© AFP / Haroon Sabawoon / Anadolu Agency
Taliban members stand guard on Saturday at a checkpoint near Hamid Karzai International Airport, the center of evacuation efforts from Afghanistan since the Taliban took over, after Friday's suicide bombing attack.
It was 20 years ago today.
Asia Times published
Get Osama! Now! Or Else...The rest is history.
Retrospectively, this sounds like news from another galaxy. Before Planet 9/11. Before GWOT (Global War on Terror). Before the Forever Wars. Before the social network era. Before the Russia-China strategic partnership. Before the
Dronification of State Violence. Before techno-feudalism.
Allow me to get a little personal. I was back in Peshawar - the Islamic Rome, capital of the tribal areas - 20 years ago after a dizzying loop around Pakistan, tribal territory, a botched smuggling op to Kunar, biding time in Tajikistan, arriving by Soviet helicopter in the Panjshir valley, a harrowing road trip to Faizabad, and a UN flight that took ages to arrive.
In the Panjshir, I had finally met "the Lion", commander Masoud, then plotting a counter-offensive against the Taliban. He told me he was fighting a triad: the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI. Less than three weeks later he was assassinated - by two al-Qaeda ops disguised as a camera crew, two days before 9/11.
No one, 20 years ago, could possibly imagine the subsequent slings and arrows of outrageous - terror - fortune.
Two decades, $2.3 trillion and at least 240,000 Afghan deaths later, the Taliban are back where they were: ruling Afghanistan. Masoud Jr in theory leads a "resistance" in the Panjshir - actually a CIA ops channeled through CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, former Afghan Vice-President.
Al-Qaeda is a harmless skeleton, even rehabilitated in Syria as "moderate rebels"; the new bogeyman in town is ISIS-K, a spin-off of the Islamic State in "Syraq".
After negotiating a stunning package deal with the Taliban, the Empire of Chaos is concluding a humiliating evacuation from the land it bombed into democracy and submitted for two decades. Once again the US was de facto expelled by a peasant guerrilla army, this time mostly consisting of Pashtuns, descendants of the White Huns - a nomad confederation - as well as the Sakas, nomadic Iranic peoples of the Eurasian steppes.
Comment: Terroristic organizations like ISIS/ISIL, Al-Qaeda, and many others are created, financed and commanded by the PTB through the Intelligence agencies. They need them, so they can cause terror and fear among the population.
They represent the secret unofficial army and they are using it to strip the basic human rights of the targeted population, to invade and destroy countries that oppose them, and to globally install totalitarian police state.
But don't worry. They are doing it for our own good.
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