-serving variety.
To keep my publisher happy, I will now remind readers in the most self-serving way that all of this and more is exposed in my book, Come from The Shadows, coming soon to a fine bookstore near you. Now back to our story.
For all the self-serving reasons you should expect, the thing known as "the Haqqani network" that is beginning to show up in the discourse of the capitulationist NATO capitals as a thing we are left with the impression is somehow separate from the phenomenon known as the "Taliban," is in fact no such thing. It is the very nexus of Talibanism.
The shorthand use of the term "Haqqani network" is instructive in the way the mere words we use oftentimes allow lies to creep into our conversations unnoticed. The term "Haqqani" comes not from a family name, like Gambino or Soprano, although to be fair to headline writers it is useful to employ it that way if only to provide readers with an immediate grasp of the network's nature and function. In fact, however, the name comes from a madrassa in Akora Khattak, Pakistan, known as Darul uloom Haqqania. Its headmaster and chancellor, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, is not without reason known as the godfather of the Taliban.
Over the years, the Darul uloom Haqqania has dispatched thousands of zombies to post-grad throat-slitting and suicide-bombing assignments in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Punjab, Balochistan, and other such locales. Just one famous alumnus is Mullah Omar, "commander of the faithful" and supremo of the Quetta Shura Taliban, the genocidal cult funded and armed by Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Agency (with no help from the CIA, incidentally) to seize and run Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, and which has been the scourge of the Afghan republic ever since. Another alumnus is the mass-murderer who calls himself Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose son Sirajuddin now more or less runs the network from its Binladenist bases in Waziristan and across the Afghan border in Paktia, Khost and other such mountainous wastelands. Sirajuddin is a senior member of Omar's Quetta Shura.
To go along with the lie that the Haqqani network was created by the CIA, one will have to first open the lid of the memory-hole and chuck in the fact that Jalaluddin had already declared a global jihad against the entire civilized world, not least the Afghan republic of Mohammed Daoud Khan, by the mid-1970s. This is long before Jimmy Carter got the bright idea of upsetting the Cold War applecart by funding Afghan jihadists, a decision he made long before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and a long, long time before the CIA decided to subcontract and outsource its entire foreign policy in Afghanistan to the ISI''s torturers and death squads.
During the CIA-ISI enterprise that came to be known as the anti-Soviet jihad, Jalaluddin reaped enormous profits from his role as guide-outfitter, caterer, hall-rental agent and logistics consultant to the eight crime syndicates ISI strategists deployed to make war upon pro-democracy Afghan resistance leaders and Soviet occupation forces alike. But Jalaluddin and his several sons and cousins and nephews and their various and sundry Palestinian, Yemeni, and Chechen affiliates were at their dirty work long before the CIA came along, and they continued long after the CIA was caught with its pants down on September 11.
Sirajuddin's hard boys have been wildly successful of late, taking advantage of the spectacular opportunity created for them by the peace-talks and troops-out lobby in the NATO capitals to terrorize and position themselves for power post-2014 with an accelerated campaign of bombing, suicide attacks and assassinations. Last week, its victims included the tragic figure Berhanuddin Rabbani, the head of President Hamid Karzai's ludicrous "High Peace Council." Yesterday, its target was the CIA's headquarters in Kabul. Two weeks ago it was the US embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, with cell phone evidence helpfully revealing that the attackers were in direct communication with the ISI before and during the attack.
That is what the "network" does, with the ISI providing its care and feeding, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards weighing in with ordnance, and with parasites like Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik providing cover all the while.
The Americans have enough blood on their hands from the anti-Soviet jihad days without having to add to the charge list a trumped-up allegation that the CIA manufactured the Haqqani network. It is a lie. But what is the "network," as we now find ourselves describing the entity that the "conventional wisdom" purports to apprehend as the party with which peace negotiations must somehow proceed?
In an exhaustive and astonishing 53-page spilling-the-beans exercise gleaned from thousands of pages of intercepted jihadist communiques and declassified intelligence reports, the Haqqani network is what lead authors Don Rassler and Vahid Brown of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center prefer to call "the fountainhead of jihad."
What the document exposes is the nexus at which the ISI, Mullah Omar, the Haqqanis and al Qaida continue to operate as they have for more than three decades. It involves the Hamas godfathers who cut their teeth in Afghanistan, along with Gaddafist mercenaries, Saudi billionaires, Turkistani crackpots - the whole blood-crazed schmeer.
The so-called Haqqani network also takes in Lashkar-e-Taiba, best known for the November, 2008 Mumbai atrocity that left at least 166 people dead. It includes Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, best known for its 2002 kidnapping and murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, but better known among its Hazara and Baloch victims as a vast ISI-supported murder network that has assassinated hundreds of innocents for crimes of faith over the past few years, and which only last week slaughtered 29 Shia pilgrims in Balochistan for the crime of being Shia.
If you really think "peace talks" are the way forward in any of this, you will want to try imagining peace talks with this elaborate complex of barbarism. If you really think that Joint Chiefs boss Mike Mullen is merely taking the opportunity of his pending retirement to say mean things about the thugs that run the military-industrial complex we lazily call "Pakistan," a quick read of the West Point study will do you good (.pdf here). To cite:
"The scholarly and policy communities have misapprehended the precise local context for the development of global jihadism," is the way the authors delicately and diplomatically describe the fashionable delusions the Obama White House hopes to provide "war weary" Americans as an excuse to abandon Afghanistan and put a stake in the heart of a sovereign and democratic Afghan republic. "It is vital that the policy community correct the course that has taken this erroneous assessment for granted and recognize the Haqqani network’s region of refuge for what it has always been – the fountainhead of jihad."
I'm not holding my breath in hopes that "the policy community" will do any such thing. When lies entrench themselves in the conventional wisdom, they are not so easily uprooted.
But one lives in hope.
It is an outrageous lie, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the terrorist savageries visited upon the people of South Asia over the past three decades will know. But I don't expect that this will matter in the least to fashionable "left-wing" opinion among the world's rich white people, where the consensus has for some long while served with remarkable precision as an echo of the lumpen view incited by right-wing Pakistani chauvinists.
After al Qaida’s July 7, 2005 suicide bombings in London claimed the lives of 52 innocents, London Mayor Ken Livingstone declared: “The Americans recruited and trained Osama Bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians and drive them out of Afghanistan.” That was a lie, and a lie of the most elaborate kind, and a lie specifically manufactured by hard-right Pakistani propagandists. When a U.S. Navy SEALs team killed Bin Laden in Abottabad, Pakistan, American documentary film huckster Michael Moore, that darling of rich white pseuds, typed the news into his Twitter account this way: "The monster we created-yes, WE-in the 1980s by ARMING, FUNDING, &TRAINING him in the art of terror agnst the USSR, finally had 2 b put down." That was a particularly spectacular propaganda lie, of the most self-serving variety.
To keep my publisher happy, I will now remind readers in the most self-serving way that all of this and more is exposed in my book, Come from The Shadows, coming soon to a fine bookstore near you. Now back to our story.
For all the self-serving reasons you should expect, the thing known as "the Haqqani network" that is beginning to show up in the discourse of the capitulationist NATO capitals as a thing we are left with the impression is somehow separate from the phenomenon known as the "Taliban," is in fact no such thing. It is the very nexus of Talibanism.
The shorthand use of the term "Haqqani network" is instructive in the way the mere words we use oftentimes allow lies to creep into our conversations unnoticed. The term "Haqqani" comes not from a family name, like Gambino or Soprano, although to be fair to headline writers it is useful to employ it that way if only to provide readers with an immediate grasp of the network's nature and function. In fact, however, the name comes from a madrassa in Akora Khattak, Pakistan, known as Darul uloom Haqqania. Its headmaster and chancellor, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, is not without reason known as the godfather of the Taliban.
Over the years, the Darul uloom Haqqania has dispatched thousands of zombies to post-grad throat-slitting and suicide-bombing assignments in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Punjab, Balochistan, and other such locales. Just one famous alumnus is Mullah Omar, "commander of the faithful" and supremo of the Quetta Shura Taliban, the genocidal cult funded and armed by Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Agency (with no help from the CIA, incidentally) to seize and run Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, and which has been the scourge of the Afghan republic ever since. Another alumnus is the mass-murderer who calls himself Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose son Sirajuddin now more or less runs the network from its Binladenist bases in Waziristan and across the Afghan border in Paktia, Khost and other such mountainous wastelands. Sirajuddin is a senior member of Omar's Quetta Shura.
To go along with the lie that the Haqqani network was created by the CIA, one will have to first open the lid of the memory-hole and chuck in the fact that Jalaluddin had already declared a global jihad against the entire civilized world, not least the Afghan republic of Mohammed Daoud Khan, by the mid-1970s. This is long before Jimmy Carter got the bright idea of upsetting the Cold War applecart by funding Afghan jihadists, a decision he made long before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and a long, long time before the CIA decided to subcontract and outsource its entire foreign policy in Afghanistan to the ISI''s torturers and death squads.
During the CIA-ISI enterprise that came to be known as the anti-Soviet jihad, Jalaluddin reaped enormous profits from his role as guide-outfitter, caterer, hall-rental agent and logistics consultant to the eight crime syndicates ISI strategists deployed to make war upon pro-democracy Afghan resistance leaders and Soviet occupation forces alike. But Jalaluddin and his several sons and cousins and nephews and their various and sundry Palestinian, Yemeni, and Chechen affiliates were at their dirty work long before the CIA came along, and they continued long after the CIA was caught with its pants down on September 11.
Sirajuddin's hard boys have been wildly successful of late, taking advantage of the spectacular opportunity created for them by the peace-talks and troops-out lobby in the NATO capitals to terrorize and position themselves for power post-2014 with an accelerated campaign of bombing, suicide attacks and assassinations. Last week, its victims included the tragic figure Berhanuddin Rabbani, the head of President Hamid Karzai's ludicrous "High Peace Council." Yesterday, its target was the CIA's headquarters in Kabul. Two weeks ago it was the US embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, with cell phone evidence helpfully revealing that the attackers were in direct communication with the ISI before and during the attack.
That is what the "network" does, with the ISI providing its care and feeding, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards weighing in with ordnance, and with parasites like Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik providing cover all the while.
The Americans have enough blood on their hands from the anti-Soviet jihad days without having to add to the charge list a trumped-up allegation that the CIA manufactured the Haqqani network. It is a lie. But what is the "network," as we now find ourselves describing the entity that the "conventional wisdom" purports to apprehend as the party with which peace negotiations must somehow proceed?
In an exhaustive and astonishing 53-page spilling-the-beans exercise gleaned from thousands of pages of intercepted jihadist communiques and declassified intelligence reports, the Haqqani network is what lead authors Don Rassler and Vahid Brown of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center prefer to call "the fountainhead of jihad."
What the document exposes is the nexus at which the ISI, Mullah Omar, the Haqqanis and al Qaida continue to operate as they have for more than three decades. It involves the Hamas godfathers who cut their teeth in Afghanistan, along with Gaddafist mercenaries, Saudi billionaires, Turkistani crackpots - the whole blood-crazed schmeer.
The so-called Haqqani network also takes in Lashkar-e-Taiba, best known for the November, 2008 Mumbai atrocity that left at least 166 people dead. It includes Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, best known for its 2002 kidnapping and murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, but better known among its Hazara and Baloch victims as a vast ISI-supported murder network that has assassinated hundreds of innocents for crimes of faith over the past few years, and which only last week slaughtered 29 Shia pilgrims in Balochistan for the crime of being Shia.
If you really think "peace talks" are the way forward in any of this, you will want to try imagining peace talks with this elaborate complex of barbarism. If you really think that Joint Chiefs boss Mike Mullen is merely taking the opportunity of his pending retirement to say mean things about the thugs that run the military-industrial complex we lazily call "Pakistan," a quick read of the West Point study will do you good (.pdf here). To cite:
"The scholarly and policy communities have misapprehended the precise local context for the development of global jihadism," is the way the authors delicately and diplomatically describe the fashionable delusions the Obama White House hopes to provide "war weary" Americans as an excuse to abandon Afghanistan and put a stake in the heart of a sovereign and democratic Afghan republic. "It is vital that the policy community correct the course that has taken this erroneous assessment for granted and recognize the Haqqani network’s region of refuge for what it has always been – the fountainhead of jihad."
I'm not holding my breath in hopes that "the policy community" will do any such thing. When lies entrench themselves in the conventional wisdom, they are not so easily uprooted.
But one lives in hope.
posted by Terry Glavin at 7:50 AM
3 Comments:
Amazing how many people prefer their ignorant prejudice to facts. And are too lazy to look for reality (cf. all the Afstan pipeline hoo-hah).
Well done,
Mark
Ottawa
Not just Michael Moore...that crazy left-wing conspiracy theorist cook Robin Cook, ex-FOREIGN SECRETARY of the United Kingdom, wrote: "Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan." Those wacky brits...
Colvin: Proof that diplopoofters can be as stupid as any unmedicated bloke shouting on a bus.
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