A message to the EDL from their pals in the Infidels :)

hahaha! Led by some little crybaby shortarse called diddyman their chief nonce, who raps as well. Little shit.

EDL Facebook is now officially calling all supporters to assemble in Westminster, outside Parliament (despite Parliament being off for the weekend) - 11am tomorrow, for an official demo start at 1pm (Old Palace Yard, London SW1)

Maybe, if 3,000 radicals are visiting London for a certain book-fair, they could occupy the EDL demo site before the Fascists get there? Either way, anyone who is attending, stay safe, don't let the Fascists photograph you, and make sure you take and post-up plenty of your own close-up photos and videos

 http://www.facebook.com/pages/EDL-English-Defence-League/238696516197018

UAF also say they'll be going ahead with what they're now calling their Victory Rally in Walthamstow, from 11am tomorrow (and before any geniuses start-up about this, that's probably a good thing as some EDL / Casuals may well try and turn-up in Walthamstow anyway, so it's good to have both bases covered)

 http://uaf.org.uk/2012/10/victory-rally-in-walthamstow-saturday-27-october/

Finally, for any journalists etc who are naive or gullible enough to think any of this has anything to do with "free speech", here's a screen-grab of EDL splinter-group NWI openly advocating unprovoked street attacks, in this case including attacks on women and children; since when has "free speech" meant freedom to advocate smashing kids heads in with baseball bats?!

 https://www.facebook.com/NwiFightbackIiii

 https://www.facebook.com/casualsunited1989

they let me out of prison before the schools closed!

What does NWI stand for?

GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 4 ● Number 2 ● Spring 2002—The Impact of 11 September

America and the Taliban: From Co-operation to War

NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the UK-based Institute for Policy Research and Development [www.globalresearch.org].

The current state of affairs in Afghanistan has its roots in a history that can be traced back to at least the end of the nineteenth century. Afghanistan has been the victim of numerous catastrophic interventions by the world’s superpowers, from the British Empire to the Soviet Union and the United States, which have left the country devastated. Even a brief overview of the history of these interventions makes it clear that the superpowers had no intention of improving the affairs of the people of Afghanistan. Rather, their involvement was motivated by their own strategic and economic interests.
Cold War Imperialism

During the late 1970s the Soviet Union installed via a coup a communist puppet regime—the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)—that served Moscow’s interests and trampled upon those of the Afghan people. Although the PDPA did implement a variety of modernisation programmes and some beneficial reforms, there was a general discontent with the regime, which consolidated itself through a variety of brutal policies.

Fearing that it would lose its influence in the region, the Soviet Union sent troops into the Afghan capital, Kabul, in 1979 during a fully fledged invasion of the country. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which presupposes that US support for the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation was triggered by the invasion, the historical record proves the opposite. In reality, the United States had begun sponsoring rebel movements within Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion. This has been recorded in the memoirs of former Central Intelligence Agency director Richard Helms, and corroborated by the testimony of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser under the Carter administration. The result was a brutal civil war in Afghanistan, effectively engineered by both superpowers to secure their hegemony. There was no regard for either human rights or democracy, despite the jingoistic lip-service paid to these ideals by top US and Soviet officials.

The United States supported the Afghan rebels throughout the 1980s, until Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan. This support came in overt forms, such as allowing and encouraging client states Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to sell arms to the Afghan mujahideen, and covertly through direct CIA involvement in the shape of funding and training. Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid records that

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence agency], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs [Islamic seminaries]. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.1

The ISI served as the intermediary through which the CIA funnelled arms (65,000 tons annually by 1987), planning and training to the Afghan rebels. US support of the mujahideen involved inculcating extremist religious “war values”, garbed in Islamic jargon, a particularly fateful and damaging step.
The Gateway to Central Asia

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the country fell into a chaotic civil war between the various rebel factions previously supported by the United States. Although the Cold War ended not long afterwards with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan remained a region of strategic interest as a gateway to Central Asia and its large oil and gas deposits.

Patrick Clawson of the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., describes the Caspian Sea as a crucial oil region, the target of ongoing conflicting and competing interests of surrounding states, as well as of the Western powers.2 The economic and geostrategic issues relate particularly to potential pipeline routes and attempts by the United States to monopolise them by creating an appropriate international oil regime in the region. The establishment of such a regime by nature requires a combination of economic, political and military arrangements to support and protect oil production and transportation to markets. US policies in Central Asia have thus consisted of a three-pronged programme of economic, political and military penetration, together with persistent efforts to prevent the intrusion of other powers, namely Russia, China and Europe, in an attempt to control access to regional resources. As an energy expert at the National Security Council noted in 1997:

US policy was to promote the rapid development of Caspian energy … We did so specifically to promote the independence of these oil-rich countries, to in essence break Russia’s monopoly control over the transportation of oil from that region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversification of supply.3

Former US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson later observed in 1998 in relation to the Central Asian republics: “We would like these newly independent countries reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”4

In other words, the Great Game of the nineteenth century, which consisted of competition among the major powers for control of Central Eurasia, has continued into the twenty-first century, with the United States leading the way. Afghanistan, as the principal opening into Central Asia, constitutes the essential vehicle for control of the region. And Central Asia is in turn an essential instrument for global control. These considerations, along with extensive strategic planning for future US intervention in the region, were discussed in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) study authored by Brzezinski. The CFR study goes into great detail about US interests in “Eurasia” and the need for a “sustained and directed” US involvement in the Central Asian region to secure these interests. “Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power,” Brzezinski observes.5 Eurasia consists of all the territory east of Germany and Poland, all the way through Russia and China to the Pacific Ocean, including the Middle East and most of the Indian subcontinent. Brzezinski argues that the key to dominating Eurasia lies in establishing influence over the republics of Central Asia.

He identifies Russia and China, both of which border Central Asia, as the two main powers which might threaten US interests in the region. The United States must, he claims, manage and manipulate the lesser surrounding powers, such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan, as buffers against Russian and Chinese moves to control the oil, gas and minerals of the Central Asian republics, namely Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Any nation becoming predominant in Central Asia would pose a direct threat to US control of oil resources there and in the Persian Gulf. “It follows that America’s primary interest is to help ensure that no single power comes to control this geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered financial and economic access to it.”6 The aim is to ensure US dominance over Eurasia, via the consolidation of US hegemony in the Central Asian republics.

US policy plans in Central Asia are thus rooted in a broad hegemonic context. Given Afghanistan’s importance as the door to Central Asia, it is clear that the CFR’s strategic planning for the expansion and consolidation of US global hegemony through control of Eurasia—in turn secured via control of Central Asia—would of necessity be initiated by establishing US hegemony in Afghanistan.
Backing the Taliban

By 1996, one of Afghanistan’s warring factions, the Taliban, gained control over most of the country. The Taliban, like their Northern Alliance predecessors, were no democrats, no agrarian reformers. Their cruel oppression of women, their ethnic cleansing of minorities such as the Hazaras of the north, their indiscriminate torture of prisoners, and many other atrocities, were well documented by numerous human rights groups. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, for example, reported and condemned the systematic human rights abuses by the Taliban and all factions within Afghanistan.

But such issues were irrelevant in the eyes of the US government, whose principal concern in Afghanistan was that a “stable” regime emerge, that is, a regime serving US strategic and economic interests, even if that were at the expense of the Afghan population. Crucial in this respect was the existence of abundant Central Asian oil and gas resources, having recently been discovered in the Caspian Sea. Afghanistan is considered the prime transhipment route for pipelines to these energy deposits. When the Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996, it was largely with the approval of the United States and its allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. After a visit to Islamabad and Kandahar by the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia funded and equipped the Taliban march on Kabul.7 US State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies explained that the United States found “nothing objectionable” in the takeover. US support of the Taliban did not end there, but in fact continued throughout most of the 1990s.

“The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis,” commented one US diplomat in 1997. “There will be Aramco [a consortium of oil companies controlling Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”8 In December 1997, Taliban representatives were invited as guests to the Texas headquarters of the Unocal oil company to negotiate their support for a pipeline project, and spent several days there. At the time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men in the technical skills required for pipeline construction, with US government approval. The company had commissioned the University of Nebraska to carry out the task, enrolling 140 Afghans in November.9

According to US Representative Dana Rohrabacher, this was merely the beginning of an ongoing US–Taliban alliance. Rohrabacher has been involved with Afghanistan since the early 1980s when he worked in the White House as special assistant to Ronald Reagan; he is now a senior member of the House International Relations Committee. He has thus been involved in US policy towards Afghanistan for some twenty years. In 1988, as a member of the US Congress, he travelled to Afghanistan with mujahideen fighters and participated in the battle of Jalalabad against the Soviets. In testimony before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee in April 1999, he accused the Clinton administration of conducting a “covert policy” of supporting the Taliban “on the assumption that the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan”. He deplored this US support for what he termed “the most anti-Western, anti-female, anti-human rights regime in the world”.10

Rohrabacher’s reading of US policy in Afghanistan corroborated earlier testimony by John Maresca, vice-president of international relations for Unocal, in congressional hearings in February 1998. Maresca made it abundantly clear that the planned pipeline project could only be implemented after the end of the civil war in Afghanistan and the establishment of a single national government for the country. A unified, stable and friendly regime in Afghanistan was needed to allow the pipelines to be built and ensure their security. At the time, the Taliban were seen to be capable of providing such a regime by defeating opposition forces and achieving control of the country.

In other words, there can be no claim that the covert US support of the Taliban was motivated by a concern for democracy or human rights. Indeed, when strategic and economic interests were weighed against ideals such as human rights and freedom, the former took precedence.
End of the Relationship

Thus, US opposition to the Taliban, when it came, was not a result of humanitarian concerns, but of the Taliban’s inability to serve US regional interests. A number of factors were critical in the growing US recognition that the Taliban could not provide the security required for the pipelines. The Unocal project was based on the premise that the Taliban would defeat opposition factions and conquer Afghanistan. It soon became clear, however, that this premise was fundamentally flawed. With opposition factions continually being funded and armed by outside powers, it was certain that despite the Taliban’s rise to power, Northern Alliance forces would continue to pose a threat to the security of the pipeline project.

These concerns were exacerbated by the Taliban’s increasingly anti-American stance. Prior to the arrival in Afghanistan of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban leadership had not been particularly antagonistic to the United States, only demanding recognition for their government. Following bin Laden’s indictment in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, however, the Taliban’s hostility towards the United States escalated. Simultaneously, US policy towards the Taliban became extremely cautious.

The eventual anti-Taliban stance of the US government thus grew out of a general realisation that the Taliban regime would be incapable of serving as a vehicle of US entry into Central Asia. Extensive US government and corporate planning for pipelines to the vast oil and gas reserves of the Caspian basin was put on hold because of the lack of security in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. By the end of 2000, the United States was already openly planning an invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime. Reports to this effect were published in the Washington Post and Toronto Sun in December of that year. The escalation of these war plans through 2001, their extensive detail, the open discussion of them with Russian, Indian and Pakistani government officials, and their actual implementation in preliminary military operations in support of the Northern Alliance, were further reported in Jane’s Intelligence Review in March 2001.

While finalising its war plans to invade Afghanistan, the administration of George W. Bush began a series of negotiations with the Taliban in what appears to have been a last-ditch attempt to save its relationship with the regime. US officials called for a government of national unity in which all factions, including the Taliban, would participate. In an interview on French television in early November 2001, one of those present at these meetings, Niaz Naik, a former foreign minister of Pakistan, referred to negotiations in July 2001 that focused “on the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid. And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come”. The Taliban, however, were unwilling to compromise their own power. In one meeting, US representatives reportedly told Taliban officials, “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”11 In a BBC interview in September 2001, Naik said he had been told privately by US officials in July that year that the Bush administration envisaged that its military plans would be implemented in mid-October 2001. Extensive evidence is thus on record indicating that the Bush administration had intended to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban regime quite independently of the events of 11 September. The war on Afghanistan was thus not primarily a response to 11 September. On the contrary, 11 September provided a convenient trigger for war plans that were already in place.
Pipeline Politics

US policy in the aftermath of 11 September confirms this assessment. As soon as the bombing campaign commenced, the Bush administration began pursuing the principal interests that had motivated the war plans against Afghanistan in the first place. Pakistan’s Frontier Post reported that

The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain paid a courtesy call on the Federal Minister for Petroleum and Natural resources, Usman Aminuddin, … and discussed with him matters pertaining to Pak–U.S. cooperation in the oil and gas sector ... Usman Aminuddin also briefed the Ambassador on the proposed Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan gas pipeline project and said that this project opens up new avenues of multi-dimensional regional cooperation particularly in view of the recent geo-political developments in the region.12

With the removal of the Taliban from power, the United States was also ready to establish the unified, friendly government required to ensure the domestic stability and security essential to allow pipelines to be constructed. The new federal administration of Northern Alliance warlords signalled a return to the barbarism and brutality that preceded Taliban rule—although this time with factional war and rivalry limited under the terms of the US/UN-brokered agreements. Continuing internal repression and brutal treatment of women, children and men, however, do not appear to have been a principal US concern. What was of concern was establishing a federal dictatorship of warlords who will maintain control over their respective Afghan territories and minimise conflict between one another, while remaining free to govern the civilians in their areas as they please.

Afghanistan has now reverted to the pre-Taliban era of warlordism, unrestricted banditry, looting of food supplies designated for civilians, widespread smuggling and extensive drug production. The international community was warned of this consequence. Tahmeena Faryal, spokesperson for the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (Rawa), the oldest women’s humanitarian and political organisation in the country, harshly criticised the sheen of legitimacy granted to the Northern Alliance factions that

have the blood of our beloved people on their hands, as of course do the Taliban … From 1992 to 1996 in particular, these forces waged a brutal war against women, using rape, torture, abduction and forced marriage as their weapons … Any initiative to establish a broad-based government must exclude all Taliban and other criminal Jehadi factions, unless and until a specific faction or person has been absolved of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Otherwise, the people will again be plunged into the living hell that engulfed our country from 1992 to 1996—under elements now involved in the Northern Alliance.13

These factors, however, were simply not a relevant consideration in the formulation of US policy. What mattered was the establishment of a unified federation that could provide a suitable degree of stability, regardless of the involvement in war crimes and human rights abuses of the federation’s various constituent factions. The policy may not be viable in the long run, but the Bush administration is clearly counting on it being so.

The energy concerns central to US policy on Afghanistan were highlighted on 28 November 2001 when the White House released a statement by President Bush on the opening of the first new pipeline by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium: “The CPC project … advances my Administration’s National Energy Policy by developing a network of multiple Caspian pipelines that also includes the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan, Baku–Supsa, and Baku–Novorossiysk oil pipelines and the Baku–Tbilisi–Erzurum gas pipeline.” The pipeline is a joint venture of Russia, Kazakhstan, Oman, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and several other oil companies, connecting the Tengiz oilfield in northwestern Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. American companies put up $1 billion of the $2.65 billion construction cost. As the New York Times observed,

There is no oil in Afghanistan, but there are oil politics, and Washington is subtly tending to them, using the promise of energy investments in Central Asia to nurture a budding set of political alliances in the region with Russia, Kazakhstan and, to some extent, Uzbekistan … Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has lauded the region as a stable oil supplier, in a tacit comparison with the Persian Gulf states that have been viewed lately as less cooperative. The State Department is exploring the potential for post-Taliban energy projects in the region, which has more than 6 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and almost 40 percent of its gas reserves.14

By New Year’s Eve, nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul, President Bush appointed a former Unocal aide, Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. (Khalilzad had previously participated in talks between Unocal and Taliban officials in 1997 aimed at implementing a 1995 agreement to build the pipeline across western Afghanistan.) It also turns out that Karzai, endorsed in mid-June 2002 as president of Afghanistan by a “Loya Jirga”, a traditional grand council drawn from Afghanis inside and outside the country, is a former paid consultant for Unocal. These nominations further illustrate the fundamental economic and financial interests underlying the US military intervention in Afghanistan.

The intervention also allowed the United States to counter its Russian rival and establish dominance over the Central Asian republics that border Russia:

The ex-Soviet republics used the crisis to assert their independence from Moscow, quickly agreeing to open air corridors and possibly airports to the United States, something that was unthinkable only two weeks ago. Once the region’s unquestioned master, Moscow found it had little choice but to agree with the Central Asian states and let U.S. forces into the region for the first time.15

Thus, new economic programmes have been accompanied by the establishment of a significant US military presence in the region, even as the war on Afghanistan draws to a close. There can be little doubt that this presence is intended to be permanent.

The consolidation of US military–economic power in Central Asia is also likely to be accompanied by the legitimisation of regional human rights abuses. On 6 January 2002, the Washington Post noted that the Bush administration plans to abrogate a Cold War–era bill placing human rights conditions on US trade relations with a number of former Soviet republics. The planned move has already been condemned by regional analysts, who say it signifies US willingness to condone human rights violations by Central Asian republics in return for their loyalty.

In the aftermath of 11 September, regional human rights abuses, dictatorship and general repression are being tolerated by the US-led international community in order to pave the way for the expansion of US hegemony. The 11 September terrorist attacks against the United States have provided a pretext for the policies behind this expansion. The “war on terrorism” is thus certainly far more complex in its causes and goals than is conventionally believed. Indeed, the available evidence indicates that it is very much a war for the narrow interests of a US elite.


Endnotes

1. Ahmed Rashid, “The Taliban: Exporting Extremism”, Foreign Affairs 78, no 6 (November/December 1999), p. 31.

2. See Patrick Clawson, foreword to Oil and Geopolitics in the Caspian Sea Region, ed. Michael P. Croissant and Bulent Aras (London: Praeger, 1999).

3. Quoted in Marjorie Cohn, “The Deadly Pipeline War: US Afghan Policy Driven by Oil Interests”, Jurist, 7 December 2001 [ http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forum/forumnew41.php].

4. Quoted in George Monbiot, “A Discreet Deal in the Pipeline”, Guardian (London), 15 February 2001.

5. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. xiii.

6. Ibid., p. 148.

7. See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 201.

8. Ibid., p. 179.

9. “Taleban in Texas for Talks on Gas Pipeline”, BBC News, 4 December 1997.

10. Statement of Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, “US Policy toward Afghanistan”, Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia, 14 April 1999.

11. Quoted in Julio Godoy, “US Taliban Policy Influenced by Oil”, Inter Press Service, 16 November 2001.

12. Frontier Post (Pakistan), 10 October 2001.

13. “Afghan Women Warn against the Northern Alliance”, Institute for Public Accuracy news release, 15 November 2001 [ http://accuracy.org/press_releases/PR111501.htm].

14. “As the War Shifts Alliances, Oil Deals Follow”, New York Times, 15 December 2001.

15. “Central Asia’s Great Game Turned on Its Head”, Reuters News Service, 25 September 2001.

As predicted EDL say some of their thugs are in Walthamstow already (on Friday night), "at least 70 lads going into stow pretending to be uaf and they're gonna let them have it"... "some staying in hotels tonight" (Friday) "so will be there in the morning, unnoticed by OB" (OB meaning Old Bill meaning un-noticed by police)... "tooled up to the tits"... "hardcore free roaming patriots"

EDL wake-up call