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Intro­duc­tion: Access­ing infor­ma­tion from the vitally impor­tant recent (in 2009) book Invis­i­ble His­tory: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, this sec­ond inter­view with the book’s authors sets forth covert his­tory of the Cold War and the Soviet Union’s inva­sion of Afghanistan. (Sub­se­quent inter­views with the authors will present more infor­ma­tion from this land­mark book, bring­ing the Afghan tragedy up to date, through the Soviet with­drawal, the birth of the Tal­iban and Al Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks and the ongo­ing U.S. mil­i­tary involve­ment in that nation.) NB: this descrip­tion fea­tures text excerpts that illus­trate the major points the authors make in this inter­view. The text is not tran­scribed from the interview.

The pro­gram begins with a read­ing of one of the many crit­i­cal pas­sages in this vitally impor­tant book. A RAND ana­lyst and wife of Zal­may Khalilzad notes that the absence of mod­er­ate inter­ests in Afghanistan is due to the fact that the U.S. and its allies pre­cip­i­tated the out­right slaugh­ter of mod­er­ates in order to oust the Sovi­ets from Afghanistan.

Next, the authors set forth the role of pri­vate intel­li­gence net­works in build­ing the covert oper­a­tion that lured the Sovi­ets into Afghanistan at the end of 1979. In addi­tion to the Safari Club, Enter­prise and other net­works dis­cussed in past pro­grams, the broad­cast notes vet­eran British intel­li­gence agent Brian Crozier’s devel­op­ment of the “6I.”

Through­out their mag­nif­i­cent book, the authors repeat­edly address the inco­her­ent nature of U.S. pol­icy in the region. In part, that inco­her­ence stems from the fact that indi­vid­ual par­ties and play­ers have been able to suc­cess­fully man­i­fest their agen­das, even when those agen­das con­flict with offi­cial pol­icy. A stun­ning exam­ple of this occurred when a Pen­ta­gon Spe­cial Forces oper­a­tion was mounted in con­junc­tion with Pak­istani spe­cial oper­a­tions troops that were assist­ing Al Qaeda and the Tal­iban. Run­ning counter to admin­is­tra­tion pol­icy, Clin­ton staffers were shocked when the oper­a­tion was disclosed.

High­light­ing the fun­da­men­tal role of the Pak­istani national secu­rity estab­lish­ment in the cre­ation and oper­a­tion of the Tal­iban, the authors then note that the force–engaged in com­bat by U.S. and NATO troops–is an exten­sion of the ISI (Pak­istani intelligence).

Next, the authors relate how the Tal­iban came to be seen by the United States as a use­ful com­mer­cial vehi­cle for the fos­sil fuel indus­try. Seek­ing to reca­pit­u­late the sta­tus quo in Saudi Ara­bia, the U.S.–acting on a pri­vate cor­po­rate agenda–saw the Tal­iban as a vehi­cle to pave the way for a Uno­cal–devel­oped pipeline to cross Afghanistan. The authors note that, even­tu­ally, the U.S. openly pres­sured the late Benazir Bhutto to accede to Unocal’s demands.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Elab­o­ra­tion of pri­vate inter­ests’ “din­ing out” on the United States–using national pub­lic pol­icy to real­ize the goals of pri­vate inter­ests; analy­sis of the role of the per­ma­nent war econ­omy on U.S. for­eign pol­icy; U.S. and British attempts to block Russ­ian access to the fos­sil fuel resources of cen­tral Asia. (Lis­ten­ers inter­ested in the authors’ work are encour­aged to check out FTR #‘s 678,  683, 685.)

1. The pro­gram begins with a read­ing of one of the many crit­i­cal pas­sages in this vitally impor­tant book. A RAND ana­lyst and wife of Zal­may Khalilzad notes that the absence of mod­er­ate inter­ests in Afghanistan is due to the fact that the U.S. and its allies pre­cip­i­tated the out­right slaugh­ter of mod­er­ates in order to oust the Sovi­ets from Afghanistan.

“. . . the real Afghanistan was lack­ing one impor­tant ingre­di­ent. In the words of Cheryl Bernard, a RAND ana­lyst and expert on the Mid­dle East who is mar­ried to Zal­may Khalilzad, ‘In Afghanistan, we made a delib­er­ate choice . . . At first, every­one thought, There’s no way to beat the Sovi­ets. So what we have to do is throw the worst cra­zies against them that we can find, and there was a lot of col­lat­eral dam­age. We knew exactly who these peo­ple were, and what their orga­ni­za­tions were like and we didn’t care,’ she says. ‘Then we allowed them to get rid of, kill all the mod­er­ate lead­ers. The rea­son we don’t have mod­er­ate lead­ers in Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all. They killed the left­ists, the mod­er­ates, the middle-of-the-roaders. They were just elim­i­nated, dur­ing the 1980’s and afterward.’”

Invis­i­ble His­tory: Afghanistan’s Untold Story by Paul Fitzger­ald and Eliz­a­beth Gould; City Lights Books [SC]; Copy­right 2009 by Paul Fitzger­ald and Eliz­a­beth Gould; ISBN-13: 978–0-87286–494-8; p. 285.

2. After review­ing some of the key points high­lighted in the sec­ond part of FTR #678, the authors set forth the role of pri­vate intel­li­gence net­works in build­ing the covert oper­a­tion that lured the Sovi­ets into Afghanistan at the end of 1979.

“. . . Referred to by var­i­ous names, includ­ing the Safari Club, the Cer­cle, the Enter­prise, the Con­sor­tium, and the 6I, the covert effort aimed at desta­bi­liz­ing Afghanistan could be traced back to the ear­li­est meet­ings between Henry Kissinger and his Com­mu­nist Chi­nese coun­ter­parts. Kissinger had used these var­i­ous groups as prox­ies dur­ing the wan­ing stages of the Viet­nam War to accom­plish mis­sions that an increas­ingly beleagured Nixon admin­is­tra­tion could not be seen doing on its own. A kind of foreign-policy ver­sion of his Water­gate plumbers unit, the ‘oth­ers’ as Kissinger referred to them, set the stage for what was to become the largest covert effort in Amer­i­can his­tory. Coo­ley writes, ‘The ‘oth­ers’ in Kissinger’s era of the early 1970’s, a time of rehearsal for the approach­ing adven­ture in Afghanistan, were a set of unlikely col­leagues and allies of cir­cum­stance. These allies, in a rough order of their actual value ren­dered to the U.S. were: France’s late Count Alexan­dre de Marenches, chief of exter­nal French intel­li­gence from 1972 to 1982; Pres­i­dent Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt from 1970 until his mur­der in 1981; the Shah of Iran, until his dethrone­ment in 1979 by Khomeini’s rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, and King Has­san II of Morocco, a dis­creet but valu­able friend of the United States since his enthrone­ment in 1960.’ Together with Saudi intel­li­gence chief Kamal Adham and the young Baathist Iraqi strong­man Sad­dam Hus­sein, the Safari Club proved a highly effec­tive method of desta­bi­liz­ing Afghanistan. Under a com­pa­ra­ble set of allies, in 1977 Brezin­ski took up where the Safari Club left off. . . .”

Ibid.; pp. 153–154.

3. Many of the pri­vate net­works alluded to above have been dis­cussed else­where, such as the Safari Club and the Enter­prise. (The Safari Club is dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 522, 524.) Dis­cussing a net­work put together by vet­eran British intel­li­gence agent Brian Crozier, the authors high­lighted the “6I.”

“. . . A year and a half ear­lier, just as the divided Carter admin­is­tra­tion team first set foot in the White House, an influ­en­tial group of intel­li­gence oper­a­tives gath­ered in Lon­don drawn together by vet­eran British intel­li­gence offi­cer Brian Crozier, the object of the meet­ing was to address the cri­sis caused by Stans­field Turner’s new poli­cies. From Crozier’s per­spec­tive, Turner’s efforts at clean­ing house by fir­ing four hun­dred Soviet experts had left the entire secu­rity appa­ra­tus of the United States in a state of near col­lapse. What was needed–and urgently–was a pri­va­tized inter­na­tional intel­li­gence oper­a­tion that would bypass the offi­cial intel­li­gence ser­vices of the world in order first to pro­vide reli­able intel­li­gence in areas which gov­ern­ments were barred from inves­ti­gat­ing, either through recent leg­is­la­tion (as in the United States) or because polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances made such inquiries dif­fi­cult or poten­tially embar­rass­ing, and to con­duct secret counter-subversion oper­a­tions in any coun­try in which such actions were deemed feasible.

Called ‘The 6I.’ Crozier’s elite group, which included unnamed Amer­i­can con­gres­sional staffers and ‘the remark­able Gen­eral Ver­non (‘Dick’) Wal­ters,’ would pro­vide a unique venue for direct­ing an unseen and for the most part unknown war of sub­ver­sion against per­ceived or imag­ined Soviet threats around the world–while simul­ta­ne­ously prepar­ing the final chap­ter in an inter­nal Com­mu­nist feud that had had spanned four decades.

Crozier writes, ‘Why the ‘6I’? I asked. ‘Because the Fourth [Com­mu­nist] Inter­na­tional split,’ he replied. The rea­son­ing was abstruse. There had been four Inter­na­tion­als, of which the third was Lenin’s Com­intern. The Fourth Inter­na­tional was the Trot­sky­ist one, and when it split, this meant that, on paper, there were five Inter­na­tion­als. In this num­bers game, we would con­sti­tute the Six Inter­na­tional or ’61.’ On this ten­u­ous basis, the orga­ni­za­tion was known among its mem­bers, as ‘The 6i.’ and mem­bers or con­scious con­tacts were known as ‘numerical.’ . . .”

ibid.; p. 156.

4. One of the points made by the authors repeat­edly con­cerns the inco­her­ent nature of U.S. pol­icy in the region. In part, that inco­her­ence stems from the fact that indi­vid­ual par­ties and play­ers have been able to suc­cess­fully man­i­fest their agen­das, even when those agen­das con­flict with offi­cial pol­icy. A stun­ning exam­ple of this occurred when a Pen­ta­gon Spe­cial Forces oper­a­tion was mounted in con­junc­tion with Pak­istani spe­cial oper­a­tions troops that were assist­ing Al Qaeda and the Tal­iban. Run­ning counter to admin­is­tra­tion pol­icy, Clin­ton staffers were shocked when the oper­a­tion was disclosed.

“. . . One exam­ple of how lit­tle over­sight the admin­is­tra­tion asserted over its own military’s agenda emerged in the sum­mer of 1998 dur­ing Oper­a­tion Inspired Ven­ture. A Joint Com­bined Exchange Train­ing oper­a­tion (JCET), Inspired Ven­ture was due to take place with Pak­istan that August despite sanc­tions imposed after the test­ing of five under­ground nuclear devices that May. Autho­rized by Sec­tion 2011 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, the 1991 law specif­i­cally allowed U.S. train­ing oper­a­tions to side­step the U.S. government’s own restric­tions on numer­ous occa­sions, ‘unen­cum­bered by pub­lic debate, effec­tive civil­ian over­sight or the con­sis­tent involve­ment of senior U.S. for­eign affairs offi­cials,’ accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post. Hav­ing side­stepped sanc­tions on Pak­istan since 1993, Oper­a­tion Inspired Ven­ture was to ‘bring together 60 Amer­i­can and 200 Pak­istani spe­cial oper­a­tions forces for small unit exer­cises out­side Peshawar near Afghanistan and for scuba attacks on mock tar­gets in Mangla Lake, n the endge of the con­tested moun­tain region of Kashmir.

Given their sup­port for Osama bin Laden and the numer­ous ter­ror­ist train­ing camps under his super­vi­sion near Peshawar and Kan­da­har, includ­ing the Kash­miri ter­ror­ist group Harakat ul-Ansar, the oper­a­tion to fur­ther train Pak­istani military–in what could only be regarded as up-to date ter­ror­ist techniques–raised some addi­tional unpleas­ant ques­tions about the real nature of the U.S.-Pakistani rela­tion­ship. Put n hold fol­low­ing the Wash­ing­ton Post expose, Clinton’s national secu­rity staff were stunned by the revelation–apparently unaware that such a pro­gram exised. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national secu­rity advi­sor, respon­si­ble for coor­di­nat­ing the president’s diplo­matic and mil­i­tary polic, at first admit­ted that he was ‘not famil­iar with the program’s details,’ then later refused to talk about it. Sec­re­tary of Defense William Cohen finally defended the JCET pro­gram, issu­ing a terse, one-paragraph state­ment say­ing that ‘JCET’s are the back­bone of train­ing for Spe­cial Oper­a­tions forces, prepar­ing them to oper­ate through­out the world . . . they encour­age demo­c­ra­tic val­ues and regional stability.’”

Ibid.; pp. 231–232.

5. High­light­ing the fun­da­men­tal role of the Pak­istani national secu­rity estab­lish­ment in the cre­ation and oper­a­tion of the Tal­iban, the authors note that the force–engaged in com­bat by U.S. and NATO troops–is an exten­sion of the ISI (Pak­istani intelligence).

“. . . Referred to as ‘the Seek­ers,’ the Tal­iban were (Pak­istani) Lt. Gen. Naseerul­lah Babar’s answer to Hekmatyar’s fail­ure to secure Afghanistan for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. Now, as the sev­en­tysome­thing inte­rior min­is­ter to Prime Min­is­ter Benazir Bhutto, Babar’s close­ness to ISI enabled him to exact a grand plan. Inspired by Bhutto’s desire to ‘mar­ket Pak­istan inter­na­tion­ally’ as the gate­way to ancient and lucra­tive trade routes, Babar’s plan was text­book 1840’s British Great Game, bypass­ing Kabul com­pletely while cut­ting a path to Cen­tral Asia through Kan­da­har and Herat. Steve Coll writes, ‘Babar spear­headed the effort. In Octo­ber 1994, he arranged a heav­ily pub­li­cized trial con­voy car­ry­ing Pak­istani tex­tiles that he hoped to drive from Quetta arrived on the Afghan bor­der above Kan­da­har just as Mul­lah Omar and his Tal­iban shura opened their preach­ing cam­paign in the area.’

Draw­ing from the orphans of dis­placed Afghan Pash­tun tribal groups liv­ing in refugee camps in the North-West Fron­tier Province in the sum­mer of 1994, funded by wealthy Saudi busi­ness­men like Osama bin Laden and trained by the Jamaat-i Ulema Islam in reli­gious madras­sas, the Taliban–‘my boys,’ as Babar referred to themn–represented a new and vir­u­lent hybrid of Islamist extremism. . . .”

Ibid.; p. 223.

6. The Tal­iban came to be seen by the United States as a use­ful com­mer­cial vehi­cle for the fos­sil fuel indus­try. Seek­ing to reca­pit­u­late the sta­tus quo in Saudi Ara­bia, the U.S.–acting on a pri­vate cor­po­rate agenda–saw the Tal­iban as a vehi­cle to pave the way for a Unocal-developed pipeline to cross Afghanistan.

“. . . Added to the incen­tive was Pakistan’s1993 agree­ment with Turk­menistan to con­struct a pipeline between the two coun­tries through Afghanistan with the help of the Argen­tin­ian energy com­pany Bridas. That year, California-based oil giant Uno­cal also joined the game, opay­ing ten mil­lion dol­lars to the for­mer Soviet repub­lic for a one-year study that was antic­i­pated to yield a mas­sive $8-billion project. Accord­ing to Benazir Bhutto, the U.S. embassy was quick to jump on her plan for the pipeline just as long as she dropped her Argen­tine part­ner Bridas in favor of Uno­cal. ‘Bridas said ‘We want to get this thing through Afghanistan.’ We said fine. But every­body in my cab­i­net laughed. When I called them over they said, ‘Ha, ha, ha. Look at them think­ing they’re going to build this.’ But any­way, we’ll keep them on board, because fight­ing was still going on in parts of AFghanistan. And then sud­denly one day Uno­cal arrived. And then we were under enor­mous pres­sure by . . . the Amer­i­can embassy in Islam­abad to break off the Bridas con­tract. We didn’t know what was happening.’

The ques­tion was, did Wash­ing­ton? For fifty years, pol­icy cen­ter­ing on South Cen­tral Asia had been dri­ven through Iran and Pak­istan by dual­ist Cold War think­ing and Cold War prac­tices. With­out a new con­cep­tual frame­work that put Afghanistan in the pic­ture, the Clin­ton regime foundered. ‘The USA dealt with issues as they came up, in a hap­haz­ard, piece­meal fash­ion, rather than apply­ing a coher­ent, strate­gic vision to the region,’ wrote Pak­istani author­ity Ahmed Rashid in his 1999 analy­sis Tal­iban: Mil­i­tant Islam, Oil and Fun­da­men­tal­ism in Cen­tral Asia. ‘Between 1994 and 1996 the USA sup­ported the Tal­iban polit­i­cally through its allies Pak­istan and Saudi Ara­bia, essen­tially because Wash­ing­ton viewed the Tal­liban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia and pro-Western. . . Between 1995 and 1997, US sup­port was even more dri­ven because of its back­ing for the Uno­cal project.

In a trib­ute to for­mer CIA direc­tor Bill Casey, some Wash­ing­ton bureau­crats blindly iden­ti­fied with the Tal­iban ‘as mes­sianic do-gooders–like born-again Chris­tians from the Amer­i­can Bible Belt,’ Rashid wrote. ‘There was not a word of crit­i­cism after the Tal­iban cap­tured Herat in 1995 and threw out thou­sands of girls from schools. In fact, the USA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, con­sid­ered Herat’s fall as a help to Uno­cal and tight­en­ing the noose around Iran.

Was the United States actively spon­sor­ing the Tal­iban or just act­ing as cheer­leader? John K. Col­ley wrote in 1999 what most care­ful observers knew at the time to be true: ‘Pakistan’s ISI and Saudi Ara­bia, the for­mer with arms and logis­ti­cal sup­port, the lat­ter with its seeminly inex­haustible sup­ply of money which had flowed dur­ing and since the CIA’s jihad against Rus­sia, sup­ported the Tal­iban advance. Many regional observers believed that the U.S. did too. . . .’”

Ibid.; pp. 223–225.

7. The authors note that, even­tu­ally, the U.S. openly pres­sured the late Benazir Bhutto to accede to Unocal’s demands.

“. . . It is hard to imag­ine how Simons’s ‘his­toric con­text’ could fail to include any men­tion of how Amer­i­can pol­icy itself had laid the ground­work for these most extreme rad­i­cal Islamic move­ments. It is also hard to imag­ine what exactly a sea­soned diplo­mat like Simons was doing by call­ing Bhutto an extortionist–to her face–for resist­ing his pres­sure to drop the Bridas con­tract in favor of Uno­cal. Steve Coll writes, ‘Simons said directly that Bhutto should can­cel her memo of under­stand­ing with Bridas and sign with Uno­cal instead. Bhutto didn’t like his tone. Mem­bers of her gov­ern­ment had been under U.S. pres­sure over the Uno­cal pipeline for months. Simons seemed to be issu­ing a demand, not a request. ‘We could never do that because that’s break­ing the con­tract,’ she told him. ‘But that’s extor­tion!’ Simon shot back forcefully.’

Dur­ing this period, talk sur­faced that the CIA secretly sup­ported Tal­iban aims, with Raphel meet­ing with Tal­iban rep­re­sen­ta­tives in Kan­da­har. The meet­ing pro­duced a rosy assess­ment of Tal­iban inten­tions. Both Raphel and Ambas­sador Simons aggres­sively sup­ported the Uno­cal pipeline, accepted Bhutto’s lies that she was not behind the Taliban’s mil­i­tary cam­paign, and angrily dero­gated Massoud’s plans for a rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­racy in Afghanistan after meet­ing with him in Kabul. So inflex­i­ble was Raphel’s posi­tion that Massoud’s camp came to believe that Raphel and Simons had marked Mas­soud as an enemy of the United States for sign­ing a $1-million agree­ment with Uno­caol rival Bridas.

Coll writes, ‘It was a tawdry sea­son in Amer­i­can diplo­macy. After years of with­drawal and dis­en­gage­ment Amer­i­can pol­icy had been cap­tured by the lan­guage of cor­po­rate deal­mak­ing. In the absence of alter­na­tives, the State Depart­ment has taken up Unocal’s agenda as its own. . . .”

Ibid.; pp. 227–228.