Subject: Afghanistan: Smoking Guns
Reply-to: map@economicdemocracy.org
--text follows this line--
Hank, this is a combination of excerpts from Pilger, from
Milner, key quotes from the BBC unknown to most, and
my own commentary, combined into one whole analysis. -Harel

On "The guilty secret", John Pilger reports (start quote:)

The guilty secret is that the attack on Afghanistan was
unnecessary. The "smoking gun" of this entire episode is evidence of
the British Government's lies about the basis for the war. According
to Tony Blair, it was impossible to secure Osama bin Laden's
extradition from Afghanistan by means other than bombing. Yet in late
September and early October, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamic parties
negotiated bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the
September 11 attacks. The deal was that he would be held under house
arrest in Peshawar. According to reports in Pakistan (and the Daily
Telegraph), this had both bin Laden's approval and that of Mullah
Omah, the Taliban leader.

The offer was that he would face an international tribunal, which
would decide whether to try him or hand him over to America. Either
way, he would have been out of Afghanistan, and a tentative justice
would be seen to be in progress. It was vetoed by Pakistan's president
Musharraf who said he "could not guarantee bin Laden's safety".
[The same pro war crowd that wants Bin Laden "Dead or Alive" ?
With the "or alive" crossed off, was worried about his safety?
Want to buy a bridge, real cheap? -HB]

But who really killed the deal?

The US Ambassador to Pakistan was notified in advance of the proposal
and the mission to put it to the Taliban. Later, a US official said
that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature
collapse of the international effort if by some luck chance Mr bin
Laden was captured". And yet the US and British governments insisted
there was no alternative to bombing Afghanistan because the Taliban
had "refused" to hand over Osama bin Laden. What the Afghani people
got instead was "American justice" - imposed by a president who, as
well as denouncing international agreements on nuclear weapons,
biological weapons, torture, and global warming, has refused to sign
up for an international court to try war criminals: the one place
where bin Laden might be put on trial.

(end of John Pilger quote)

It has already been pointed out that the Bush administration
couldn't write all those anti-civil-rights laws overnight...so how did
they come up with them so quickly after 9/11? Answer: they were already
planned, sitting and waiting for an opportunity, that's how they got
several hundred pages of anti liberty laws coming out in such a
flash. The same is true for foreign policy: things they had already
wanted to  do, 9/11 made is possible for them to do.

So not this "Smoking gun". We already knew about Bush's decision not
to put Bin Laden on trial; of the Taliban's offer to hand Bin Laden
over to a neutral third party, to be tried under regular law (not
under Islamic Law as was the Taliban's first offer), but now we have
this additional information on what appears to have been yet another,
parallel opportunity, turned down.

Now add to this, the BBC report that back in July (many weeks,
indeed, two months  before Sept 11) Bush already was planning
to bomb Afghanistan:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1550000/1550366.stm

"US 'planned attack on Taleban'

"A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning
military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before
last week's attacks.  Niaz Naik, a FORMER PAKISTANI FOREIGN SECRETARY,
[emph added] was told by senior American officials in mid-July that
military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of
October.  Mr Naik said US officials told him of the plan at a
UN-sponsored international contact group on Afghanistan which took
place in Berlin.  Mr Naik told the BBC that at the meeting the US
representatives told him that unless Bin Laden was handed over swiftly
America would take military action to kill or capture both Bin Laden
and the Taleban leader, Mullah Omar" yet we know that when the offer
was made to turn over Bin Laden, it (or apparently, two offers) were
turned down, so that does not make sense.

What does make sense is that there was a plan to attack
Afghanistan to replace one set of thugs with a more obedient
reliable set of thugs [those equally known for rape, torture,
and executions as the Taliban, namely the Northern Alliance]

...Similarly the thugs, who who cut off people's hands and heads, and
where (unlike even IRAN) women are not allowed to drive...when they 
are obedient thugs, on oil interests, so they are called "moderate"
even though it is the most extremist Islamist state on the planet
after the Taliban. Yes, it is called Saudi Arabia..

What does make sense is that as both Pilger says and Dick Cheney
himself admits, oil fro the Caspian is key. First Pilger:

"When Tony Blair said this war was not an attack on Islam as such, he
was correct. Its aim, in the short term, was to satisfy a domestic
audience then to accelerate American influence in a vital region where
there has been a power vacuum since the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the emergence of China, whose oil needs are expected eventually to
surpass even those of the US. That is why control of Central Asia and
the Caspian basin oilfields is important as exploration gets under
way."

In "The Truths they never tell us" Pilger adds, quoting Cheney from
1998: "For Washington, the real problem with the Taliban was not human
rights; these were irrelevant. The Taliban regime simply did not have
total control of Afghanistan: a fact that deterred investors from
financing oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea, whose strategic
position in relation to Russia and China and whose largely untapped
fossil fuels are of crucial interest to the Americans. In 1998, Dick
Cheney told oil industry executives: 'I cannot think of a time when we
have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically
significant as the Caspian.'"

In "A Hollow Victory" Seumas Milne (www.zmag.org/milne.htm) writes,

"The war against the Taliban has so dominated the global response to
the atrocities of September 11, it is hard to remember that the
Kandahar clerics probably had nothing directly to do with them [or
perhaps no more than Saudi Arabia which is not being bombed (see
above) despite support originating there for Al Qaeda -HB]. And
even if Bin Laden and his Afghan-based acolytes knew of the attacks in
advance, it is highly unlikely that they were involved in the detailed
planning, not least because of the intense surveillance he was under
and the logistical problems of communication from one of the world's
most technologically backward countries [and with the Taliban
apparently having taken away Bin Laden's fax, internet, and satellite
phones, until the US attack in which Bin Laden felt a need counter
the extremely serious charges against him and the Taliban]

" Despite the best endeavors of US investigators to make the link,
there seems to be no reliable evidence that the hijackers even trained
in Afghanistan - though several did in the US. Western governments
exaggerate the importance of state sponsorship to terror campaigns.

"The case against the Afghan war was never that the Taliban would
turn out to be a latterday Vietcong - critics predicted they would
be defeated - but primarily that it would lead to large-scale
civilian casualties, fail to stamp out anti-western terrorism,
create a political backlash throughout the Muslim world and
actually increase the likelihood of further attacks. In the absence
of any serious effort to address the grievances underlying anti-US
hatred, that argument has been strengthened. It was clear long ago,
certainly since the demise of the Soviet Union, that no state could
defeat the US in a conventional military confrontation and that
only the war of the flea - guerrilla warfare or terrorism - could
be effective. The Afghan debacle has hammered that lesson
home."