Monday, August 31, 2009

How ODA 574 Installed Karzai, And Afghan Democracy


Afghan democracy is the work of US army's special forces unit, led by Major Jason Amerine. This is a fake, imposed democracy. It will not last.

The Afghan election is not about George Washington, Cromwell or the French Revolution. It is more about Major Jason Amerine and his battle-hardened covert operations boys who introduced Hamid Karzai to the world, along with fake, warlord-backed, drug-money-financed Afghan democracy that will never work.


For the people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose historical emperors ruled a large swath of Central and South Asia, they would never accept a ruler installed by an occupation force. The setup in Kabul is there as long as the Americans are in Kabul with the coalition of the unwilling, NATO. The only other country that is keen to sustain the Afghan mess is India, for reasons that have to do with Pakistan than anything else.


Hamid Karzai was brought to power seven years ago by US special forces unit ODA 574.


His rival, Abdullah Abdullah, is worse. He was a smalltime PR person working for the northern alliance force, a proxy militia created by the Indians and Iranians, with Russian backing.


Remember the breaking news on CNN and BBC on Nov. 2, 2001 when the two Am-Brit channels aired a planted news story about a heroic Hamid Karzai entering Afghanistan with fighters from his tribe to liberate Kabul from Taliban government?
 It was a drama orchestrated to legitimize the US- and UK-installed pawn in Kabul.


You can see here a private picture taken by someone from ODA 574. It shows what Karzai was actually doing on the ground about the same time that the American and British media was glorifying Karzai's solo attempt at 'liberating' Afghanistan.


On September 11, 2001, US Army's lead special forces unit, ODA 574, was in Kazakhstan reportedly training the Kazakh army. Three days later, its members were secretly entering Afghanistan, one month before the formal launch of the American-British invasion of Afghanistan. ODA 574 entered Afghan territory even before the United Nations granted Washington the right to wage war in response to 9/11.


ODA 574 does not operate as part of the US military on the ground. Its job is to infiltrate other countries, carry out sabotage and generally help break the target from the inside. This includes assassinating political or religious leaders, destroying power plants, or sparking ethnic or sectarian clashes.


In a way, what the unit was doing in this picture above was a dry run for all the mess introduced to the region in the following years, in Pakistan, in Iran, and in China's Xinjiang. Pakistanis are almost convinced that the miraculous and sudden rise of the so-called Pakistani Taliban to spread terror inside Pakistan had everything to do with support from covert elements inside Afghanistan, possibly a setup similar to ODA 574.


There is little doubt also that US-controlled Afghanistan is being used by both Americans and Indians to stir trouble in China's Xinjiang.


Russia and Iran are paying the price for helping the Americans use their assets, the Northern Alliance, to occupy Afghanistan. In Russia, the fronts in Ingushetia and Chechnya have suddenly warmed up recently with mysterious attacks on vital installations. Payback time, Putin.


According to information available in the public domain, members of ODA 574 are equipped with training for unconventional warfare, special communications systems and backed by combat controllers.


The unit helped glorify Hamid Karzai, who until then was nothing more than a fixer hired by American oil interests to court the Taliban government in Kabul. Karzai worked for Zalmay Khalilzad, who worked for people close to Dick Cheney and the Bush family, who were in bed with oil giants.


Washington used the Indian-Iranian-Russian backed Northern Alliance against Kabul. But after the occupation, Washington wanted to see its own puppet in power. Karzai was 'lionized' so that he could stand up to the Northern Alliance in the negotiations to form a post-Taliban government. Needless to say, the Am-Brit media pumped so much hot air into Karzai's image that everyone else had to concede the presidency to America's nominee.


This is, of course, my version of the story. The version of the US army is slightly different. The US military does not deny that ODA 574 was there on the ground in Afghanistan helping Karzai. The US military simply constructs a myth around the help extended by ODA 574 to Afghan 'freedom fighters' led by Hamid Karzai to topple an oppressive regime in Kabul. The American version also defines ODA 574's mission as that to bolster democracy in pursuance of the ideals of America's founding fathers. In short, the usual American foreign policy doublespeak.


The worst part of this story is that the American people, who are a fine people, are spoon-fed government planted lies 24/7 through CNN and Fox News. A majority of the Americans don't know what their government and their military have done to Afghanistan, empowering thugs and drug pushers and using the occupied nation to destabilize neighboring countries.


If Afghanistan were America's war of independence, the government in Kabul today would be the equivalent of General George Howe of Britain defeating George Washington and appointing a British puppet as chief executive in White House.


Conclusion: The elections in Afghanistan were a success. A triumph for freedom. Ahem.


6 comments:

  1. Clearly America is eager to trumpet the election's outcome, having a stake in both candidates, but that exuberance has since faded as fraud allegations pile up. President Obama made a bad bet. The election was doomed to fail because both Karzai and Abdullah will create schisms in Afghanistan's political and cultural landscape. Do you agree with the rising chorus that Afghanistan should restructure from a federal to parliamentary system?

    ReplyDelete
  2. James, I am sure the majority of the Afghans are too attached to their tribal system to care for the parliamentary or the federal systems.

    What US needs to do in Afghanistan is to:

    1. End reliance on thugs and drug pushers in the Kabul government

    2. Restore power to the Pashtun majority

    3. Put in place mechanisms for power sharing and conflict resolution among various Afghan parties

    4. Recognize the central role of Pakistan in helping stabilize Afghanistan and not try to undermine this Pakistani role

    5. Once all the four above are achieved, US should withdraw from Afghanistan

    These are a few other things too but these five broad points are the most urgent.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree with your points, but am afraid the chances of an American withdrawal decrease with a tribal system. America seems determined to impose a Western-style democracy. I believe this to be a mistake, but realistically I'm trying to figure out what's compatible with Afghanistan's tribal system.

    ReplyDelete
  4. We are fast approaching a time when the US will not have the luxury to decide to leave or not based on what system of government is left behind in Kabul.

    Currently, US does have options. But US military commanders who have served on the ground in Afghanistan understand it's a no-win.

    Take Pakistan for example. US is using this country as a logistical base. But this base is shrinking, not expanding. Any government that allies itself with the US occupation of Afghanistan meets a tragic end. That's what happened with Musharraf. Come next elections and the incumbent Pakistani government will face a certain defeat. In Afghanistan, US allies in Kabul don't stand a chance without actual US military backing. If Washington announces today that it is leaving, there will be an exodus in Kabul.

    This picture does not lead to the conclusion that US will have the luxury to see a permanent government in Kabul of its liking.

    The only situation where this is possible is through a permanent military occupation. I leave it to you to assess if this is feasible. US can take this option and wait it out. But imagine the price that the entire region and its people will pay in terms of instability and multiplied anti-Americanism.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Entertaining story. Watching the history of our campaign written and re-written over the last several years has been quite an adventure.

    Conspiracy theorists will say we installed the government. Idealists will say that President Karzai's rise was the result of a well-planned campaign in Afghanistan to support the resistance movement.

    The truth is that the campaign was poorly planned and really much more of a symbolic effort to put troops on the ground while a plan was developed.

    For all the criticism of the Karzai regime, he really did ride into Afghanistan without support. We only caught up with him later when we realized, belatedly, that we needed to lend him a hand. If sending eleven SF guys to help makes him a puppet, I'll defer to you for the definition. But, having been there from the start, I'll tell you that he was a self-made man.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Roark, Karzai a self-made man?

    Not as President of Afghanistan he is not.

    Karzai was lived in total obscurity in Quetta, Pakistan, until the mid 1990s when he was hired by Texas oilmen to court the Taliban when they were in power and is on record having accompanied at least one official Taliban delegation to Washington and Houston.

    He was recruited for this job by Zalmay Khalilzad, a close friend of both Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney.

    When he was living in Quetta, Mr. Karzai used to receive a monthly stipend from ISI for consulting work.

    He later switched employers from ISI to America's neocons who were rising to power at the time.

    A lot of people know Mr. Karzai from his days in Quetta. They will tell you that Mr. Karzai had no backing or capacity to summon tens of tribal fighters and enter Afghanistan in the dead of night to try reach Kabul and topple the Taliban. He was backed by the US government. The support he received from the special forces unit is a small part of a bigger picture, where he worked very closely with the CIA and the US military and the neocon cabal in enlisting the Northern Alliance in the American invasion of Afghanistan.

    The assessment that Karzai is a self-made man and that he was assisted by the US special ops teams after the fact does not tally with the above history.

    ReplyDelete

Your comments are welcome. Please do observe common courtesy rules. This blog is linked to PakNationalists.com and follows the same comment guidelines. The purpose of this blog is to promote the views of PakNationalists on Pakistan's domestic and foreign policy interests.