Hiya. Iraq is at flashpoint and Latham’s crash through policy to withdraw our troops from Iraq is starting to look very well timed. The troops out plan and the extraordinary revelations of the US September 11 inquiry have reignited Webdiarist discussion on the reasons for the war and how it will end. Tonight the Webdiary gender debate and lots of information and comment on the war, the troops, and the way forward.
NOTICEBOARD
Scott Burchill recommends Protests Unleashed by Cleric Mark a New Front in War and Bush and Blair made secret pact for Iraq war in The Guardian, where a former British ambassador reveals that “President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001”.
Scott also recommends Musharraf left counting the cost, on the civil war in Pakistan encouraged by the United States.
Chris Murphy recommends a New York Times piece at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/international/asia/04NAUR.html on Australia’s lock-up of boat people (subscription required). Julian Burnside QC is quoted: “[Nauru] is indistinguishable from the detention of people in Guantanamo Bay but for this difference: the people being held in Guantanamo Bay are suspected of serious offenses.”
For more on the alleged intervention of the CIA in Australian poltcis in 1995 see Ray Martin’s interview with ex-CIA officer Christopher Boyce.
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WEBIARY AND WOMEN
Maggie Churchward
Yes, women are not well represented on Webdiary. My gut feeling is that many women read it but don’t respond. I suspect that women think and express themselves differently from men.They also have different needs, requirements and demands from men. What matters to men may not matter to women.
One only needs to check out Iraqi blogs to see that difference. Most of the blogs are by men with freedom to move as they choose. Yet Riverbend, a woman, talks about the US invasion of Iraq in very negative terms (see her today for the latest on the uprising in Iraq). She talks about abductions, rape and attacks on women who are not wearing a head scarf. She is denounced by most of the comments from Americans as a Baathist who has lost out since Hussein was ousted. Yet all the male bloggers give only positive statements on what is happening in Iraq and all of their respondents are in support of the Iraq invasion.
PS: I now have a much clearer understanding of why women’s contributions are so limited on Webdiary. Before I emailed you I put on the vegetables to cook. After emailing you I found that I had destroyed the vegetables and two sauce pans. Our house is on the market for sale and all you can smell is burnt something. Is it any wonder that women don’t sent in responses! The men who respond are probably doing it from their offices or somewhere else that allows them to comment without other responsibilities intruding. How many women are in that position???
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Susan Metcalfe
Harry Heidelberg’s comments in Webdiarist’s verdict: troops out, please point to a number of the elements which continue to marginalise women. Harry says, “Didn’t we go through that debate on Webdiary in 2001 and say it didnt matter?”
Harry, who is included in this ‘we’ and who decided it didn’t matter? And why should the subject be closed now because some people had a debate about it in August 2001?
In recent months there’s been a noticeable decline in women’s presence on Webdiary. I dont understand why these men have a problem with my drawing attention to that. It’s like saying that because we had the debate about refugees arriving on boats in 2001 we should all shut up about it now. Never mind that many of those refugees are still despairing in the Topside Detention Camp on Nauru more than 2 years later.
Harry also says, “Gender is relevant when we speak of gender specific topics but otherwise, I don’t get the relevance of gender and Webdiary contributions.”
What exactly is a gender specific topic? As a woman, I am much more than the sum of my biology if that is what you mean by gender specific topics. And in our society my lived experience is gender specific – the way other people deal with me is often coloured very much by my identity as a woman. Considering that this is a political forum, my gender is perhaps even more specific.
Harry says, ‘I never think about what sex the contributors are’.
If you are a man Harry then it is likely that you have not had to think very much about your gender – men (in general terms) have not been denied a voice and a presence in our society. On the contrary, women have long been marginalised and silenced. If you are a woman Harry, then I think you may have bought into a view that doesn’t serve you very well.
And if gender doesnt matter then why aren’t there more women in politics? Although numbers of women in positions of power have grown in recent years, these changes are extremely slow. In 2003, statistics on women in parliaments put Australia at number 25 in the world with a female representation of 25.3%, just behind Rwanda with 25.7%. Sweden had the highest representation of women at 45.3%, whilst women worldwide represented just 15.3% of the total number of parliamentarians.
In matters of war, conflict and securing the peace, women in Australia are largely excluded from decision-making processes. When the talk turns to these issues we see the images and hear the rhetoric of the men who have the power to decide our fates. George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard all dominated our media last year, leading us into wars against other men – the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. At a human rights conference last year Betty McClellan said:
Whenever the leaders of nations (who are usually men) are considering war, women are deliberately pushed aside, ignored, alienated. No male leader considering involving his country in war ever stops to seek women’s opinion. Women were almost totally left out of decision-making about the war on Iraq and the previous war on Afghanistan. It’s like war is mens business and women are not permitted to give an opinion.
This is not to say that women are not also the perpetrators and supporters of conflicts. But when it comes to war, it is overwhelmingly the women and children who suffer the greatest consequences – the same women and children who are excluded from the decision-making processes which determine their lives.
At the peace tables and at war talks women are silenced and left to, literally, pick up the pieces of their families and communities. Bosnian women for example were excluded from the Dayton talks even though during the conflict 40 womens associations remained organised and active across ethnic lines. In March 2000, of 34 UN Special Representatives or Special Envoys appointed to regions of conflict, none were women. At the Bonn peace talks on Afghanistan in November 2001, only three women were included compared to sixty male delegates, and only after intense international pressure had demanded female representation. Each of the three women were exiles currently living outside Afghanistan; the women who were currently experiencing life in Afghanistan were given no representation and no voice. The men in these situations might also have said that gender doesn’t matter.
Harry says, ‘I get the feeling that Susan would like to contribute more often but feels so alienated by the men so she can’t. Susan, relax.’
Relax Harry, I can speak for myself about how I feel, I don’t need an interpreter. Mostly I don’t have time to contribute more than I have. But I do try to read Webdiary when I can and I would like to hear more women’s voices and opinions.
If we were all meeting in person instead of online, I would not want to be sitting in a group of only men hearing only their views. My preference would be to listen to the opinions of both men and women. For me, the fact that people are writing on a web page doesn’t change that.
I dont have all the answers on this issue. I am simply asking questions and presenting my personal point of view. Some of the issues may not be gender related at all but may be due instead to entrenched ideas of left/right divisions and ways of debating that exclude anything that falls in between.
And what is so wrong with wanting to hear a bit less from men and more from some of the great women out there instead? Women have written some wonderful pieces on Webdiary and I would like to read more. If men find that ‘bizarre’ there is more of a problem here than I had imagined.
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Paul Walter in Adelaide
My initial reaction to Susan Metcalf and Marilyn Shepherd was that Marilyn is hardly a shrinking violet and has been coming forward to contribute to debates for years: I’d like a dollar for every time I have seen her comments published in different places and good on her, although I don’t always agree with what she says. So, maybe another couple would-be rad feminists on an anti-bloke kick, I thought.
Then Harry Heidelberg expressed the sort of world-weary sympathy and sentiments I was feeling in Webdiarist’s verdict: troops out, please.
But I reread Webdiary’s gender debate in 2001 and the comments, in particular, of Elen Seymour and Paul Zikking concerning stereotyping of women and prejudging the value of any prospective contribution to a given discussion made by women.
I was provoked enough to reread Susan’s and Marilyn’s pieces. What REALLY emerges on second glance is not so much contempt of debate but intense disappointment that so little often emerges FROM all this earnest debating. I am depressed enough myself at the slowness of social change in a world of suffering people to admit the identification is very keen, here, after all!
I am so glad that the many women who contribute here do so. I hope they will not get too discouraged with an intractable political system and “cop out”, as I am tempted to do, in despair. I also re-read Polly Bushfrom that debate a few years ago, because if enough people “turn off” we DO become a “banana republic”, with all the horrors that might entail.
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LATHAM’S TROOPS PULLOUT
Chris Dickinson
I have been following the discussion on Webdiary since your piece Latham’s Iraq indiscretion ends honeymoon. While I agree overall with your take on it, I disagree with your comment that the real issue is when the troops’ job will be done. Perhaps this SHOULD be the issue, but it isn’t what either side of politics were arguing about last week. Latham, as you correctly said, has made a silly statement and refused to back down from it.
His comment was that the troops would be back at Christmas if a Labor government were elected in November . That qualification changed everything – from “Back by Christmas” to “Back within weeks of the election of a Labor government, whenever that might be”. This is a major change of policy, apparently taken on the spur of the moment, and highly irresponsible in the immediate post-Spanish bombing climate.
Although he clearly didn’t intend to, Latham gave Al Qaeda a side to support in the coming election, and that can’t be good. He effectively said that he was hoping for a re-run of Spain. In politics, context is everything, as Latham must learn. Naturally, the government has attacked this as irresponsible. Any government would, even one less desperate for a political lifeline than ours.
To make matters even worse, Latham responded by charging that the PM wanted to bring the troops back in the election campaign. He was probably right, but the unfortunate side-effect is that the troops might NOT now be returned before the election, because if Howard did so it would make a nonsense of his attack! So our troops may end up spending longer in Iraq than they would have otherwise done, with all the risks that entails, because of some unthinking words on Mark Latham’s part. That is not a good outcome. In war, loose statements by politicians can endanger lives. Latham has to realise this (even if it is too late to expect John Howard to).
I consider myself to be on the center-left politically. Before the war I considered the Iraq invasion unjustified for the stated reasons – and imminent WMD threat) but probably justified on humanitarian grounds. My opinion has not changed.
Nonetheless, for its domestic policies alone I am eager to get rid of the Howard government as soon as possible. But Latham has yet to convince me that he has what it takes to be Prime Minister, sadly. I hope he will continue to mature, and that come November (or whenever) I will be able to vote for him in good conscience, instead of having to comfort myself with voting “Greens” or “Informal”.
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James Davis
The job is done is in Iraq when it is safe enough for Australian diplomats and staff to perform their tasks under the protection of a civlian security service. The current troop deployment should not be confused with SAS involvement in the preliminary stages of the war, which had a different task. All those troops have now returned to Australia.
I support what Shaun O’Brien says in Media don’t get it on Latham and Iraq – if Mark Latham wants to bring the troops home he needs to examine the issue in the context of Australia’s security partnership with the US (obviously a much wider issue than just Iraq) and the Government’s non-military involvement in Iraq.
Latham’s contention regarding the Iraq based troops’ contribution to homeland security is flawed. The ADF fights conventional military threats to Australia and Australian interests. It can be used to defeat other threats (terrorism) but only when requested to by the civil authorities and approved by the government. The forces currently in Iraq would not be used to defeat terrorist threats in Australia..
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Simon Neldner
I’ve been thinking about the intensity of the Howard-Latham debate on the future of Australia’s Iraqi deployment, and realised that no-one has put forward the proposition that our own intelligence agencies probably know next-to-nothing about Iraq, its problems or where it all might end. They probably know about as much as your more informed readers can discern from a variety of newspapers, current affairs programs and expert analyses on the public record. Let’s consider the garbage we were spoon-fed from the over-paid, over-educated and easily manipulated intelligence agencies from the start of this sorry affair.
I enter into evidence the following: (1) those elusive weapons of mass destruction (not found and likely never to have existed since the early 1990s); (2) the unprecedented levels of post-war instability (not anticipated or planned for); (3) the level of funding needed to improve the antiquated and dilapidated state of Iraqi infrastructure and utility services (massively under-estimated); (4) the reliance on Iraqi oil production to bankroll everything and lower world oil prices (totally unrealistic given point [3]); (5) the role of Iraqi irregular forces and foreign fighters (not recognised until unprotected supply columns were ambushed, making it clear too few troops had been deployed to provide security – a problem that continues to this very day); and (6) having decided on invasion without the necessary post-war planning, the troops on the ground – and ordinary Iraqi’s caught in the crossfire – are reaping the whirlwind (claims of “mission accomplished” were completely premature).
All in all, a massive and continuing intelligence failure, and given the chaos reported daily by such fine journalists as Paul McGeough (Age-SMH) and John Burns (New York Times), it doesn’t look like improving anytime soon.
On these counts alone Howard deserves to be thrown-out of office at the earliest opportunity, not because the Iraqi adventure has turned out so badly, but because Howard could be so easily manipulated by a foreign power and a leadership cadre that is clearly unhinged. We should demand and expect a higher level of competence from our leaders. And … despite everything that has happened, it compounds a sorry situation when Howard won’t admit that he was completely and utterly wrong.
Nothing is his fault, there is always someone else to blame. At least David Kay could admit this basic fact. But Webdiary readers don’t need to be reminded of this Government’s abysmal record of ministerial accountability, where time-honoured parliamentary standards are seen as optional extras. To think we believed Keating was arrogant!
I don’t really care what Latham was told, by whom or where and when a meeting supposedly took place. What I found surprising is that Latham could claim to have been ‘informed’ by anyone remotely connected to or working for Australian intelligence and defence agencies. That’s the real problem, in that we are tied to American intelligence agencies and the strategic thinking which guides its information gathering activities – our own capabilities (particularly under-valued human intelligence) would be severely limited in this area. As a result, by having to rely on foreign intelligence agencies for information, we are compromised by their own political imperatives which demand adherence to the “official” line – i.e. everything in Iraq is going to plan.
It is only through people like Andrew Wilkie, Richard Clarke and a growing band of US State Department employees (who have resigned in protest) that we know how badly the intelligence was mis-used and how the public was manipulated. It’s the biggest case of political spin and deliberate subterfuge imaginable, and shows no sign of abating. Everything we’ve been told about Iraq has been a lie from day one, and the adequacy of the post-war planning severely compromised because of it.
So where to now?
Howard needs to be asked this question: How will we know when the job is done? A popular uprising against an unrepresentative, US backed Iraqi installed Government? These are scary days, and one look at the catalogue of death and injury appearing daily at lunaville makes the rosy predictions of a stable and secure Iraq look the stuff of fairy-tales.
And while there is some merit in Howard’s claim to “hold our nerve” until the “job is done”, the Australian public is asked to sign a blank cheque and trust a government whose judgment is questionable and its decision-making capacity compromised by the Howard-Bush relationship. I don’t think Howard has a clue about when our Iraqi commitment will end.
What are the options? I guess they come down to escalation (remember Vietnam?), keeping our current level of commitment or pulling our troops out completely (Latham’s way).
If Howard had the courage of his convictions we’d be deploying thousands of troops into Baghdad and beyond to secure the peace, but Latham is right – the current commitment is tokenistic at best. We comprise less then one half of one percent of total coalition forces deployed. That is, we’re not serious.
Howard claims that leaving by Christmas would give aid and comfort to the terrorists, but what happens if the attacks on coalition troops and civilian contractors are the work of Iraqis opposing the occupation? The American’s claim that it’s all the work of foreign terrorists, but where is the evidence? Have you seen one proven case, where a non-Iraqi has been detained, incriminating documents found or smuggled weapons seized?
The capture of Saddam was meant to break the will of disgruntled Baathists, but instead March has been the second worst month for US casualties. Every declared security ‘victory’ is met by something worse, a never-ending catalogue of death and destruction. If this is how we define victory, I’d hate to see us taste defeat.
The danger is that it’s become a low-level insurgency, where there is no organized resistance or coordinating figure (in terms of conventional warfare doctrines): most of the Saddam loyalists on the ‘deck-of-cards’ have turned out to be a pathetic bunch, incapable of doing the dirty and dangerous work themselves. So if it’s not them, then who? One answer could be that we’re on the long, slippery slope of having to fight those born and bred Iraqi’s opposed to the occupation, and then we will (eventually) find ourselves on the wrong side of the liberation equation.
We haven’t reached this point and it won’t happen overnight, but if the security situation doesn’t improve, then the majority of Iraqi’s are going to be looking for someone else to provide the answer to the myriad of problems that confront them (from a lack of jobs to mob rule).
Will we still be liberators when tear gas or rubber bullets have to be used to break-up ever larger demonstrations? More worryingly, what happens if the attacks aren’t coordinated at all, but the work of local groups or even individuals acting independently of one another (and for a host of reasons) all aimed at undermining the legitimacy of the occupation. The farmer who had his crops bulldozed, the father who loses a child in the crossfire, the cousin who gets detained for no reason …. and on it goes. In other words, a quagmire that cannot be resolved militarily, where almost every action to maintain order brings its own unpredictable dynamic. On a strategic level, Chalmers Johnson saw this as the “blowback” effect, but in Iraq it seems to be a street-level, community centred issue that cannot be so neatly categorised.
Yes, we helped overthrow a despotic and evil regime. Is the world a safer place? Maybe, maybe not – it may be years, possibly a decade before we know how things will play out – hardly the clear-cut promises made before the invasion. Heaven knows what types of “blowback” we’ve let ourselves in for, and this is what makes the whole situation extremely volatile and problematic.
Building an independent and capable intelligence capacity is now a priority – the least we can do is start making some informed choices. Because if the current trend of politicisation and interference in our security and defense services continue, we will be dangerously exposed, as fearless, dispassionate advice will be hard to come by and lives will be lost as a result. That may be the most terrible and unconscionable legacy of the Howard years.
In the meantime, I guess we’ll arm ourselves to the teeth and spend billions more on security and defence programs, while the foreign aid programs we actually need to take the recruitment heat out of the terrorism problem (by providing people with a future through fairer trade, cleaner drinking water, better health care and enough food to eat) will be grossly under funded. A recipe to screw all of our futures. Welcome to Howard’s way.
In an ironic twist, the only Iraqi we’ve managed to safely house and feed is Saddam Hussein and the other cronies in US custody. The rest of the population are at the mercy of armed gangs, a 15000 strong unregulated (read mercenary) security force and an increasingly trigger-happy occupation force. Unemployment is rampant, petrol is in short supply and basic services are problematic.
Latham got one thing right. It’s been a fiasco from start to finish, whenever that might be. But what really upset me was seeing the closing minutes of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer (SBS) and the faces, ages and hometowns of those American soldiers killed in Iraq: 603 and counting.
We’re not allowed to see the flag-draped caskets, we rarely see the terrible injuries of those maimed for life, but one can’t forget those who have been asked to make the ultimate sacrifice in a conflict in search of a reason. Now we’ve been left with an insoluble problem, to leave or stay, and no clear idea which of these choices will make things worse.
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Sue Bushell and Terry Embling
The question the media disingenuously skirted last week – and which should and must become the essence of the entire debate is: what is “the job” and when will it be done? Is it when enough Iraqi “insurgents/freedom-fighters/resisters/guerillas/”terrorists”, not to mention the innocent civilians unlucky enough to get in the way, have been killed or captured?
Is it when the toll of American and Coalition of the Willing soldiers, contractors and mercenaries gets too great for the American populace to bear? Is it when Howard wins the next election? Is it when “democracy” is “granted” to the Iraqis? (a dubious proposition, as anyone who have been watching the machinations of Paul Bremer and the Iraqi Governing Council as they work to hamstring any future Iraqi government will understand). For another take on why Australia should withdraw military as soon as possible read Dennis Rahkonen’s piece ‘Fallujah: Graveyard of the Bush presidency’.
Perhaps the job will be done when Haliburton’s profits start to peak? Or when foreign corporations have seized control of the Iraqi economy?
Naomi Klein makes clear just how little control a sovereign Iraqi government will have over the future of the nation under the Bushite’s vision for its future.
We highly recommend TomDispatch, where if you subscribe you have delivered into your mailbox, free, five days a week, some of the most thoughtful, incisive, germane commentary on the Bush Administration, US Imperialism, the US Occupation in Iraq and the war on terror to be found.
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WHAT THIS WAR’S REALLY ABOUT
Chris Mardon
The story goes back much further than Kerryn Higgs suggests in Bush on the ropes: his awful deeds post S11, and the oil industry was influencing the US government long before Bush Jr. came along. The bookBlowback! by Chalmers Johnson points out that the imperious behaviour of the US is generating many future problems for itself, including terrorism.
The War on Afghanistan and the War on Terror have been portrayed in the media as responses to September 11, but the reality is different. The US was negotiating with the Taliban up to a few weeks prior to that event to secure their cooperation with neighbouring states in the construction and operation of oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan. The Taliban refused to cooperate on the terms demanded by the US, so the Americans threatened to destroy them. They have done just that!
As in Vietnam, they have replaced the government with one of their own choosing. The new president of Afghanistan and one of his colleagues in the new government are both former employees of Unocal, the US company that wants to build the pipelines. Moreover, while opium production had virtually ceased under the Taliban, it has taken off again, and armed struggles between members of the Northern Alliance have resumed, sometimes with unwitting US involvement.
The following 2001 report comes from an oil industry web site via Asia Times Online. The Brisard book was originally published in French, but has since been published in English. It refers to secret negotiations between the US and the Taliban that continued until August 2001, and were broken off when the US issued an ultimatum to the Taliban. The “carpet of gold” statement is crucial to the whole argument about what really happened and why we went to war in Afghanistan.
What most people do not seem to realise is that 9/11 was a response to that ultimatum! It did not come out of the blue, and the US knew that it was coming yet they did nothing to stop it. Why? It has provided a credible pretext for the War on Terror, the attacks on civil liberties, and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq that they intended to carry out anyway if the governments concerned did not play ball. The US knows that world oil production is likely to reach a peak within the next few years, so they want to gain control of as much of the remaining oil reserves as they can by then.
The US has built a string of bases around Afghanistan to take effective control of the Central Asian region and prevent the Russians or the Chinese from exerting control there. They already had control of the Middle East, so they now control the area where about 70% of remaining oil reserves are located.
It is good to see some of the truth about 9/11 coming out, but I can assure you that there is still heaps to come! Incidentally, the Asian Development Bank is funding feasibility studies for the pipelines right now.
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US policy on Taliban influenced by oil, 20-11-01
Under the influence of United States oil companies, the government of President George W Bush initially blocked intelligence agencies’ investigations on terrorism while it bargained with the Taliban on the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim.
In the book Bin Laden, la verite interdite (Bin Laden, the forbidden truth), that was released recently, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) deputy director John O’Neill resigned in July in protest over the obstruction.
The authors claim that O’Neill told them that “the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it”. The two claim that the US government’s main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia.
They affirm that until August, the US government saw the Taliban regime “as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia” from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. Until now, says the book, “the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that.”
But, confronted with Taliban’s refusal to accept US conditions, “this rationale of energy security changed into a military one”, the authors claim. “At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs,'” Brisard said in Paris.
According to the book, the Bush administration began to negotiate with the Taliban immediately after coming into power in February. US and Taliban diplomatic representatives met several times in Washington, Berlin and Islamabad.
To polish their image in the United States, the Taliban even employed a US expert on public relations, Laila Helms. The authors claim that Helms is also an expert in the works of US intelligence organizations, for her uncle, Richard Helms, is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The last meeting between US and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. On that occasion, Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the US government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad.
Brisard and Dasquie have long experience in intelligence analysis. Brisard was until the late 1990s director of economic analysis and strategy for Vivendi, a French company. He also worked for French secret services, and wrote for them in 1997 a report on the now famous Al-Qaeda network, headed by bin Laden.
Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of Intelligence Online, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy, available through the Internet. Brisard and Dasquie draw a portrait of the closest aides to Bush, linking them to the oil business. Bush’s family has a strong oil background, as do some of his top aides. >From Vice President Dick Cheney, through the director of the National Security Council Condoleezza Rice, to the ministers of commerce and energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham, all have for long worked for US oil companies.
Cheney was until the end of last year president of Halliburton, a company that provides services for oil industry; Rice was between 1991 and 2000 manager for Chevron; Evans and Abraham worked for Tom Brown, another oil giant.
Besides the secret negotiations held between Washington and Kabul and the importance of the oil industry, the book takes issue with the role played by Saudi Arabia in fostering Islamic fundamentalism, in the personality of bin Laden, and with the networks that the Saudi dissident built to finance his activities.
Brisard and Dasquie contend that the US government’s claim that it had been prosecuting bin Laden since 1998. “Actually,” Dasquie says, “the first state to officially prosecute bin Laden was Libya, on the charges of terrorism.” “Bin Laden wanted to settle in Libya in the early 1990s, but was hindered by the government of Muammar Gaddafi,” Dasquie claims. “Enraged by Libya’s refusal, bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Gaddafi.”
Dasquie singles out one group, the Islamic Fighting Group (IFG), reputedly the most powerful Libyan dissident organization, based in London, and directly linked with bin Laden. “Gaddafi even demanded Western police institutions, such as Interpol, to pursue the IFG and bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation,” Dasquie says. “Until today, members of IFG openly live in London.”
The book confirms earlier reports that the US government worked closely with the United Nations during the negotiations with the Taliban. “Several meetings took place this year, under the arbitration of Francesc Vendrell, personal representative of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to discuss the situation in Afghanistan,” says the book. “Representatives of the US government and Russia, and the six countries that border with Afghanistan were present at these meetings,” it says. “Sometimes, representatives of the Taliban also sat around the table.”
These meetings, also called Six plus 2, because of the number of states (six neighbours plus the US and Russia) involved, have been confirmed by Naif Naik, former Pakistani minister for foreign affairs. In a French television news program, Naik said that during a Six plus 2 meeting in Berlin in July, the discussions turned around “the formation of a government of national unity. If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid. And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come,” he added.
Naik also claimed that Tom Simons, the US representative at these meetings, openly threatened the Taliban and Pakistan. “Simons said, ‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option’. The words Simons used were ‘a military operation’,” Naik claimed.