It was quite a spectacle for this century. If Western media were not all tied to the war establishment, they would have commented on the symbolism: a U.S. envoy signing a peace agreement with an official representatives of the Taliban movement.
Had Osama bin Laden been alive, he may have been invited to the signing ceremony. Younger readers did not live through the massive propaganda campaign by all Western governments against the Taliban back in 2001. The U.S. war on Afghanistan was very popular then: at least 90 percent of Americans supported it in 2001.
Conservatives and liberals united to convince public opinion that the removal of the Taliban from power was an American national priority. The liberal organization, the Feminist Majority, aided the White House in its propaganda effort by releasing information on the Taliban’s war on women.
But when U.S. bombs started to kill women and children on a regular basis, the Feminist Majority and other liberals were silent. (Among women’s rights activists — including some in Afghanistan — the Feminist Majority’s pro-military position on Afghanistan was controversial at the time.)
George W. Bush and his wife briefly posed as feminist in an effort to persuade the public that the American invasion of Afghanistan is a humanitarian effort.
Much of the history of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is yet to be written. So much disinformation surrounded the U.S. pretexts. The U.S. said that it was invading Afghanistan because the Taliban government did not surrender bin Laden to the U.S. In reality, the Taliban government said at the time that it would consider a U.S. request to surrender bin Laden if the U.S. would show evidence of his complicity in Sept. 11 (and the Taliban government reached the decision after holding a national tribal conference). But the U.S. was not going to negotiate with the Taliban once the decision to invade was taken.
What is curious about the case of the Taliban is that the U.S. did not object to the Taliban’s seizure of power back in 1996. By 2001, only three governments in the world recognized the Taliban’s government and all were close clients of the U.S. (UAE, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). Prince Turki Faisal (the head of Saudi foreign intelligence until days after Sept. 11) was one of the few officials in the region who had met with the Taliban-founder and leader Mullah Omar and who had longstanding relations with bin Laden. In the summer before Sept. 11, the U.S. had praised the Taliban’s war on opium.
All this now seem to read like a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality, but the long U.S. history in Afghanistan stretches to the time when the U.S. decided that its war against the Soviets in Afghanistan would be more important than the welfare of the Afghan people. When the Soviet Union was supporting secularism, feminism and modernity in Afghanistan, the U.S. was on the side of fundamentalism, obscurantism and reactionary organizations wishing to bring back the Middle Ages. The U.S., after all, was in the same trench with bin Laden.
Kurgen
Article URL : https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/04/the-angry-arab-the-lessons-of-the-taliban/