Insider accounts published in the British, French and Indian media have revealed that US officials threatened war against Afghanistan during the summer of 2001. These reports include the prediction, made in July, that "if the military action went ahead, it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest." The Bush administration began its bombing strikes on the hapless, poverty-stricken country October 7, and ground attacks by US Special Forces began October 19.
The pundits for the American television networks and major daily newspapers celebrate the rapid military defeat of the Taliban regime as an unexpected stroke of good fortune. They distract public attention from the conclusion that any serious observer would be compelled to draw from the events of the past two weeks: that the speedy victory of the US-backed forces reveals careful planning and preparation by the American military, which must have begun well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The official American myth is that "everything changed" on the day four airliners were hijacked and nearly 5,000 people murdered. The US military intervention in Afghanistan, by this account, was hastily improvised in less than a month. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a television interview November 18, actually claimed that only three weeks went into planning the military onslaught.
This is only one of countless lies emanating from the Pentagon and White House about the war against Afghanistan. The truth is that the US intervention was planned in detail and carefully prepared long before the terrorist attacks provided the pretext for setting it in motion. If history had skipped over September 11, and the events of that day had never happened, it is very likely that the United States would have gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the same schedule.
Afghanistan and the scramble for oil
The United States ruling elite has been contemplating war in Central Asia for at least a decade. As long ago as 1991, following the defeat of Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, Newsweek magazine published an article headlined "Operation Steppe Shield?" It reported that the US military was preparing an operation in Kazakhstan modeled on the Operation Desert Shield deployment in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq.
If the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union provided the opportunity for the projection of American power into Central Asia, the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves provided the incentive. While the Caspian Sea coast of Azerbaijan (Baku) has been an oil production center for a century, it was only in the past decade that huge new reserves were discovered in the northwest Caspian (Kazakhstan) and in Turkmenistan, near the southwest Caspian.
American oil companies have acquired rights to as much as 75 percent of the output of these new fields, and US government officials have hailed the Caspian and Central Asia as a potential alternative to dependence on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region. American troops have followed in the wake of these contracts. US Special Forces began joint operations with Kazakhstan in 1997 and with Uzbekistan a year later, training for intervention especially in the mountainous southern region that includes Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan.
The major problem in exploiting the energy riches of Central Asia is how to get the oil and gas from the landlocked region to the world market. US officials have opposed using either the Russian pipeline system or the easiest available land route, across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, over the past decade, US oil companies and government officials have explored a series of alternative pipeline routes-west through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean; east through Kazakhstan and China to the Pacific; and, most relevant to the current crisis, south from Turkmenistan across western Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.
The Afghanistan pipeline route was pushed by the US-based Unocal oil company, which engaged in intensive negotiations with the Taliban regime. These talks, however, ended in disarray in 1998, as US relations with Afghanistan were inflamed by the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for which Osama bin Laden was held responsible. In August 1998, the Clinton administration launched cruise missile attacks on alleged bin Laden training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The US government demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and imposed economic sanctions. The pipeline talks languished.
Subverting the Taliban
Throughout 1999 the US pressure on Afghanistan increased. On February 3 of that year, Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. Inderfurth and State Department counterterrorism chief Michael Sheehan traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, Abdul Jalil. They warned him that the US would hold the government of Afghanistan responsible for any further terrorist acts by bin Laden.
According to a report in the Washington Post (October 3, 2001), the Clinton administration and Nawaz Sharif, then president of Pakistan, agreed on a joint covert operation to kill Osama bin Laden in 1999. The US would supply satellite intelligence, air support and financing, while Pakistan supplied the Pushtun-speaking operatives who would penetrate southern Afghanistan and carry out the actual killing.
The Pakistani commando team was up and running and ready to strike by October 1999, the Post reported. One former official told the newspaper, "It was an enterprise. It was proceeding." Clinton aides were delighted at the prospect of a successful assassination, with one declaring, "It was like Christmas."
The attack was aborted on October 12, 1999, when Sharif was overthrown in a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf, who halted the proposed covert operation. The Clinton administration had to settle for a UN Security Council resolution that demanded the Taliban turn over bin Laden to "appropriate authorities," but did not require he be handed over to the United States.
A CIA secret war
According to a front-page article in the Washington Post November 18, the CIA has been mounting paramilitary operations in southern Afghanistan since 1997. The article carries the byline of Bob Woodward, the Post writer made famous by Watergate, who is a frequent conduit for leaks from top-level military and intelligence officials.
Woodward provides details about the CIA's role in the current military conflict, which includes the deployment of a secret paramilitary unit, the Special Activities Division. This force began combat on September 27, using both operatives on the ground and Predator surveillance drones equipped with missiles that could be launched by remote control.
The Special Activities Division, Woodward reports, "consists of teams of about half a dozen men who do not wear military uniforms. The division has about 150 fighters, pilots and specialists, and is made up mostly of hardened veterans who have retired from the US military.
The Special Activities Division (SAD) is a division of the Central Intelligence Agency's National Clandestine Service, responsible for covert action paramilitary operations, the collection of intelligence in hostile and/or denied areas and all high threat military and/or intelligence operations when the U.S. Government does not wish to be overtly associated with such activities. As such, members of the unit, when on missions, normally do not carry any objects or clothing (e.g., military uniforms) that would associate them with the United States. If compromised during a mission, the government of the United States may legally deny their status and all knowledge of their mission. SAD officers are a majority of the recipients of the coveted Distinguished Intelligence Cross and the Intelligence Star. These are the two highest medals for valor in the CIA. Not surprisingly, SAD officers also make up the majority of those memorialized on the Wall of Honor at CIA headquarters.
The National Clandestine Service's primary action arm is SAD, which conducts direct action such as raids, ambush, sabotage, unconventional warfare (e.g. training and leading guerrillas), and deniable psychological operations, the latter also known as black propaganda or "Covert Influence". Special reconnaissance is another area that can be under either military or intelligence, but is usually carried out by SAD officers in denied areas.
The unit's existence became better understood in the autumn of 2001, when U.S. special operations forces arrived in Afghanistan to hunt down Al Qaeda leaders and aid the Northern Alliance against the ruling Taliban. SAD units also defeated Al Qaeda in Northern Iraq prior to the invasion and trained, equipped, organized and led the Kurdish forces to defeat Saddam's Army in the North.
On occasion, there is a conflict between United States Special Operations Command USSOCOM units and SAD on the primary mission force for these types of operations. This is usually confined to the civilian/political heads of the respective Department/Agency and is largely a result of those individuals seeking credit. More importantly for America, when SAD is combined with the U.S. Military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and/or other USSOCCOM units, many consider it the most lethal and effective force in the world.
These units are the the U.S. Navy's SEAL team six (DEVGRU) and the rest of SEAL teams, Army's DELTA Force (CAG), the U.S. Army's Special Forces (Green Berets), U.S. Army Rangers and the U.S. Marine Corps' Marine Special Operations Command MARSOC. SAD operatives are the most unique, because they combine the best special operations and clandestine intelligence capabilities in one individual. These individuals can operate in any environment (Sea, Air or Ground) and with limited to no support. These Paramilitary Operations Officers (as they are called) are from the Special Operations Group (SOG) of SAD, which is considered one of the most elite special operations units in the world.
This means that the US spy agency was engaged in attacks against the Afghan regime-what under other circumstances the American government would call terrorism-from the spring of 2000, more than a year before the suicide hijackings that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.
The SAD mission was multifold. Equipped with secure satellite communications equipment, and backed up by unmanned Predator drones and other aircraft, SAD had been tasked to gather intelligence to help U.S. Special Forces in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, as well as making contact with the Northern Alliance to provide the rebels with intelligence and help to coordinate their activities. Their purpose at Qala-i-Jangi, says E, a veteran CIA paramilitary officer, “was to sort out the al-Qaeda foreigners from the Taliban and identify for interrogation ... those who could be used to extract intel on the networks that brought those guys to the war zone.” Obviously, we and alike were also interested in eliciting whatever information they could about Osama bin Laden's whereabouts.
There has been previous press cover-age of paramilitary or covert-action missions. It is usually followed by loud bitching about the endangering of national security from CIA officials. This time was different. Not only were SAD's covert activities in Afghanistan leaked to the press by high-ranking officials intimately knowledgeable and well-informed about SAD5 secret capabilities, the leaks occurred while dozens of officers li1ie Dave and Mike were and still are in harm's way. In harm’s way because when CIA paramilitary officers operate in mufti – civilian clothes – they do not come under the Geneva Convention rules for military prisoners. Unlike Marines or SF troops, captured CIA officers can be summarily executed.
But the fact that CIA personnel might be killed didn’t bother the highly placed sources for an 18 November 2001 Washington Post article by well-connected Washington Establishment reporter Bob Woodward. Entitled “Secret CIA Units Playing a Central Combat Role,” the article described in detail SAD’s mission and its tactical capabilities in Afghanistan. The article also went on to extol the Agency’s role in the war, claiming that “Senior administration officials attribute a significant portion of the speed and effectiveness of recent Northern Alliance advances in Afghanistan to the assistance of CIA units.”
Secret CIA Units Playing a Central Combat Role
The CIA is mounting a hidden war in Afghanistan with secret paramilitary units on the ground and Predator surveillance drones in the sky that last week provided key intelligence for concentrated U.S. airstrikes on al Qaeda leaders, according to well-placed sources.
The CIA units, whose existence has not been previously disclosed, are operating in what amounts to a central combat role in America's unconventional war in Afghanistan. On Sept. 27, one of these units was the first U.S. force to enter the country in the current terrorism war, paving the way for U.S. Special Operations forces. The units also have been providing the rebel Northern Alliance movement with intelligence on opposing Taliban and al Qaeda troop concentrations, the sources said.
The units are part of a highly secret CIA capability, benignly named the Special Activities Division, that consists of teams of about half a dozen men who do not wear military uniforms. The division has about 150 fighters, pilots and specialists, and is made up mostly of hardened veterans who have retired from the U.S. military.
The division's arsenal includes helicopters and airplanes and the unmanned aerial Predator drones equipped with high-resolution cameras and Hellfire antitank missiles. Last week, a CIA-run Predator provided intelligence resulting in three days of strikes that killed key al Qaeda leaders. But it was unclear what role CIA information played in the successful attack on Muhammad Atef, the senior operations lieutenant for Osama bin Laden whose death was confirmed yesterday by the Taliban.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has given almost daily briefings summarizing the course and accomplishments of the U.S. military action in Afghanistan, which began six weeks ago. Absent from those briefings are any details or sense of the CIA's covert role in the battles, a secret war that has until now remained largely under wraps.
The role of the CIA's paramilitary units has been particularly important in Afghanistan, several sources say, because much of the war has turned on intelligence and targeting information. The CIA warriors also bring an experienced knowledge of the territory and Northern Alliance factions.
In addition to its paramilitary units, the CIA's Special Activities Division has inserted into Afghanistan specialized CIA case officers from the agency's Near East Division who know the local languages and had previous covert relationships with the Northern Alliance going back years.
For the last 18 months, the CIA has been working with tribes and warlords in southern Afghanistan, and the division's units have helped create a significant new network in the region of the Taliban's greatest strength.
One source said that the Special Activities Division units have directly or indirectly helped with hundreds of successful military strikes since Oct. 7, when the U.S. military bombing campaign began. The handling of intelligence for airstrikes and the use of the Predator has led to some turf friction and complaints about sharing between the U.S. Air Force and the CIA, but both military and nonmilitary sources say the relationship is working and has provided obvious benefits. The CIA's global response center monitors critical intelligence and video and is in direct communication with the U.S. Central Command, which runs the war from its headquarters in Tampa.
In addition to their war-fighting role, the CIA's covert units designate locations where the massive U.S. humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan is most needed.
All of this covert CIA work is a key part of President Bush's strategy, which one source described as an attempt to "deny the sanctuary of Afghanistan to bin Laden and his al Qaeda network." Bush in September signed an intelligence order, called a finding, ordering the CIA to use all necessary means to destroy bin Laden and al Qaeda. About $1 billion in new funds have been provided the CIA, most of which is for covert action.
The CIA work with the Northern Alliance and tribes in the south is central to that strategy. Operationally, it means that once the CIA locates opposition groups in Afghanistan that have the will and capacity to hunt and kill Taliban and al Qaeda members, those groups will receive covert or overt U.S. support in the form of weapons, ammunition, food and money.
A unit of the Special Activities Division was the first to enter Afghanistan after Bush declared his war on terrorism. The unit established a bridgehead on Sept. 27 for the regular U.S. Special Forces that followed.
These CIA paramilitary units have moved in and out of Afghanistan periodically, and some have established permanent bases. The special units work "hand in glove with the special forces and notably have provided a crucial eyes-on-the-ground capability," a well-placed source said. The Special Activities Division reports to the deputy director for operations, the clandestine arm of the CIA.
Before last year, the division was called the Military Support Program, or MSP, which had existed in the agency for decades. Senior administration officials attribute a significant portion of the speed and effectiveness of recent Northern Alliance advances in Afghanistan to the assistance of the CIA units.
Key has been the precision bombing of Taliban logistics. The sources said coordination on targeting among the CIA special units, traditional satellite and signals intelligence and the U.S. military has improved significantly over the course of the short war, accounting, in part, for the rapid collapse of Taliban forces. "They can't get food and ammunition," a source said. "The Taliban communications have been largely severed."
Because the CIA has focused on bin Laden and al Qaeda for years and gained a strong foothold among the Northern Alliance opposition, several sources said the Afghan phase of the war on terrorism may turn out to be easier than coming phases directed at terrorists in other countries where there is less of a CIA presence.
In some respects, the war on terrorism in Afghanistan appears, at least so far, to provide some ideal circumstances. First, the special units have been going in and out of Afghanistan since 1997, and have gained immense operational experience and important contacts, particularly with the Northern Alliance.
Second, the CIA gained experience during the 1980s covert war in Afghanistan, when the agency provided massive support and funding to the mujaheddin rebels, who eventually drove the Soviet army out. The Near East Division has 10 to 20 case officers with Afghan experience, knowledge of the terrain and languages, and contacts with anti-Taliban groups and tribes. Some of these case officers have been inserted into Afghanistan with the help of the CIA's paramilitary units as liason and support for the Alliance.
Third, in the mid-1980s, the CIA set up a counterterrorism center to coordinate intelligence and operations within the U.S. government. Personnel are assigned from the CIA, the FBI, other U.S. intelligence agencies, even the Federal Aviation Administration. Nearly 300 worked in the center before Sept. 11, and that number has swollen to 900 since the terrorist attacks that killed more than 4,300.
Nine days after the terrorist strikes at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush outlined the plan for the war on terrorism in a nationally televised speech to a joint session of Congress. He said the war might include "covert operations, secret even in success."
The US threatens war-before September 11
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, two reports appeared in the British media indicating that the US government had threatened military action against Afghanistan several months before September 11.
The BBC's George Arney reported September 18 that American officials had told former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik in mid-July of plans for military action against the Taliban regime:
"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 Taliban leader, Mullah Omar.
"The wider objective, according to Mr. Naik, would be to topple the Taliban regime and install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place-possibly under the leadership of the former Afghan King Zahir Shah.
"Mr. Naik was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place.
"He was told that Uzbekistan would also participate in the operation and that 17,000 Russian troops were on standby. "Mr. Naik was told that if the military action went ahead it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest."
Four days later, on September 22, the Guardian newspaper confirmed this account. The warnings to Afghanistan came out of a four-day meeting of senior US, Russian, Iranian and Pakistani officials at a hotel in Berlin in mid-July, the third in a series of back-channel conferences dubbed "brainstorming on Afghanistan."
The participants included Naik, together with three Pakistani generals; former Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Saeed Rajai Khorassani; Abdullah Abdullah, foreign minister of the Northern Alliance; Nikolai Kozyrev, former Russian special envoy to Afghanistan, and several other Russian officials; and three Americans: Tom Simons, a former US ambassador to Pakistan; Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state for south Asian affairs; and Lee Coldren, who headed the office of Pakistan, Afghan and Bangladesh affairs in the State Department until 1997.
The meeting was convened by Francesc Vendrell, then and now the deputy chief UN representative for Afghanistan. While the nominal purpose of the conference was to discuss the possible outline of a political settlement in Afghanistan, the Taliban refused to attend. The Americans discussed the shift in policy toward Afghanistan from Clinton to Bush, and strongly suggested that military action was an option.
While all three American former officials denied making any specific threats, Coldren told the Guardian, "there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was sodisgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action." Naik, however, cited one American declaring that action against bin Laden was imminent: "This time they were very sure. They had all the intelligence and would not miss him this time. It would be aerial action, maybe helicopter gunships, and not only overt, but from very close proximity to Afghanistan."
The Guardian summarized: "The threats of war unless the Taliban surrendered Osama bin Laden were passed to the regime in Afghanistan by the Pakistani government. The Taliban refused to comply but the serious nature of what they were told raises the possibility that Bin Laden, far from launching the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon out of the blue 10 days ago, was launching a pre-emptive strike in response to what he saw as US threats."
The politics of provocation
This account of the preparations for war against Afghanistan brings us to September 11 itself. The terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon was an important link in the chain of causality that produced the US attack on Afghanistan. The US government had planned the war well in advance, but the shock of September 11 made it politically feasible, by stupefying public opinion at home and giving Washington essential leverage on reluctant allies abroad.
Both the American public and dozens of foreign governments were stampeded into supporting military action against Afghanistan, in the name of the fight against terrorism. The Bush administration targeted Kabul without presenting any evidence that either binLaden or the Taliban regime was responsible for the World Trade Center atrocity. It seized on September 11 as the occasion for advancing longstanding ambitions to assert American power in Central Asia.
There is no reason to think that September 11 was merely a fortuitous occurrence. Every other detail of the war in Afghanistan was carefully prepared. It is unlikely that the American government left to chance the question of providing a suitable pretext for military action.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, there were press reports-again, largely overseas-that US intelligence agencies had received specific warnings about large-scale terrorist attacks, including the use of hijacked airplanes. It is quite possible that a decision was made at the highest levels of the American state to allow such an attack to proceed, perhaps without imagining the actual scale of the damage, in order to provide the necessary spark for war in Afghanistan.
How otherwise to explain such well-established facts as the decision of top officials at the FBI to block an investigation into Zaccarias Massaoui, the Franco-Moroccan immigrant who came under suspicion after he allegedly sought training from a US flight school on how to steer a commercial airliner, but not to take off or land?
The Minneapolis field office had Massaoui arrested in early August, and asked FBI headquarters for permission to conduct further inquiries, including a search of the hard drive of his computer. The FBI tops refused, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence of criminal intent on Massaoui's part-an astonishing decision for an agency not known for its tenderness on the subject of civil liberties.
This is not to say that the American government deliberately planned every detail of the terrorist attacks or anticipated that nearly 5,000 people would be killed. But the least likely explanation of September 11 is the official one: that dozens of Islamic fundamentalists, many with known ties to Osama bin Laden, were able to carry out a wide-ranging conspiracy on three continents, targeting the most prominent symbols of American power, without any US intelligence agency having the slightest idea of what they were doing.
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