Invisible History Blog

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Messiah of Darkness

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

The history of turning warlords like Hekmatyar to the good has consistently proven to be nothing but bad for the Afghan people

It’s not everyday that an American citizen living in the USA gets an email from the representative of a legendary terrorist warning that they may face legal action for writing well documented criticisms of his boss. But on January 25, 2010 Mr. Daoud M. Abedi of the Hesb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) emailed us on behalf of Afghanistan’s longest running warlord, drug trafficker and terrorist, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Abedi was reacting to our blog, In Afghanistan: Embracing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Is No Method at All posted that day. We had addressed the insane possibility that terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might be considered as a “sane” solution for the mess the U.S. has gotten itself into in Afghanistan. Since Hekmatyar was listed on February 18, 2003 by the United States State Department and the United States Treasury as a global terrorist under Executive Order 13224 (which freezes his assets and criminalizes any U.S. support for him) and has been the object of a Predator drone strike, and recently claimed credit for a deadly attack on French NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, we thought that a terrorist maintaining a high public profile in the U.S. would be a disadvantage. So it came as a surprise that Hekmatyar and his political party Hesb-i-Islami are not only out in the open in the United States, but are issuing threats (just the way they do in Afghanistan) to anyone who tries to get the word out about their past.

The order of Abedi’s complaints are a window into the mind of one of the world’s legendary terrorists. It is not Hekmatyar’s well documented reputation as a terrorist and major drug kingpin that disturbs him. The terrorist-strongman label actually appeals to Abedi, who asserts that he is “happy he is called a terrorist because what he does for Afghanistan is what George Washington did for the US,..” Abedi’s primary concern is for reports that “His Excellency,” might have been a member of the nominally communist, People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, (PDPA) as a student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is willing to bend time and well-documented facts in order to protect Hekmatyar’s reputation as a pure, messianic Islamist, lay off blame for his bad deeds onto communists, Maoists, Afghanistan’s King Zahir Shah and others, while denouncing his chief rival, Ahmad Shah Massoud as “the biggest traitor of Afghan politics.” To Mr. Abedi, other people’s facts accumulated over the last forty years and compiled by experts are lies. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s critics are wrong because Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is always right, and if he and his Hesb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) come to power, “I promise you, the HIA will call on all these so called experts, and knowledgeable sources to come up and clean what they have written, prove it or apologize to the Afghan and international communities for misleading them, or we will not allow their feet in Afghan soil so they don’t do this kind [of] stupidity in the future against other Afghans.”

Abedi has been negotiating on Hekmatyar’s behalf at least since the Obama administration came to power. A May 10, 2009 report in the London Sunday Times stated that a representative of Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s regional envoy, had met with “Daoud Abedi, an Afghan-American businessman close to Hekmatyar,” and that “the US administration will fund an Afghan government department to conduct negotiations with the Hesb-i-Islami and the Taliban.” In the interim, with the help of Abedi, he has begun to re-brand himself as a “moderate fundamentalist with Afghanistan’s best Islamic interest at heart.”

But Hekmatyar is no moderate. According to published reports during the 1980s, Hekmatyar’s Hesb-i-Islami developed a reputation for attacking moderates, raiding caravans of other forces as well as relief organizations. According to author Steve Coll, Hekmatyar attacked Ahmad Shah Massoud so often during his climb to power as the CIA’s favorite in the 1980s that Washington “feared he might be a secret KGB plant whose mission was to sow disruption within the anti-communist resistance.” According to press reports, Hekmatyar was not viewed as the most aggressive anti-Soviet guerrilla and “not feared so much by the communists as by his allies,” who believed his commanders were saving their men and weapons to establish Hesb-i-Islami as the dominant organization once the Soviets departed.

A 1988 report by Henry Kamm for the New York Times summed up what was then common knowledge about the potential for a government run by Hekmatyar. “[H]e advocates a radical program that rejects a return to the traditional ways of Islam that dominated Afghanistan during the monarchy that was overthrown in 1973… ‘We want a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan,’ said Hekmatyar. ‘Before 1973? That was never an Islamic system. It was completely against Islam.’”

Nick Grono and Candace Rondeaux of the International Crisis Group in Belgium wrote in January of 2010, “One of the warlords who may soon star in the new US efforts to rebrand fundamentalists as potential government partners is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a brutal Afghan insurgent commander responsible for dozens of deadly attacks on coalition troops. As a mujahedeen commander during the civil war in the 1990’s Hekmatyar turned his guns on Kabul, slaughtering many thousands of Afghans, with his militias raping and maiming thousands more… Doing deals with Hekmatyar, or others like him is a mistake… Instead of entering into alliances of convenience with the most undesirable of local power-holders, the international community, and the Afghan government, would gain by holding warlords like Hekmatyar accountable for past abuses, and ending the climate of impunity that has allowed so many of them to flourish within and outside the government. ”

In the final analysis, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has never been successful at anything except creating chaos and bloodshed. Should he finally come to power and gain his dream of a “pure Islamic state” it is certain that he will demand more than just apologies from the people on whom he calls. For over forty years, through his ruthlessness, brutality, financial backing and unceasing public relations campaigns, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has clung to his messianic dream of power. If Washington finally relents and invites him to assume a role in the Afghan government with the volumes of deeds that are known about him, it will be opening Afghanistan as well as itself, to a very dark messiah.

Copyright 2010 Gould & Fitzgerald. All rights reserved

Who is Behind all the Talk to the Taliban Talk?

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

With all the Talk to the Taliban Talk going on everywhere it was refreshing to find an op-ed in the February 17th Boston Globe by US Representative Stephen F. Lynch that hit the nail on the head. Titled , The price of appeasing the Taliban , it framed the true nature of the scam being perpetrated on the Afghan people. Even though the latest poll of Afghans reveals that only a puny 6% want the Taliban back, it seems nobody from the Obama administration is talking to the Afghan people except Representative Lynch.

Here are some of Representative Lynch’s facts :
“The Taliban is a violent and oppressive regime that has given support to Al Qaeda and employed brutality against the general population, especially against women. The Taliban has massacred ethnic minority civilians and used rape as a tool of intimidation. It has burned hundreds of schools to prevent the education of girls. It has stormed schools that teach girls and has beheaded teachers as horrified children watched.”

“The Taliban enforces a strict doctrine that, in part, prohibits women from venturing outside the home except under specific and narrow circumstances and has so terrorized the population in parts of southern Afghanistan that you can drive for miles through crowded village streets and seldom see a woman or girl. Women who violate the Taliban rules have been publicly whipped with car antennas and ferociously beaten/”.

“And if there is any lingering doubt about “outlawing” the Taliban, consider this: in an absurd attempt to gain the support of the local Afghan population the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar, recently announced that its members will, for now, “cease the practice of cutting off the lips, noses and ears of detainees.”

‘I recently met with female members of the Afghan parliament who were angry Karzai had proposed the Taliban appeasement plan in London without getting the input of women in parliament. They said they fear for the women of Afghanistan, their basic rights of free speech, freedom of travel, freedom of association and voting rights. These women said that they respect the United States, not merely for its economic success or its military power, but for “upholding individual rights for all of its citizens.” This, they said, “is the intoxicating idea of America.”

As a member of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Relations, Representative Lynch has stated the facts about the Taliban with a clarity that now must be incorporated into the Afghan policy.

This scam against the Afghan people has gone on long enough. Whoever is behind all the Talk to the Taliban Talk should hide in shame and let the adults takeover!

Copyright © Gould & Fitzgerald 2010 All rights reserved

The Huffington Post   

In Afghanistan: Embracing Gulbuddin Hekmatyar Is No Method At All  

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Colonel Kurtz: Did they say why [Captain] Willard, why they want to terminate my command?

Captain Willard: They told me, that you had gone totally insane and uh, that your methods were unsound.

Colonel Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Captain Willard: I don’t see any method at all, Sir.

Apocalypse Now

One thing that remains consistent over the last 30 years in observing America’s participation in Afghanistan is that mistakes and errors of judgment, no matter how egregious or self-defeating, never seem to get corrected. In fact, in its effort to rationalize a growing culture of war-making from Vietnam to Afghanistan, America has come around to embracing the insanity of the fictional Colonel Kurtz. read more…

 ”Like Great Britain before it, Washington’s interactions with Afghanistan exhibited an ignorance of Afghanistan’s historical desire for non-alignment. This ignorance was combined with an insistence that any expression of that desire proved that Moscow was influencing Kabul’s politics. Fitzgerald and Gould write that this was not an accident. In fact, it was the logical outcome of a 1950 national security directive known as NSC 68.”

“The direct result of this directive was the creation of a permanent war economy and the creation of a national security state. In practice, some of what this meant was that national liberation struggles and national desires for non-alignment were perceived to be Soviet-inspired and therefore part of the enemy camp.”

The Arrogance of Empire, Detailed

by Ron Jacobs  / January 16th, 2010 

In the first week of 2010, five US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. The last week of 2009 saw the deaths of eight CIA agents there. Several more Afghan civilians were killed during this period, including the apparent executions of several young boys by persons either in the US military or working with them. In addition, insurgent forces targeted a Karzai government in official in eastern Khost and launched rockets at the site of a future US consulate in Herat. It was reported on January 6, 2010 that the Obama administration was sending 1,000 more US civilian experts to the country to help in so-called reconstruction projects. This news was greeted with skepticism from Afghans both in and out of the government. The Afghan ambassador to the United Nations noted that few Afghans trusted these so-called reconstruction endeavors and that the US might do better if they hired Afghans to do the rebuilding instead of shipping in US citizens to “create parallel structures that would ruin (the Afghan government’s) efforts.” The ambassador must be quite aware that the history of US reconstruction in either Afghanistan or Iraqis is a legacy of corruption, poor construction, and failed endeavors that benefited no one but the foreign companies that garnered the contracts. Read more…

Shadow War  

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Posted: January 12, 2010   News that suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, (the man who targeted the forward CIA operating base Chapman) was a trusted informant, should prompt more than just a reassessment of President Obama’s AfPak war. The shocking infiltration of a key CIA operating facility indicates that either America’s former partners in its covert war against the Soviet Union are so well schooled in American methods and practices that they have become all but invisible, or, that in their desperation, America’s best operatives are failing to follow precautions. Just when the administration was hoping to build on a solid foundation of reliable intelligence, it must now question not only the intelligence it has received, but also the fundamental assumptions on which the intelligence has been operating from the start.

We heard the rumblings of apprehension from local Afghans when we visited Kabul in the fall of 2002. What exactly was the United States doing by hurting those who wanted to build a stable Afghanistan and re-empower those who had already torn it to shreds? In a conscious effort not to lose Afghanistan the way Vietnam had been lost, the U.S. was going back to the same fractious warlords it had empowered during the 1980s without ever questioning whether they had been backing the right people to begin with.

At the time, insurgent leaders, whose ideology was as alien to Afghanistan as any foreign colonial power, made it clear that the U.S. was only an ally of convenience and that once the Soviet Union was defeated the tide of radicalism would be turned loose on the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, America’s largest beneficiary, made his disdain clear when he refused to visit President Reagan at the White House on a 1985 trip to the United Nations in New York. All through the 1990s South Asia expert Selig Harrison made it clear to the CIA that they were creating a “monster” in the Taliban. Yet this, and an ocean of clear and unambiguous information was overlooked, discredited or just plain ignored.

Now the U.S. must look back at all the information this “trusted informant” from Al Qaeda’s Lashkar al-Zil (Shadow Army) provided and determine what is real and what is “shadow.” But there is nothing in the CIA’s history to indicate that any internal examination can correct the mistakes that encouraged small bands of religious extremists to grow into a powerful insurgency or for that matter to define exactly which enemy is the most dangerous.

Did other reliable informants bordering Helmand province intentionally target Baluch nationalists for Predator drone assassinations, knowing that they would turn the long- suffering Baluch population against the United States? According to Amnesty International, Pakistan’s war on Baluch and Sindhi nationalists has claimed more than 900 activists who have disappeared without a trace, exceeding the massive human rights violations perpetrated by Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s. Have reliable informants also singled out moderate Afghans and Pakistanis for elimination while protecting Afghan Taliban who prey on American units in the long contested Pakistani border region? Under the best of circumstances intelligence gathering is a tricky business, requiring expert skills, experience and knowledge of the indigenous culture. But good intelligence also requires the wisdom to know who your enemy is and the war you are fighting, and by all indications, that remains the black hole of American efforts.

In a report released by the Center for a New American Security on Monday January 4,
NATO’s highest intelligence officer, U.S. Major General Michael T. Flynn, writes that “our intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade. This problem or its consequences exist at every level of the U.S. intelligence hierarchy, and pivotal information is not making it to those who need it.”

Either unable or unwilling to adapt to a post-cold war, multi-polar world, and after eight years of failure in Afghanistan, the Obama administration now wants the Afghan and Pakistani people to believe that the United States is on their side. But until the American intelligence bureaucracy catches up to the President’s rhetoric, Al Qaeda’s army will continue to operate effectively from the shadows while the U.S. will continue to stumble along in the dark.

© Copyright 2010 Gould & Fitzgerald. All rights reserved

Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan  Part One  By Joan Brunwasser

OpEdNews  January 9, 2010 

Please tell our readers a bit about your background and what made you the right ones for the job.

Big things were happening in 1978, with new approaches to old problems as the Carter administration vowed to eliminate the threat of nuclear war and reevaluated detente with the Soviet Union. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, SALT was a major vehicle for these changes and by 1979 we had focused on its impact by interviewing the central figures. By the end of 1979, we had finished a documentary called the Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, analyzing the effects of defense spending on the US economy. Having experienced a decade of improving relations with the Soviet Union our documentary was received with great interest. (Read Part One: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan )

Part Two: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan By Joan Brunwasser

OpEdNews  January 10, 2010 

Welcome back for the conclusion of my interview with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. In the first half, you dissected how we got to this point. The next question for you two is, can we break out of this military mindset?
The U.S. is currently in a tenuous financial arrangement with the rest of the world and especially Russia and China. How long the United States can continue to act as a hegemonic power in Central Asia with the intention of controlling pipeline routes against Chinese and Russian interests is a delicate and growing issue. Without careful and ingenious diplomacy, the United States could soon find itself as the odd man out. No amount of military thinking or spending will resolve the problem the United States faces. If the United States can’t adjust to this new post cold war reality, then the U.S. will go the way of the Soviet Union. (Read Part Two: Veteran Journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould Give OpEdNews the Lowdown on Afghanistan )

Charlie Wilson’s War is a Fantasy!

By Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould

boilingfrogspost Tuesday, 22. December 2009

The Rallying Cry for an Arms Buildup & to End Public Debate about American Foreign Policy on Afghanistan

As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We’ve seen this pattern from the media again and again. It was particularly disturbing to read Ken Herman’s December 18 interview, Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan, in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN filled with CIA disinformation. The secret campaign was activated before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to sell the American people on financing the coming Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union

Let’s separate the child-like fantasy that has been resurrected over and over again from the true nature of Charlie Wilson and his war effort. From the interview:

“…the former East Texas congressman – immortalized in a book and a movie about his exploits that helped the Afghans drive out the Soviet Union.“

FACT: Covert funding for the mujahideen began long before the Soviet invasion, not after. This covert aid was intended to lure the Soviets into the Afghan trap and hold them there, not drive them out, as claimed by Charlie Wilson. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s national security adviser, have admitted in print (Gates, in his 1997 book, From the Shadows; Brzezinski, 1998 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the U.S. had been secretly undermining its own diplomatic efforts in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan.

The American press failed to report these revelations from high-ranking government officials as news, back then. More recently, Brzezinski’s remarks were addressed in an interview  with Samira Goetschel for her film, Our Own Private Bin Laden.  She asked:

“In your 1998 interview with the French Magazine Le Nouvel Observateur you said that you knowingly increased the probability of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.“

Brzezinski responded:

“The point very simply was this. We knew the Soviets were already conducting operations in Afghanistan. We knew there was opposition in Afghanistan to the progressive effort which had been made by the Soviets to take over. And we felt therefore it made a lot of sense to support those that were resisting. And we decided to do that. Of course this probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do…“

FACT: As we document in our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” the record contradicts Brzezinski’s assumption that the Soviets would have invaded had it not been for his intentional provocation to lure the Soviet’s into the “Afghan trap.”

FACT: It is well documented that Charlie Wilson’s war prolonged Afghanistan’s agony for another six years, provided a secure multibillion-dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism, and set the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. It’s bad enough that a Hollywood film continues to project the propaganda campaign that kept Americans in the dark about America’s role in helping terrorism grow in Afghanistan. At this late date, it is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the Congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan. 

FACT: America’s mistake in Afghanistan was not “the endgame” problem depicted by “Charlie Wilson’s War.” The problem was in the conceptual framework created by America’s Cold War policy makers in the first place that made Afghanistan the bleeding ground it remains to this day.

FACT: Charlie Wilson’s War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end­ public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. The world was remade with the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, a Communist empire destroyed and the West’s pre-eminence assured. But the price in human suffering in Afghanistan and the impact on our democratic freedoms has yet to be understood.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

 President’s speech struck a new milestone for Washingtonian denial

 The President’s speech is history now. Al Qaeda is still the objective and General Stanley McChrystal will get 30,000 more troops and 18 months to make his counterinsurgency plan work. In a country the size of Afghanistan, even ten times that number wouldn’t matter. What does matter is that little has changed in Washington and it appears that Washington cannot change.  It’s too bad that the interests of the United States and those of the Afghan and Pakistani people are apparently mutually exclusive. Before this all began in the 1970’s and the U.S. support for extremist Islam began, Afghanistan did have a government. It was decentralized, but it was a government and it did function alongside a secular tribal structure that had been moving toward modernization for a century.

The Afghans came to the U.S. in the late 40’s and early 50’s asking for help. They needed some basic infrastructure development. They needed a cement factory, paved roads. They needed a hospital and some city buses. The didn’t get them. They at least expected that their external security would be protected by the Americans the way it had been by the British Empire. It wasn’t. During the Eisenhower administration the U.S. made it clear to the Afghans, often in insulting and demeaning ways that Pakistan would be America’s ally and that Afghanistan would have to fend for itself. Washington liked Pakistan’s plucky military brass. They liked their style, their uniforms and their British accents. Read more  Posted at  boilingfrogspost

What are We Fighting for in Afghanistan?

“It was the opportunity for the president of the United States to deliver his most important address yet. America was entering a new era after failing to defeat an implacable foe in a far off and forbidding land. His speech was filled with Sturm und Drang, delivered to the finest young men and women the country had to offer and the highest defense and intelligence officials in the land at the world’s most prestigious military academy. It should have been a sacred moment in American history.”

-Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Counterpunch Dec 3, 2009