Interviews with Fisk and Brzezinski

*Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski
*Interview of Robert Fisk
http://www.ultimateflags.com/

Peace flags (just the sign, US Flag with Peace instead of stars), UN Flags, Earth from Space flags!

Buy two get one free.
http://www.peaceflags.org

Deb

*Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski
Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998


--- Original Message ---
From: BBlum6 [at] aol.com
To: <BBlum6 [at] aol.com
Cc:
Sent: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 13:39:10 EDT
Subject: How Carter and Brzezinski helped start the Afghan mess

In light of what's happened, I think it's important to give the following
very wide currency. So start forwarding:

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski
Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs
["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the
Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this
period you were the national security adviser to President Carter.
You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to
the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet
army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded
until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that
President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents
of The pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to
the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was
going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But
perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to
provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we
knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they
intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in
Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of
truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the
effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to
regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote
to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its
Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war
unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the
demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [intégrisme],
having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the
collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation
of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated:
fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to
Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a
rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading
religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there
in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan
militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more
than what unites the Christian countries.

* There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the perhaps sole
exception of the Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States
is shorter than the French version, and the Brzezinski interview was not
included in the shorter version.

The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum Author, "Killing
Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" and "Rogue
State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" Portions of the books can be
read at: http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm (with a link to
Killing Hope)

If anyone whose French is better than mine can translate the bracketed
word, "intégrisme", I'd appreciate hearing from them <bblum6 [at] aol.com

=======
So we basically hired the Afghan people, the rebels, the Fundamentalist,
first to provoke and then to fight, suffer and die for our Cold War
objectives, (a well known and constant strategy the US has used through the
decades) then we abandoned them to the resulting massive destruction of
their country.



John Johnson
Change-Links Progressive Newspaper
change [at] pacbell.net or change-links [at] change-links.org
http://www.change-links.org
Subscribe to our list server. Email change-links-subscribe [at] egroups.com
(818) 982-1412
Cell (818) 681-7448.

> ROBERT FISK INTERVIEW
> ON OSAMA BIN LADEN AND
> THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS
>
> Host: Zoltan Grossman
> (608) 246-2256 mtn [at] igc.org
> "A Public Affair," WORT-FM Community Radio,
> Madison, Wisconsin, USA
> Interview date: September 21, 2001
> Transcribed by Rob Maberry.
>
> MP3 of this Fisk interview at
> http://madison.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=1127&group=webcast
> Robert Fisk articles at
> http://www.independent.co.uk
>
> Mr. Grossman: Welcome to A Public Affair on WORT. I'm
> your host, Zoltan Grossman. Today we have on the line from
> Dublin, Ireland, Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for
> The Independent Newspaper, who was the first Western journalist
> to interview Osama bin Laden and has an extensive background throughout
> the region in trying to ascertain exactly what it is that's going on.
> Welcome, Mr. Fisk, to A Public Affair.
>
> Mr. Fisk: Thank you, Zoltan.
>
> Mr. Grossman: First, in your recent column, you said that
> Osama bin Laden's attack on the United States was not
> simply a statement but some kind of a lure, a trap, an engraved
> invitation to retaliation, to some kind of massive retaliation.
> What exactly do you mean and how would that fit the agenda?
>
> Mr. Fisk: Well, first of all, I did say in the article, if, indeed
> he is responsible. It looks as if he may be, but I'm still to
> hear Mr. Cheney's evidence, and Mr. Powell's evidence,
> Mr. Bush's evidence. I'd like to see it.
> Well, you see, in all his conversations with me, and I've met
> him three times, once in Sudan
> and twice in Afghanistan, one of the principal, indeed much
> more obsessional than he used on the United States, a place he's
> never been to and which he's a little obsessional about, his principal
> concern was always he wants American forces out of the
> Gulf area and he wants the overthrow of the pro-Western
> regimes in the Middle East. That's to say the kingdoms and emirates
> of the Gulf - the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan. He always
> made the point in his view that these were basically dictatorships
> supported by the West, who tortured their own people and suppressed
> their own people's free speech, but he wanted, of course, Sharia law.
> He wanted Islamic states in the place of all these, allegedly, secular
> nations. You could hardly say that about Saudi Arabia. So it occurred
> to me certainly after the atrocities in Washington and New York, that
> it may have been, given the awesome scale and cost in innocent life, if
> indeed, he was behind it, that he might be trying to provoke the
> Americans
> into such an indiscriminate and brutal response with so many civilian
> casualties in the country which would be bombed or attacked, that
> the people, the normal docile Arab masses as they like to call
> themselves,
> would actually go onto the streets and start to smash down the
> monuments,
> or I don't mean literally, but the institutions of their own
> governments.
> In other words, people might actually be so outraged at the American
> response that it would bring about just what bin Laden wants, which
> is the overthrow of those regimes.
>
> Mr. Grossman: I was trying to assess during September 11,
> why it is that they didn't simply attack the Pentagon? Why the
> World Trade Center? Why this massive civilian carnage if not to
> trigger some kind of massive response, some
> kind of polarization of the world into Islam and the West, along the
> lines of Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations, and Bush is falling
>
> into it by using the word, "crusade'. Do you see ...?
>
> Mr. Fisk: Yes, the "crusade" word. I couldn't believe it
> when I heard it. And then it was used a second time in the same
> statement when he got off the helicopter. I have to say, a weariness
> overcomes me every time I hear the name, Samuel Huntington,
> because I read his book and I find it extremely trite and
> banal and lacking of any serious understanding of the region,
> or indeed, of the way in which politics works in the region.
> I think, first of all, you have to sort of go backwards and say this
> must have been planned for two - two and a half years. The degree
> of planning; they must have done dummy runs on these aircraft
> many times. The hijackers must have traveled, Newark, San Francisco
> Los Angeles. They must have traveled to see estimated time of departure
> delays, average number of passengers, does the
> crew normally leave the flight deck door unlocked, how much fuel
> does it normally carry, etc.,, etc. Now, given that, we can be sure the
> same amount of time was taken to assess what targets to hit, if indeed,
> you can call innocent civilians a target as such,
> but that's obviously what they were in the eyes of the people who did
> it.
> My assumption was that since American power in the eyes of the Middle
> East is built upon weapons and money, they went for the two principal
> symbols of weapons and money: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
> The fact that the casualties would be enormous, I mean it horrified any
> ordinary Arabs, of course, just as much as it has people in the West.
> But, of course, these are people who would, under their own logic, and
> it's
> not a logic I share or would ever promote, but under their view, you
> see,
> they'd say, "Well, we have lost tens of thousands of people in our part
> of the world because of America's policies. Therefore, why should we
> weep if American's civilians are killed?"
> Again, this is not something that I ... a view that I would share.
> But I mean it is instructive to look back, for example, to say, July and
>
> August of 1982, and when, during those bloody months, Israel, with a
> green light from then Secretary of State,
> Alexander Haig, invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO out. 17,000 -
> not 6,000, but 17,500 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed - civilians,
>
> almost all of them. And at this time, I don't remember any memorial
> services or candle-lighting in the West for the 17,500 dead.
> Remember that's more than twice the figure of the World Trade Center.
> Now again, that's not a justification and it should never be used as a
> justification. But it's not difficult to see that a person who came from
>
> that part of the world, and certainly one of the hijack pilots, a man
> called,
> Ziad Jarrah came from Lebanon, and was a small boy at that time in
> Beirut when it was surrounded by the Israelis. It is not difficult to
> see
> how in their own mind they would say, "Well, we have suffered
> enough. It's time that the people who supply the weapons that are
> dropped on us should suffer themselves." Now that argument will
> seem perverse and cruel and indeed, it is perverse and cruel, but
> you can see how the argument would work. Now I'm not saying
> that that's what they actually said, any more than I can prove it's Bin
> Laden.
> But I can understand the kind of cruel logic that might have worked in
> their
> minds when they undertook these merciless and cruel ... what I actually
> think is a crime against humanity. I think that's the way to describe
> what
> happened in Washington and New York. Although, oddly enough, your
> government doesn't describe it as that. He just describes it as mindless
>
> terror or atrocities. I think it's a crime against humanity, although I
> have
> my suspicions why perhaps the U.S. government doesn't want to use
> that phrase.
>
> Mr. Grossman: What did you think of Bush's speech last night and
> this idea of "smoking out the terrorists" and extending the war
> possibly beyond Afghanistan into Iraq, Sudan, the Bekaa Valley of
> Lebanon?
>
> Mr. Fisk: I think you have to understand that Mr. Bush's grasp of the
> Middle East is pretty flimsy and probably as slim as his grasp of Wild
> West history. The people who were ... The phrase, "smoking them out",
> as far as I remember, comes from the U.S. cavalry in the days of General
>
> Custer, when they were in the habit of going into camps of Indians and
> massacring all the squaws and children, as Custer was about before the
> Little Big Horn. Look, you don't have to
> have an educated Arab to understand what that language means. The
> language of the Wild West, wanted dead or alive. It's the language,
> really,
> of Hollywood, more than the Wild West. That's why we have the
> Pearl Harbor references. We have ... you know, . Mr. Blair, last night,
> was saying we were on America's side because we remember America's
> support for Britain in two world wars. To which my reaction ... having
> had a father who fought in both world wars, is that America, indeed,
> did come in on our side, but only after some very long years, in both
> cases, of quite profitable neutrality. But again, when you go to war you
>
> invent myths; myths about history. And that's what both sides are
> now doing. The truth of the matter is that great injustices have
> taken place in the Middle East. Not just for the Arabs but for the
> Israelis as well, as a matter of fact. But great injustices have been
> done there. And in almost all cases, they've been done by Western
> powers - by the British and French after the First World War and
> very much by the Americans totally one-sided, double-standard
> policy in the Middle East, since the Second. And as a result of that,
> this huge feeling of injustice has created a society from which
> people can come who would do the things which we saw happen
> last week in New York and Washington. You can't turn around
> and say, well they did it because children are dying under sanctions
> in Iraq or the Egyptian police used torture or the Israelis seized
> more Arab land for colonies for Jews and Jews only. And that
> might play a role; we don't know. On the silence of whoever did the ...
> well, the silence in public. Heaven knows what messages reach the
> U.S. government in private. It's very ominous and very disturbing,
> I think. These people ... Twenty people commit suicide and mass
> murder at the same time and no one tells us why. But then again,
> we're not being told what the evidence is against bin Laden. We
> keep talking ... hearing about insets and hard evidence and the
> New York Times has run these immensely authoritative pieces.
> But if you read them, we're not actually told what the evidence is.
> It would be good to know. But when I heard Bush, I just sighed.
> I'd heard ... I remember Reagan when he wanted to attack Libya.
> He said he was the ...Qadhafi was the mad dog of the Middle East.
> Nice bit of alliteration. And then he said, "He can run, but he can't
> hide."
> Soon we'll hear Mr. Bush say the same of bin Laden, if he hasn't
> already done so.
>
> Mr. Grossman: He's already done so.
>
> Mr. Fisk: Well, there we go. I don't keep up with everything
> Mr. Bush says.
>
> Mr. Grossman: You describe President Bush as unaware and isolated.
> When you met Osama bin Laden himself, you also described him as
> somewhat isolated. He didn't seem like the mastermind, that he wasn't
> aware of the West.
>
> Mr. Fisk: No, quite so. The last time I saw him, which was four
> years ago, I was at one of his camps at the top of a mountain in
> Afghanistan, so cold that when I woke up in my tent in the camp
> in the morning, I had frost in my hair. And at that point, I'd arrived
> ...
> I'd been taken for hundreds of miles by his armed followers up to the
> camp. And so high that there were clouds below me and frozen water
> falls above me. And I sat in the tent with a sputtering oil lamp beside
> me,
> very cold, with coats put around me by one of the armed men. And
> bin Laden entered and he sat down. We had met twice before. He knew
> me, of course, and I knew him. And after the sort of normal pleasantries
>
> had been through and he had gotten his people to produce the usual
> tin plate of olives, cheese and eggs, he noticed I was carrying a sort
> of
> school satchel on my shoulder, which I do in rough countries, mainly
> to keep my passport and documentation in. And he saw inside it, perched
> on the
> top, some Arabic language newspapers and he seized upon them and
> went to the corner of the tent, by the oil lamp, ignoring all armed men
> who were obviously waiting to hang upon his every word and did so later,
>
> and me. And for twenty minutes poured his way through the newspapers.
> I noticed at one point he turned around and said he didn't know, he
> hadn't realized that the Iranian Foreign Minister had just visited
> Riyadh,
> the capital of his own country, Saudi Arabia. Although he just lost his
> citizenship
> in Saudi Arabia at the time we met. And I thought to myself, this is a
> very
> isolated man. This does not look like the Master of World Terror! I
> thought,
> doesn't he have a radio? Doesn't anyone ever get a phone message to him
> or a written message, telling him what's happening in the world. So
> he seemed to me to be very out of touch. A man who would like to
> have been seen as a mastermind of world terror, perhaps. But who
> clearly was a little.....But he wasn't. Later when America put a five
> million dollar reward on him, a somewhat small figure given his own
> personal wealth, I thought, I remember thinking how pleased he must
> be that the Americans were at last taking notice of him. But I got that
> impression. I still can't shake off the idea that he's not the sort of
> person
> who can ... who would sort of walk to the top of a mountain with a
> cellular phone and say, "Operation B. Go ahead. Attack now."
> I don't think that's how it works and I don't think that's what
> happened.
> But, yes, it's an intriguing irony that both Bush and bin Laden live in
> immense ignorance of each other's societies. And are actually very
> isolated from the reality of the other person. And I'm sure ... I asked
> bin Laden if he'd been to the West. And he said he remembered
> as a very little boy being taken by his parents - he has 37 brothers
> and step-brothers, of course - being taken by his parents to London
> and he had a faint memory of being at an expensive hotel in Mayfair
> and seeing red London busses outside. But that
> I think is probably the intellectual extent of his knowledge of the
> West.
>
> Mr. Grossman: Now we're being told that there are ties between
> Iraq and the hijackers. And last time you spoke with us about
> Osama bin Laden you said that he doesn't like Iraq.
>
> Mr. Fisk: No, no, no. I told you he hated Saddam Hussein.
> And he spoke with great emotion about the tens of thousands
> of children who died in Iraq under U.N. sanctions, which of
> course, he blames principally the Americans for. And indeed the
> Americans are principally behind the sanctions. No, I've heard all
> the rumors, of course. I must say I reflected quite seriously upon
> the personal behavior, in so far as we know it, from those who
> met the men who were to carry out this crime against humanity.
> Some of these hijack pilots- to-be were obviously drinking heavily.
> The evidence seems fairly clear on that: for example, one of the men,
> Ziad Jarrah, the one from Lebanon. I spent a couple hours with his
> family. He had two sisters; mother and father still alive, in the
> Bekaa Valley in Lebanon last Saturday. And what was particularly
> interesting was that the father showed me a photograph of him
> dancing at a wedding party and he enjoyed drinking, several people in
> the
> village said. He wasn't an alcoholic, but he enjoyed drinking; he did
> drink alcohol. He never went to the mosque, and there is a massive
> mosque about 200 meters from the family home. And he had a
> Turkish girlfriend with whom he lived from time to time in Bochum
> near Hamburg. Now, I met a lot of bin Laden's followers, I mean, his
> armed guards and members of his al-Qaeda group, although they
> didn't call themselves that then, in Afghanistan. And whatever else
> they were, they were very strict Muslims. They wouldn't smoke, they
> wouldn't drink, they stopped even in heavy rain on wild tracks through
> the Afghanistan - the vastness of Afghanistan, the mine fields - they
> would stop and get out and put down rugs on the wet soil and pray
> five times a day. Now, these hijackers clearly didn't fit into that
> particular
> framework. So I've asked myself, could there be another connection
> somehow? If you want to look at hard drinking Arab institutions,
> you would look at Iraq, who learned it from the Russians. And so there
> is a sort of strange loose living element to the people responsible.
> Loose living at least in the eyes of an ordinary Muslim, which makes
> it quite unlikely that it's bin Laden. On the other hand I'd have to say
>
> that my own sources in Lebanon tell me that Ziad Jarrah, eighteen
> months ago, just before he went to the United States, traveled to
> Afghanistan and spent forty days there. That is parents desperately
> sought to get him out, and had friends in Peshawar, on the Pakistani
> side of the Pakistan / Afghan border, trying to get him out. And that
> when he returned he had a beard and was praying five times a day.
> That's not what the villagers say. It's not what his father, Simiz
> says and it's not what his uncle, Jamal says. But my sources do
> say that is correct. And so there's a question, I suppose...
> which perhaps they were told, look, don't act the part of
> Orthodox conservative movements because people will be suspicious
> of you. They'll never suspect you if you're, ... you know ...
> taking drinks and going out with girls and going to nightclubs.
> Ziad apparently enjoyed nightclubs in Hamburg very much.
> So it may be that there was an instruction, or at least advice,
> to behave like the corrupt Westerners might behave, so to speak.
> But again, I find it odd. I think the phrase I'd use is, it's the
> hole in the story. I don't quite understand that part of it.
>
> Mr. Grossman: You're listening to Robert Fisk, Middle East
> correspondent for The Independent newspaper in London, who
> was the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden,
> and has been covering the region extensively, particularly around
> Lebanon, Palestine, Israel. You can join our conversation very
> briefly with a short question by calling, 256-2001. Before we
> get to a couple of calls, I wanted to ask you: Something has been
> really confusing me about the connection between Saudi Arabia,
> Pakistan, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden. Didn't Saudi Arabia
> originally aid the Taliban in a massive way, as well as Pakistan.
> Why was the ...?
>
> Mr. Fisk: Spot on, Zoltan! Spot on! The Taliban were created
> by Saudi Arabia, not by Pakistan. Pakistan tried to take them
> over because the Pakistani intelligence service is principally
> in control of Afghanistan, in so far as any outside
> power can be, but it was the Saudis that created them.
> Remember bin Laden, himself, is a member of the Sunni
> Wahhabi sect. A very, very strict demanding Sharia rule.
> And the Taliban are a kind of a mirror image of the most
> power, the Saudi religious police, with their sticks, and
> their insistence that women can't drive, women can't go
> out on their own, women must be completely covered,
> men and women who are not married cannot be together,
> and so on and so forth. And so in a way, the Taliban are in
> the mirror image of the Saudis. He interesting thing is that ...
>
> Mr. Grossman: Our allies the Saudis.
>
> Mr. Fisk: Well, more than allies. I remember once traveling
> to Jalalabad and seeing bin Laden, oh, hundreds of miles from
> Jalalabad, but I went on a plane of Ariana -- the Afghan national
> airline -
> the Taliban national airline now. I won't describe the flight to you.
> But anyway, it took off, it was scheduled to take off on the timetable,
> from Sharjah, the small emirate close to Dubai in the
> United Arab Emirates, and to land in Jalalabad. But when I went
> to introduce myself to the flight crew, which seemed a good idea
> at the time, they showed me the flight plan. In fact, the plane had
> started in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. So there was a
> regular, twice daily flight between Jalalabad, the closest city to
> where bin Laden was at that time, and the capital of Saudi Arabia.
> At one point bin Laden told me that he had just received an
> emissary from the Saudi royal family. Actually the emissary
> came from the Saudi embassy in Islamabad, on the Pakistani side
> of the Afghan / Pakistan border, who was offered about $300 million,
> or so he said, to his family and him, the return of his passport if
> he would give up his holy war. He and his family, he said, had
> rejected that. So there were quite clear contacts and I think they
> remain there. One of the things you need to realize is that there
> is a great deal of feeling about him in Saudi Arabia, and quite a
> lot of people including, I believe, some princes in the royal family,
> feel basically that he's got it right; that the Saudi regime is corrupt,
>
> that the Americans should never have been invited into the country
> and that the Americans should never have stayed ten years after
> they were first invited. So the Saudis have a lot to answer for.
> And remember, not only that, at least three of the hijack pilots,
> so far as they can make out, were either Saudis or Saudis using
> the identification papers of other Saudis. And remember, bin Laden,
> himself, is a Saudi. So the relationship between Saudi Arabia and
> the Taliban is probably more than brotherly. And it certainly has
> strong religious, theological roots. But, of course, the Americans
> are putting the pressure on Pakistan, hoping that the Saudis will
> let them use their air bases, but disconnecting the narrative of
> history between the Saudis and the Taliban, because that muddies
> up the whole simplistic Bush line on the war against ... you know ...
> evil on the parts of democracy.
>
> Mr. Grossman: Why would the Taliban be harboring
> al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden if there's this history?
>
> Mr. Fisk: Well, my theory has always been that the Saudis
> wanted them to keep bin Laden because he was much safer to
> Saudi Arabia's point of view, if he was locked into the
> mountain vastness of Afghanistan than wondering around in
> the West, or anywhere else, whether he was in jail or not,
> making speeches even in front of Muslims or in front of courts,
> given the fact that the Saudi Arabian regime is a very, very fragile
> one.
> I think that they were very keen to get him out of Sudan where he
> had more of a voice. And once he fled Sudan where the French
> were trying to get him, I believe, on behalf of the Americans, just
> as they got Carlos the Jackal a little bit earlier. Once
> he got to Afghanistan, he was where the Saudis wanted him.
> He could do no real harm from there. And given my own
> experience in talking to him there, I don't ... clearly there
> are connections. Clearly people go to see him. I was able to see him.
> But he can't sit there, as I say, with a huge consult - an underground
> bunker - operating a world terror network. Well, that may prove to
> be untrue now. But I think the Saudis wanted him out of the way
> to keep him away from Saudi Arabia.
>
> Mr. Grossman: O.K. We have time for a few quick calls.
> And I wanted to ask about the difficulties in invading Afghanistan.
>
> Mr. Fisk: Americans are not talking very much about this.
> And you've got to remember we British left 16,500 soldiers
> in the greatest loss of arms in the British army to date in 1842.
> Only a British doctor...was left after
> the Afghans had finished with the British there. He arrived at
> the fort in Jalalabad on a dying, exhausted horse.
> The British lost again against the Afghans...
> when the Afghans - and I've got a temporary account of it in my
> home in Beirut - according to a British captain...the
> Talibs (isn't that extraordinary, we're using the word then)
> threw themselves into the ranks of the British grenadiers, pulled
> our soldiers out and hacked them to pieces with hatchets. Then
> we have the Russian experiences of only the last few decades ago.
> Ten years of rape and plunder and eviscerating the country and
> in the end, to quote bin Laden to me, he said we won the battle
> against the Russian army from this mountain we're sitting on,
> he said, and we also helped to destroy the Soviet Union. And
> then I should add he went on to say, "I pray to God that
> he allows us to turn America into a shadow of itself."
> And I must say I thought of that when I saw New York
> as a shadow of itself last week.
>
> Mr. Grossman: Is it true that the U.S. gave the Taliban
> $43,000,000 for the drug war?
>
> Mr. Fisk: I have no idea if that's true. I suspect it might be because
> I did speak to Taliban officials four years ago who certainly seem
> to be fairly wealthy and have nice cars and they were all in theory
> involved with pulling up the drug crop around Jalalabad. I think
> much more interesting is the degree to which the
> CIA in effect built the camps. One of the things you need to realize
> is that when America bombs Osama bin Laden's training camps -
> they know where they are because the CIA built them for the mujahadin
> during the war against the Russians.
>
> Mr. Grossman: And there's so many land mines around.
>
> Mr. Fisk: More than 10,000,000 land mines. That's more that
> 10% of all the world's land mines, are in Afghanistan. Every day
> between twenty and twenty-five people are blown up by land mines
> in Afghanistan. Not the sort of place you'd like to send your infantry.
>
> Caller: Mr. Fisk, would you please elaborate on the idea of Bush
> and the U.S. walking into a trap. I mean, would this trap be one of
> the United States military invasion causing problems in Pakistan,
> Saudi Arabia, Egypt?
>
> Mr. Fisk: Yes, absolutely. And particularly Pakistan. I mean,
> I don't know if you've been to Pakistan or if you've been there lately
> if you have, but it is constantly on the edge of anarchy, Karachi
> feels like wartime, civil war Beirut. It's not just a question of
> Sunnis and Shiites being opposed to each other. It's a society
> that's breaking apart on secular -religious lines. Corruption is
> endemic to the extent I've never seen anywhere else in the
> Muslim world. It is a very violent, lawless, rapist society now,
> indeed. Women will not travel at night on many roads because
> the policemen are involved in gang rapes. It's a very, very
> dangerous place. And if Pakistan is now going to be an
> American ally, my goodness me, it's a dangerous ally to choose.
>
> Mr. Grossman: Could we see the ethnic splintering of either Afghanistan
> or Pakistan out of this crisis, because both are multi-ethnic?
>
> Mr. Fisk: Afghanistan has been splintered on ethnic grounds
> for a long time. That's why, for example, Farsi, which is the
> language of the elite of Kabul, is frowned upon by the Taliban,
> who speak Pashto. So you've got Pashto almost delineating
> the front lines of the various tribal groups. Look what
> happened just two years ago in the northern city of Mazar e-Sharif
> where the Taliban briefly captured the town and massacred
> 3,000 to 4,000 civilians and threw them in mass graves.
> They also managed to massacre virtually the entire diplomatic
> staff of the Iranian consulate in Mazar, which almost sent the
> Iranians to war. The Iranians put all their front line troops right
> along the border between Iran and Afghanistan. One of the
> reasons, by the way, that you'll find Middle Easterners are
> oversympathizing almost with the United States, is that the
> Taliban has more enemies in the Middle East than they do
> in the West.
>
> Mr. Grossman: What do you see as a possible outcome,
> possible solution to the crisis?
>
> Mr. Fisk: You know, I'm utterly floored by that question.
> I just don't know to the extent that when I've given this lecture in
> Dublin tonight I'm flying back to Beirut, I'm going to sit down with
> the atlas and decide where I should be. I'm not even certain.
> If America really is talking, I mean, I heard Richard Perle the
> other night. I mean, talk about the Prince of Darkness;
> he was out of Walt Disney! He was talking about bombing
> Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. These are vast geopolitical areas.
> I have no idea what the Americans are getting themselves
> involved in. I can fully understand why they want to get their
> own bat for what happened. I would want to after that crime
> against humanity. But I go back to something I said before,
> I wonder why the American government doesn't call it a
> crime against humanity. Is it because terrorism sounds
> better? I don't think so. I suspect it's because we need an
> international criminal court to deal with these kind of monsters.
> And the Americans don't want an international criminal court
> because they want carte blanche not to be put in it themselves.
>
> Caller: My question has to do with the destabilization of
> Afghanistan and what is going to happen is this is going
> to be inevitable if America uses their soil. And what is
> going to happen is this is going to have major geopolitical
> impact on India, which is a frontline state.
>
> Mr. Fisk: I think it will have much more effect on India.
> India has a much better relationship with the White House.
> If they're wise, they'll just sit and watch. Pakistan - the big
> problem with Pakistan is not that it's anarchic or that it may
> break apart in a civil war. American has always been quite
> happy to watch countries break apart in civil war if it's not
> in their interest to involve themselves in it. The problem is
> Pakistan is a nuclear power. It has nuclear weapons
> now. And that's not a country that you want to have
> a civil war in.
>
> Mr. Grossman: We want to thank you for joining us,
> Robert Fisk, and good luck in Beirut.
>
> Interview provided by Penne Heilmann-Reckner and
> Rob Maberry (608-265-9041).

> List of U.S. military interventions since 1890
> http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/interventions.htm
>
> A briefing on the history of U.S. interventions
> http://www.zmag.org/grossmanciv.htm
>
> Afghanistan is not simply like Vietnam
> http://www.badgerherald.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2001/09/30/3bb7cc953e5bd




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War is good business. Invest your son.
--seen on a placard held by a mother in Northern Ireland