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Afghan Taliban Camps Were Built by NATO
The New York Times August 24, 1998
By TIM WEINER - WASHINGTON
=======================================
[A note from Emperor's Clothes: This 'N.Y. Times' article appeared shortly
after the U.S. bombed a pill factory in Sudan and facilities in Afghanistan.
Pres. Clinton went on TV and said the Afghan facilities the U.S. had bombed
were "...terrorist facilities and infrastructure in Afghanistan. Our forces
targeted one of the most active terrorist bases in the world...a training
camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe." ('N.Y.
Times', 8/21/98, p. a12.) The 'Times' coverage of the bombing attacks is
discussed in 'Credible Deception' at
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/sudan.html ]
Throughout the 1980's, the Soviet Union threw almost every weapon it had,
short of nuclear bombs, at the Afghan camps attacked by the United States
last week.
During their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets attacked the
camps outside the town of Khost with Scud missiles, 500-pound bombs dropped
from jets, barrages of artillery, flights of helicopter gunships and their
crack special forces. The toughest Soviet commander in Afghanistan, Lieut.
Gen. Boris Gromov, personally led the last assault.
But neither carpet bombing nor commandos drove the Afghan holy warriors from
the mountains. Afghanistan has a long history of repelling superpowers. Its
terrain favors defenders as well as any in the world, whether their
opponents, like the Soviets, are trying to defeat them on the ground or
whether, like the United States, they are trying to disperse, deter and
disrupt them. It is uncertain that the United States, which fired dozens of
million-dollar cruise missiles at those same camps on Thursday, can do
better than the Soviets.
The camps, hidden in the steep mountains and mile-deep valleys of Paktia
province, were the place where all seven ranking Afghan resistance leaders
maintained underground headquarters, mountain redoubts and clandestine
weapons stocks during their bitter and ultimately successful war against
Soviet troops from December 1979 to February 1989, according to American
intelligence veterans.
The Afghan resistance was backed by the intelligence services of the United
States and Saudi Arabia with nearly $6 billion worth of weapons. And the
territory targeted last week, a set of six encampments around Khost, where
the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has financed a kind of "terrorist
university," in the words of a senior United States intelligence official,
is well known to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A.'s military and financial support for the Afghan rebels indirectly
helped build the camps that the United States attacked. And some of the same
warriors who fought the Soviets with the C.I.A.'s help are now fighting
under Mr. bin Laden's banner.
From those same camps, the Afghan rebels, known as mujahedeen, or holy
warriors, kept up a decadelong siege on the Soviet-supported garrison town
of Khost.
Thousands of mujahedeen were dug into the mountains around Khost. Soviet
accounts of the siege of Khost during 1988 referred to the rebel camps as
"the last word in NATO engineering techniques." After a decade of fighting
during which each side claimed to have killed thousands of the enemy, the
Afghan rebels poured out of their encampments and took Khost.
"This was the most fiercely contested piece of real estate in the 10-year
Afghan war," said Milt Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.'s side of the war from
1986 to 1989.
United States officials said their attack was intended to deter Mr. bin
Laden, whom they call the financier and intellectual author of this month's
bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which killed 263 people,
including 12 Americans. They said the damage inflicted on the Khost camps
was moderate to heavy.
But the communications infrastructure used by Mr. bin Laden is based on
portable satellite telephones, not a centralized command-and-control system
that can be destroyed with a missile, intelligence officials said. The
strongest power that binds his loose-knit network of confederates is his
money, which is hidden inside a thus-far impenetrable global maze.
And history does not favor superpowers trying to subdue men dug into the
mountains of Afghanistan.
Mr. bin Laden has said he spent the 1980's supporting the mujahedeen from
their political base in Peshawar, Pakistan, near the foot of the Khyber
Pass. He was most strongly allied with the most fundamentalist leaders of
the Afghan resistance, particularly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of the
group called the Islamic Party. After the fall of the Soviet-backed
Government, Mr. Hekmatyar spent most of his brief tenure as Prime Minister
hurling missiles and mortars at Kabul, trying to dislodge more moderate
rebel leaders from power.
The more militant Afghan rebels, like Mr. Hekmatyar, denounced the United
States and backed Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, as did Mr. bin
Laden. A year after the Persian Gulf war, posters throughout eastern
Afghanistan displayed heroic, if imaginary, portraits of Saddam Hussein and
Mr. Hekmatyar standing side by side.
No amount of money or moral support could keep the veterans of the Afghan
resistance from killing one another after the fall of Kabul. The chaos that
their infighting created led to the rise of the Taliban, the militant armed
religious party that now controls most of Afghanistan and harbors Mr. bin
Laden.
In the nine years since the Soviet withdrawal, Afghan resistance veterans
have hoarded the remaining weapons sent by the C.I.A. and set up military
training centers at resistance camps like the one near Khost, according to
United States officials. In those years, thousands of Islamic outcasts,
radicals and visionaries from around the world came to the borderlands of
Afghanistan to learn the lessons of war from the mujahedeen. Mr. bin Laden s
ponsored many of those foreigners.
In a 1994 interview, a commander loyal to Mr. Hekmatyar, Noor Amin, said
that "the whole country is a university for jihad," or holy war.
"There are many formal training centers," Mr. Amin said. "We have had
Egyptians, Sudanese, Arabs and other foreigners trained here as assassins."
United States officials said the former mujahedeen camps it attacked on
Thursday were precisely that kind of "university for jihad."
Mr. bin Laden, stripped of his Saudi citizenship and formally stateless,
returned to the anarchy of Afghanistan in 1996 from the Sudan, where United
States intelligence analysts believe he built at least three training camps
for veterans of the Afghan war.
He said in an interview with CNN last year that one of his main missions
during the war, which he helped finance with millions of dollars of his own
money, was to transport bulldozers, front-end loaders and other heavy
equipment to Pakistan to help build tunnels, military depots and roads
inside Afghanistan for the mujahedeen.
It is unclear whether Mr. bin Laden, who inherited about $250 million from a
fortune his father made building mosques, palaces and public works for the
Saudi royal family, personally helped build the Khost camps during the war
against the Soviets, or has substantially upgraded them since returning to
the mountains of Afghanistan.
[(c) 'N.Y.Times', 1998, Reprinted for Fair Use Only]