Have Islamic State’s Jihadists Joined Al-Nusra Front in Syria’s Idlib?

At its peak in 2014, when the Islamic State declared its “caliphate” in Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, the Islamic State, according to the mainstream media’s count, used to have 70,000 jihadists. But now, only several hundred fighters seem to have been left within its ranks, who have been cornered in a holdout in Hajin in eastern Syria near the town of Al-Bukamal on the border between Syria and Iraq.

The divisions within the rank and file of the terrorist organization seem to be growing as it has lost all its territory and is now surrounded in a border town, with the US-backed Kurdish militias pressing their offensive from the west on the Syrian side and the Iran-backed militias from the east on the Iraqi side of the border.

Moreover, tens of thousands of Islamic State jihadists and civilians have been killed in the airstrikes conducted by the US-led coalition against the Islamic State and the ground offensives by the Iraqi armed forces and allied militias in Iraq and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria.

Furthermore, due to frequent desertions, the number of fighters within the Islamic State’s ranks has evidently dwindled. But a question would naturally arise in the minds of curious observers of the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria that where did the remaining tens of thousands of Islamic State’s jihadists vanish?

The riddle can be easily solved, though, if we bear in mind that although Idlib Governorate in Syria’s northwest has firmly been under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led by al-Nusra Front since 2015, its territory was equally divided between Turkey-backed rebels and al-Nusra Front.

In a brazen offensive last month, however, the al-Nusra jihadists completely routed Turkey-backed militants even though the latter are supported by a professionally trained and highly organized and disciplined military of a NATO member Turkey. And al-Nusra Front now reportedly controls 70% territory in Idlib Governorate.

The reason why al-Nusra Front has been easily able to defeat Turkey-backed militants appears to be that the ranks of al-Nusra Front have now been filled by hardcore jihadist deserters from the Islamic State after the fall of the latter’s “caliphate” in Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

The merger of al-Nusra Front and Islamic State in Idlib doesn’t come as a surprise, though, since the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front used to be a single organization [1] before a split occurred between the two militant groups in April 2013 over a leadership dispute.

Regarding the nexus between Islamic jihadists and purported “moderate rebels” in Syria, while the representatives of Free Syria Army (FSA) were in Washington in January last year, soliciting the Trump administration to restore the CIA’s “train and equip” program for the Syrian militants that was shuttered in July 2017, hundreds of Islamic State’s jihadists joined the so-called “moderate rebels” in Idlib in their battle against the advancing Syrian government troops backed by Russian airstrikes to liberate the strategically important Abu Duhur airbase, according to a January last year’s AFP report authored by Maya Gebeily.

The Islamic State already had a foothold in neighboring Hama province and its foray into Idlib was an extension of its outreach. The Islamic State captured several villages and claimed to have killed two dozen Syrian soldiers and taken twenty hostages, according to the report.

Though the AFP report titled “Four years and one caliphate later, Islamic State claims Idlib comeback” [2] has been taken down by Yahoo News, because it mentioned that on January 12, 2018, the Islamic State officially declared Idlib one of its “Islamic emirates.”

The reason why the AFP report has been redacted appears to be that it did not meet the editorial line of the mainstream media, as it mentioned Idlib, which is surrounded by the Syrian government troops, as an “Islamic emirate” of the Islamic State, which could provide a pretext to the Syrian armed forces backed by Russian airstrikes to mount an offensive against the jihadists in Idlib Governorate.

Nevertheless, in all likelihood, some of the Islamic State’s jihadists who joined the battle in Idlib in January last year were part of the same contingent of thousands of Islamic State militants that fled Raqqa in October 2017 under a deal brokered [3] by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

In fact, one of the main objectives of the deal was to let the jihadists fight the Syrian government forces in Idlib and elsewhere in Syria, and to free up the Kurdish-led SDF in a scramble against the Syrian government troops to capture oil and gas fields in Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria and the border posts along Syria’s border with Iraq.

Notwithstanding, according to a December 29 report by RT [4]: “A high-ranking Turkish delegation arrived in Moscow on December 29, only a day after international media broke news of Kurdish militias inviting Syrian forces to enter Manbij before the Turks do. Syria’s military proclaimed they ‘raised the flag’ over Manbij, but there have been no independent reports confirming the moving of troops into the city.”

The report notes: “The Saturday Moscow meeting was key to preventing all actors of the Syrian war from locking horns over the Kurdish enclave. Obviously, Turkey will insist that it is their forces that should enter Manbij, Russia will of course insist the city should be handed over to Assad’s forces, Kirill Semenov, an Islamic studies expert with Russia’s Institute for Innovative Development, told RT.”

The report further adds: “Realpolitik, of course, plays a role here as various locations across Syria might be used as a bargaining chip by all parties to the conflict. Semenov suggested the Turks may agree on Syrian forces taking some parts of Idlib province in exchange for Damascus’ consent for a Turkish offensive toward Manbij or Kobani.”

It becomes abundantly clear after reading the RT report that a land swap agreement between Ankara and Damascus under the auspices of Moscow is in the works to avoid standoff over Arab-majority towns of Manbij and Kobani which have been occupied by the Kurds since August 2016 and January 2015, respectively.

The regions currently being administered by the Kurds in Syria include the Kurdish-majority Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria along the border with Iraq, and the Arab-majority towns of Manbij to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria and Kobani to the east of the Euphrates River along the southern Turkish border.

The oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate in eastern Syria has been contested between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and it also contains a few pockets of the remnants of the Islamic State militants alongside both eastern and western banks of the Euphrates River.

The Turkish “East of Euphrates” military doctrine basically means that the Turkish armed forces would not tolerate the presence of the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds – which the Turks regard as “terrorists” allied to the PKK Kurdish separatist group in Turkey – in Manbij and Kobani, in line with the longstanding Turkish policy of denying the Kurds any territory in the traditionally Arab-majority areas of northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border.

The aforementioned Moscow-brokered agreement would likely stipulate that Damascus would permit Ankara to mount offensives in the Kurdish-held towns Manbij and Kobani in northern Syria in return for Ankara withdrawing its militant proxies from Maarat al-Numan, Khan Sheikhoun and Jisr al-Shughour, all of which are strategically located in the south of Idlib Governorate.

Just as Ankara cannot tolerate the presence of the Kurds in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border, similarly even Ankara would acknowledge the fact that Damascus cannot possibly conceive the long-term presence of Ankara’s militant proxies in the aforementioned strategic locations in the south of Idlib Governorate threatening the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, particularly now that al-Nusra Front jihadists have overrun 70% of Idlib Governorate and the hardcore deserters from the Islamic State have also established their foothold in northwestern Syria. If such a land swap agreement is concluded between Ankara and Damascus under the auspices of Moscow, it would be a win-win for all parties to the Syrian conflict.

Footnotes:

[1] Al-Nusra Front: Islamic State’s Breakaway Faction in Syria’s Idlib:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/al-nusra-front-islamic-states-breakaway-faction-in-syrias-idlib/5667920

[2] Four years and one caliphate later, Islamic State claims Idlib comeback:

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/four-years-one-caliphate-later-claims-idlib-comeback-143938964.html

[3] Raqqa’s dirty secret: the deal that let Islamic State jihadists escape Raqqa:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/raqqas_dirty_secret

[4] Land swap between Turkey and Syria – an option to avoid standoff over Manbij:

https://www.rt.com/news/447698-syria-manbij-russia-turkey-talks/

Islamic State’s Chief Al-Baghdadi Survived a ‘Coup’ by his Fighters

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.

Martin Chulov reported [1] for The Guardian yesterday, February 7, the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had survived a coup attempt last month by foreign fighters within the ranks of the terrorist organization in its holdout in Hajin in eastern Syria near the town of Al-Bukamal on the border between Syria and Iraq, and the Islamic State had reportedly placed a bounty on the main plotter’s head.

The report states: “The incident is believed to have taken place on 10 January in a village near Hajin in the Euphrates River valley, where the jihadist group is clinging to its last sliver of land. Regional intelligence officials say a planned move against Baghdadi led to a firefight between foreign fighters and the fugitive terrorist chief’s bodyguards, who spirited him away to the nearby deserts.”

The report further adds: “Isis has offered a reward to whomever kills Abu Muath al-Jazairi, believed to be a veteran foreign fighter, one of an estimated 500 Isis fighters thought to remain in the area. While Isis did not directly accuse Jazairi, placing a bounty on the head of one of its senior members is an unusual move and intelligence officials believe he was the central plotter.”

The divisions within the rank and file of the terrorist organization seem to be growing as it has lost all its territory and is now surrounded in a border town, with the US-backed Kurdish militias pressing their offensive from the west on the Syrian side and the Iran-backed militias from the east on the Iraqi side of the border. Moreover, due to frequent desertions, it now has only several hundred fighters left within its ranks.

The Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is known to be a diabetic, suffering from high blood pressure and had suffered a permanent injury in an airstrike several years ago. Although al-Baghdadi has not publicly appointed a successor, two of the closest aides who have emerged as his likely successors over the years are Iyad al-Obaidi, his defense minister, and Ayad al-Jumaili, the in charge of security.

The latter of the two had already reportedly been killed in an airstrike in April 2017 in al-Qaim region on Iraq’s border with Syria. Thus, the most likely successor of al-Baghdadi would be al-Obaidi. Both al-Jumaili and al-Obaidi had previously served as security officers in Iraq’s Baathist army under Saddam Hussein, and al-Obaidi is known to be the de facto deputy [2] of al-Baghdadi.

Moreover, according to an AFP report [3] last year, hundreds of Islamic State’s jihadists had joined the so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria’s northwestern Idlib Governorate where they were surrounded by the Syrian government troops. The Islamic State already had a foothold in neighboring Hama province and its foray into Idlib was an extension of its outreach.

Though the AFP report authored by Maya Gebeily seems to have been taken down by Yahoo News because it mentioned that on January 12, 2018 the Islamic State officially declared Idlib one of its “Islamic emirates.” The Islamic State had captured several villages and claimed to have killed two dozen Syrian soldiers and taken twenty hostages, according to the report.

In all likelihood, some of the Islamic State’s jihadists who joined the battle in Idlib were part of the same contingent of militants that fled Raqqa in October 2017 under a deal brokered [4] by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). In fact, one of the main objectives of the deal was to let the jihadists fight the Syrian government troops and to free up the Kurdish-led SDF in a scramble to capture oil and gas fields in Deir al-Zor and the border posts along Syria’s border with Iraq.

The reason why the AFP report has been redacted appears to be that it did not meet the editorial line of the mainstream media. As it mentioned Idlib, which is surrounded by the Syrian government troops, as an “Islamic emirate” of the Islamic State, which could provide a pretext to the Syrian armed forces backed by Russian airstrikes to mount an offensive there.

It bears mentioning that Idlib has firmly been under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) led by al-Nusra Front since 2015. And in a brazen offensive last month, the al-Nusra jihadists completely routed Turkey-backed militants, and al-Nusra now reportedly controls more than 70% of territory in Idlib Governorate.

The reason why al-Nusra Front has been easily able to defeat Turkey-backed militants appears to be that the ranks of al-Nusra Front have now been swelled by deserters from the Islamic State after the fall of its “caliphate” in Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. The merger of al-Nusra Front and Islamic State in Idlib doesn’t come as a surprise, though, since the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front used to be a single organization [5] before a split occurred between the two militant groups in April 2013 over a leadership dispute.

Furthermore, the Islamic State’s foray into Idlib isn’t the only instance of its kind. Remember when the Syrian government forces were on the verge of winning a resounding victory against the militants holed up in east Aleppo, the Islamic State came to the rescue of so-called “moderate rebels” by opening up a new front in Palmyra in December 2016.

Consequently, the Syrian government had to send reinforcements from Aleppo to Palmyra in order to defend the city. Although the Syrian government troops still managed to evict the militants holed up in the eastern enclave of Aleppo and they also retook Palmyra from Islamic State in March 2017, the basic purpose of this tactical move by the Islamic State was to divert the attention and resources of the Syrian government away from Aleppo to Palmyra.

Fact of the matter is that the distinction between Islamic jihadists and purported “moderate rebels” in Syria is more illusory than real. Before it turned rogue and overran Mosul in Iraq in June 2014, Islamic State used to be an integral part of the Syrian opposition and it still enjoys close ideological and operational ties with other militant groups in Syria.

It’s worth noting that although turf wars are common not just between the Islamic State and other militant groups operating in Syria but also among rebel groups themselves, the ultimate objective of the Islamic State and the rest of militant outfits operating in Syria was the same: to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad.

Notwithstanding, in order to create a semblance of objectivity and fairness, the American policymakers and analysts are always willing to accept the blame for the mistakes of the distant past that have no bearing on the present; however, any fact that impinges on their present policy is conveniently brushed aside.

In the case of the creation of the Islamic State, for instance, the US policy analysts are willing to concede that invading Iraq back in 2003 was a mistake that radicalized the Iraqi society, exacerbated sectarian divisions and gave birth to an unrelenting Sunni insurgency against the heavy handed and discriminatory policies of the Shi’a-led Iraqi government.

Similarly, the “war on terror” era political commentators also “generously” accept the fact that the Cold War era policy of nurturing al-Qaeda and myriads of Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” against the erstwhile Soviet Union was a mistake, because all those fait accompli have no bearing on their present policy.

The corporate media’s spin-doctors conveniently forget, however, that the creation of the Islamic State and myriads of other jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq had as much to do with the unilateral invasion of Iraq back in 2003 under the Bush administration as it was the doing of the Obama administration’s policy of funding, arming, training and internationally legitimizing the militants against the Syrian government since 2011-onward.

In fact, the proximate cause behind the rise of the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and numerous other militant groups in Syria and Iraq was the Obama administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria.

The border between Syria and Iraq is highly porous and poorly guarded. The Obama administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Syrian government was bound to have its blowback on Iraq, sooner or later. Therefore, as soon as the Islamic State consolidated its gains in Syria, it overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

Footnotes:

[1] ISIS leader believed to have fled coup attempt by his fighters:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/07/isis-leader-believed-to-have-fled-coup-attempt-by-his-own-fighters

[2] Military chief, al-Obeidi, could be the new commander of ISIS:

http://www.atimes.com/article/military-chief-new-commander-isis/

[3] Four years and one caliphate later, Islamic State claims Idlib comeback:

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/four-years-one-caliphate-later-claims-idlib-comeback-143938964.html

[4] Raqqa’s dirty secret: the deal that let Islamic State jihadists escape Raqqa:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/raqqas_dirty_secret

[5] Al-Nusra Front: Islamic State’s Breakaway Faction in Syria’s Idlib:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/al-nusra-front-islamic-states-breakaway-faction-in-syrias-idlib/5667920

Does US Provide Covert Support to Islamic State in Afghanistan?

Last year, Russia’s seasoned Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Washington of providing material support [1] to the Islamic State Khorasan militants based in Afghanistan in order to divide and weaken the Taliban resistance against American occupation of Afghanistan. The accusations were also echoed by Iran.

Referring to news reports [2] that unmarked military helicopters had touched down in known Islamic State Khorasan strongholds in Afghanistan, Lavrov alleged: “Unidentified helicopters, most likely helicopters to which NATO in one way or another is related, fly to the areas where the [Islamic State] insurgents are based, and no one has been able to explain the reasons for these flights yet.”

Moreover, a news report leaked [3] in March last year, during the trial of the widow of Orlando nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, who had killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, that his father, Seddique Mateen, was an FBI informant for eleven years.

In an email, the prosecution revealed to the defense attorney of Noor Salman, the widow of Omar Mateen, that Seddique Mateen was an FBI informant from January 2005 to June 2016 and that he had been sending money to Afghanistan and Turkey, possibly to fund violent insurrection against the government of Pakistan.

Although the allegation that Washington provides money and arms to its arch-foe in Afghanistan, the Taliban, to mount an insurrection against the government of Pakistan might sound far-fetched, we need to keep the background of the Taliban insurgency in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in mind.

In Pakistan, there are three distinct categories of militants: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Chinese Uyghur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants, the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.

Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus. The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, it is the difference of ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.

Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, as far as the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because such militant groups are regarded as “strategic assets” by Pakistan’s security agencies.

Therefore, the allegation that Washington had provided material support to the Islamic State-affiliate in Afghanistan and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) as a tit-for-tat response to Pakistan’s security agencies double game of providing support to the Afghan Taliban to mount attacks against the Afghan security forces and their American backers cannot be ruled out.

In November, for instance, infighting between the main faction of the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada and a breakaway faction led by Mullah Mohammad Rasul left scores of fighters dead in Afghanistan’s western Herat province.

Mullah Rasul was close to Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, and served as the governor of southwestern Nimroz province during the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. After the news of the death of Mullah Omar was made public in 2015, Mullah Rasul broke ranks with the Taliban and formed his own faction.

Mullah Rasul's group is active in the provinces of Herat, Farah, Nimroz and Helmand, and is known to have received arms and support [4] from the Afghan intelligence, as he had expressed willingness to recognize the Washington-backed Kabul government.

Regarding Washington’s motives for providing covert support to breakaway factions of the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack, and toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the Northern Alliance comprised of ethnic Tajik and Uzbek warlords.

The leadership and fighters of the Taliban found sanctuary in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and mounted an insurgency against the Washington-backed Kabul government. Throughout the occupation years, Washington kept pressuring Islamabad to mount military operations in the tribal areas in order to deny safe havens to the Taliban.

However, Islamabad was reticent to conduct military operations, which is a euphemism for all-out war, for the fear of alienating the Pashtun population of the tribal areas. After Pakistan’s military’s raid in July 2007 on a mosque in the heart of Islamabad, which also contained a religious seminary, scores of civilians, including students of the seminary, died.

The Pakistani Taliban made the incident a rallying call for waging a jihad against Pakistan’s military. Thereafter, terror attacks and suicide bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus peaked after the July 2007 incident. Eventually, Pakistan’s military decided in 2009 to conduct military operations against militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The first military operation was mounted in the Swat valley in April 2009, the second in South Waziristan tribal agency in October the same year, and the third ongoing military operation was launched in North Waziristan and Khyber tribal agencies in June 2014. In the ensuing violence, tens of thousands of civilians, security personnel and militants lost their lives.

Although Pakistani political commentators often point fingers at the Washington-backed Kabul government in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s arch-foe India for providing money and arms to the Pakistani Taliban for waging a guerrilla war against Pakistan’s state establishment, according to inside sources of Pakistan’s security agencies, Washington had provided covert support to the Pakistani Taliban in order to force Pakistan’s military to conduct military operations against militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Keeping this background of Washington’s covert support to breakaway factions of the Afghan Taliban that had waged an insurgency against the US-backed Kabul government and to the Pakistani Taliban that had mounted a guerrilla war against Pakistan’s state establishment in mind, the allegations by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Washington had provided material support to the Islamic State’s affiliate in the Af-Pak region in order to divide and weaken the Taliban resistance against American occupation of Afghanistan cannot be ruled out.   

Finally, the distinction between the Taliban and the Islamic State lies in the fact that the Taliban follow Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is a sect native to South Asia and the jihadists of the Islamic State mostly belong to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi denomination.

Secondly, and more importantly, the insurgency in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan is a Pashtun uprising which is an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, whereas the bulk of the Islamic State’s jihadists in Syria and Iraq was comprised of Arab militants and included foreign fighters from neighboring countries, North Africa, the Central Asian states, Russia, China and even radicalized Muslims from as far away as Europe and the United States.

The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige and to draw funds and followers, but which doesn’t have any organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.

The total strength of the Islamic State Khorasan is estimated to be between 3,000 to 5,000 fighters. By comparison, the strength of the Taliban is estimated to be between 60,000 to 80,000 militants. The Islamic State Khorasan was formed as a merger between several breakaway factions of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban in early 2015. Later, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a Pakistani terrorist group Jundullah and Chinese Uyghur militants pledged allegiance to it.

In 2017, it split into two factions. One faction based in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province is led by a Pakistani militant commander Aslam Farooqi, and the other faction based in the northern provinces of Afghanistan is led by a former Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) commander Moawiya. The latter faction also includes Uzbek, Tajik, Uyghur and Baloch militants.

Footnotes:

[1] Moscow accuses Washington of aiding Islamic State Khorasan:

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-military-rejects-russia-numbers-of-islamic-state-fighters-in-afghanistan/4268999.html

[2] Hamid Karzai’s interview: ISIS in Afghanistan is US tool:

https://www.rt.com/news/407134-isis-afghanistan-us-tool-karzai/

[3] Pulse Nightclub Gunman's Father Was an FBI Informant:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pulse-gunman-s-father-was-secret-fbi-informant-court-filing-n860116

[4] Mullah Rasul faction of Taliban has received support from Kabul:

https://www.rferl.org/a/taliban-infighting-leaves-dozens-of-militants-dead-in-afghanistan/29630816.html

As Washington’s Client, Can Europe Save Iran Nuclear Deal?

The Trump administration recently announced the most stringent set of sanctions against Iran to appease Benjamin Netanyahu. Donald Trump has repeatedly said during the last two years that the Iran nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration in 2015 was an “unfair deal” that gave concessions to Iran without giving anything in return to the US.

Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth in Trump’s statements because the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in July 2015 under pressure, as Washington had bungled in its Middle East policy and it wanted Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to get a face-saving.

In order to understand how the Obama administration bungled in Syria and Iraq, we should bear the background of Washington’s Middle East policy during the recent years in mind. The eight-year-long conflict in Syria that gave birth to scores of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional Sunni allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama Administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause, hence they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Obama Administration began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017, and then another truck-ramming atrocity occurred in Lower Manhattan in October 2017 that was also claimed by the Islamic State.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Obama administration in Syria and Iraq in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Obama administration desperately needed Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to salvage its botched policy of training and arming jihadists to topple the government Bashar al-Assad in Syria that backfired and gave birth to the Islamic State that carried out some of the most audacious terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Thus, Washington signed JCPOA in July 2015 that gave some concessions to Iran, and in return, the then hardliner Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki was forced out of power in September 2014 with Iran’s tacit approval and the moderate former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was appointed in his stead who gave permission to the US Air Force and ground troops to assist the Iraqi Armed Forces and allied militias to beat back the Islamic State from Mosul and Anbar.

The Trump administration, however, is not hampered by the legacy of Obama administration and since the objective of defeating the Islamic State has already been achieved and Donald Trump gave indications of withdrawing American troops from Syria as early as April last year, though the long-awaited decision was finally announced on December 19, therefore Washington felt safe to annul the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and the crippling “third party” sanctions have once again been put in place on Iran at Benjamin Netanyahu’s behest.

Although the European Union is resisting the Trump administration’s pressure to cancel the Iran nuclear deal for now, the neocolonial world order is led by the United States; Europe will find no choice but to toe Washington’s line sooner or later.

It’s worth noting that both NATO and European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset the influence of former Soviet Union which is geographically adjacent to Europe. It is not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the foundations of the European Union was signed in February 1992.

The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to lure the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of agreements to abolish internal border checks between the EU member states, thus allowing the free movement of labor from the impoverished Eastern Europe to the prosperous countries of the Western Europe.

Reportedly, 80,000 US troops have currently been deployed in Europe out of 275,000 total US troops stationed all over the world, including 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the UK. By comparison, the number of US troops stationed in Afghanistan is only 14,000 which is regarded as an occupied country. Thus, Europe is nothing more than a client of corporate America.

No wonder then, the Western political establishments, and particularly the deep states of the US and EU, are as freaked out about the outcome of Brexit as they were during the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and tried to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars of loan package offered by Vladimir Putin.

In this regard, the founding of the EU has been similar to the case of Japan and South Korea in the Far East where 45,000 and 30,000 US troops have currently been deployed, respectively. After the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of geographically adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman administration authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and to send a signal to the leaders of the former Soviet Union, which had not developed its nuclear program at the time, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in Europe.

Then, during the Cold War, American entrepreneurs invested heavily in the economies of Japan and South Korea and made them model industrialized nations to forestall the expansion of communism in the Far East. Similarly, after the Second World War, Washington embarked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with an economic assistance of $13 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in the current dollar value. Since then, Washington has maintained its military and economic dominance over Western Europe.

There is an essential stipulation in the European Union’s charter of union, according to which the developing economies of Europe that joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the developed countries would allow free movement of labor.

What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of people only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.

Now, when the international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they try to protect the interests of their largest donors by shares, the developed economies.

Regardless, while joining the EU, Britain compromised on the rights of its working class in order to protect the interests of its bankers and industrialists, because free trade with the rest of the EU countries spurred British exports. The British working classes overwhelmingly voted in the favor of Brexit because after Britain’s entry into the EU and when the agreements on abolishing internal border checks between the EU member states became effective, the cheaper labor force from the Eastern and Central Europe flooded the markets of Western Europe, and consequently the wages of native British workers dropped and it also became difficult for them to find jobs, because foreigners were willing to do the same job for lesser pays, hence raising the level of unemployment among the British workers and consequent discontentment with the EU.

The subsequent lifting of restrictions on the Romanians and Bulgarians to work in the European Union in January 2014 further exacerbated the problem, and consequently the majority of the British electorate voted in a June 2016 referendum to opt out of the EU. The biggest incentive for the British working class to vote for Brexit is that the East European workers will have to leave Britain after its exit from the EU, and the jobs will once again become available with better wages to the native British workforce.

The developed economies of the Western Europe would never have acceded to the condition of free movement of labor that goes against their economic interests; but the deep state of the US, which is the hub of corporate power and wields enormous influence in the Western capitalist bloc, persuaded the unwilling states of the Western Europe to yield to the condition against their national interests in order to wean away the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe from the Russian influence.

Thus, all the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and equality aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the Western military alliance against the erstwhile Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to isolate adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policy as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.

It would be pertinent to mention that though Theresa May’s Conservatives-led government is in favor of Brexit, the neoliberal British deep state and European establishments led by France and Germany are fiercely opposed to Britain’s exit from the EU.

Since the referendum, the British deep state and European establishments have created numerous hurdles in the way of Brexit. The First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon is demanding more autonomy and control over Scotland’s vast oil and gas reserves and a debate is raging on over a “soft border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which will remain in EU post-Brexit. Instead of a smooth transition to an independent state, Britain is more likely to disintegrate in its effort to leave the EU.

Last year, 25 out of 28 EU member states signed an enhanced security cooperation agreement known as the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), whose aim is to structurally integrate the armed forces of EU members. Britain along with Denmark and Malta has been left out. Keeping the EU’s status as Washington’s client in mind, it would be naïve to assume the EU can bypass the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran for long.

Kashmir Insurgency: The Legacy of Soviet-Afghan Jihad

A question would naturally arise in the minds of curious observers of regional geopolitics that why did Pakistan choose to wage Washington’s proxy war against the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s?

Was it to strengthen its defenses against India, the oft-quoted “strategic depth” military doctrine, or the fear that the former Soviet Union might make further advances into Pakistan’s western Balochistan province to reach the warm waters of the Arabian Sea?

All these geopolitical considerations might have played a part, but in order to understand the real reason why Pakistan decided to become Washington’s accomplice in the Afghan conflict, we need to understand the nature of power.

Rationally speaking, power ought to be means to achieve higher goals, but “normative idealism” is generally shunned in realpolitik, and rather than as means to an end, power is cherished as an end in itself, and it is the nature of power to expand further and to grow more powerful.

Thus, Pakistan’s military establishment did not collaborate in Washington’s “bear trap” project for any ulterior strategic goal; the objective was simply to exercise power by taking advantage of the opportunity.

In order to elaborate this abstract concept, I would like to draw a parallel between power and sex. In the grand scheme of things, sex is not an end in itself; it is means to an end, the end being the procreation of offspring.

But many hedonic couples nowadays use contraceptives and don’t consider it worthwhile to procreate and nurture children, due to economic constraints or the unnecessary effort that nurturing children inevitably entails.

Social scientists have no business offering advice or moral lessons; to each his own. But if the ultimate end for which nature has invented the agency comes to a naught, that does not per se renders the agency any less significant, instead the agency itself becomes a categorical imperative.

Thus, power is like sex; its exercise is pleasurable and its goal is further expansion and amassing more power to gratify insatiable needs of compulsive power-maniacs.

Regarding the much-touted argument that Pakistan’s military trained and armed Afghan jihadists during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s as self-defense to prevent the likelihood of Soviet Union invading Pakistan’s western Balochistan province in order to reach the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, according to recently declassified documents [1] of the White House, CIA and State Department, as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

The then American President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year. That the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was formed several years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Historically, Pakistan’s military first used the Islamists of Jamaat-e-Islami during the Bangladesh war of liberation in the late 1960s against the Bangladeshi nationalist Mukti Bahini liberation movement of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman – the father of current prime minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, and the founder of Bangladesh, which was then a province of Pakistan and known as East Pakistan before the independence of Bangladesh in 1971.

Jamaat-e-Islami is a far-right Islamist movement in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – analogous to the Muslim Brotherhood political party in Egypt and Turkey – several of whose leaders have recently been hanged by the Bangladeshi nationalist government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed for committing massacres of Bangladeshi civilians on behalf of Pakistan’s military during the late 1960s.

Then, during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security establishment was wary of his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a result of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

Pakistan’s support to the Islamists with the Saudi petro-dollars and Washington’s blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamic insurgencies in the entire region comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indian-administered Kashmir and the Soviet Central Asian States.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamic insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

Regarding the Kashmir dispute, there can be no two views that the right of self-determination of Kashmiris must be respected in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions on the right of plebiscite for the Kashmiri people, and Pakistan should lend its moral, political and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri cause; but at the same time, the militarization of any dispute, including Kashmir, must be avoided due to massive human suffering that militancy and wars anywhere in the world inevitably entail.

The insurgency in Kashmir erupted in the fateful year of 1984 of the Orwellian-fame when the Indian Armed Forces surreptitiously occupied the whole of Siachen glacier, including the un-demarcated Pakistani portion.

Now, we must keep the backdrop in mind: those were the heydays of the Cold War and Pakistan Army’s proxies, the Afghan jihadists, were winning battle after battle against the Soviet Red Army, and the morale of Pakistan Army's top brass was touching the sky.

Moreover, Pakistan’s security establishment also wanted to inflict damage to the Indian Armed Forces to exact revenge for the dismemberment of Pakistan at the hands of India during the Bangladesh War of 1971, when India provided support to Bangladeshi nationalists and took 90,000 Pakistani soldiers as prisoners of war after Pakistan’s humiliating defeat in the war of liberation of Bangladesh.

All the military’s top brass had to do was to divert a fraction of its Afghan jihadist proxies toward the Indian-administered Kashmir to kindle the fires of insurgency in Kashmir. Pakistan’s security agencies began sending jihadists experienced in the Afghan guerilla warfare across the border to the Indian-administered Kashmir in the late 1980s; and by the early 1990s, the Islamist insurgency engulfed the whole of Jammu and Kashmir region.

Here, it’s worth noting, however, that an insurgency cannot succeed anywhere unless militants get some level of popular support from local population. For example: if a hostile force tries to foment an insurgency in Pakistan’s province of Punjab, it wouldn’t succeed; because Punjabis don’t have any grievances against Pakistan.

On the other hand, if an adversary tries to incite an insurgency in the marginalized province of Balochistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas, it will easily succeed, because the local Baloch and Pashtun populations have grievances against the heavy-handedness of Pakistan’s security establishment.

Therefore, to put the blame squarely on the Pakistani side for the Kashmir conflict would be unfair. Firstly, immediately after the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, India annexed the Muslim-majority princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in violation of the agreed-upon “partition principle” that allocated the Muslim-majority provinces of the British India to Pakistan and the Hindu-majority regions to India.

Even now, if someone tries to foment an insurgency in the Pakistan-administered Kashmir, it wouldn’t succeed, because the Kashmiri Muslims identify themselves with Pakistan. The Indian-administered Kashmir has seen many waves for independence since 1947, but not a single voice has been raised for independence in the Pakistan-administered Kashmir in Pakistan’s seventy-year history.

Secondly, India re-ignited the conflict by occupying the strategically placed Siachen glacier in 1984. Pakistan's stance on Kashmir has been quite flexible and it has floated numerous proposals to resolve the dispute. But India is now the new strategic partner of Washington against China, hence India’s stance on the Kashmir dispute has been quite inflexible, as it is negotiating from a position of strength. Diplomacy aside, however, the real victims of this intransigence and hubris on both sides have been the Kashmiri people and a lot of innocent blood has been spilled for no good reason.

Finally, another obstacle to the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute is that the Kashmiri liberation struggle and militancy have been indigenized to a great extent during the last two decades. An entire generation of Kashmiri youth has been brought up in an environment of fear and bloodletting. Now, no political solution to the Kashmir conflict is possible unless it is acceptable to domestic political leadership of the Kashmiri people.

Afghanistan Pullout: Culmination of America’s Longest War

On Saturday, January 26, Reuters reported [1] that Taliban officials said the US negotiators agreed on a draft peace pact setting out the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan within 18 months, potentially ending the United States longest war.

Confirming the news, New York Times reported [2] on Monday, January 28, that the US chief negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad stated the American and Taliban officials had agreed in principle to the framework of a peace deal in which the insurgents guaranteed to prevent Afghan territory from being used by terrorists, and that could lead to a full pullout of American troops in return for a ceasefire and Taliban talks with the Afghan government.

Moreover, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted on Saturday: “The US is serious about pursuing peace, preventing Afghanistan from continuing to be a space for international terrorism and bringing forces home,” though he declined to provide a timeframe for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan.

The news of drawdown of American forces is expected after the next round of peace talks is held in late February in the capital of Qatar, Doha, in which Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close aide to the Taliban’s deceased leader Mullah Omar, will lead the Taliban delegation.

Baradar was released from captivity [3] in October by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and was allowed to join his family in Afghanistan. He was captured in a joint US-Pakistan intelligence operation in the southern port city of Karachi in 2010. His release was a longstanding demand of the Afghan government because he is regarded as a comparatively moderate Taliban leader who could play a positive role in the peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban.

Alongside the issues of Taliban providing guarantees it would not allow Afghan soil to be used by transnational terrorists, al-Qaeda and Islamic State Khorasan, the Taliban holding direct negotiations with the US-backed Afghan government – which the Taliban regards as an American stooge and hence refuse to recognize – a permanent ceasefire and the formation of a mutually acceptable interim government, a few other minor issues, such as the exchange and release of prisoners, removing travel restrictions on the Taliban leadership and unfreezing its bank accounts are also on the agenda of the peace talks.

Although both Reuters and New York Times reports hailed the news of the pullout of American forces from Afghanistan a diplomatic victory for Washington since the Taliban had agreed to a ceasefire and holding talks with the US-backed government of Afghanistan, in fact the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Afghan soil would be a stellar victory for the Taliban and one of the most humiliating defeats for Washington since the Fall of Saigon in 1975, because besides destroying a country of thirty-million people, Washington has failed to achieve any of its objective, including the much-touted imperialist project of “nation-building,” during its seventeen years of occupation of Afghanistan.

Regarding the presence of transnational terrorist networks on the Afghan soil, the al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has already been killed in a May 2011 raid of the US Navy Seals in the Abbottabad compound in Pakistan and its second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri is on the run. Besides, the number of al-Qaeda’s Arab militants in the Af-Pak region does not exceed more than a few hundred and are hence inconsequential.

As far as Islamic State Khorasan is concerned, a number of Islamic State affiliates have recently sprung up all over the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia regions that have no organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq, such as the Islamic State-affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and even Boko Haram in Nigeria now falls under the rubric of the Islamic State.

It is understandable for laymen to conflate such local militant outfits for the Islamic State proper in Iraq and Syria, but how come the policy analysts of think tanks and the corporate media’s terrorism experts, who are fully aware of this not-so-subtle distinction, have fallen for such a ruse?

Can we classify any ragtag militant outfit as the Islamic State merely on the basis of ideological affinity and “a letter of accreditation” from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi without the Islamic State’s Baathist command structure and superior weaponry that has been bankrolled by the Gulf’s petro-dollars?

The Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, deliberately and knowingly fall for such stratagems because it serves the scaremongering agenda of vested interests. Before acknowledging the Islamic State’s affiliates in the region, the Western mainstream media also similarly and “naively” acknowledged al-Qaeda’s affiliates in the region, too, merely on the basis of ideological affinity without any organizational and operational association with al-Qaeda Central, such as al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb.

Regarding the creation and composition of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, apart from training and arms which were provided to Syrian militants in the training camps located in the Turkish and Jordanian border regions adjacent to Syria by the CIA in collaboration with Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies, another factor that contributed to the stellar success of the Islamic State in early 2014 when it overran Raqqa in Syria and Mosul and Anbar in Iraq was that its top cadres were comprised of former Baathist military and intelligence officers from the Saddam era.

Reportedly, hundreds of ex-Baathists constituted the top and mid-tier command structure of the Islamic State who planned all the operations and directed its military strategy. The only feature that differentiated the Islamic State from all other insurgent groups was its command structure which was comprised of professional ex-Baathists and its state-of-the-art weaponry that was provided to all militant outfits fighting in Syria by the intelligence agencies of the Western powers, Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf states.

Recently, the Islamic State’s purported “terror franchises” in Afghanistan and Pakistan have claimed a spate of bombings against the Shi’a and Barelvi Muslims who are regarded as heretics by Takfiris. But to contend that the Islamic State is responsible for suicide blasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan is to declare that the Taliban are responsible for the sectarian war in Syria and Iraq.

Both are localized militant outfits and the Islamic State without its Baathist command structure and superior weaponry is just another ragtag, regional militant outfit. The distinction between the Taliban and the Islamic State lies in the fact that the Taliban follow Deobandi sect of Sunni Islam which is a sect native to South Asia and the jihadists of the Islamic State mostly belong to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi denomination.

Secondly, and more importantly, the insurgency in Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan is a Pashtun uprising which is an ethnic group native to Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, while the bulk of the Islamic State’s jihadists is comprised of Arab militants of Syria and Iraq.

The so-called “Khorasan Province” of the Islamic State in the Af-Pak region is nothing more than a coalition of several breakaway factions of the Taliban and a few other inconsequential local militant outfits that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in order to enhance their prestige and draw funds and followers, but which don’t have any organizational and operational association, whatsoever, with the Islamic State proper in Syria and Iraq.

Conflating the Islamic State either with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or with myriads of ragtag, local militant groups is a deliberate deception intended to mislead public opinion in order to exaggerate the threat posed by the Islamic State which serves the scaremongering agenda of Western and regional security establishments.

CIA was Aiding Jihadists before Soviets Invaded Afghanistan

Ronald Reagan and Younas Khalis.

Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan’s security agencies which nurtured the Afghan so-called “mujahideen” (freedom fighters) on the behest of Washington.

Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile ‘freedom fighters’ to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran.

According to recently declassified documents [1] of the White House, CIA and State Department as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviets invaded in 1979. The then American President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.

That the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents and admitted by The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. The Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA as Bezos won a $600 million contract [2] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

Fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was formed several years earlier.

During the late 1970s, Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security establishment was wary of his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a result of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

Pakistan’s support to the Islamists with the Saudi petro-dollars and Washington’s blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamic insurgencies in the entire region comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Soviet Central Asian States.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its 40 million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamic insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

Even the American President Donald Trump recently admitted [3]: “The reason Russia invaded Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia; they were right to be there.” Incidentally, Trump also implied the reason why Soviet Union collapsed was due to the economic burden of the Soviet-Afghan War, as he was making a point about the withdrawal of American forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding, in the Soviet-Afghan War between the global capitalist and global communist blocs, Saudi Arabia and the rest of Gulf’s petro-monarchies took the side of the global capitalist bloc because the former Soviet Union and Central Asian states produce more energy and consume less. Thus, the Soviet-led bloc was a net exporter of energy whereas the Western capitalist bloc was a net importer.

It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the Western capitalist bloc. Now, the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East’s energy, but it’s a recent development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the industrialized Western nations suited the economic interests of the Gulf countries.

Why did Pakistan choose to join this unholy alliance against the global Left? In order to understand this, we need to take a cursory look at the history of Pakistan. During the British colonial rule before the independence of the subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan’s leadership used to have a patron-client relationship with the British imperialists.

The Indian leadership also used to have that relationship with the British imperialists, but in the case of Pakistan, there was an additional aggravating factor involved: the numerical weakness of the Indian Muslims and their consequent dependence on the British imperialists against the permanent numerical majority of the Hindus.

It’s not that the Hindu leaders were not afflicted with the colonial mentality, but in the case of Pakistani leaders, the myth of invincibility and infallibility of the West was cherished even more. That’s why Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan declined the request of a state visit from the former Soviet Union and went on a state visit to Washington instead.

It wasn’t just the colonial mentality of Pakistan’s leaders but certain geopolitical considerations also played into their thinking for forming a strategic alliance with the Western bloc. Immediately after the independence, India annexed the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir in violation of the agreed-upon Partition Principle that allocated the Muslim-majority provinces of the British India to Pakistan and the Hindu-majority regions to India.

Then in the 1950s, India took advantage of the Kashmiri territory, as the riverheads of Pakistani rivers are located in Kashmir, and diverted the waters of Pakistani rivers to irrigate India’s western provinces. The whole of Bahawalpur region in southern Punjab turned barren overnight and the agricultural economy of the nascent state of Pakistan suffered a tremendous blow.

With the involvement of the World Bank and the Tennessee Valley Authority of the US, Pakistan and India signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960, which allocated exclusive rights for the use of three eastern rivers to India, and some rights such as the right to build hydroelectric projects over the western Pakistani rivers, Jhelum and Chenab, as well.

All these incidents and Pakistan’s relative weakness vis-à-vis India made it even more dependent on the Western military and developmental aid. That’s why it joined the Washington-led, anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the region during the 1950s.

So much so that when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in May 1960 by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then-President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged that the spy plane had flown from the American airbase in Pakistan’s northwestern metropolis, Peshawar.

When Pakistan had forged such a close alliance with Washington, it became impossible for it to stay neutral when the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Regarding the motives of the belligerents involved, the Americans wanted to take revenge for their defeat at the hands of communists in Vietnam, the Gulf countries had forged close economic ties with the Western bloc and Pakistan was dependent on the Western military aid, hence it didn’t have a choice but to toe Washington’s policy in Afghanistan.

In the end, the Soviet-Afghan War proved to be a “bear trap” and the former Soviet Union was eventually defeated and was subsequently dissolved in December 1991. It did not collapse because of the Afghan Jihad but that was an important factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Regardless, more than twenty years before the declassification of the State Department documents as mentioned in the aforementioned Washington Post report, in the 1998 interview [4] to the alternative news outlet The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview: The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “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?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.