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Group CGeographyAfghanistan, approximately the size of Texas, is bordered on the north by Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, on the extreme northeast by China, on the east and south by Pakistan, and by Iran on the west. The country is split east to west by the Hindu Kush mountain range, rising in the east to heights of 24,000 ft (7,315 m). With the exception of the southwest, most of the country is covered by high snow-capped mountains and is traversed by deep valleys. GovernmentIn June 2002 a multiparty republic replaced an interim government that had been established in Dec. 2001, following the fall of the Islamic Taliban government. HistoryDarius I and Alexander the Great were the first to use Afghanistan as the gateway to India. Islamic conquerors arrived in the 7th century, and Genghis Khan and Tamerlane followed in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the 19th century, Afghanistan became a battleground in the rivalry between imperial Britain and czarist Russia for control of Central Asia. Three Anglo-Afghan wars (1839–1842, 1878–1880, and 1919) ended inconclusively. In 1893 Britain established an unofficial border, the Durand Line, separating Afghanistan from British India, and London granted full independence in 1919. Emir Amanullah founded an Afghan monarchy in 1926. Soviet Invasion During the cold war, King Mohammed Zahir Shah developed close ties with the Soviet Union, accepting extensive economic assistance from Moscow. He was deposed in 1973 by his cousin Mohammed Daoud, who proclaimed a republic. Daoud was killed in a 1978 coup, and Noor Taraki took power, setting up a Marxist regime. He, in turn, was executed in Sept. 1979, and Hafizullah Amin became president. Amin was killed in Dec. 1979, as the Soviets launched a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and installed Babrak Karmal as president. The Soviets, and the Soviet-backed Afghan government, were met with fierce popular resistance. Guerrilla forces, calling themselves mujahideen, pledged a jihad, or holy war, to expel the invaders. Initially armed with outdated weapons, the mujahideen became a focus of U.S. cold war strategy against the Soviet Union, and with Pakistan's help, Washington began funneling sophisticated arms to the resistance. Moscow's troops were soon bogged down in a no-win conflict with determined Afghan fighters. In 1986 Karmal resigned, and was replaced by Mohammad Najibullah. In April 1988 the USSR, U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan signed accords calling for an end to outside aid to the warring factions. In return, a Soviet withdrawal took place in Feb. 1989, but the pro-Soviet government of President Najibullah was left in the capital, Kabul. The Rise of the Taliban By mid-April 1992 Najibullah was ousted as Islamic rebels advanced on the capital. Almost immediately, the various rebel groups began fighting one another for control. Amid the chaos of competing factions, a group calling itself the Taliban—consisting of Islamic students—seized control of Kabul in Sept. 1996. It imposed harsh fundamentalist laws, including stoning for adultery and severing hands for theft. Women were prohibited from work and school, and they were required to cover themselves from head to foot in public. By fall 1998 the Taliban controlled about 90% of the country and, with its scorched-earth tactics and human rights abuses, had turned itself into an international pariah. Only three countries—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAR—recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government. On Aug. 20, 1998, U.S. cruise missiles struck a terrorist training complex in Afghanistan believed to have been financed by Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Islamic radical sheltered by the Taliban. The U.S. asked for the deportation of Bin Laden, whom it believed was involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998. The UN also demanded the Taliban hand over Bin Laden for trial. In Sept. 2001, legendary guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Masoud was killed by suicide bombers, a seeming death knell for the anti-Taliban forces, a loosely connected group referred to as the Northern Alliance. Days later, terrorists attacked New York's World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and Bin Laden emerged as the primary suspect in the tragedy. The U.S. Responds to the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks On Oct. 7, after the Taliban repeatedly and defiantly refused to turn over Bin Laden, the U.S. and its allies began daily air strikes against Afghan military installations and terrorist training camps. Five weeks later, with the help of U.S. air support, the Northern Alliance managed with breathtaking speed to take the key cities of Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, the capital. On Dec. 7, the Taliban regime collapsed entirely when its troops fled their last stronghold, Kandahar. However, al-Qaeda members and other mujahideen from various parts of the Islamic world who had earlier fought alongside the Taliban persisted in pockets of fierce resistance, forcing U.S. and allied troops to maintain a presence in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar remained at large. In Dec. 2001, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun (the dominant ethnic group in the country) and the leader of the powerful 500,000-strong Populzai clan, was named head of Afghanistan's interim government; in June 2002, he formally became president. The U.S. maintained about 12,000 troops to combat the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and about 31 nations also contributed NATO-led peacekeeping forces. In 2003, after the United States shifted its military efforts to fighting the war in Iraq, attacks on American-led forces intensified as the Taliban and al-Qaeda began to regroup. President Hamid Karzai's hold on power remained tenuous, as entrenched warlords continued to exert regional control. Remarkably, however, Afghanistan's first democratic presidential elections in Oct. 2004 were a success. Ten million Afghans, more than a third of the country, registered to vote, including more than 40% of eligible women. Karzai was declared the winner in November, taking 55% of the vote, and was inaugurated in December. In May 2005, 17 people were killed during anti-American protests prompted by a report in Newsweek that American guards at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had desecrated the Koran. In September 2005, Afghanistan held its first democratic parliamentary elections in more than 25 years. Reemergence of the Taliban The Taliban continued to attack U.S. troops throughout 2005 and 2006—the latter becoming the deadliest year for U.S. troops since the war ended in 2001. In 2004 and 2005, American troop levels in Afghanistan gradually increased to nearly 18,000 from a low of 10,000. Throughout the spring of 2006, Taliban militants—by then a force of several thousand—infiltrated southern Afghanistan, terrorizing local villagers and attacking Afghan and U.S. troops. In May and June, Operation Mount Thrust was launched, deploying more than 10,000 Afghan and coalition forces in the south. About 700 people, most of whom were Taliban, were killed. In Aug. 2006, NATO troops took over military operations in southern Afghanistan from the U.S.-led coalition. NATO's Afghanistan mission is considered the most dangerous undertaken in its 57-year history. Attacks by the Taliban intensified and increased in late 2006 and into 2007, with militants crossing into eastern Afghanistan from Pakistan's tribal areas. The Pakistani government denied that its intelligence agency supported the Islamic militants, despite contradictory reports from Western diplomats and the media. An August 2007 report by the United Nations implicated the Taliban in Afghanistan's opium production, which has doubled in two years. The report further stated that the country supplies 93% of the world's heroin. Southern Afghanistan, particularly Helmand Province, saw the largest spike. The Taliban continued to launch attacks and gain strength throughout 2007 and into 2008. In February 2008, U.S. Secretary of State Robert Gates warned NATO members that the threat of an al-Qaeda attack on their soil is real and that they must commit more troops to stabilize Afghanistan and counter the growing power of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban.Taliban Attacks Become More Deadly The U.S. had 34,000 troops in Afghanistan during the summer of 2008, the highest level since 2005, but that was not enough to stem growing violence in the country or the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Indeed, June 2008 was the deadliest month for U.S. and coalition troops since the American-led invasion began in 2001. Forty-six soldiers were killed; there were 31 U.S troop deaths in Iraq during the same period. In addition, a Pentagon report indicated that the U.S. is facing two separate insurgencies in Afghanistan: the Taliban in the south and a collection of militant bands in the east, which borders Pakistan. These adversaries seek the expulsion of "all foreign military forces from Afghanistan, the elimination of external government influence in their respective areas, and the imposition of a religiously conservative, Pashtun-led government." Some U.S. officials began to question the effectiveness of President Karzai and his ability to rein in the mounting insurgency. Those doubts were further justified in June, when the Taliban brazenly orchestrated a jailbreak in Kandahar, which freed about 900 prisoners, 350 of them were Taliban. In August, as many as 90 Afghan civilians, 60 of them children, were killed in a U.S.-launched airstrike in the western village of Azizabad. It was one of the deadliest airstrikes since the war began in 2001, and the deadliest on civilians. The U.S. military refuted the figures, however, which were confirmed by the UN, claiming that the airstrike, in response to an attack by militants, killed less than 10 civilians and about 30 members of the Taliban. An investigation by the U.S. military, released in October, found that more than 30 civilians and less than 20 militants were killed in the raid. The Pakistani military launched a three-week-long cross-border air assault into Afghanistan's Bajaur region throughout August, which resulted in more than 400 Taliban casualties. The continuous airstrikes forced many al-Qaeda and Taliban militants to retreat from towns formally under their control. However, the Pakistani government declared a cease-fire in the Bajaur region for the month of September in observance of Ramadan, raising fears that the Taliban will use the opportunity to regroup. Allied deaths in Afghanistan reached 267 in 2008, the highest number since the war began in 2003. U.S. president-elect Barack Obama said defeating the Taliban would be a top priority of his administration. The Pentagon, seeming to share Obama's sense of urgency, said it would comply with a request by Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan, and send an additional 20,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2009. In May 2009, Gen. David McKiernan was replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a veteran Special Operations commander. Afghanistan Holds Second Direct Presidential Elections Provincial and presidential elections were held on August 20, 2009, despite calls by the Taliban to boycott the elections and the militia's attendant threats to harm those who cast votes. Violence spiked in the days leading up to the elections. More than 30 candidates challenged incumbent Karzai, with Abdullah Abdullah as the most formidable contender. Abdullah, who served under Karzai as minister of foreign affairs until 2006, ran as head of the United National Front opposition alliance. Early results put Karzai well ahead of Abdullah, but allegations of widespread and blatant fraud surfaced immediately. In September, the United Nations-backed Electoral Complaints Commission announced it had "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" and called for a partial recount. Complaints of fraud were particularly egregious in southern regions of Afghanistan, where Karzai drew most of his support. Election results released in October indicated that Karzai came up short in garnering 50% of the vote and a second-round election was necessary. Karzai agreed to participate in a runoff against his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah. About a week before the Nov. 7 second-round election, Abdullah withdrew from the race in protest of the Karzai administration's refusal to dismiss election officials accused of taking part in the widespread fraud that marred the first round of the election. Karzai was declared the winner on Nov. 5 and began his second five-year term as president. He faced difficulties from the onset of his second term when parliament rejected about two-thirds of his cabinet picks in January 2010. A smooth election was seen as vital for continued support of the U.S.-backed war in Afghanistan. During the election turmoil, President Obama's plan to send additional troops to Afghanistan began drawing opposition from critics who said the operation was veering away from the original mission to fight terrorism and toward nation building and who questioned Afghanistan's ability and commitment to improve security and stabilize its government. Support for the War on the Wane The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan continued its downward spiral in 2010. Popular support for the nine-year campaign waned in the U.S. as casualties mounted and the Afghan government and military showed few signs of being able to assume control of the country, never mind the Taliban strongholds. About six thousand American, Afghan, and British troops stormed the southern city of Marja in February in an attempt to destroy the Taliban haven. The attack, the largest since the beginning of the invasion, was an example of a new anti-insurgency strategy that would have allied and Afghan troops clear the area of militants and Afghan troops eventually assuming control with the continued support of allied forces. By May, the Taliban returned to Marja and resumed their fight against troops and residents. The failure in Marja forced the U.S. to rethink a similar effort in Kandahar. However, U.S. and Afghan troops launched an offensive in September to dislodge the Taliban from Kandahar. The whistle-blower website WikiLeaks released 92,000 classified U.S. military documents in July 2010 that portrayed a much less optimistic picture of the war than has been reported by the U.S. government. The documents revealed that the insurgency has continued to increase in strength and resiliency while allied forces lacked many resources necessary for success in the war. The documents also reinforced the widely held perception that the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, has been playing both sides in the war against the Taliban and militant groups, clandestinely supporting the insurgents in their fight against allied troops in Afghanistan while also cooperating with the U.S. WikiLeaks released about 250,000 diplomatic cables in November that highlighted the endemic corruption that has plagued Afghanistan. For example, Ahmed Zia Massoud, a former vice president, was found with $52 million in cash. The cables also reveal deep skepticism among world leaders about Karzai's leadership and describe him as increasingly unpredictable and unreliable. Parliamentary elections were held in September 2010. Voter turnout was low, with about one-third of eligible voters casting ballots. As in previous elections, allegations of ballot-stuffing and voter intimidation were widespread. About 20% or 1.3 million of the votes were rejected as fraudulent. As a result, the government was held in limbo for several months as election officials reviewed the results of the election. In August 2011—nearly a year after the election, the Independent Election Commission changed the results, stripping nine members of Parliament of their seats and reinstating another nine who had been disqualified. The ruling should pave the way for Karzai to appoint a cabinet and nominate justices to the Supreme Court. Leading members of the Taliban, President Karzai, and his advisors met in October to negotiate an end to the 9-year war. The Taliban leaders, whose identities were kept secret in order to prevent rival Taliban leaders from harming or killing them, were led to the meetings from their safe havens in Pakistan by NATO troops. One of the Taliban leaders was believed to have been Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the group's second in command. However, it was revealed in November that the person posing as Mansour was an imposter who duped Karzai and NATO officials. By the end of 2010, with Karzai's mercurial leadership and the Taliban's stubborn resistance, the Obama administration began to make clear that U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, far longer than he had predicted in 2009, when he suggested combat troops would begin to be withdrawn in July 2011. Osama bin Laden Is Killed On May 2, 2011, U.S. troops and CIA operatives shot and killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a city of 500,000 people that houses a military base and a military academy. A gun battle broke out when the troops descended upon the building in which bin Laden was located, and bin Laden was shot in the head. News of bin Laden's death brought cheers and a sense of relief worldwide. "For over two decades, Bin Laden has been Al Qaeda's leader and symbol," said President Barack Obama in a televised speech. "The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat Al-Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. There's no doubt that Al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad." While Bin Laden's demise was greeted with triumph in the United States and around the world, analysts expressed concern that Al-Qaeda may seek retaliation. U.S. embassies throughout the world were put on high alert, and the U.S. State Department issued a warning for travelers visiting dangerous countries, instructing them "to limit their travel outside of their homes and hotels and avoid mass gatherings and demonstrations." Some Afghan officials expressed concern that bin Laden's death might prompt the U.S. to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and said the U.S. should maintain a presence there because terrorism continues to plague the country and the region. "The killing of Osama should not be seen as mission accomplished," former interior minister Hanif Atmar told the New York Times . "Al Qaeda is much more than just Osama bin Laden." Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor who is al-Qaeda's theological leader, will likely succeed bin Laden. The fact that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan in a compound located in close proximity to a military base will likely strain the already distrustful relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistan has long denied that bin Laden was hiding within its borders, and the U.S. has provided Pakistan with about $1 billion each year to fight terrorism and to track down bin Laden. Violence and Assassinations Diminish Confidence in Afghanistan's Security Forces In June, President Obama announced that the U.S. had largely achieved its goals in Afghanistan and that time had come to start withdrawing troops and begin "to focus on nation-building here at home." He said about 10,000 of the 30,000 troops deployed in 2009 as part of the surge will leave the country by the end of 2011 and the remaining 20,000 will be out by the summer of 2012. The remaining U.S. troops—some 70,000—will be gradually withdrawn through the end of 2014, when security will be transferred to Afghan authorities. Some military officials expressed concern that the drawdown would compromise advances made against the Taliban. President Karzai's half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, arguably the most powerful—and feared— man in southern Afghanistan, was assassinated by his security chief in July. Karzai served as provincial council chief in Kandahar, a strategically important city in the south, and was a figurehead of the Pashtun tribe. Despite widespread allegations of corruption and accusations that he ran a heroin ring, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) worked closely with Karzai, relying on his status as a feared power broker to help bring stability to the volatile region by uniting several tribes with the common goal of defeating the Taliban. On Aug. 6, 2011, the Taliban shot down a transport helicopter, killing 30 American troops, seven Afghans, and a translator. It was the highest death toll in a single day for U.S. troops. Twenty-two elite Navy SEALs were killed, some members of the unit that killed Osama bin Laden. In September, members of the Haqqani network, a group allied with the Taliban, launched a brazen attack in Kabul, firing on the U.S. embassy, the headquarters of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, and other diplomatic outposts. Nearly 30 people were killed, including 11 militants. The U.S. later accused Pakistan's spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, of helping the Haqqani network plan the attack. In fact, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the ISI "acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency." The peace process in Afghanistan was dealt another blow in late September when Burhanuddin Rabbani was assassinated in Kabul. A Tajik, Rabbani joined the fight against the Soviets, becoming leader of one of the five major factions of the mujahideen. After the fall of the communist regime in 1992, Rabbani became president of the interim government that lasted until 1996, when it was overthrown by the Taliban. Recently he was the chief negotiator in peace talks between the government and insurgents. He was considered one of the few politicians who could bring the Taliban and former members of the Northern Alliance to the bargaining table. U.S. Begins to Reduce Its Role in Afghanistan as Relationship Deteriorates Shortly after U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta announced in early February 2012 that the military would end its combat role in Afghanistan by the middle of 2013 and shift toward an "advise and assist" capacity, a series of missteps and tragedies that intensified anti-U.S. sentiment forced officials to consider accelerating the withdrawal of troops even further. First, U.S. troops were caught on video urinating on the bodies of Taliban fighters. This incident was followed in February with another in which U.S. troops unintentionally burned several copies of the Koran. Two U.S. officials working in Afghanistan's interior ministry were shot and killed in retaliation. In March, a U.S. soldier went on a door-to-door rampage, brutally killing 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children. The events sparked nationwide anti-U.S. protests in Afghanistan, and U.S. officials feared a resurgence of the Taliban–and renewed support of the Taliban by Afghan citizens. In addition, the Taliban said it was withdrawing from talks with the Karzai government and U.S. officials. In April, the U.S. took a significant step toward transferring military control to Afghanistan when it gave Afghan troops control over special operations missions, which include the controversial night-time attacks on suspected insurgents that have claimed scores of civilian casualties. A week later, the the Haqqani network, a militant group allied with the Taliban, launched seven synchronized attacks on Parliament and the Green Zone in Kabul and in three provinces (Nangarhar, Paktia, and Logar). The assaults tested the Afghan military's defensive abilities and highlighted the network's increasing sophistication and threat. Casualties were minimal—only six fatalities—but the raid on Parliament lasted 18 hours. On May 1—the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama made a surprise visit to Afghanistan and signed an agreement with President Karzai that said the U.S. will provide Afghanistan development assistance for 10 years after troops withdraw in 2013. Group CGroup CSome Ethnic and Political Groups of AfghanistanPashtun - The dominant minority group in Afghanistan, the Pashtun, is divided into various tribes and clan groups. Pashtuns regard themselves as the true Afghans and are governed by an honor cod of proper behavior known as Pashtunwali. Pashtuns are a big, strapping people who look Aryan and, indeed, were regarded by Hitler as the wellspring of Germanic peoples. They have their own language, Pashtu, which is spoken in the tribal areas of the country. However, most Pashtuns also speak Farsi (Persian). They are Sunni Muslims. Pshtuns are used to ruling the country; for example, King Zahir Shah, who led the country forty years prior to his overthrow in 1983, was Pashtun, as was his cousin, Douad, who engineered his overthrow in a bloodless coup.Hazara - One of the many minority ethnic groups who populate Afghanistan, the Hazaras originally arrived from central steppes of Asia by horseback in the 13th century. They look Mongolian or somewhat Chinese by appearance. In modern times, the Hazaras occupy the mountainous region of Afghanistan. In the cities, the Hazara enjoy little social status and work difficult, low-paying jobs, like water carrying or human waste removal. The Hazaras are Shia ‘a Muslims and the traditional rivals of Sunnis. Tajiks - Sunni Muslims who speak Persian and live predominately in the Northeast and West of the country. They make up the bulk of the educated elite in Afghanistan and possess significant political influence. They are the Pashtun’s closest rivals for power and prestige.Taliban - The Taliban are a political group of extreme fundamentalist Muslims who ruled Afghanistan after the final withdrawal of the Russian occupying force in 1989 and ensuing civil war. They want to have society conform their behaviors exactly prescribed in their interpretation of the Quran. The Taliban were notorious for their oppressive treatment of women, requiring them to wear burqas (a garment that conceals the woman from head to toe) and be accompanied by a male relative when out in public. The Taliban government gave Osama bin Laden a safe haven in Afghanistan, setting the stage for his terrorist training camps and the attack on the World Trade Center.Group CGroup CAn Afghan-American speaksYou can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants. By Tamim Ansary I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” Ronn Owens, on San Francisco’s KGO Talk Radio, conceded today that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but “we’re at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?” Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we “have the belly to do what must be done.” And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived in the United States for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing. I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters. But the Taliban and bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.” It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats’ nest of international thugs holed up in their country. Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan — a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban. We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and healthcare? Too late. Someone already did all that. New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans; they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban — by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time. So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that, folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West. And guess what: That’s bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose; that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong — in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean — but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else? Group CRoute to richesAfghanistan has huge strategic importance for the west as a corridor to the untapped fuel reserves in central Asia, reports Andy RowellTuesday 23 October 2001 As the war in Afghanistan unfolds, there is frantic diplomatic activity to ensure that any post-Taliban government will be both democratic and pro-west. Hidden in this explosive geo-political equation is the sensitive issue of securing control and export of the region's vast oil and gas reserves. The Soviets estimated Afghanistan's proven and probable natural gas reserves at 5 trillion cubic feet - enough for the UK's requirement for two years - but this remains largely untapped because of the country's civil war and poor pipeline infrastructure. More importantly, according to the US government, "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian Sea". To the north of Afghanistan lies the Caspian and central Asian region, one of the world's last great frontiers for the oil industry due to its tremendous untapped reserves. The US government believes that total oil reserves could be 270bn barrels. Total gas reserves could be 576 trillion cubic feet. These dwarf the UK's proven reserves of 5bn barrels of oil and 27 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The reason oil is so attractive to the US - which imports half of its oil - and the west, is for three reasons. "Firstly it is non-Opec oil," says James Marriott, an oil expert from Platform, an environmental NGO. "Opec has been the bête-noire of the west since its inception in 1960. Secondly, these states are not within the Arab world and thirdly, although they are Muslim, they are heavily secularised." The presence of these oil reserves and the possibility of their export raises new strategic concerns for the US and other western industrial powers. "As oil companies build oil pipelines from the Caucasus and central Asia to supply Japan and the west, these strategic concerns gain military implications,"argued an article in the Military Review, the Journal of the US army, earlier in the year. Despite this, host governments and western oil companies have been rushing to get in on the act. Kazakhstan, it is believed, could earn $700bn (?486bn) from offshore oil and gas fields over the next 40 years. Both American and British oil companies have struck black gold. In April 1993, Chevron concluded a $20bn joint venture to develop the Tengiz oil field, with 6-9bn barrels of estimated oil reserves in Kazakhstan alone. The following year, in what was described as "the deal of the century", AIOC, an international consortium of companies led by BP, signed an $8bn deal to exploit reserves estimated at 3-5bn barrels in Azerbaijan. The oil industry has long been trying to find a way to bring the oil and gas to market. This frustration was evident in the submission by oil company Unocal's vice-president John Maresca, before the US House of Representatives in 1998. "Central Asia is isolated. Their natural resources are landlocked, both geographically and politically. Each of the countries in the Caucasus and central Asia faces difficult political challenges. Some have unsettled wars or latent conflicts." The industry has been looking at different routes. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) route is 1,000 miles west from Tengiz in Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiisk and came on stream last week. Oil will go by tanker through the Bosporus to the Mediterranean. Another route being considered by AIOC goes from Baku through Tbilisi in Georgia to Ceyhan in Turkey. However, parts of the route are seen as politically unstable as it goes through the Kurdistan region of Turkey and its $3bn price tag is prohibitively expensive. But even if these pipelines are built, they would not be enough to exploit the region's vast oil and gas reserves. Nor crucially would they have the capacity to move oil to where it is really needed, the growing markets of Asia. Other export pipelines must therefore be built. One option is to go east across China, but at 3,000km it is seen as too long. Another option is through Iran, but US companies are banned due to American sanctions. The only other possible route is through Afghanistan to Pakistan. This is seen as being advantageous as it is close to the Asian markets. Unocal, the US company with a controversial history of investment in Burma, has been trying to secure the Afghan route. To be viable Unocal has made it clear that "construction of the pipeline cannot begin until a recognised government is in place in Kabul that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company." This, it can be argued, is precisely what Washington is now trying to do. "Washington's attitude towards the Taliban has been, in large part, a function of oil," argues Steve Kretzmann, from the Institute for Policy Studies in the US. "Before 1997, Washington refused to criticise and isolate the Taliban because Kabul seemed to favour Unocal, to build a proposed natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the Pakistan coast." In 1997, the Taliban signed an agreement that would allow a proposed 890-mile, $2bn natural gas pipeline project called Centgas led by Unocal to proceed. However by December 1998, Unocal had pulled out citing turmoil in Afghanistan making the project too risky. To secure stability for the Afghan pipeline route, the US State Department and Pakistan's intelligence service funnelled arms to the Taliban, argues Ahmed Rashid in his book: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, the book Tony Blair has been reportedly reading since the conflict started. Rashid called the struggle for control of post-Soviet central Asia "the new Great Game". Critics of the industry argue that so long as this game is dependent on fossil fuels the region will remain impoverished due to the effects of the oil industry, which is, says Kretzmann, "essentially a neo-colonial set-up that extracts wealth from a region. The industry is sowing the seeds of poverty and terrorism. True security, for all of us, can only be achieved by reducing our dependence on oil."Group CBackyard terrorismThe US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's still at itBy George MonbiotMonday 29 October 2001 "If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention. For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government. Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni. In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas. In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976. Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico. All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its students from Colombia than from any other country. The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives. Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself Whisc. As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic". But visit Whisc's website and you'll see that the School of the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked "History" fails to mention it. Whisc's courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of counter drug operations". Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is the fact that Whisc's "peace" and "human rights" options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them. We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all, it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the al-Qaida training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia? Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag. You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and the war now being waged in Afghanistan. Group CThe Plight of the Afghan Womanleft000The vast majority of Afghanistan's population professes to be followers of Islam. Over 1400 years ago, Islam demanded that men and women be equal before God, and gave them various rights such the right to inheritance, the right to vote, the right to work, and even choose their own partners in marriage. For centuries now in Afghanistan, women have been denied these rights either by official government decree or by their own husbands, fathers, and brothers. During the rule of the Taliban (1996 - 2001), women were treated worse than in any other time or by any other society. They were forbidden to work, leave the house without a male escort, not allowed to seek medical help from a male doctor, and forced to cover? themselves from head to toe, even covering their eyes. Women who were doctors and teachers before, suddenly were forced to be beggars and even prostitutes in order to feed their families. Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, many would agree that the political and cultural position of Afghan women has improved substantially. The recently adopted Afghan constitution states that "the citizens of Afghanistan - whether man or woman- have equal rights and duties before the law". So far, women have been allowed to return back to work, the government no longer forces them to wear the all covering burqa, and they even have been appointed to prominent positions in the government. Despite all these changes many challenges still remain. The repression of women is still prevalent in rural areas where many families still restrict their own mothers, daughters, wives and sisters from participation in public life. They are still forced into marriages and denied a basic education. Numerous school for girls have been burned down and little girls have even been poisoned to death for daring to go to school.- by Abdullah Qazi ................
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