Trilateral Commission co-founder says infighting amongst elite, combined with awakening of humanity worldwide, is hampering move towards one world government

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, May 19, 2010

At a recent Council on Foreign Relations speech in Montreal, co-founder with David Rockefeller of the Trilateral Commission and regular Bilderberg attendee Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that a “global political awakening,” in combination with infighting amongst the elite, was threatening to derail the move towards a one world government.

Brzezinski explained that global political leadership had become “much more diversified unlike what it was until relatively recently,” noting the rise of China as a geopolitical power, and that global leadership in the context of the G20 was “lacking internal unity with many of its members in bilateral antagonisms.”

Brzezinski then explained another significant factor in that, “For the first time in all of human history mankind is politically awakened – that’s a total new reality – it has not been so for most of human history.” Read more

“Darth Radar” by Paul Jamiol

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The Ill-Logic of the U.S. Predator Drone Campaign

A Bad Omen for America

By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of the law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast. Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake!                    A Man For All Seasons

With the U.S. already having cut down every law in the forest when it comes to terrorism in the last 9 years, there was nothing left for Barack Obama’s war cabinet to do but risk a hazardous new escalation of its AfPak war following the attempted bombing in Times Square by Pakistani Taliban-trained Faisal Shahzad.

The administration sold its own version of the Afghan war originally by narrowing it to hunting Al Qaeda in Pakistan regardless of the moral, ethical, legal or even political consequences. It continues to claim success in its greatly expanded use of Predator drone assassinations. But as the administration scrambles to counter something that was apparently beyond what it thought possible, it must now face the grim reality that warfare, no matter how high tech or expensive, is and will continue to be a two way street. It must also finally face up to the fact that its glaring lack of sophistication in its dealings with Afghanistan and Pakistan have made the U.S. more vulnerable to attack and not less.

The entire strategy for a draw-down of U.S. forces in 2011 rests on the blindly unrealistic assumptions that a NATO-trained Afghan Army and police force can somehow magically replace American “boots on the ground,” while the drone campaign will deter the enemy’s leadership from acting effectively and frighten away potential recruits. Up to now, the administration’s policy has rested on the claimed effectiveness of these strikes to weaken the Taliban and make them more receptive to a peace agreement that would bring them into the Afghan government. But in a gaping breach of logic, the possibility that they might actually retaliate on U.S. soil, was never even factored into the equation.

The efficacy of assassinating Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects with such weapons challenges at least two major assumptions. The first is that the weapons themselves are not a technically suitable replacement for human counterinsurgency forces (which in and of themselves are beset by problems). The second and perhaps more important, is whether high tech warfare – with all its imperial-death-from-above implications – isn’t actually self-defeating, given the negative political impact it has on the local population. Critics of the Predator attacks have warned of the potential blowback for years.

In 2004, Robert A. Pape, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago warned of the negative consequences of an over reliance on drone technology in a Foreign Affairs commentary. “Decapitating the enemy has a seductive logic. It exploits the United States’ advantage in precision air power; it promises to win wars in just days, with few casualties among friendly forces and enemy civilians; and it delays committing large numbers of ground troops until they can be welcomed as liberators rather than conquerors. But decapitation strategies have never been effective, and the advent of precision weaponry has not made them any more so.”

According to counterinsurgency experts David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, the strategy of predator drone strikes in Pakistan fails on all counts by creating a siege mentality among Pakistan’s civilian population, “exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion,” while actually being only a “tactic,” masquerading as a “strategy,” which only “encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of [British] colonial-era policies.”

Kilcullen and Exum explain the ill-logic of the U.S. Predator campaign. “Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.”

Drone attacks and targeted assassinations have already opened a Pandora’s box of legal demons for the United States that will someday have to be faced. On February 14, 2010 the Washington Post reported on the gory details of how the administration had come to deal with the inflammatory legal issue of jailing terror suspects by choosing to kill, rather than capture those it deemed terrorists.  But, in the ten days following the failed terror attack in New York, instead of pausing to reconsider the consequences of  such draconian tactics, the U.S. responded by threatening Pakistan with a direct U.S. military “boots-on-the-ground” expansion while accelerating pilotless attacks in the tribal area of North Waziristan even further, firing 18 missiles on May 10, alone.

That the Obama administration continues to believe its response to the “almost” Taliban attack in New York will “soften up” Pakistan’s Taliban after 9 years of softening, is a bad omen for America. Having already discarded the “benefit of the law,” for our own safety’s sake, it will only be a matter of time before the devil comes knocking again.

Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

The Vanishing Point for the American Empire

by Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

The region today delineated as both Afghanistan and Pakistan has known many borders over the millennia, yet none have been more artificial or contentious than the one today separating Pakistan from Afghanistan known as the Durand line but referred to by the military and intelligence community as Zero line. A funny thing happened to the United States when the Obama administration decided to cross Zero line and bring the Afghan war into Pakistan. Instead of resolution, after nearly two years into the administration’s AfPak strategy, it would seem the gap between reality and the Washington beltway has only widened.

Instead of moving into a new future that defused India and Pakistan’s nuclear rivalry and promised “a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people,” the U.S. is falling back on its old cold war relationships that created the problem in the first place. But as the costs of maintaining an archaic cold war posture mount, the world’s economy crumbles and the contradictions tear the war’s flimsy logic to shreds, it’s clear that, the U.S. is facing a bigger enemy than it ever imagined.

Before the Obama administration even set foot in office it promised to shift its attention, time, money and energy away from Iraq towards Afghanistan. The president’s AfPak policy was intended to correct the mistakes of the past while addressing the war in a more realistic fashion that focused as much on the actions of Pakistan’s military as it did the actions of the Afghan government.

The Obama administration’s decision to actively address Pakistan’s behavior emerged only after Washington’s military/intelligence community reluctantly accepted proof that Pakistan’s ISI was aiding Taliban actors such as Malawi Jalaluddin Haqqani. It also emerged after solid evidence suggested that Pakistan itself was on the verge of caving in to their own Taliban extremists, known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP .

Despite being the single largest focus of the American military, much of what the United States does in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains a military secret. A report issued by the Center For Strategic and International Studies by Anthony H. Cordesman in September 2008, declared alarmingly. “No country or international organization provides useful unclassified overview data on the developments in the fighting [in Afghanistan] in anything like the depth that the US Department of Defense provides in its quarterly reports on the Iraq war. The [limited] reporting that is available also decouples the fighting in Afghanistan from that in Pakistan. Accordingly, public official reporting on the growing intensity of the war since 2006 ignores one of the most critical aspects of the conflict.”

Evidence of the strain facing America’s cold war-trained bureaucrats now appears regularly as the contradictions deepen. Defense Secretary Robert Gates crossed his own personal zero line in an address to the National Defense University in February when he criticized Europe’s growing anti-war sentiment as a dangerous threat to peace. The Obama administration rails at the Karzai government’s corruption but denies it the guidance and expertise necessary to make it effective at governance. The U.S. then diverts power and money to regional tribal leaders whom many fear (including U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry) will simply become a new class of warlord, once the U.S. departs.

Since January 2009, U.S. Predator Drone strikes are reported to have killed at least 529 people in the tribal areas of Pakistan of whom 20 percent may have been civilians. Considered to be a clear violation of international law by American legal scholars, the cross border strikes inflame Pakistani opinion against the U.S. Yet, the Pentagon praises their new anti-terror weapon while at the same time continuing to deny that the program even exists.

As the Obama administration struggles to reconcile Washington’s special interests with those posed by Iran, Pakistan, India, China and Russia, it should be remembered that the Soviet Union faced a similar challenge in Afghanistan. But in the end the biggest enemy the Soviets faced was not the Stinger missiles or the disunited Mujahideen Jihadis. The Soviet Union’s biggest enemy was the archaic cold war structure of the Soviet system itself, and that is a lesson that Washington refuses to accept.

The United States has fought on both the Pakistani and Afghan sides of the Durand line. In the 1980s it fought on the side of extremist-political Islam. Since September 11, 2001 it has fought against it. But the border separating the two seemingly incompatible behaviors remains largely a dark mystery. It is therefore appropriate to think of Zero line as the vanishing point for the American empire, the point beyond which its power and influence disappears; the line where 60 year’s worth of American policy in Eurasia confronts itself and ceases to exist. The Durand line separating the two countries is visible on a map. Zero line is not.

Crossing ZeroThe AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

Published on www.boilingfrogspost.com

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Messiah of Darkness

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The history of turning warlords like Hekmatyar to the good has consistently proven to be nothing but bad for the Afghan people

It’s not everyday that an American citizen living in the USA gets an email from the representative of a legendary terrorist warning that they may face legal action for writing well documented criticisms of his boss. But on January 25, 2010 Mr. Daoud M. Abedi of the Hesb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) emailed us on behalf of Afghanistan’s longest running warlord, drug trafficker and terrorist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Abedi was reacting to our blog, In Afghanistan: Embracing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Is No Method at All posted that day. We had addressed the insane possibility that terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might be considered as a “sane” solution for the mess the U.S. has gotten itself into in Afghanistan. Since Hekmatyar was listed on February 18, 2003 by the United States State Department and the United States Treasury as a global terrorist under Executive Order 13224 (which freezes his assets and criminalizes any U.S. support for him) and has been the object of a Predator drone strike, and recently claimed credit for a deadly attack on French NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, we thought that a terrorist maintaining a high public profile in the U.S. would be a disadvantage. So it came as a surprise that Hekmatyar and his political party Hesb-i-Islami are not only out in the open in the United States, but are issuing threats (just the way they do in Afghanistan) to anyone who tries to get the word out about their past.

The order of Abedi’s complaints are a window into the mind of one of the world’s legendary terrorists. It is not Hekmatyar’s well documented reputation as a terrorist and major drug kingpin that disturbs him. The terrorist-strongman label actually appeals to Abedi, who asserts that he is “happy he is called a terrorist because what he does for Afghanistan is what George Washington did for the US,..” Abedi’s primary concern is for reports that “His Excellency,” might have been a member of the nominally communist, People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, (PDPA) as a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is willing to bend time and well-documented facts in order to protect Hekmatyar’s reputation as a pure, messianic Islamist, lay off blame for his bad deeds onto communists, Maoists, Afghanistan’s King Zahir Shah and others, while denouncing his chief rival, Ahmad Shah Massoud as “the biggest traitor of Afghan politics.” To Mr. Abedi, other people’s facts accumulated over the last forty years and compiled by experts are lies. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s critics are wrong because Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is always right, and if he and his Hesb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) come to power, “I promise you, the HIA will call on all these so called experts, and knowledgeable sources to come up and clean what they have written, prove it or apologize to the Afghan and international communities for misleading them, or we will not allow their feet in Afghan soil so they don’t do this kind [of] stupidity in the future against other Afghans.”

Abedi has been negotiating on Hekmatyar’s behalf at least since the Obama administration came to power. A May 10, 2009 report in the London Sunday Times stated that a representative of Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s regional envoy, had met with “Daoud Abedi, an Afghan-American businessman close to Hekmatyar,” and that “the US administration will fund an Afghan government department to conduct negotiations with the Hesb-i-Islami and the Taliban.” In the interim, with the help of Abedi, he has begun to re-brand himself as a “moderate fundamentalist with Afghanistan’s best Islamic interest at heart.”

But Hekmatyar is no moderate. According to published reports during the 1980s, Hekmatyar’s Hesb-i-Islami developed a reputation for attacking moderates, raiding caravans of other forces as well as relief organizations. According to author Steve Coll, Hekmatyar attacked Ahmad Shah Massoud so often during his climb to power as the CIA’s favorite in the 1980s that Washington “feared he might be a secret KGB plant whose mission was to sow disruption within the anti-communist resistance.” According to press reports, Hekmatyar was not viewed as the most aggressive anti-Soviet guerrilla and “not feared so much by the communists as by his allies,” who believed his commanders were saving their men and weapons to establish Hesb-i-Islami as the dominant organization once the Soviets departed.

A 1988 report by Henry Kamm for the New York Times summed up what was then common knowledge about the potential for a government run by Hekmatyar. “[H]e advocates a radical program that rejects a return to the traditional ways of Islam that dominated Afghanistan during the monarchy that was overthrown in 1973… ‘We want a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan,’ said Hekmatyar. ‘Before 1973? That was never an Islamic system. It was completely against Islam.'”

Nick Grono and Candace Rondeaux of the International Crisis Group in Belgium wrote in January of 2010, “One of the warlords who may soon star in the new US efforts to rebrand fundamentalists as potential government partners is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a brutal Afghan insurgent commander responsible for dozens of deadly attacks on coalition troops. As a mujahedeen commander during the civil war in the 1990’s Hekmatyar turned his guns on Kabul, slaughtering many thousands of Afghans, with his militias raping and maiming thousands more… Doing deals with Hekmatyar, or others like him is a mistake… Instead of entering into alliances of convenience with the most undesirable of local power-holders, the international community, and the Afghan government, would gain by holding warlords like Hekmatyar accountable for past abuses, and ending the climate of impunity that has allowed so many of them to flourish within and outside the government. ”

In the final analysis, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has never been successful at anything except creating chaos and bloodshed. Should he finally come to power and gain his dream of a “pure Islamic state” it is certain that he will demand more than just apologies from the people on whom he calls. For over forty years, through his ruthlessness, brutality, financial backing and unceasing public relations campaigns, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has clung to his messianic dream of power. If Washington finally relents and invites him to assume a role in the Afghan government with the volumes of deeds that are known about him, it will be opening Afghanistan as well as itself, to a very dark messiah.

Copyright 2010 Gould & Fitzgerald. All rights reserved

Warlords were Brought into the Afghan Government by the Bush Administration in 2001 By Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould March 22, 2010 According to a March 16 Reuters article by Peter Graff titled Afghanistan confirms blanket pardon for war crime , Afghanistan’s government “has enacted into law a blanket pardon for war crimes and human rights abuse carried out before 2001.” It may sound democratic that “this law passed with a two-thirds majority.” but it isn’t. Graff goes on to explain that, “Parliament is made up largely of lawmakers from former armed groups, some accused by rights groups and ordinary Afghans of war crimes.” What few seem to remember is that in 2001 it was the Bush administration that brought warlords into the Afghan government against the will of the Afghan people. It confirmed what is obvious to anyone with common sense, if you bring warlords into the political process, warlords will eventually takeover completely. That’s what warlords do. Let’s set the record straight. It didn’t need to happen this way. According to Afghan human rights expert, Sima Wali, who represented King Zahir Shah at the Bonn conference in 2001, the process of building a new Afghanistan was doomed to be overrun by Taliban and extremist warlords from the beginning.”During the debates establishing the post-Taliban government of Afghanistan in 2001, Islamist principles that had never been considered Afghan and were never a part of previous Afghan constitutions were infused into the new constitution. Many in leadership positions in the current government of Afghanistan also subscribe to extremist ideologies of the Islamic kind that were never part of Afghan politics.” According to Afghanistan expert David B. Edwards, the extremist, anti-modernist ideologies of the Taliban and the seven major Peshawar mujahideen organizations were known to be as alien to Afghanistan’s traditional ideas of governance as anything introduced by foreign colonial powers. In addition to placing former Taliban madrassa students in positions of authority, the decision by the administration of George W. Bush to bring warlords into the tribal Loya Jirga that established the new government, had a predictable effect. Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, wrote in his book “Descent Into Chaos” about a European diplomat’s shock at the American strategy. ” “Giving the warlords a front seat was a blow to the Afghans and a negative symbol of U.S. influence,’ said one ambassador.” Operating under the false assumption that warlords were always a fundamental aspect of governance in Afghanistan, few in the media or Washington policy establishment questioned the thinking behind such decisions. But the fatal blow to the aspirations of the Afghan people arrived when the Bush administration made the unilateral decision to sideline the one person who could have pulled the country together after 30 years in exile, King Zahir Shah. One commentator, William Pfaff, wrote: “Washington manipulated the Loya Jirga (national assembly of tribal leaders) called in June 2002, so as to put Karzai in office. This was despite the will of the majority of the assembly to bring back the royal family, and the ex-king, as nonpartisan and traditionally legitimate influences in the country’s affairs.” The February 17th Boston Globe article The Price of Appeasing the Taliban by US Representative Stephen F. Lynch framed the dilemma of the Afghan people accurately regarding President Karzai’s role. “”I recently met with female members of the Afghan parliament who were angry Karzai had proposed the Taliban appeasement plan in London without getting the input of women in parliament. They said they fear for the women of Afghanistan, their basic rights of free speech, freedom of travel, freedom of association and voting rights. These women said that they respect the United States, not merely for its economic success or its military power, but for “upholding individual rights for all of its citizens.” This, they said, “is the intoxicating idea of America.” Even though a recent BBC poll of Afghans reveals that only 6% want the Taliban back, it seems nobody from the either the Karzai or Obama administration is talking to the Afghan people. Brad Adams, Asia director for watchdog Human Rights Watch, summed the issue up succinctly in Graff’s article when he raised this issue: “The U.S. needs to decide whether they’re with the victims or the perpetrators, and make their views known publicly,” Our advise to Adams is simple. Until the Afghan people get what they need to run their own nation, don’t be distracted by what the Obama administration says and watch what they do like a hawk. Copyright 2010 Gould & Fitzgerald. All rights reserved

Who is Behind all the Talk to the Taliban Talk?

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

With all the Talk to the Taliban Talk going on everywhere it was refreshing to find an op-ed in the February 17th Boston Globe by US Representative Stephen F. Lynch that hit the nail on the head. Titled , The price of appeasing the Taliban , it framed the true nature of the scam being perpetrated on the Afghan people. Even though the latest poll of Afghans reveals that only a puny 6% want the Taliban back, it seems nobody from the Obama administration is talking to the Afghan people except Representative Lynch.

Here are some of Representative Lynch’s facts :
“The Taliban is a violent and oppressive regime that has given support to Al Qaeda and employed brutality against the general population, especially against women. The Taliban has massacred ethnic minority civilians and used rape as a tool of intimidation. It has burned hundreds of schools to prevent the education of girls. It has stormed schools that teach girls and has beheaded teachers as horrified children watched.”

“The Taliban enforces a strict doctrine that, in part, prohibits women from venturing outside the home except under specific and narrow circumstances and has so terrorized the population in parts of southern Afghanistan that you can drive for miles through crowded village streets and seldom see a woman or girl. Women who violate the Taliban rules have been publicly whipped with car antennas and ferociously beaten/”.

“And if there is any lingering doubt about “outlawing” the Taliban, consider this: in an absurd attempt to gain the support of the local Afghan population the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, recently announced that its members will, for now, “cease the practice of cutting off the lips, noses and ears of detainees.”

‘I recently met with female members of the Afghan parliament who were angry Karzai had proposed the Taliban appeasement plan in London without getting the input of women in parliament. They said they fear for the women of Afghanistan, their basic rights of free speech, freedom of travel, freedom of association and voting rights. These women said that they respect the United States, not merely for its economic success or its military power, but for “upholding individual rights for all of its citizens.” This, they said, “is the intoxicating idea of America.”

As a member of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Relations, Representative Lynch has stated the facts about the Taliban with a clarity that now must be incorporated into the Afghan policy.

This scam against the Afghan people has gone on long enough. Whoever is behind all the Talk to the Taliban Talk should hide in shame and let the adults takeover!

Copyright © Gould & Fitzgerald 2010 All rights reserved

The Huffington Post   

In Afghanistan: Embracing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Is No Method At All  

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Colonel Kurtz: Did they say why [Captain] Willard, why they want to terminate my command?

Captain Willard: They told me, that you had gone totally insane and uh, that your methods were unsound.

Colonel Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Captain Willard: I don’t see any method at all, Sir.

Apocalypse Now

One thing that remains consistent over the last 30 years in observing America’s participation in Afghanistan is that mistakes and errors of judgment, no matter how egregious or self-defeating, never seem to get corrected. In fact, in its effort to rationalize a growing culture of war-making from Vietnam to Afghanistan, America has come around to embracing the insanity of the fictional Colonel Kurtz. read more…

 “Like Great Britain before it, Washington’s interactions with Afghanistan exhibited an ignorance of Afghanistan’s historical desire for non-alignment. This ignorance was combined with an insistence that any expression of that desire proved that Moscow was influencing Kabul’s politics. Fitzgerald and Gould write that this was not an accident. In fact, it was the logical outcome of a 1950 national security directive known as NSC 68.”

“The direct result of this directive was the creation of a permanent war economy and the creation of a national security state. In practice, some of what this meant was that national liberation struggles and national desires for non-alignment were perceived to be Soviet-inspired and therefore part of the enemy camp.”

The Arrogance of Empire, Detailed

by Ron Jacobs  / January 16th, 2010 

In the first week of 2010, five US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. The last week of 2009 saw the deaths of eight CIA agents there. Several more Afghan civilians were killed during this period, including the apparent executions of several young boys by persons either in the US military or working with them. In addition, insurgent forces targeted a Karzai government in official in eastern Khost and launched rockets at the site of a future US consulate in Herat. It was reported on January 6, 2010 that the Obama administration was sending 1,000 more US civilian experts to the country to help in so-called reconstruction projects. This news was greeted with skepticism from Afghans both in and out of the government. The Afghan ambassador to the United Nations noted that few Afghans trusted these so-called reconstruction endeavors and that the US might do better if they hired Afghans to do the rebuilding instead of shipping in US citizens to “create parallel structures that would ruin (the Afghan government’s) efforts.” The ambassador must be quite aware that the history of US reconstruction in either Afghanistan or Iraqis is a legacy of corruption, poor construction, and failed endeavors that benefited no one but the foreign companies that garnered the contracts. Read more…

Shadow War

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Posted: January 12, 2010   News that suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, (the man who targeted the forward CIA operating base Chapman) was a trusted informant, should prompt more than just a reassessment of President Obama’s AfPak war. The shocking infiltration of a key CIA operating facility indicates that either America’s former partners in its covert war against the Soviet Union are so well schooled in American methods and practices that they have become all but invisible, or, that in their desperation, America’s best operatives are failing to follow precautions. Just when the administration was hoping to build on a solid foundation of reliable intelligence, it must now question not only the intelligence it has received, but also the fundamental assumptions on which the intelligence has been operating from the start.

We heard the rumblings of apprehension from local Afghans when we visited Kabul in the fall of 2002. What exactly was the United States doing by hurting those who wanted to build a stable Afghanistan and re-empower those who had already torn it to shreds? In a conscious effort not to lose Afghanistan the way Vietnam had been lost, the U.S. was going back to the same fractious warlords it had empowered during the 1980s without ever questioning whether they had been backing the right people to begin with.

At the time, insurgent leaders, whose ideology was as alien to Afghanistan as any foreign colonial power, made it clear that the U.S. was only an ally of convenience and that once the Soviet Union was defeated the tide of radicalism would be turned loose on the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, America’s largest beneficiary, made his disdain clear when he refused to visit President Reagan at the White House on a 1985 trip to the United Nations in New York. All through the 1990s South Asia expert Selig Harrison made it clear to the CIA that they were creating a “monster” in the Taliban. Yet this, and an ocean of clear and unambiguous information was overlooked, discredited or just plain ignored.

Now the U.S. must look back at all the information this “trusted informant” from Al Qaeda’s Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army) provided and determine what is real and what is “shadow.” But there is nothing in the CIA’s history to indicate that any internal examination can correct the mistakes that encouraged small bands of religious extremists to grow into a powerful insurgency or for that matter to define exactly which enemy is the most dangerous.

Did other reliable informants bordering Helmand province intentionally target Baluch nationalists for Predator drone assassinations, knowing that they would turn the long- suffering Baluch population against the United States? According to Amnesty International, Pakistan’s war on Baluch and Sindhi nationalists has claimed more than 900 activists who have disappeared without a trace, exceeding the massive human rights violations perpetrated by Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s. Have reliable informants also singled out moderate Afghans and Pakistanis for elimination while protecting Afghan Taliban who prey on American units in the long contested Pakistani border region? Under the best of circumstances intelligence gathering is a tricky business, requiring expert skills, experience and knowledge of the indigenous culture. But good intelligence also requires the wisdom to know who your enemy is and the war you are fighting, and by all indications, that remains the black hole of American efforts.

In a report released by the Center for a New American Security on Monday January 4,
NATO’s highest intelligence officer, U.S. Major General Michael T. Flynn, writes that “our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade. This problem or its consequences exist at every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy, and pivotal information is not making it to those who need it.”

Either unable or unwilling to adapt to a post-cold war, multi-polar world, and after eight years of failure in Afghanistan, the Obama administration now wants the Afghan and Pakistani people to believe that the United States is on their side. But until the American intelligence bureaucracy catches up to the President’s rhetoric, Al Qaeda’s army will continue to operate effectively from the shadows while the U.S. will continue to stumble along in the dark.

© Copyright 2010 Gould & Fitzgerald. All rights reserved

Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan  Part One  By Joan Brunwasser

OpEdNews  January 9, 2010 

Please tell our readers a bit about your background and what made you the right ones for the job.

Big things were happening in 1978, with new approaches to old problems as the Carter administration vowed to eliminate the threat of nuclear war and reevaluated detente with the Soviet Union. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT was a major vehicle for these changes and by 1979 we had focused on its impact by interviewing the central figures. By the end of 1979, we had finished a documentary called the Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, analyzing the effects of defense spending on the US economy. Having experienced a decade of improving relations with the Soviet Union our documentary was received with great interest. (Read Part One: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan )

Part Two: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan By Joan Brunwasser

OpEdNews  January 10, 2010 

Welcome back for the conclusion of my interview with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. In the first half, you dissected how we got to this point. The next question for you two is, can we break out of this military mindset?
The U.S. is currently in a tenuous financial arrangement with the rest of the world and especially Russia and China. How long the United States can continue to act as a hegemonic power in Central Asia with the intention of controlling pipeline routes against Chinese and Russian interests is a delicate and growing issue. Without careful and ingenious diplomacy, the United States could soon find itself as the odd man out. No amount of military thinking or spending will resolve the problem the United States faces. If the United States can’t adjust to this new post cold war reality, then the U.S. will go the way of the Soviet Union. (Read Part Two: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan )