Doug Lorimer
On July 13, Prime Minister John Howard announced that the federal Coalition government had decided to send Australian troops back to Afghanistan to help prop up the regime of US puppet President Hamid Karzai, in the face of a strengthening Afghan anti-occupation insurgency.
Karzai relies on US-led forces for his grip on power — even his bodyguards are from the US — along with a shifting series of alliances with reactionary local warlords. The US has around 18,000 troops in Afghanistan, while its NATO allies — including Germany, France and Spain — have 8000.
Howard announced that a force of 150 elite SAS troops and supporting officers will go to Afghanistan in September for a 12-month deployment, and that the Australian Defence Force will also look at sending up to 200 soldiers next June to work on "reconstruction".
Fifteen-hundred Australian troops participated in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, but since late 2002 Australia has had only one mine clearance expert in the country.
Welcoming the decision, Labor shadow defence minister Robert McClelland told reporters in Canberra, "The Howard government should stand up and admit that they cut and ran from Afghanistan prematurely in 2002".
The ALP has been pushing for Howard to send Australian troops back to Afghanistan for some time.
While Howard justified his decision on the grounds of helping Karzai's government defeat the Afghan insurgency, Labor has argued that a return of Australian troops to Afghanistan is necessary to defeat the threat of Islamist terrorism in South-East Asia.
At a July 8 press conference in Perth, federal ALP leader Kim "Bomber" Beazley used the previous day's London terrorist bombings to again argue for sending Australian troops back to Afghanistan. After denouncing the perpetrators of the London bombings as "sub-human filth who must be captured and eliminated", Beazley declared: "Obviously we have to be useful in the area under which we're under threat, which is South-East Asia, and I think we have a role to play in dealing with terrorist central, which is currently along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan."
The isolated and rugged mountainous border region between these two countries is where Saudi Arabian right-wing Islamist Osama bin Laden and the remnants of his al Qaeda terrorist organisation are presumed by Western governments and terrorism experts to be hiding.
Beazley's argument — that bin Laden's remote hide-out is "terrorism central" — presumes that al Qaeda is a centralised international organisation of jihadist terrorists, a presumption for which he offers no evidence.
Al Qaeda
Bin Laden's group certainly derived its name from a centralised international organisation. As Scott Atran, organiser of a NATO working group on suicide bombings, noted in the March 24, 2004, edition of the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor, al Qaeda ("the Base", in Arabic) was the US Central Intelligence Agency's processing centre for those it recruited and trained from across the Arab world, including bin Laden, to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980s. (The Jamestown Foundation is a think-tank run by former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, the principal architect of Washington's policy of recruiting non-Afghan Muslims — at least 35,000 — to fight a jihad alongside the private armies of Afghan drug-lords against the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party government.)
Most Western terrorism experts are agreed that al Qaeda is not "terrorism central", but a label applied by the US government to all the right-wing Islamist terrorist groups that draw ideological inspiration from bin Laden's occasional taped messages and which may or may not use the al Qaeda brand name.
Atran, for example, argued in his Terrorism Monitor article that prior to 9/11, bin Laden's al Qaeda was just one of a variety of loosely connected jihadist groups left over from the CIA's anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.
"Only after the FBI began investigating the 1998 American embassy bombings in Africa", Atran wrote, "did US prosecutors in the Southern District Court of New York — and the rest of the world — begin referring to al Qaeda as 'a worldwide terrorist organization led by bin Laden'. The subsequent interconnection of regional jihadist groups into an 'al-Qaeda network' may be, in part, the result of the United States over-attributing to bin Laden and al Qaeda a global concentration of power and organization."
In an interview with the February 26, 2004, Terrorism Monitor, James Burke, London Observer reporter and author of Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, pointed out that since 2001, "al Qaeda's hard core has been dispersed and has lost its focus on Afghanistan". He also said that, since "bin Laden is peripheral to the on-going campaign of jihad groups from Indonesia to Morocco", killing or capturing him would have little effect on these groups, which are able to feed off ' 'a profound sense of injustice and humiliation in the Islamic world", resulting from US policy in the Middle East.
Atran pointed out that this is why waging war on Muslim countries, like Iraq and Afghanistan, won't stop jihadist terrorism — an argument confirmed by the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, and by this month's terrorist bombings in London.
"'Strategic' bombardment, invasion, occupation and other massive forms of coercion", he wrote, "will not eliminate tactically innovative and elusive jihadist swarms or do away with their popular support. Nearly half of all Pakistanis and substantial majorities of people in 'moderate' Muslim countries, such as Morocco and Jordan, support suicide bombings as a way of countering the application of military might by the United States in Iraq and by Israel in Palestine."
Narco-terrorism?
Beazley's argument for Australian combat troops to rejoin the US-led occupation of Afghanistan was repeated and elaborated on by ALP foreign affairs spokesperson Kevin Rudd, who told reporters on July 12: "If we are concerned about stopping future attacks on Australians in South-East Asia by Jemaah Islamiah, [which is] closely linked to al Qaeda, then we have got to tackle terrorism at its source, at its base, at its centre — and that is Afghanistan."
Rudd claimed then that Jemaah Islamiah's terrorist operations in South-East Asia were financed by the $2.3 billion a year which came from narcotics operations based on the annual Afghan opium crop.
This claim, of course, presumes that it is Bin Laden's al Qaeda group in Afghanistan that is financing Jemaah Islamiah's terrorist operations, and that al Qaeda is a player in Afghanistan's huge illicit drugs economy.
Since the US invaders overthrew the right-wing Islamist Taliban regime in late 2001, Afghanistan has regained the place it enjoyed as the world's biggest supplier of opium before the Taliban won the post-1992 civil war between the various Afghan Islamist factions. Afghanistan now produces three-quarters of the world's opium, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a research fellow at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) specialising in the geopolitics of illicit drugs with a particular focus on Asia, has pointed out that opium is produced in the areas of Afghanistan that are under the control of local warlords who are unofficial allies of the US occupiers in their war against the remnants of the Taliban regime and al Qaeda.
Writing in the March 25 Terrorism Monitor, Chouvy noted that "Even more official allies of the US 'war on terrorism' also seem to be engaged in, or benefiting from, the drug economy. Indeed, as was testified under oath on March 20, 2003, by Wendy Chamberlin, the former US ambassador to Pakistan, before the International Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, involvement by the ISI in opium trafficking across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has been 'substantial' over the last six years." (The ISI is the Pakistani military's Inter-Service Intelligence directorate.)
Chouvy pointed out that during the US covert war against the PDPA government and its Soviet ally, the Afghan warlords "received most of the funds supplied by the CIA (and matched by Saudi Arabia) through the ISI, whose National Logistics Cell trucks delivered weapons to Afghanistan and brought opium back to Pakistan".
Is there evidence of al Qaeda involvement in the Afghan drugs economy? Chouvy argues there isn't. "Although the head of Afghanistan's Counter Narcotics Directorate estimates that the Taliban and its allies derived more than US$150 million from drugs in 2003, hard evidence linking al Qaeda directly to the drug economy is still scarce, most investigators say."
Sending Australian troops to Afghanistan to help Washington's occupation of that country will do nothing to end its drugs economy. That's not only because it is Washington's Afghan warlord allies who are the ones who profit from the illicit drugs trade, but because, as Chouvy notes, "commercial production of opium has also been the only means of subsistence available to many Afghan peasants".
Overcoming this will require "implementing a broad program of alternative and integrated development in the whole country", Chouvy argues, not a "war on terrorism".
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 20, 2005.
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