From: Ali Abunimah
To: watc@npr.org, nprnews@npr.org
Subject: Afghanistan Whitewash

March 14, 1999

Dear NPR News,

Jackie Lyden's conversation on Weekend All Things Considered today, with Barnett Rubin of the Council on Foreign relations on the reported peace deal in Afghanistan was a remarkable exercise in historical revisionism.

In their conversation about Afghanistan's recent history, Lyden noted that the Taliban rose to power with the military backing of "Pakistan and Saudi Arabia," whereas she underlined that the United States has been shocked, shocked by Taliban human rights abuses, especially against women. Notably absent from the conversation, however, was any reference to the United States' own well-documented support for the Taliban, diplomatic, and through its funding of bases in northwest Pakistan, military. While the Lyden-Rubin conversation made no mention of US support for the Taliban, they referred several times to US "pressure" on the Taliban to now respect human rights. This is a total white wash which distorts the historical record beyond recognition. Let's now cast our minds back to 1996 in the heady days after the Taliban captured Kabul, when The Independent (London) reported:

"In many ways, the Taliban might be more acceptable to Islamabad and even to Washington than they are to the majority of Afghans. With unseemly haste, the Clinton administration has also given support to the Taliban, even as the corpse of former dictator, Najibullah - supposedly under UN protection - was still dangling from a Kabul lamppost.

Diplomats in Islamabad and New Delhi said that the Americans are not displeased by the Taliban conquest of Kabul, despite the refusal of the militia's ruling six-man council to behave according to the minimum acceptable norms on human rights.

Washington views the Taliban as useful in preventing the spread of Islamic revolution from neighbouring Iran, since Kabul's new lords belong to the Sunni sect and consider the Shia of Iran to be little better than heretics. Washington also looks upon the Taliban as useful allies in the international war against drugs.

The Clinton administration is also counting on the 20,000-strong Taliban militia to also deal harshly with the various Islamic revolutionaries and terrorists, from the Middle East, the Gulf and even Chechnya, who have been using Afghanistan as a sanctuary and arms bazaar." (October 1, 1996)

Soon after the seizure of Kabul, the Washington Thinktankocracy and the oil companies were almost gleeful, predicting that Taliban control would allow a US-backed multi-billion dollar pipeline project to bring oil and gas from Central Asia, to proceed. Business Week reported that "Unocal Vice-President Marty F. Miller recently told the U.S. Senate he's concerned that Iran, which wants to sell gas to Pakistan and has a competing pipeline in the works, will 'promote conflict in order to advance their own economic interests.' Still, senior Unocal execs in Islamabad hope the Taliban's grip on Afghanistan will bring stability. " (October 21, 1996)

In a Time Magazine article, entitled "Good News/Bad News in the Great Game: Afghanistan's new Islamic regime may prove both stabilizing and disruptive,"(October 14, 1996) Christopher Ogden reported:

BEGIN EXCERPT "Afghanistan's neighbors--and the West--are concerned less with the country's social and religious mores than with the strategic question, Will the Taliban be a stabilizing or a disruptive force in an area of expanding Islamic influence that now spreads from Turkey through Central Asia? "The answer is yes; most likely they will be both," says Barnett Rubin, the Afghanistan expert at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations."

And why were they so concerned with "stability"? Ogden goes on to reveal the rub:

"Now, with a single entity controlling most of the country, the hope in Washington is that the devastation of war and the misery of millions of refugees, plus the arms and drug trade that helped foster the fighting and the Balkanization of Afghanistan, will ease dramatically, if not end. Pakistan hopes that stability will allow the opening of safe trade routes into Central Asia, offering an alternative to dealing with Iran. Western oil companies, like California's Unocal, are thrilled with the prospect that work may actually begin on a $10 billion-to-$15 billion project to develop Turkmenistan's natural-gas resources and build pipelines across Afghanistan to Pakistan.

That's the good news, and there is more. 'The Taliban do not have any links to Islam's international radicals. In fact, they hate them,' says Rubin. The Taliban are Sunni Muslims like those in Saudi Arabia, not Persian Shi'ites like the followers of Ayatullah Khomeini, and 'are not into exporting revolution. Nor are they hostile to the U.S.,' says Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-born senior analyst at Rand Corp., a Los Angeles-based research organization. If the regime is not led by international radicals, the U.S. cares little who governs Afghanistan as long as it is governed." END EXCERPT

It wasn't until international concern for the fate of Afghan women embarassed the United States, that statements were made and press releases issued to express the appropriate amount of outrage. Now apparently, history has been totally revised to omit any mention of US government and corporate support for the Taliban, and to recast its role as the champion of Afghan women's rights. This is really inexcusable. You would do well to do a little background reading that might challenge your basic assumptions, and better equip you to address complex issues that are not quite as clear as perhaps we would like them to be. Your listeners would also be more accurately informed.

Sincerely,

Ali Abunimah
ahabunim@midway.uchicago.edu