D. 16.12.08 Fra den verdensberømte jurist "Boyle, Francis" <FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU>
Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (Voice)
217-244-1478 (Fax)
(personal comments only)
From: Sherwood Ross
[mailto:sherwoodr1@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 1:59 PM
To: MWC News
Cc: Blog, Global Researcher
Subject: President-Elect Obama Should drop his plans to escalate Afghan
war by Sherwood Ross
|
OBAMA
SHOULD DROP PLANS TO
ESCALATE AFGHAN WAR; SEND
IN PEACE CORPS INSTEAD By
Sherwood Ross President-elect
Obama should drop his plans to escalate the war in Afghanistan, a country
that never attacked America, out of pity for a helpless civilian population
that will only suffer increasing misery from an expanded fight against the
Taliban and its allies. Recall
military intervention was used to capture Panamanian military dictator Manuel
Noriega for a drug charge in December 20, 1989. That illegal assault, ordered
by President George H.W. Bush, killed 500 Panamanian civilians, wounded 3,000
more, and pushed 15,000 people out of their homes, an incredible price
innocent people were made to pay to enable the U.S. to nail one
drug-runner. In
Afghanistan, the civilian population has already paid a much higher price.
“The basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in place,” warns
Norman Solomon, executive director of the Washington-based Institute For
Public Accuracy, “including, pivotally, a dire lack of wide-ranging debate
over Washington’s options.” "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be
our biggest national security priority," Senator Barack Obama pledged
during the televised presidential debate of last October 7. Yes, and in so doing, thousands of additional Afghan civilians are
liable to perish, likely far more of them then the 3,000 Americans massacred
on 9/11 in New York and Washington. In just the first two years after 9/11, the U.S. had already killed
between 3,000 and 5,000 Afghan civilians, David Krieger noted in Counterpunch.
And Jay Shaft, of the Coalition For Free Thought in Media, points to a United
Nations estimate that up to 500 Afghan civilians are dying monthly from U.S.
cluster bombs, most of them children and teenage boys. "The president (Obama) is going to inherit the problem the
Soviets had roughly 15 years ago during the Soviet jihad. You cannot tame the
people in the North-West Frontier Province and on the border in Pakistan and
Afghanistan," Dalton Fury, the commander of special operations at Tora
Bora, recently told Cable News Network. By its illegal invasion of Iraq, the Bush regime allowed the Taliban
in Afghanistan and its allies to regain control of the nation. Anand Gopal,
of the Christian Science Monitor, writes that just a 20-minute drive
outside the capital Kabul, “the American-backed government of Afghanistan no
longer exits.” He states, “Violence has reached record levels this year and
Afghanistan is now considered a deadlier battlefield than Iraq.” But a leading U.S. international law authority says (1) there is no
sufficient proof that bin Laden even masterminded the 9/11 attacks and (2)
diplomacy to secure justice would be the more rational and humane approach
than armed force. Francis Boyle, a University of Illinois professor, writes in
“Destroying World Order”(Clarity Press): “There is not and may never be
conclusive proof as to who was behind the terrible bombings..on Sept. 11…
Suffice it to say that the accounts provided by the United States government
simply do not add up.” There is no evidence bin Laden ordered the attack or even that Al
Qaeda or the Taliban was involved, Boyle said. Recall that former Secretary
of State Colin Powell pledged the U.S. would produce a “White Paper” to
document the case against bin Laden, but that he never produced one.
Instead, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, hardly an American official,
issued a report the British press ridiculed for its lack of proof. Boyle also points out the so-called bin Laden video that the Central
Intelligence Agency “miraculously discovered” in a bombed out house in
Jalalabad, Afghanistan, was “disjointed” and “non-sequential.” The videotape is suspect because the Pentagon’s translated version was
not word for word but an “information flow” paraphrase created at The Johns
Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies where Paul Wolfowitz, the
war hawk and deputy defense secretary, had just been dean. In case you didn’t
know, Johns Hopkins is no impartial academic institution but one of the very
biggest Pentagon contractors in terms of the boodle it siphons off from the
military-industrial complex. “The bin Laden video provided no evidence that implicated the Taliban
government of Afghanistan in the 11 September 2001 attacks (and)…no justification
for the United States to wage war against Afghanistan, a U.N. Member State,
in gross violation of the United Nations Charter,” Boyle writes. Little known to most Americans is that Afghanistan likely was invaded
because its Taliban government refused to okay pipelines sought by Union Oil
Co. of California(UNOCAL). “Since Central Asia is landlocked, the United States government wanted
to find a way to get the oil and natural gas out, while avoiding Iran,
Russia, and China,” Boyle said. “The easiest way to do that was to construct
a pipeline south through Afghanistan, into Pakistan and right out to the
Arabian Sea. UNOCAL had been negotiating with the Taliban government of
Afghanistan for quite some time, still with the full support of the U.S.
government into the summer of 2001, but their negotiations had failed. The
U.S….then rendered a proverbial offer that could not be refused to the
Taliban government.” A
“major consideration” for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was to put
in office a regime favoring the oil and gas pipelines the U.S. sought running
from Turkmenistan south through Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea coast of
Pakistan, writes Chalmers Johnson in “The Sorrows of Empire”(Owl Books). Oil
“has been a constant motive” driving “the vast expansion of (U.S.) bases in
the Persian Gulf” in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAR,
Johnson says. Because Afghanistan’s Taliban regime opposed the U.S.-backed
venture, its overthrow became the secret reason behind “the war on
terrorism,” Johnson claims. To
build the proposed $2-billion, 918-mile natural gas pipeline and a $4-billion
1,005-mile oil pipeline UNOCAL “needed a government in Kabul it could deal
with in obtaining transit rights.” Thus,
Johnson writes, “A remarkable group of Washington insiders came together to
promote the Unocal project”: #
UNOCAL hired former President Nixon’s national security adviser Henry
Kissinger to negotiate with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. #
Kissinger worked with Turkmenistan’s top consultant, none other than his own
former White House aide Gen. Alexander Haig, later President Regan’s
Secretary of State. #
UNOCAL also employed two well-connected Afghans to influence the Taliban in
its favor, naturalized U.S. citizen Zalmay Khalilzad, and Hamid Karzai, both
linked to former Afghan king Zahir Shah, then living in Pakistan. The pair
later became U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and U.S.-backed President of
Afghanistan, respectively. #
President Bush first appointed Khalilzad to his National Security
Council(NSC) staff, under Condoleezza Rice, and on December 31, 2001, named
him “special envoy” to Afghanistan, only nine days after the Karzai
government took office in Kabul. “It
should be recalled,” Johnson writes, Khalilzad joined NSC on May 23, 2001,
“just in time to work on an operational order for an attack on Afghanistan.” Johnson
writes “it would appear that the attacks of September 11 provided an
opportunity for the United States to act unilaterally to remove the Taliban,
without assistance from Russia, India, or any other country.” According
to Boyle, even before 9/11 the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan had made
“repeated offers to negotiate a solution” over “the disposition of bin Laden---as
well as over the UNOCAL oil pipeline.” Boyle
said the Taliban offered to have bin Laden tried in a neutral Islamic court
by Muslim judges applying the laws of Sharia; then they modified this to have
him tried before some type of neutral court, which would exclude handing him
over to the U.S; and finally, “even offered to try bin Laden themselves
provided the United States gave them some credible evidence of his
involvement in the ll September attacks, which was never done.” Bush
responded in his September 20, 2001, address “by ruling out any type of
negotiations and instead issuing the Taliban government an impossible
ultimatum,” Boyle said. As
President Bush put it, “tonight, the United States of America makes the
following demands on the Taliban: Deliver to United States
authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land.
(Applause.) Release all foreign nationals, including American
citizens, you have unjustly imprisoned… Close immediately and permanently
every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and hand over every terrorist,
and every person in their support structure, to appropriate
authorities. (Applause.) Give the United States full
access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer
operating.” Bush emphasized: “These demands are not open to
negotiation or discussion. (Applause.) The Taliban must act, and act
immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will
share in their fate.” Boyle
said that by giving an impossible ultimatum to Afghanistan that ruled out
negotiations and chose the military path, Bush ignored “12 or so multilateral
conventions already on the books that deal with…international terrorism,”
“many of which could have been used…to handle this matter in a lawful,
effective, and peaceful manner.” “So a
decision was made remarkably early in the process to ignore and abandon the
entire framework of international treaties that had been established under
the auspices of the UN Organization for the past 25 years,” Boyle summarized,
“in order to deal with acts of international terrorism and instead go to war
against Afghanistan, a U.N. member state.” Surely,
the hour has come for the U.S. to reverse the failed Bush military approach
and negotiate an equitable solution to stop the killing and bring bin Laden
to justice. If you think the U.S. cannot negotiate with the Taliban, recall
during the 1980s it was the CIA that funneled literally billions of dollars
directly into Taliban pockets to overthrow Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed
government, increasing the prospect of an invasion by the Red Army, which is
exactly what happened. “In
the end, the United States and the Taliban ‘won’, and…the rest of
Afghanistan, lost,” writes William Blum in “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press).
More than a million dead, three million disabled, five million refugees; in
total about half the population.” Hasn’t
Afghanistan suffered enough? The U.S. would be far better off if instead of
pouring tens of thousands of troops into Afghanistan it sent in a like number
of unarmed Peace Corps volunteers with a comparable budget. Time to give
non-violence a chance. C'mon, guys, show a little imagination, huh? # (Sherwood
Ross, director of Anti-War News Service(AWNS), formerly worked for the
Chicago Daily News and contributed regular columns to wire services. To reach
him and support the work of AWNS email sherwoodr1@yahoo.com) |
--
_______________________________________________
TP-list mailing list
To post a message email TP-list@tridentploughshares.org
Tilbage til forsiden