According to Afghan, Iranian, and Turkish government sources,
Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, was a top adviser
to the El Segundo, California-based UNOCAL Corporation which was negotiating
with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from
Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Karzai, the leader of the southern Afghan Pashtun Durrani tribe, was
a member of the mujaheddin that fought the Soviets during the 1980s. He
was a top contact for the CIA and maintained close relations with CIA
Director William Casey, Vice President George Bush, and their Pakistani
Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) Service interlocutors. Later, Karzai
and a number of his brothers moved to the United States under the auspices
of the CIA. Karzai continued to serve the agency's interests, as well
as those of the Bush Family and their oil friends in negotiating the CentGas
deal, according to Middle East and South Asian sources.
When one peers beyond all of the rhetoric of the White House and Pentagon
concerning the Taliban, a clear pattern emerges showing that construction
of the trans-Afghan pipeline was a top priority of the Bush administration
from the outset. Although UNOCAL claims it abandoned the pipeline project
in December 1998, the series of meetings held between U.S., Pakistani,
and Taliban officials after 1998, indicates the project was never off
the table.
Quite to the contrary, recent meetings between U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan
Wendy Chamberlain and that country's oil minister Usman Aminuddin indicate
the pipeline project is international Project Number One for the Bush
administration. Chamberlain, who maintains close ties to the Saudi ambassador
to Pakistan (a one-time chief money conduit for the Taliban), has been
pushing Pakistan to begin work on its Arabian Sea oil terminus for the
pipeline.
Meanwhile, President Bush says that U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan
for the long haul. Far from being engaged in Afghan peacekeeping -- the
Europeans are doing much of that -- our troops will effectively be guarding
pipeline construction personnel that will soon be flooding into the country.
Karzai's ties with UNOCAL and the Bush administration are the main reason
why the CIA pushed him for Afghan leader over rival Abdul Haq, the assassinated
former mujaheddin leader from Jalalabad, and the leadership of the Northern
Alliance, seen by Langley as being too close to the Russians and Iranians.
Haq had no apparent close ties to the U.S. oil industry and, as both a
Pushtun and a northern Afghani, was popular with a wide cross-section
of the Afghan people, including the Northern Alliance. Those credentials
likely sealed his fate.
When Haq entered Afghanistan from Pakistan last October, his position
was immediately known to Taliban forces, which subsequently pinned him
and his small party down, captured, and executed them. Former Reagan National
Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, who worked with Haq, vainly attempted
to get the CIA to help rescue Haq. The agency claimed it sent a remotely-piloted
armed drone to attack the Taliban but its actions were too little and
too late. Some observers in Pakistan claim the CIA tipped off the ISI
about Haq's journey and the Pakistanis, in turn, informed the Taliban.
McFarlane, who runs a K Street oil consulting firm, did not comment on
further questions about the circumstances leading to the death of Haq.
While Haq was not part of the Bush administration's GOP (Grand Oil Plan)
for South Asia, Karzai was a key player on the Bush Oil team. During the
late 1990s, Karzai worked with an Afghani-American, Zalmay Khalilzad,
on the CentGas project. Khalilzad is President Bush's Special National
Security Assistant and recently named presidential Special Envoy for Afghanistan.
Interestingly, in the White House press release naming Khalilzad special
envoy, no mention was made of his past work for UNOCAL. Khalilzad has
worked on Afghan issues under National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice,
a former member of the board of Chevron, itself no innocent bystander
in the future CentGas deal. Rice made an impression on her old colleagues
at Chevron. The company has named one of their supertankers the SS Condoleezza
Rice.
Khalilzad, a fellow Pashtun and the son of a former government official
under King Mohammed Zahir Shah, was, in addition to being a consultant
to the RAND Corporation, a special liaison between UNOCAL and the Taliban
government. Khalilzad also worked on various risk analyses for the project.
Khalilzad's efforts complemented those of the Enron Corporation, a major
political contributor to the Bush campaign. Enron, which recently filed
for bankruptcy in the single biggest corporate collapse in the nation's
history, conducted the feasibility study for the CentGas deal. Vice President
Cheney held several secret meetings with top Enron officials, including
its Chairman Kenneth Lay, earlier in 2001. These meetings were presumably
part of Cheney's non-public Energy Task Force sessions. A number of Enron
stockholders, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick, became officials in the Bush administration. In addition,
Thomas White, a former Vice Chairman of Enron and a multimillionaire in
Enron stock, currently serves as the Secretary of the Army.
A chief benefactor in the CentGas deal would have been Halliburton, the
huge oil pipeline construction firm that also had its eye on the Central
Asian oil reserves. At the time, Halliburton was headed by Dick Cheney.
After Cheney's selection as Bush's Vice Presidential candidate, Halliburton
also pumped a huge amount of cash into the Bush-Cheney campaign coffers.
And like oil cash cow Enron, there were Wall Street rumors in late December
that Halliburton, which suffered a forty per cent drop in share value,
might follow Enron into bankruptcy court.
Assisting with the CentGas negotiations with the Taliban was Laili Helms,
the niece-in-law of former CIA Director Richard Helms. Laili Helms, also
a relative of King Zahir Shah, was the Taliban's unofficial envoy to the
United States and arranged for various Taliban officials to visit the
United States. Laili Helms' base of operations was in her home in Jersey
City on the Hudson River. Ironically, most of her work on behalf of the
Taliban was practically conducted in the shadows of the World Trade Center,
just across the river.
Laili Helms' liaison work for the Taliban paid off for Big Oil. In December
1997, the Taliban visited UNOCAL's Houston refinery operations. Interestingly,
the chief Taliban leader based in Kandahar, Mullah Mohammed Omar, now
on America's international Most Wanted List, was firmly in the UNOCAL
camp. His rival Taliban leader in Kabul, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani (not
to be confused with the head of the Northern Alliance Burhanuddin Rabbani),
favored Bridas, an Argentine oil company, for the pipeline project. But
Mullah Omar knew UNOCAL had pumped large sums of money to the Taliban
hierarchy in Kandahar and its expatriate Afghan supporters in the United
States. Some of those supporters were also close to the Bush campaign
and administration. And Kandahar was the city near which the CentGas pipeline
was to pass, a lucrative deal for the otherwise desert outpost.
While Clinton's State Department omitted Afghanistan from the top foreign
policy priority list, the Bush administration, beholden to the oil interests
that pumped millions of dollars into the 2000 campaign, restored Afghanistan
to the top of the list, but for all the wrong reasons. After Bush's accession
to the presidency, various Taliban envoys were received at the State Department,
CIA, and National Security Council. The CIA, which appears, more than
ever, to be a virtual extended family of the Bush oil interests, facilitated
a renewed approach to the Taliban. The CIA agent who helped set up the
Afghan mujaheddin, Milt Bearden, continued to defend the interests of
the Taliban. He bemoaned the fact that the United States never really
bothered to understand the Taliban when he told the Washington Post last
October, "We never heard what they were trying to say... We had no
common language. Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.' They were saying, 'Do
something to help us give him up.' "
There were even reports that the CIA met with their old mujaheddin operative
bin Laden in the months before September 11 attacks. The French newspaper
Le Figaro quoted an Arab specialist named Antoine Sfeir who postulated
that the CIA met with bin Laden in July in a failed attempt to bring him
back under its fold. Sfeir said the CIA maintained links with bin Laden
before the U.S. attacked his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in
1998 and, more astonishingly, kept them going even after the attacks.
Sfeir told the paper, "Until the last minute, CIA agents hoped bin
Laden would return to U.S. command, as was the case before 1998."
Bin Laden actually officially broke with the US in 1991 when US troops
began arriving in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. Bin Laden
felt this was a violation of the Saudi regime?s responsibility to protect
the Islamic Holy Shrines of Mecca and Medina from the infidels. Bin Laden?s
anti-American and anti-House of Saud rhetoric soon reached a fever pitch.
The Clinton administration made numerous attempts to kill Bin Laden.
In August 1998, Al Qaeda operatives blew up several U.S. embassies in
Africa. In response, Bill Clinton ordered cruise missiles to be launched
from US ships in the Persian Gulf into Afghanistan, which missed Bin Laden
by a few hours. The Clinton administration also devised a plan with Pakistan's
ISI to send a team of assassins into Afghanistan to kill Bin Laden. But
Pakistan's government was overthrown by General Musharraf, who was viewed
as particularly close to the Taliban. The CIA cancelled its plans, fearing
Musharraf's ISI would tip off the Taliban and Bin Laden. . The CIA's connections
to the ISI in the months before September 11 and the weeks after are also
worthy of a full-blown investigation. The CIA continues to maintain an
unhealthy alliance with the ISI, the organization that groomed bin Laden
and the Taliban. Last September, the head of the ISI, General Mahmud Ahmed,
was fired by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf for his pro-Taliban
leanings and reportedly after the U.S. government presented Musharraf
with disturbing intelligence linking the general to the terrorist hijackers.
General Ahmed was in Washington, DC on the morning of September 11 meeting
with CIA and State Department officials as the hijacked planes slammed
into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Later, both the Northern Alliance
spokesman in Washington, Haron Amin, and Indian intelligence, in an apparent
leak to The Times of India, confirmed that General Ahmed ordered a Pakistani-born
British citizen and known terrorist named Ahmed Umar Sheik to wire $100,000
from Pakistan to the U.S. bank account of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
When the FBI traced calls made between General Ahmed and Sheik's cellular
phone - the number having been supplied by Indian intelligence to the
FBI - a pattern linking the general with Sheik clearly emerged. According
to The Times of India, the revelation that General Ahmed was involved
in the Sheik-Atta money transfer was more than enough for a nervous and
embarrassed Bush administration. It pressed Musharraf to dump General
Ahmed. Musharraf mealy-mouthed the announcement of his general's dismissal
by stating Ahmed "requested" early retirement.
Sheik was well known to the Indian police. He was arrested in New Delhi
in 1994 for plotting to kidnap four foreigners, including an American
citizen. Sheik was released by the Indians in 1999 in a swap for passengers
on board New Delhi-bound Indian Airlines flight 814, hijacked by Islamic
militants from Kathmandu, Nepal to Kandahar, Afghanistan. India continues
to believe the ISI played a part in the hijacking since the hijackers
were affiliated with the pro-bin Laden Kashmiri terrorist group, Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin,
a group only recently and quite belatedly placed on the State Department's
terrorist list. The ISI and bin Laden's Al Qaeda reportedly assists the
group in its operations against Indian government targets in Kashmir.
The FBI, which assisted its Indian counterpart in the investigation of
the Indian Airlines hijacking, says it wants information leading to the
arrest of those involved in the terrorist attacks. Yet, no move has been
made to question General Ahmed or those U.S. government officials, including
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who met with him in September.
Clearly, General Ahmed was a major player in terrorist activities across
South Asia, yet still had very close ties to the U.S. government. General
Ahmed's terrorist-supporting activities - and the U.S. government officials
who tolerated those activities - need to be investigated.
The Taliban visits to Washington continued up to a few months prior to
the September 11 attacks. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research's South Asian Division maintained constant satellite telephone
contact with the Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul. Washington permitted the
Taliban to maintain a diplomatic office in Queens, New York headed by
Taliban diplomat Abdul Hakim Mojahed. In addition, U.S. officials, including
Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca,
who is also a former CIA officer, visited Taliban diplomatic officials
in Islamabad. In the meantime, the Bush administration took a hostile
attitude towards the Islamic State of Afghanistan, otherwise known as
the Northern Alliance. Even though the United Nations recognized the alliance
as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, the Bush administration,
with oil at the forefront of its goals, decided to follow the lead of
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and curry favor with the Taliban mullahs of
Afghanistan. The visits of Islamist radicals did not end with the Taliban.
In July 2001, the head of Pakistan's pro-bin Laden Jamiaat-i-Islami Party,
Qazi Hussein Ahmed, also reportedly was received at the George Bush Center
for Intelligence (aka, CIA headquarters) in Langley, Virginia.
According to the Washington Post, the Special Envoy of Mullah Omar, Rahmatullah
Hashami, even came to Washington bearing a gift carpet for President Bush
from the one-eyed Taliban leader. The Village Voice reported that Hashami,
on behalf of the Taliban, offered the Bush administration to hold on to
bin Laden long enough for the United States to capture or kill him but,
inexplicably, the administration refused. Meanwhile, Spozhmai Maiwandi,
the director of the Voice of America's Pashtun service, jokingly nicknamed
"Kandahar Rose" by her colleagues, aired favorable reports on
the Taliban, including a controversial interview with Mullah Omar.
The Bush administration's dalliances with the Taliban may have even continued
after the start of the bombing campaign against their country. According
to European intelligence sources, a number of European governments were
concerned that the CIA and Big Oil were pressuring the Bush administration
not to engage in an initial serious ground war on behalf of the Northern
Alliance in order to placate Pakistan and its Taliban compatriots. The
early-on decision to stick with an incessant air bombardment, they reasoned,
was causing too many civilian deaths and increasing the shakiness of the
international coalition.
The obvious, and woefully underreported, interfaces between the Bush
administration, UNOCAL, the CIA, the Taliban, Enron, Saudi Arabia, and
Pakistan, the groundwork for which was laid when the Bush Oil team was
on the sidelines during the Clinton administration, is making the Republicans
worried. Vanquished vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman is in
the ironic position of being the senator who will chair the Senate Government
Affairs Committee hearings on the collapse of Enron. The roads from Enron
also lead to Afghanistan and murky Bush oil politics.
UNOCAL was also clearly concerned about its past ties to the Taliban.
On September 14, just three days after terrorists of the Afghan-base al
Qaeda movement crashed their planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon,
UNOCAL issued the following statement: "The company is not supporting
the Taliban in Afghanistan in any way whatsoever. Nor do we have any project
or involvement in Afghanistan. Beginning in late 1997, Unocal was a member
of a multinational consortium that was evaluating construction of a Central
Asia Gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and Pakistan [via western Afghanistan].
Our company has had no further role in developing or funding that project
or any other project that might involve the Taliban."
The Bush Oil Team, which can now rely on the support of the interim Prime
Minister of Afghanistan, may think that war and oil profits mix. But there
is simply too much evidence that the War in Afghanistan was primarily
about building UNOCAL's pipeline, not about fighting terrorism. The Democrats,
who control the Senate and its investigation agenda, should investigate
the secretive deals between Big Oil, Bush, and the Taliban.