Friday September 21, 2007, 6:48 pm



Another Neocon Fantasy: Iran Has Teamed Up With the Taliban

Kurt Nimmo, Independent Journalist
'Another Day in the Empire (ADE)' Blog
ADE Review (.Com)
September 21, 2007


Not only is Iran supplying IEDs to the “insurgents” in Iraq, but if we are to believe the neocons they are also supplying so-called roadside bombs to the Taliban in Afghanistan. “A top American commander on Friday accused Iran of supplying powerful roadside bombs to militants in Afghanistan and said the U.S. would ‘act decisively’ if the cross-border flow continues,” reports News for Yahoos. “Adm. William Fallon, the head of U.S. Central Command, said Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is supplying roadside bomb parts for the type of sophisticated and deadly bombs found in Iraq known as explosively formed penetrators.”

Of course, this makes absolutely no sense, as Iran and Afghan installed president and former Unocal employee Hamid Karzai established a bilateral trade relationship in 2005. Mohammad Khatami traveled to Prague in early 2005 with “a high-level delegation” that included “ministers of the interior, finance, and economy, as well as the minister for refugees,” Golnaz Esfandiari reported for Radio Free Europe. “The Iranian Embassy in Kabul said Karzai and Khatami would also open a newly completed power transmission line running from Torbat-e Jam in northeastern Iran to Herat, as well as eight border stations constructed by Iran in Afghanistan's Herat, Nimruz, and Farah provinces.” Now we are expected to believe the Iranians want to sabotage this relationship by providing IEDs to the Taliban, not only staunch enemies of Karzai but Iran as well.

Does not compute. But then so much about the flaccid and utterly absurd neocon propaganda campaign against Iran does not compute, that is unless you buy into the up-is-down, black-is-white worldview of the Bushzarrians.

“Fallon said the U.S. was carefully watching the flow of weapons from Iran and said the U.S. would ‘act decisively’ if the cross-border flow continues,” News for Fans of Glass Parking Lots continues. “His comments were not meant as a threat of military action against Iran but a suggestion that border interdiction efforts may need to be increased, Fallon’s aides said later.”

In other words, in addition to “border interdiction” on the Iran-Iraq border, Fallon and his crew, taking orders from the neocons, will do likewise on the other side of Iran. No doubt, sooner before later, the neocons will “act decisively,” that is begin a campaign culminating in the wanton mass murder of Iranian grandmothers and toddlers. Before this, however, they must set the stage with bogus and completely undocumented and unverifiable claims that Iran is helping the Taliban kill U.S. soldiers, designed to outrage the witless, that is to say the average American Fox News zombie.

It was only a couple days ago the neocons accused China of sending weapons to the Taliban by way of Iran. “U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte says Washington has complained to Beijing about Chinese weapons shipments to Iran that appear to be turning up in the hands of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan,” Radio Free Europe, the long linked CIA propaganda service reported. “Negroponte confirmed the U.S. concerns over China’s weapons deals with Tehran after a 10-ton weapons cache was discovered in the western Afghan province of Herat…. The cache found in Ghurian district, near the border with Iran, included artillery shells, land mines, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers with Chinese, Russian, and Persian markings on them.”

Once again, the culprits neglected to wipe their fingerprints off the evidence.

Sort of like a late stage Alzheimer’s patient, the American people have a short if not non-existent memory. In June, 2005, USA Today reported members “of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards fought alongside and advised the Afghan rebels who helped U.S. forces topple Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” according to Mohsen Rezaie, an Iranian politician. “Even before U.S. forces entered Afghanistan, Iran backed the Northern Alliance, a loose coalition of warlords and militias from the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities. The alliance fought the ruling Taliban, a regime dominated by majority Pashtuns that imposed a harsh Sunni Islamic government…. Former CIA Afghan team leader Gary Schroen says there were two Iranian guard colonels attached to a Northern Alliance commander, Bismullah Khan, outside Kabul when U.S. Special Forces arrived in September 2001.”

Moreover, News for Yahoos fails to remind us that Iran and the Taliban are mortal enemies. Shi’ite Iran nearly went to war against the Taliban after the massacre of Afghan Shi’ites and nine Iranian diplomats in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998. But no doubt the Shi’ite Iranians and crazed Sunni Wahhabist Taliban kissed and made up—just so they can kill Americans and thus provide and excuse for the neocons to mass murder Iranians. Makes sense to me.

“Regarding potential conflicts on the country's eastern border, Iran came close to declaring war against Afghanistan's Taliban government in 1998 in response to repression against the country's Shiite minority and the killings of nine Iranian diplomats in the Northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif,” notes Stephen Zunes. “Iran accepted nearly two million Afghan refugees during more than 20 years of war in Afghanistan, a country with which the Iranians have close ethnic ties. Iran also provided military support for the Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban. Despite all this, the Bush administration has warned Iran not to interfere in Afghanistan's internal affairs, an ironic admonition coming as it did after months of U.S. interference in Afghanistan that included heavy bombing, ground combat, the ouster of one government, and the installation of another.” But then, of course, the neocons are famous for ironic admonitions.

Finally, all we need to know is that the Taliban was created by the CIA, as Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars told the Times of India back in 2001. “The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan,” a “mistake” that cost around $3 billion. “I warned them that we were creating a monster,” a collaborative project between the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. Call it a match made in heaven—or more accurately, hell—as the “CIA still has close links with the ISI (Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence),” according to Harrison. The creation of the Taliban was central to Pakistan’s “pan-Islamic vision,” a “vision” that continues to this day.

The Taliban’s “members came from madrassas set up by the Pakistani government along the border and funded by the U.S., Britain, and the Saudis, where they had received theological indoctrination and military training. Thousands of young men-refugees and orphans from the war in Afghanistan-became the foot soldiers of this movement,” writes Phil Gasper.

"With the aid of the Pakistani army, the Taliban swept across most of the exhausted country promising a restoration of order and finally capturing Kabul in September 1996. The Taliban imposed an ultra-sectarian version of Islam, closely related to Wahhabism, the ruling creed in Saudi Arabia. Women have been denied education, health care, and the right to work. They must cover themselves completely when in public. Minorities have been brutally repressed. Even singing and dancing in public are forbidden.

"The Taliban’s brand of extreme Islam had no historical roots in Afghanistan. The roots of the Taliban’s success lay in 20 years of “jihad” against the Russians and further devastation wrought by years of internal fighting between the warlord factions. Initially, villagers-especially the majority Pashtuns in the south who shared the Taliban’s ethnicity-welcomed them as a force that might end the warfare and bring some order and peace to Afghanistan. Their lack of a social base within Afghanistan made them appear untainted by the factional warfare, and their moral purism made them appear above compromise. Before launching their war to conquer power, they first won some public support by appearing as the avenger against the warlords’ raping of women and boys. Of course, they could not have risen so far and so fast without the financial and military backing of Pakistan.

"The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban’s reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. “The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul,” adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: “The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan.” “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that,” said another U.S. diplomat in 1997."

As we know, the United States devised a more productive role for the Taliban as perennial enemies and “al-Qaeda” accessories. Of course, as Iran is the next neocon target, it makes perfect sense the two demons—or as Harrison would have it, monsters, albeit convenient monsters—have teamed up together, never mind they hate each other, sort of like Saddam and Osama hated each other.

Oddly, although predictably, millions of American, thanks to the Fox News Effect, are unable to this day to tell the two apart.

Monday September 24, 2007, 10:16 am



Thank you to everyone who Noted this and thereby brought it to the front page! Kudos to all of you!