BLACK TERROR WHITE SOLDIER PART 37

The New Great Game Part 1

   Once the Christian Right were recruited to the cause of conservatism, the neoconservatives’ imperialistic objectives could also be packaged for broader popular consumption by making use of religious terminology. According to Professor Stephen Holmes, who was interviewed in the Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Power of Nightmares:

The Straussians started to create a worldview which is a fiction. The world is not divided into good and evil. The battle in which we are engaged is not a battle between good and evil. The United States, as anyone who observes understands, has done some good and some bad things. It’s like any great power. This is the way history is. But they wanted to create a world of moral certainties, so therefore they invent mythologies— fairytales—describing any force in the world that obstructs the United States as somehow Satanic, or associated with evil.¹

With Reagan in office, who now referred to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire,” the neoconservatives, to build on their global ambitions, escalated a covert strategy inherited when he came into office. It consisted of assisting the Muslim“freedom fightheers,”Mujahideen of Afghanistan, who were combatting the Soviets since their invasion of the country in 1979. The secret war was part of the Americans’ ongoing confrontations, both during and after the Cold War, known as the New Great Game, a conceptualization of modern geopolitics in Central Eurasia, as a competition between the US, Britain and other NATO countries against Russia, China and other Shanghai Cooperation Organisation countries for “influence, power, hegemony and profits in Central Asia and the Transcaucasus.” ²

The new confrontation in Afghanistan was part of a long-term plan devised by Carter’s Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski’s plan was itself an extension of the one devised by influential neoconservative academic Bernard Lewis, a former British agent and Oxford university specialist in Islamic studies. In May of 1979, four months after the installation of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Lewis presented a detailed study on the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism at a Bilderberg meeting in Austria. Lewis’ proposal then came to be known as the Bernard Lewis Plan, a revision of the British Divide and Conquer strategy, which endorsed the Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote the Balkanization and fragmentation along ethnic and religious lines of the entire Muslim Near East. Lewis argued that the West should encourage nationalistic upheavals among minorities, such as the Lebanese Maronites, the Kurds, the Armenians, Druze, Baluchis, Azerbaijani Turks, Syrian Alawis, the Copts of Ethiopia, Sudanese mystical sects, Arabian tribes and so on.³

Brzezinski accepted Lewis’ hypothesis in believing that Islamic fundamentalism could be played as a “geo -strategic” card to destabilize the USSR.⁴ In his plans, Brzezinski was inspired by the ideas of Halford Mackinder, one of the founding fathers of “geopolitics,” who had also inspired the author of the Nazi lebensraum policy, and Vril society member, Karl Haushofer. What Brzezinski learned from Mackinder was to regard the domination of the world as dependent on control of Eurasia, which in turn was dependent on control of Central Asia. In Brzezinski’s time, however, the several states of Central Asia were all under Soviet domination, which included many of the “stans,” like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Also in Central  Asia,  but  only  within  the the  sphere  of     Soviet            influence, was Afghanistan. Brzezinski’s plan therefore was to create an “Arc of Crisis” by igniting a vanguard of Islamic fundamentalism across the Middle East and Asia to confront the Soviets.⁵ In the second chapter of The Grand Chessboard, entitled “The Eurasian Chessboard,” Brzezinski describes a “global-zone of percolating violence” that can be skillfully manipulated to impede Eurasian integration. According to a map of this region in the book, this zone includes all of Central Asia, extending westward to include Turkey, northward to include southern Russia and eastward to touch upon the western borders of China. It includes the entire Middle East, where Brzezinski claims it is imperative for the United States to retain control, especially in the critical Persian Gulf. And, the zone extends eastward to include Afghanistan and Pakistan, up to the latter’s border with India.

Brzezinski’s plan began by triggering the war in Afghanistan. Little publicized in the West is the fact that the Americans started to fund factions of the Muslim Brotherhood in Afghanistan, knowing full well that it would provoke the Russians into invading the country.⁶ Once the plan had succeeded and the Russians invaded in December 1979, the Americans continued to fund these Mujahideen factions, then being celebrated in the media as “Freedom Fighters,” with the Saudis matching their funding “dollar for dollar.” Code-named Operation Cyclone, it became one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken, with combined contributions eventually achieving a total of ten billon dollars. To ensure the CIA’s plausible deniability, support to the Mujahideen was coordinated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI originally established in 1948 by Joseph Cawthorn, a British Intelligence agent of MI6, with whom it has continually maintained close ties.⁷

  

        As Gilles Keppel explains in The War for Muslim Minds, “The young neoconservatives who came to Washington during the Reagan years seized upon the Afghan conflicts as a proxy war against the Soviet Union, part of a broad global strategy to combat communism around the globe.”⁸ To recruit President Reagan to their objectives, the neoconservatives had set out to prove that the Soviet threat was far greater than what Team B had initially proposed. They would demonstrate that the majority of terrorism and revolutionary movements around the world were part of a secret Soviet conspiracy. The main proponent of this theory was Michael Ledeen, acting as the special adviser to the Secretary of State from 1981 to 1982. Over the next several years, Ledeen would use his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, to lead the neoconservatives in their attempt to demonstrate the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world’s key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East.

   Ledeen  had  been influenced by a best-selling book calledTheTerror Network, which alleged that all terrorist groups, from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany and the IRA were secretly run by the Soviet Union. Though the CIA denounced the allegations as more neoconservative fantasy, William Casey, who was the new head of the CIA, was a powerful ally of the neoconservatives. He was convinced of the plot outlined in the Terror Network and called a meeting of the CIA’s Soviet analysts and told them to produce a report for the President that proved the network existed. But the analysts informed him that much of the information in the book came from black propaganda the CIA deliberately invented to impugn the Soviet Union. All the analysts were therefore dismissed.

However, at the State Department, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig and his director of policy planning Paul Wolfowitz also believed these charges and asked the CIA to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on Soviet sponsorship of international terrorism. The draft estimate concluded that Moscow provided arms and training to such groups as the PLO and that Moscow’s East European allies provided support to terrorist groups. However, it noted, there was no evidence of such Soviet involvement, nor was there any evidence of Soviet links to such groups as the Red Brigades in Italy, Baader-Meinhof in West Germany or the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). In fact, the draft explained that the bulk of the evidence pointed to the contrary and the intelligence organizations of Italy, West Germany and the United Kingdom agreed.⁹

Under this intense lobbying, Reagan agreed to yield to the neoconservatives and signed a secret document that would now allow the funding of covert operations to combat the supposed hidden Soviet threat around the world.¹⁰ The escalation of America’s covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan then evolved in stages. Over the fi rst war or defeat the Soviets and force a withdrawal, but rather to bleed and cause them international embarrassment. In 1984, however, with the help of Rep. Charlie Wilson, with the enthusiastic support of director William Casey, the CIA’s funding increased rapidly, compounded by the matching contributions of the Saudis. In addition to increasing funding, Casey also sought to provide the Mujahideen more sophisticated weaponry, like the Stinger missiles, which are believed to have been decisive in changing the momentum of the war.

To add to the number of Mujahideen fighting the Casey Soviet endorsed a worldwide recruitment effort to be organized through the CIA. Arab governments from around the world, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and international organizations, in addition to the Muslim Brotherhood, like the Muslim World League, the International Relief Organization, the Jamat Tabligh,  a Pakistani missionary organization, all ran to recruit fighters.

From Egypt were recruited those fanatics who had been responsible for the assassination of its president Anwar Sadat in 1981. At the time, the revolution had succeeded in Iran, the CIA-backed war was under way in Afghanistan and a wave of Islamic activism was sweeping across the Arab world. As Robert Dreyfuss explains:

This extraordinary series of developments were made possible in part by Sadat’s and America’s favorite ally, Saudi Arabia. Now awash in tens of billions of petrodollars, thanks to the 1970s oil-price increases imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Saudis used cold, hard cash to build a pro-American empire of Islamic banks and financial institutions Pakistan, in Egypt and elsewhere. It was the marriage between the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and the power of Islamic ba wing Islamism to worldwide power.¹¹

Sheikh Omar Abdur Rahman, also known as the Blind Sheikh, was among the recruits of Sadat’s project Islamization, having been a founding member of the Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE). Nevertheless, he was ultimately involved in inspiring the radicals responsible for Sadat’s assassination in 1981. Although praised in the West, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and honored as “Man of the Year” on the cover of Time magazine, in 1977 Sadat gained the ire of the Islamists by taking a controversial stance in the Muslim world by opening negotiations with Israel that led to the Camp David Egypt-Israel agreement. To make matters worse, Israel quickly and brashly exploited the peace treaty by annexing East Jerusalem, constructing West- Bank settlements, and bombing Iraq’s nuclear facilities, further infuriating the Muslim World.

Sadat’s assassination was coordinated by Abdul Salam Faraj, leader of the Cairo branch of Islamic Jihad, to which Sheikh Omar belonged. As explained by Kamal Habib, a founding member of Islamic Jihad:

We spearheaded the jihadi state of mind rather than the earlier, more moderate ideas in the liberal era that simply accepted reality. Psychologically we thought we were superior to reality. We despised the everyday vision of the world, and we wanted to transform or change this reality. Therefore our dream was to get rid of Sadat.¹²

Faraj made a significant contribution in elevating the role of “ Jihad” in radical  Islam with his pamphlet al Farida al Ghaiba (“The neglected obligation”), which popularized the use of the bogus Mardin Fatwa, and that has become a manifesto for militant groups. The original goal of Faraj’s Islamic Jihad was to overthrow the Egyptian Government and replace it with an Islamic state. Later it broadened its aims to include attacking American and Israeli interests in Egypt and abroad. The culmination of this terror campaign was the parade by a group of Army officers who were assassination of Sadat at an army a part of Islamic Jihad, led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli.

Eric Margolis of the Toronto Star said General Hosni Mubarak, who was wounded in the attack, was then put into power with US assistance.¹³ Many members of Islamic Jihad were immediately arrested, and the regime launched a massive manhunt. Among the leaders arrested were Ayman al Zawahiri, later to become bin Laden’s second-in-command. From his jail cell Zawahiri pronounced to the media:

Now, we want to speak to the whole world! Who are we? Who are we?

Why did they bring us here? And w question: we are Muslims! We are Muslims who believe in their religion, in their broad feelings, as both an ideology and practice. We believe in our religion, both as an ideology and practice. And hence, we tried our best to establish [unintelligible] Islamic state and Islamic society!¹⁴

Al Zawahiri hails from an elite Egyptian family. His father’s uncle, Rabia al Zawahiri, was the grand imam of Al Azhar University. His mother came from the wealthy and influential  Azzam clan. Her father, Ayman’s grandfather, served as the president of Cairo University and founded King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.¹⁵ His great-uncle was British agent Abdul Rahman Azzam, who was also associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. After World War I, when the Sanussi Brotherhood became an asset of British Arab Bureau in Cairo, Azzam was dispatched to Tripolitania to help organize the order’s political work. Azzam would eventu the British-sponsored League of Arab States after World War II.¹⁶

Zawahiri’s interpretation of “Jihad” showed how Islamic terrorism could be employed by Western powers by completely betraying the very essence of Islam. Worse still, Zawahiri exemplified Machiavellianism which is acomplete reversal of the message of Islam. As explained Azzam Tamimi of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought:

…came to the conclusion that because you have what you believe to be a sublime objective, then the means can be as ugly as they can get. You can kill as many people as you wish, because the end means is noble. The logic is that “we are the vanguards, we are the correct Muslims, everybody else is wrong. Not only wrong, but everybody else is not a Muslim, and the only means available to us today is just to kill our way to perfection. ¹⁷

Following the assassination of Sadat, an offshoot of Islamic Jihad was created, known as al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (also known as “The Islamic Group”), of which Sheikh Omar became the leader. Zawahiri has since come to be considered bin Laden’s second hand man, and then the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, after the organization was formally merged with al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was created when the ISI requested the presence of a Saudi prince to lead the “Jihad” in Afghanistan. While no volunteers were forthcoming, the Saudi leaders recommended the scion of a wealthy family that was close to the monarchy, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was the son of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a Yemeni who started a Saudi construction firm whichafter his death in 1967 his sons built into the Saudi BinLaden Group, a multibillion dollar enterprise. Mohammed established a close relationship with Ibn Saud, who asked him to rebuild the sacred city of Mecca. Bin Laden, according to at least two separate reports, was recruited by the CIA in 1979.¹⁸ And contrary to common perception, bin Laden was not a fighter¹⁹ Working closely with  Saudi  intelligence, bin Laden was the bagman responsible for transmitting funds to the front, and to train the thousands around the world to fight  Brzezinski’s “ Jihad.” ²⁰

Casey also oversaw the complexities of what came to be known as the Iran-Contra Operation, which was viewed as “off-the- shelf,” meaning unaccountable and invisible, which involved an international network of illicit drug trafficking to garner secret funds to assist the Jihad” in  Afghanistan. It was as a response to the Iranian Hostage Crisis that the Americans had imposed an arms embargo on Iran, but which the CIA breached, despite Reagan’s campaign promise to never “negotiate with terrorists.” The key Iranian broker for arms talks between the Israelis and Iran was Ahmed Kashani, the son of British agent Ayatollah Kashani. Ahmed Kashani visited Israel in 1980, but according to Sick, “other channels between Israel and Iran were functioning long before he arrived.”²¹ While American policy had otherwise tilted towards support for Iraq, the Israelis, along with Casey and many neoconservatives, who held Zionist inclinations, saw otherwise. As Robert Dreyfuss explains:

Israel’s ties to Khomeini’s Iran were multifaceted. They had links to Iran’s armed forces and the successor organization to the Shah’s SAVAK secret service. In addition, thousands of Iranian Jews had long been active in the bazaar merchant class, many of whom had immigrated to Israel but maintained ties to Iran, including links to the families of the wealthier, conservative ayatollahs.²²

Funds from sales to the Iranians were then traded with the Contras for cocaine, which was then shipped to Mena, Arkansas, under then Governor Bill Clinton’s supervision, touching off the crack cocaine epidemic of the 80s.²³ Government involvement  in drug-trafficking dates back to Britain’s Opium Wars against China, headed by Lord Palmerston in 1840 and 1858. Starting in 1773, the British East India Company established a monopoly on the production of Indian opium, transporting it to China. The CIA’s involvement with drug-trafficking goes  back at least to its predecessor the Office of Strategic Service ( OSS).  Allen Dulles, then Swiss “Station Chief” for the OSS, allowed the former  Nazis he had hired          to finance themselves from their vast        stocks  of morphine, plundered Jewish gold and a mass of counterfeit British banknotes. ²⁴ Then, during the  Vietnam War, with the Air America network of  aircraft the  CIA took over control of the  opium trade controlled by the French,  known as the French Connection.

One estimate suggests that Barry Seal, known as the greatest drug dealer in American history, but who also worked for the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), ran as much as a hundred million worth of cocaine a month through Mena.²⁵ But it was the crashing of Barry Seal’s plane in that Niaragua finally exposed    the      Iran-Contra affair. Nevertheless.Nevertheless,expose CBS News correspondent Bill Plante complained there was a trail of “tens of millions of dollars in cocaine profits[from Mena], and we       don’t            know where it leads. It is a trail that has been blocked by the National Security Council.”²⁶

Barry Seal had been recruited at the age of seventeen along with Lee Harvey Oswald by CIA agent David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol in 1957.²⁷ Ferrie is the bizarre character and known pedophile portrayed by Joe Pecci in Oliver Stone’s JFK. A career US intelligence agent, Ferrie was a participant in the assassination of President Kennedy, and the first focal point of Jim Garrison’s investigation of  Kennedy’s  murder. The assassination team went by the name of Operation 40, established by Allen Dulles under Eisenhower in 1960, and later presided over by then Vice President Richard M. Nixon until 1961. Operation 40 played a major role in the Bay of Pigs invasion during the Kennedy administration, and recruited former Batista-regime intelligence officers, mob henchmen,   and mercenaries like Frank Sturgis, CIA case Howard Hunt, who would later become one of the Watergate burglars, and Felix Rodriguez who was later involved in the execution of Che Guevara.²⁸ Agents of Operation 40 were also commanded by Otto Skorzeny for operations in Guatemala, Brazil and Argentina.²⁹

The primary money laundering mechanism was the notorious Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), which was  closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE). Founded in 1972 by Pakistani Hassan Abedi, BCCI eventually collapsed under extensive fraud allegations in 1998. The BCCI had become the favored bank for Middle Eastern terrorists, and arms and drug runners, South American drug cartels, organized crime lords, and intelligence services such as the ISI, Mossad, MI6 and the CIA.³⁰ In Senate testimony, Robert Gates, the CIA director under former President George Bush Sr., referred to BCCI as the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International.”

One of the directors of BCCI was Khalid bin Mahfouz, who along with Salem bin Laden, head of the wealthy Saudi Arabian family and one of seventeen brothers to Osama bin Laden, was in business in Texas with young George W. Bush through his intermediary James Bath. Bath was recruited in 1976 by then CIA Director George H. W. Bush, to create offshore companies to move CIA funds and aircraft between Texas and Saudi Arabia.³¹ While also acting as Salem’s sole US business representative, Bath ran a business for  bin Mahfouz and joined a partnership with him and  Gaith Pharaon,  BCCI’s  frontman         in Houston. In 1979, Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, obtained financing from Bath.            As one of many investors, Bath gave Bush fifty    thousand dollars    for a five percent stake in Arbusto.      In the Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride  Into the Secret Heart of  BCCI, authors Beaty and Gwynne suggest that Bath’s  investment in Arbusto may have belonged to  bin Mahfouz, since  James Bath  “had no substantial money of his own at the time.” ³²

   

    Bath also operated Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd., an aviation business  based in the Cayman Islands, owned by bin Mahfouz. First, within a month  of its incorporation, the temporary board at Cotopax named Bath as company president, changed the company name to Skyways and then resigned en masse, leaving Bath as sole director. One of the original subscribers to Cotopax, a company called Cayhave Corporate Services, Ltd, was also a subscriber to IC Inc. In reality, IC Inc was the same entity as ICIC, which is the International  Credit and Investment Corporation of Grand Caymans, termed  BCCI’s “bankwithin-a-bank” in the Kerry Committee report. The company was found by investigators to be at the very center of a chart, found in  Oliver North’s White House safe, showing the banking network of the  Iran-Contra operation. ³³

    Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the   Saudi Defense Minister  Prince Sultan, that Mahfouz had channeled tens of millions of dollars into  terrorist accounts in London and New York. ³⁴ As shown in an excellent article  by Martin Rivers titled “A Wolf in Sheikhs Clothing: Bush Business Deals with  9 Partners of  bin Laden’s Banker,” Mahfouz was part of an intricate network  that spanned numerous  CIA activities and personalities. Mahfouz at the time  was also the owner of the   Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB). During the 1980s, Mahfouz’s banking syndicate performed major  CIA-inspired banking  operations for such former  CIA assets, in addition to   bin Laden, as   Saddam  Hussein, Manuel Noriega and other drug-dealing generals, such as in  Pakistan.  Mafouz’s  NCB           was  affiliated with  the   Inter Maritime bank, whose president Bruce Rappaport was deeply implicated in the  BCCI Affair.  Bruce Rappaport, a golfing buddy      of then  CIA director William  Casey, also partnered with  Oliver North in the  Iran-Contra operation. Dr.   Alfred Hartmann, the Inter Maritime Bank’s  Vice  President, was also chief financial officer  of Mahfouz’s BCCI Holdings of Luxembourg. In addition, Mahfouz’   Saudi Investment Corporation (SICO) was partnered with the   Saudi  BinLaden Group, and Hartmann, Rappaport, and William  Casey were responsible for arranging SICO’s financing of Osama   bin Laden. Simultaneously, Dr. Hartmann was also the managing director of a subsidiary of  BCCI, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements(BCP) In Geneva. It was BCP that helped to finance Arbusto. SICO was chaired by Osama’s brother  Yesla m  bin Laden. ³⁵ Board members included Baudoin Dunant, one of French-speaking Switzerland’s leading lawyers, who is on the boards of over twenty companies in Geneva, Fribourg, Morges, Nyons, etc. He received international publicity in 1983, when he represented Nazi banker  Francois Genoud. ³⁶

  After several transformations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation. In 1987, when Harken ran into trouble, a 17.6 percent share was purchased by Saudi Sheikh, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a business partner with Pharaon, while his banker was bin Mahfouz.³⁷ Though Bush told the Wall Street Journal he had “no idea” BCCI was involved in Harken’s fi nan the network of connections between Bush and BCCI is so extensive that the Journal concluded by stating: “The number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken all since George W. Bush came on board raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.”³⁸ Bath finally came under investigation by the FBI in 1992 for his  Saudi business relationships accused of funneling Saudi money through Houston in order to influence the foreign policies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Sami Baarma, a top executive of the Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB), sits on the board of Mahfouz’s Middle East Capital Group (MECG) that had on its board, Sheikh Bakhsh. In addition, Baarma sat on the board of the notorious Carlyle Group, which had former President George H. W. Bush as a senior advisor. Carlyle is the eleventh largest military contractor in the US, and a leading contributor to George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Former President George H. W. Bush has visited Saudi Arabia at least twice to successfully  court bin Laden family financing for the Carlyle Group.

Bin Laden’s activities were in service of the worldwide recruitment effort endorsed by CIA director William Casey in 1986.³⁹ In charge of the entire operation, according to John Loft eighties, was Reagan’s Vice President George Bush Sr.⁴⁰ In his own words, as bin Laden said, “I set up my f were trained by Pakistani and Ame by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.”⁴¹ While Osama was responsible for the organization and training of new recruits, it was Sheikh Abdullah Azzam who formulated the legal ju Afghanistan as a fulfillment of Islamic “ Jihad,” based on the Fatwas of Ibn Taymiyyah. Azzam was a Palestinian- born teacher of religion, and an active member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank. After receiving his doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Al Azhar University in 1973, Azzam met the family of Sayyed Qutb. Thereafter, he moved to Saudi Arabia after being invited to teach at King Abdul Aziz University, where he linked up with Sayyed Qutb’s brother Mohammed. Barnett R Rubin, a Columbia University associate professor and senior fellow at the CFR, says sources have told him that Abdullah Azzam was “enlisted” by the CIA.⁴² Azzam was killed in 1989, some say, a hit commissioned by bin Laden.

  Though he had been tied to the assassination of Anwar Sadat, the CIA nevertheless regarded Sheikh Omar, Azzam’s associate in Afghanistan, as a valuable asset. Also according to Barnett Rubin, Sheikh Omar was in the employ of the CIA as well. As a reward for his services, the CIA gave Sheikh Omar a one-year visa to the US in May, 1990, even though he was on a State Department terrorism watch list.⁴³ Once in the US, the CIA paid Sheikh Omar “to preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow

the Kabul regime.” ⁴⁴ As one  FBI agent said in 1993, he is “hands-off… It  was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he’s still in the country.  He’s here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the  NSA, and the  CIA.” ⁴⁵

However,  Sheikh Omar was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in the US for his role in the 1993  World Trade Center bombing.

According to Rubin, not long after he was arrested, a source asked Robert Oakley, former US Ambassador to  Pakistan, how the US would respond if the  Sheikh disclosed he had worked for the  CIA. Oakley laughed, saying it would  never happen, because the admission would ruin the Sheikh’s credibility with  his militant followers. ⁴⁶ Sheik Omar’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya is also reported to be responsible for the killing of hundreds of Egyptian policemen, soldiers and civilians, including the 1997 Luxor massacre in which 58 foreign tourists and  four Egyptians were killed.

    Of the many groups that emerged in  Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, the  CIA chose the most radical, primarily Gulbuddin  Hekmetyar, head of the Hezbi Islami.  Hekmetyar was part of the illicit trade in narcotics that began  in  Nicaragua and eventually expanded to include  opium from  Afghanistan, which eventually became the world’s largest producer of the drug, accounting

for 90% of world production. The  opium supply chain that  Hekmetyar  established before he departed from  Afghanistan was eventually managed by  bin Laden. ⁴⁷ The  DEA confirms          having received multi-source information that  bin Laden had been involved in the financing  and facilitation of heroin trafficking activities. ⁴⁸ Al Qaeda reportedly earned as much as six billion a

year from drug-trafficking. ⁴⁹

      Following the withdrawal of the Soviets from  Afghanistan, the Americans acquiesced to a plan devised by the  ISI whereby the nascent movement of the  Taliban would be brought to power, to oust the warring factions of the ensuing civil war, and purportedly create stability by uniting the country. The Taliban were for the most part Afghan refugees who had been brainwashed in

Saudi-funded Madrassas in  Pakistan. The Madrassas were run mainly by Fazlur Rahman, and his Jamiat e Ulema, based on the  Deobandi movement, which for a century or more had been closely connected to  Wahhabism . ⁵⁰ Rahman, whose party formed a combined government in Pakistani elections in 2002 and 2008,  is described in a cable released by WikiLeaks as “more politician than mullah”  and as professing his “support for cooperation with the United States.” ⁵¹

  The  Taliban represented a cruel and grossly deformed caricature of  Islam. But for a purpose. As a seasoned American observer told John Cooley, author  of Unholy Wars:

  The  Taliban began, essentially, as a kind of experimental Frankenstein monster. They were created in the laboratories, so to speak, of Pakistani intelligence, the  ISI — in order to produce a counter-force to Iran and Iranian Islamism, which would be even more repugnant and unacceptable to the West and  Russia than the Ayatollah  Khomeini’s successors in Tehran. ⁵²

  The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on American relations with Asia.⁵³ According to journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of The Taliban, “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul.”⁵⁴ When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Deobandi version of the Shariah. “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis,” said another US diplomat in 1997, “There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”⁵⁵ Once the Taliban had served their purpose, they opened the way for the Americans to invade the country themselves, fulfilling Brzezinski’s and  Mackinder’s long-term objective towards

controlling Eurasia..