Jon Pilger on Afghanistan

Here's an article by Jon Pilger with a great line in it

Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history".

The article talks about how the fight for women's rights before 9/11 was undermined by the Clinton administration's desire to do business with the Mullahs and get an oil pipeline for Unocal

It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.)

Of course once they became the enemy, women's rights became one of the reasons for the invasion. I suppose we should be grateful that women's rights were well established in the west before the advent of high-altitude saturation bombing or we might have had to blow the shit out of ourselves too.

Charlie Wilson's War... led to 9/11

This article talks about the arming of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan by the CIA and their use as pawns in the cold war. This is now celebrated in Tom Hanks' new movie Charlie Wilson's War. The plan was to give the USSR it's own Vietnam which sounds like a great idea and apparently damaged the USSR significantly. Of course it's not so much fun for those playing the role of the Vietnamese. Despite receiving training and funding, they weren't too happy to be used in this way and to have their country fucked over. They went on to form Al Qaeda and bomb US embassies and barracks in several locations around the world and finally the World Trade Centre. Doh!

This is described by Charlie Wilson, in the book of the same title, as "And then we fucked up the endgame.", something of an understatement I would have thought.

The film apparently skips all this nastiness because apparently Tom Hanks "just can't deal with this 9/11 thing" (second page). This despite Wilson appearing on Fox News after 9/11 and saying "This was as much my fault as anybody's." (first page of that link).

I'm probably not going to get to see the movie anyway...