Reading Zaeef: 15: 9/11 and its Aftermath

December 30, 2010

Reading Abdul Salam Zaeef: My Life with the Taliban:

My mind raced as I looked at the screen and considered the probable repercussions of the attack. At that very moment, I knew that Afghanistan and its poverty-stricken people would ultimately suffer for what had just taken place in America. The United States would seek revenge, and they would turn to our troubled country.

The thought brought tears to my eyes, but those sitting with me in the room looked at me with genuine surprise and asked me why I was sad. To be honest, some of them were overjoyed, offering congratulations and shaking each other’s hands for the events that we had just witnessed.

This happiness and jubilation worried me even more; I was anxious about the future. How could they be so superficial, finding joy in an event for a moment, but oblivious to its impact on the days to come? I turned to the others, asking them, “who do you think the United States and the world will blame for what has just happened? Who will face their anger?”
…
Pakistan was making every effort to meet with Communist generals and former mujahedeen commanders while the ISI facilitated contacts for the United States, introducing them to potential allies in a war against the Islamic Emirate. America was willing to pay for the cooperation of commanders; they spent millions of dollars, providing free satellite phones and other resources in unimaginable quantities. Even staff from the Afghan embassy in Islamabad received money to gather information for America.

America’s efforts were a blessing for Pakistan, which grasped at the generous provisions of money and resources with outstretched hands. Pakistan provided military bases in Sindh and Baluchistan province to the US and these were soon overflowing with stockpiled arms and munitions for the war against Afghanistan. The Pakistani and American intelligence agencies shared information on various issues, including details about the leaders of the Afghan forces who commanded the Afghan military and air bases.

The ISI, however, had their own secret agenda in order to gain a strategic advantage in Afghanistan. They sought to regroup and organize the jihadi commanders who were living in the frontier regions—as well as throughout Pakistan—who hadn’t been involved in operations inside our country since the end of the wars of the 1980s. In a parallel move, they secretly planted commanders among the military forces of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan who would be used to bring down our government. And finally, Pakistan held its own secret talks with the Northern Alliance to discuss the military and political future of the country. Pakistan saw the Northern Alliance as the future leaders of Afghanistan, who would have not only a considerable stake in any new government, but also continue to be important to the United States, which would have to rely on them for a long while yet.

All the signs were pointing towards war, and the more I learnt the clearer it became to me that a war could not be avoided. Pakistan, once our brother, had turned its back on us and the world was rallying behind President Bush and his call for action. I knew that the calm days would soon come to an end, and that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan would have to face a mighty enemy in a battle for its very survival.

Posted by b on December 30, 2010 at 11:48 UTC | Permalink

Comments

those are the same sentiments I had when I saw the first tower come down. I remember thinking to myself, now a lot of people must die.
and so it was.
if indeed the attack on sept 11 was planned by muslims, they certainly did not either care about the consequences of their actions or else figured that that was the price that needed to be paid to remove the great satan.
looking at it from a non psycopathic POV it would seem that it would have almost had to have been a false flag operation…

Posted by: dan of steele | Dec 30 2010 18:18 utc | 1

Arrgh! Dan don’t start…please! Nah as long as the discussion stays clear of all the nutty theories and sticks to proven and checkable facts rather than suppositions it does a deal of good to consider the implications of the WTC and pentagon actions.
So far as Zaeef goes I think this is salient.
From para 154.21 of “My Life with the Taliban”

” travelled to Kandahar to meet Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Amir ul-Mu’mineen, at his new house. I presented him with all the information I had gathered over the past few weeks about the operation America was planning. Mullah Mohammad Omar was unwilling to believe the details of what I had told him; he reasoned that America couldn’t launch an offensive without a valid reason, and that since he had demanded that Washington conduct an official investigation, and deliver incontrovertible proof incriminating bin Laden and others in the 11 September attacks, the government of Afghanistan would take no further steps regarding the matter till they were presented with such hard evidence.
In Mullah Mohammad Omar’s mind there was less than a 10 per cent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats, and so an attack was unlikely.”

We tend to forget nowadays that despite much whining to the world at large and lying to the ill-informed amerikan citizenry, prior to the events of 911 amerika had complied with international law on most big obvious issues. When they did throw out the rulebook, they did so covertly.
Many people about the planet (clearly this includes some islamic freedom fighters) still thought that amerika would keep sticking to the basic framework of international law because they believed amerika would lose more than it gained by creating a state of anarchy.
This was the major miscalculation on the part of the resistance groups at that time and their acknowledgement of that harsh reality is the primary reason that anti-imperial resistance groups across the planet haven’t mounted a major action military against western interests since the mid noughties.
BushCo reasoned that without a counterbalancing superpower to keep amerikan ‘might is right’ in check they could indeed, ‘do what they wanted’. Of course eventually amerika’s decision to ignore the rules will cost them, quite simply because their ability to ‘keep order according to their needs & desires’ about the globe is really predicated on the status quo of a compliant europe, and on no other blocs forming.
That just cannot happen, the present ‘balance’ has only been maintained because the global financial meltdown which left most humanist political movements in social democracies implicated in the neo-liberal philosophies which had engendered the meltdown, thus far has not been able to be used as a cohesive rally point for opposition to amerikan hegemony. As I have written (and will soon post) on the perennial Iran invasion scare thread, another major amerikan attack on other nations’ sovereignty, would likely provide just the rally point required to gather effective opposition to amerikan tyranny.
But that is getting ahead of myself; even while some (maybe including Zaeef, but we must not forget he writes with the benefit of hindsight) did recognise that a sufficiently large attack on amerikan global capitalism would create the ideal excuse for amerika to ignore all those pesky rules, many did not believe that any major player could afford to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. They hadn’t studied bygone times; there are many historical examples of nations abusing their advantage.
The Mullah Omar view is comparable to an economic rationalist view, whereas the Zaeef opinion is similar to Keynesian economics.
The economic rationalist believe everything that occurs in an economy does so for a logical reason just as Omar believes amerika would not be so stupid as to risk long term peace and stability for a short term gain.
A Keynesian appreciates that human beings are emotional and can therefore unpredictably behave in a way that endangers long term stability, just to grab a short term ‘feeling’, in this case some sort of satisfaction that bastards had been paid back. Of course the Omar’s position is further strengthened by Omar’s belief that amerika’s ruling elite are fully cognisant of the fact that Afghanistan had nothing to do with 911. That if it was aided by OBL, and wasn’t just a bunch of angry Hamburg Uni engineering graduates, then amerika would know that OBL had done so in breach of the agreement about exactly that issue the Talib administration had reached with OBL when the amerikans first began kicking up about him after the Cole action.
Omar and the rationalists clearly didn’t understand the way people can easily be manipulated to bypass their ‘logic circuits’ by appeals directly to human emotions.
If that same belief was held by those who did implement the 11 September actions, they made an error which will cost their brothers and sisters dearly for generations.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 31 2010 0:31 utc | 2

Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death
Part 1 of a captivating 40 minute documentary on the fade of some 4 to 5000 Taliban fighters who surrendered to Northern Alliance troops and US forces in Nov 2001. Merciless! I am sure Joe Queen would have loved to have been there.

Posted by: Juan Moment | Dec 31 2010 1:36 utc | 3

Sure, Omar is an “economic realist.” He’s also a guy who signed off on destroying pre-Islamic indigenous art, and hitting little girls with sticks when they tried to go to school.
I’ve read the first seven chapters of the book. I wonder so far what kind of Afghanistan the author wants to defend? He never had much of a model, caught up always in its internecine tribal violence and chronic bureaucratic malfeasance of the state.

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 31 2010 1:38 utc | 4

and notice to how his brand of utopianism is embedded in the idealism of universal Islam. So far, the model for Afghanistan excludes a comprehension of Afghanistan as a unity of ideas or experience even worth fighting for, so far as I can tell.

Posted by: slothrop | Dec 31 2010 1:42 utc | 5

Well of course, although born into a poor family Zaeef held a privileged position in society, by dint of his education. This made him a conservative who defended the status quo against the land reform that the communists were instituting.
Things change tho I remember reading a couple of weeks ago (age depleted memory being what it is I can’t remember the author let alone find a link) a critique on the ineffectual nature of the anti-talib social engineering in Pashtun Afghanistan and Pakistan, which commented on the Taliban takeover of the swat valley in early 2010. The article pointed out that one of the main reasons that the Taliban carried the people with them when they organised the Swat uprising was that the entire valley had been in the hands of a half dozen greedy and oppressive feudal landlords & the Taliban won the support of the populace by reforming land ownership in the Swat Valley. A 180 degree turnaround by Talibs in the space of 3 decades.
It is important to remember an outsider who supports the Taliban resistance doesn’t neccessarily support the Taliban philosophy. Many are supporting the rights of a community to self-determination, free from foreign interference. However oppressive some elements of the Taliban rule may have been, it was nowhere near as crude, violent and freakily unpredictable as the current rule by foreign armies is.
The first chapters of Zaeef’s book make it plain that their decision to institute a sharia style rule was made somewhat reluctantly, and made solely because the nation had become unsafe for ordinary citizens going about their business.
This is an inevitable result of successfully resisting foreign invaders, at the end of the war the idealists go back to their farms turning swords back into ploughshares, but the greedy & power hungry team up with those who have been corrupted by violence and attempt to take ‘what they are due for freeing everyone’. The Chinese gangster cults grew out of the successful resistance to the Yuan dynasty – the Camorra were alleged to have begun at the creation of Neopolitan Republic, early 19th century, during the chaos of the Napoleonic era.
Cruel warlordism created the demand for Talib take-over, most likely if Afghanistan had been left alone, free from outside interference changes to social conventions would have continued to evolve apace with economic changes. We will never know simply because too many nations who had no business concerning themselves with Afghanistan interferred and pressured the new administration, thereby creating a situation whereby change of any sort was regarded as an anathema because no onne could be sure if a proposed change concealed an agenda of foreign interference.
Some Mediterranean xtian countries had oppressive dowry systems along with ‘honour killings’ to enforce them well into the second half of the 20 century.
As much as the professional god botherers are used to dig up relevant bits of the bible or koran to justify these oppressions, the real cause is the economic structure of old rural societies. Land holdings (either freehold or tenancy) have been split as small as they can economically, so controls are put in place to ensure land is passed on securely and economically. A man who has possession of an economically viable plot is a commodity in demand, able to support the children of himself and his wife and possibly even his wife’s antecedents should they outlive their working life.
Commodities in great demand attract a high price, or dowry. The strict adultery laws are one of the means of enforcing ‘honest brokerage’. The murders and beatings associated with that enforcement petered out in europe as the population moved from a strictly agrarian society to one where other income options were available.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 31 2010 4:10 utc | 6

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