Nexus - 1303 - New Times Magazine-pages

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AL-QAEDA, US Olt COMPANIES AND CENTRAL ASIA At-QaAEDA, OiL COMPANIES CENTRAL ASIA AND The cosy relationship between US petroleum corporations, the US government and the military in the 1990s destabilised Central Asia and the Balkans and fostered the spread of Islamist jihadists as well as the flow of Afghan heroin. The then leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sayed Kuttub, a man Faisal sponsored to undermine Nasser, openly admitted that during this period [the 1960s] "America made Islam". Caraw A — Said K. Avburish, in The Rise, Corruption and the Coming Fall of the House of Saud (1995)! hat is slowly emerging from al-Qaeda [al-Qa'ida] activities in Central Asia in the 1990s is the extent to which they involved both American oil companies and the US government.* By now we know that the US-protected movements of al-Qaeda terrorists into regions like Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Kosovo have served the interests of US oil companies. In many cases they have also provided pretexts or opportunities for a US military commitment and even troops to follow. This has been most obvious in the years since the Afghanistan war with the Soviet Union ended in 1989. Deprived of Soviet troops to support it, the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime in Kabul finally fell in April 1992. What should have been a glorious victory for the mujahedin proved instead to be a time of troubles for them, as Tajiks behind Massoud and Pashtuns behind Hekmatyar began instead to fight each other. The situation was particularly difficult for the Arab Afghans, who now found themselves no longer welcome. Under pressure from America, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the new interim president of Afghanistan, Mojaddedi, announced that the Arab Afghans should leave. In January 1993, Pakistan followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in its country and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.* Shortly afterwards, Pakistan extradited a number of Egyptian jihadists to Egypt, some of whom had already been tried and convicted in absentia.* Other radical Islamists went to Afghanistan, but without the foreign support they had enjoyed before. Fleeing the hostilities in Afghanistan, some Uzbek and Tajik mujahedin and refugees started fleeing or returning north across the Amu Darya.’ In this confusion, with or without continued US backing, cross-border raids—of the kind originally encouraged by CIA director Casey back in the mid-1980s—continued.° Both Hekmatyar and Massoud actively supported the Tajik rebels, including in the years up to 1992 when both continued to receive aid and assistance from the United States.” The Pakistani observer Ahmed Rashid documents further support for the Tajik rebels from both Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence directorate ISL.‘ These raids into Tajikistan and later Uzbekistan contributed materially to the destabilisation of the Muslim republics in the Soviet Union (and after 1992 of its successor, the Commonwealth of Independent States). This destabilisation was an explicit goal of US policy in the Reagan era, and did not change with the end of the Afghanistan war. On the contrary, the United States was concerned to hasten the break-up of the Soviet Union and increasingly to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be "the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet"” The collapse of the Soviet Union had a disastrous impact on the economies of its Islamic republics. Already in 1991, the leaders of Central Asia "began to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and the US company Chevron"."” The first Bush administration actively supported the plans of US oil companies to contract for exploiting the resources of the Caspian region, and also for a pipeline not controlled by Moscow that could bring the oil and gas production out to the by Peter Dale Scott, PhD © September 1, 2005 (revised) Website: http://www. peterdalescott.net From chapter 9 of his forthcoming book The Road to 9/11 by Peter Dale Scott, PhD © September 1, 2005 (revised) Website: http://www. peterdalescott.net From chapter 9 of his forthcoming book The Road to 9/11 APRIL — MAY 2006 NEXUS = 11 www.nexusmagazine.com