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For The Record  

FTR #680 Interview [#2] with Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald

MP3 Side 1 | Side 2

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 678683, 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.

Discussion

2 comments for “FTR #680 Interview [#2] with Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald”

  1. [...] #678 FTR #680 FTR #683 FTR [...]

    Posted by Afghanistan: Bzrezinski’s Grand Chessboard game and the continuation of the Anglo-Afghan War | lys-dor.com | April 15, 2011, 7:15 am
  2. Decem­ber 15, 2012
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/world/asia/as-gold-is-spirited-out-of-afghanistan-officials-wonder-why.html?pagewanted=print

    An Afghan Mys­tery: Why Are Large Ship­ments of Gold Leav­ing the Coun­try?

    By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

    KABUL, Afghanistan — Packed into hand lug­gage and tucked into jack­et pock­ets, rough­ly hewed bars of gold are being flown out of Kab­ul with increas­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty, con­found­ing Afghan and Amer­i­can offi­cials who fear mon­ey laun­der­ers have found a new way to spir­it funds from the coun­try.

    Most of the gold is being car­ried on com­mer­cial flights des­tined for Dubai, accord­ing to air­port secu­ri­ty reports and offi­cials. The amounts car­ried by sin­gle couri­ers are often heavy enough that pas­sen­gers fly­ing from Kab­ul to the Per­sian Gulf emi­rate would be well advised to heed warn­ings about the dan­ger of bags falling from over­head com­part­ments. One couri­er, for instance, car­ried near­ly 60 pounds of gold bars, each about the size of an iPhone, aboard an ear­ly morn­ing flight in mid-Octo­ber, accord­ing to an air­port secu­ri­ty report. The load was worth more than $1.5 mil­lion.

    The gold is ful­ly declared and legal to fly. Some, if not most, is legit­i­mate­ly being sent by gold deal­ers seek­ing to have old and dam­aged jew­el­ry refash­ioned into new pieces by skilled crafts­men in the Per­sian Gulf, said Afghan offi­cials and gold deal­ers.

    But gold deal­ers in Kab­ul and cur­rent and for­mer Kab­ul air­port offi­cials say there has been a surge in ship­ments since ear­ly sum­mer. The talk of a grow­ing exo­dus of gold from Afghanistan has been spread­ing among the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty here, and in recent weeks has caught the atten­tion of Afghan and Amer­i­can offi­cials. The offi­cials are now puz­zling over the ori­gin of the gold — very lit­tle is mined in Afghanistan, although larg­er mines are planned — and why so much appears to be head­ing for Dubai.

    “We are inves­ti­gat­ing it, and if we find this is a way of laun­der­ing mon­ey, we will inter­vene,” said Noorul­lah Delawari, the gov­er­nor of Afghanistan’s cen­tral bank. Yet he acknowl­edged that there were more ques­tions than answers at this point. “I don’t know where so much gold would come from, unless you can tell me some­thing about it,” he said in an inter­view. Or, as a Euro­pean offi­cial who tracks the Afghan econ­o­my put it, “new mys­ter­ies abound” as the war appears to be draw­ing to a close.

    Fig­ur­ing out what pre­cise­ly is hap­pen­ing in the Afghan econ­o­my remains as con­found­ing as ever. Near­ly 90 per­cent of the finan­cial activ­i­ty takes place out­side for­mal banks. Writ­ten con­tracts are the excep­tion, receipts are rare and sta­tis­tics are often unre­li­able. Mon­ey laun­der­ing is com­mon­place, say West­ern and Afghan offi­cials.

    As a result, with the gold, “right now you’re stuck in that sit­u­a­tion we usu­al­ly are: is there some­thing bad going on here or is this just the Afghan way of com­merce?” said a senior Amer­i­can offi­cial who tracks illic­it finan­cial net­works.

    There is rea­son to be sus­pi­cious: the gold ship­ments track with the far larg­er prob­lem of cash smug­gling. For years, flights have left Kab­ul almost every day car­ry­ing thick wads of bank notes — dol­lars, euros, Nor­we­gian kro­ner, Sau­di Ara­bi­an riyals and oth­er cur­ren­cies — stuffed into suit­cas­es, packed into box­es and shrink-wrapped onto pal­lets. At one point, cash was even being hid­den in food trays aboard now-defunct Pamir Air­ways flights to Dubai.

    Last year alone, Afghanistan’s cen­tral bank says, rough­ly $4.5 bil­lion in cash was spir­it­ed out through the air­port. Efforts to stanch the flow have had lim­it­ed impact, and con­cerns about mon­ey laun­der­ing per­sist, accord­ing to a report released last week by the Unit­ed States Spe­cial Inspec­tor Gen­er­al for Afghanistan Recon­struc­tion.

    The unim­ped­ed “bulk cash flows raise the risk of mon­ey laun­der­ing and bulk cash smug­gling — tools often used to finance ter­ror­ist, nar­cotics and oth­er illic­it oper­a­tions,” the report said. The cash, and now the gold, is most often tak­en to Dubai, where offi­cials are known for ask­ing few ques­tions. Many wealthy Afghans park their mon­ey and fam­i­lies in the emi­rate, and gold deal­ers say more mid­dle-class Afghans are send­ing mon­ey and gold — seen as a safe­guard against eco­nom­ic ruin — to Dubai as talk of a post­war eco­nom­ic col­lapse grows loud­er.

    But giv­en Dubai’s rep­u­ta­tion as a haven for laun­dered mon­ey, an Afghan offi­cial said that the “obvi­ous sus­pi­cion” is that at least some of the appar­ent growth in gold ship­ments to Dubai is tied to the myr­i­ad illic­it activ­i­ties — opi­um smug­gling, cor­rup­tion, Tal­iban tax­a­tion schemes — that have come to define Afghanistan’s econ­o­my.

    There are also indi­ca­tions that Iran could be dip­ping into the Afghan gold trade. It is already buy­ing up dol­lars and euros here to cir­cum­vent Amer­i­can and Euro­pean sanc­tions, and it may be using gold for the same pur­pose.

    Yahya, a deal­er in Kab­ul, said oth­er gold traders were help­ing Iran buy the pre­cious met­al here. Pay­ment was being made in oil or with Iran­ian rials, which read­i­ly cir­cu­late in west­ern Afghanistan. The Afghan deal­ers are then tak­ing it to Dubai, where the gold is sold for dol­lars. The mon­ey is then moved to Chi­na, where it was used to buy need­ed goods or sim­ply fun­neled back to Iran, said Yahya, who like many Afghans uses a sin­gle name.

    He declined to name those involved in aid­ing Iran. But West­ern offi­cials said his descrip­tion of how the process worked tracked with their knowl­edge of mon­ey laun­der­ing net­works that oper­ate in Afghanistan and the sur­round­ing region.

    Before offi­cials can say whether the gold ship­ments are part of an illic­it finan­cial scheme, though, they first have to fig­ure out how much gold is going out — or, for that mat­ter, com­ing in.

    It is a task eas­i­er said than done. The Finance Min­istry, which is sup­posed to col­lect tax­es on each ship­ment, did not have fig­ures, said Wahidul­lah Tawhi­di, a spokesman for the min­istry. He sug­gest­ed that the Com­merce Min­istry would know. The Com­merce Min­istry did not, and offi­cials there said it would be best to con­tact air­port cus­toms offi­cials.

    At the air­port, a reluc­tant cus­toms offi­cial, who spoke only on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty, brushed aside con­cerns that there had been an uptick in gold ship­ments out of Afghanistan. He then end­ed the con­ver­sa­tion with the cryp­tic promise to one day share “the real sto­ry of what is hap­pen­ing to the gold.”

    M.Y. Ras­suli, the pres­i­dent of the air­port, said ship­ments had begun increas­ing over the sum­mer. He said that he could not offer specifics because he deals with oper­a­tions, not cus­toms. But he expressed frus­tra­tion about the prob­lem. “If it’s 5 kilo­grams or 500 kilo­grams, that’s not a nor­mal thing to trans­fer,” he said in an inter­view. “This is why Afghanistan is No. 1 in cor­rup­tion.”

    With­out knowl­edge of how much gold is leav­ing, it is impos­si­ble to cal­cu­late the val­ue of the trade. But air­port secu­ri­ty forms that cov­er the last two weeks of Octo­ber indi­cate about 560 pounds, worth about $14 mil­lion, were car­ried by hand out of Afghanistan dur­ing that peri­od.

    Posted by R. Wilson | December 16, 2012, 6:52 pm

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