Thursday 7th of November 2024

mining lithium...

lithiumlithium

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Taliban fighters entered Kabul on Aug. 15, they didn’t just seize control of the Afghan government. They also gained the ability to control access to huge deposits of minerals that are crucial to the global clean energy economy.

In 2010, an internal US Department of Defense memo called Afghanistan “the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” after American geologists discovered the vast extent of the country’s mineral wealth, valued at at least $1 trillion. The silvery metal is essential for electric vehicles and renewable energy batteries.

Ten years later, thanks to conflict, corruption, and bureaucratic dysfunction, those resources remain almost entirely untapped. And as the US looks to disentangle its clean energy supply chains from China, the world’s top lithium producer, to have Afghanistan’s minerals under Taliban control is a severe blow to American economic interests.

“The Taliban is now sitting on some of the most important strategic minerals in the world,” said Rod Schoonover, head of the ecological security program at the Council on Strategic Risks, a Washington think tank. “Whether they can/will utilize them will be an important question going forward.”

Minerals are a double-edged sword for Afghanistan

Global demand for lithium is projected to skyrocket 40-fold above 2020 levels by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency, along with rare earth elements, copper, cobalt, and other minerals in which Afghanistan is naturally rich. These minerals are concentrated in a small number of pockets around the globe, so the clean energy transition has the potential to yield a substantial payday for Afghanistan.

In the past, Afghan government officials have dangled the prospect of lucrative mining contracts in front of their US counterparts as an enticement to prolong the American military presence in the country. With the Taliban in charge, that option is likely off the table.

But Ashraf Ghani, the World Bank economist-turned-Afghan president, who fled the country the day of the Taliban takeover, saw the minerals as a potential “curse.” For one, most economists agree that mineral riches breed corruption and violence, particularly in developing countries, and that they often fail to yield many benefits for average citizens. At the same time, the Taliban have long illegally tapped the country’s minerals (especially lapis lazuli, a gem) as a source of up to $300 million in annual revenue for their insurgency.

What happens now that the Taliban is in control

The Taliban can’t simply flick a switch and dive into the global lithium trade, Schoonover said. Years of conflict have left the country’s physical infrastructure—roads, power plants, railways—in tatters. And at the moment Taliban militants are reportedly struggling even to maintain the provision of basic public services and utilities in the cities they have captured, let alone carry out economic policies that can attract international investors.

 

Competing factions within the Taliban would make it very difficult for any company to negotiate mining deals, and China is unlikely to extend to the group the scale of infrastructure loans that would be required to bring any sizable mining operations online, said Nick Crawford, a development economics researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank. That’s especially true after Chinese investors got burned on a $3 billion copper mining project in Afghanistan, that started in 2007 and failed to produce anything, largely because of challenges related to the lack of infrastructure.

“As long as there are safer and more reliable sources elsewhere, full utilization of Afghan minerals is likely to remain slow,” Schoonover said. However, China and Russia are already retaining diplomatic ties with the Taliban, and will almost certainly do business with the new regime on its home turf.

One reason for China to do so, Crawford said, could be to offshore some of the localized environmental destruction that comes with rare earth and lithium mining. In that case, mining is likely to add to the range of other environmental hazards—including water scarcityair pollution, and extreme weather disasters related to climate change—already faced by the Afghan people.

 

Read more:

https://qz.com/2047785/under-the-taliban-what-will-happen-to-afghanistans-minerals/

 

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taliban communications

This is a preview of the On Tech With Shira Ovide newsletter, which is now reserved for Times subscribers. Sign up to get it in your inbox three times a week.

 

Almost as soon as the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other large internet companies confronted an uncomfortable decision: What should they do about online accounts that the Taliban began to use to spread their message and establish their legitimacy?

The choice boils down to whether the online companies recognize the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan or isolate it because of the group’s history of violence and repression. International governments themselves are also grappling with this.

I want us to stop and sit with the discomfort of internet powers that are functioning like largely unaccountable state departments. They don’t do this entirely alone, and they don’t really have a choice. It’s still wild that a handful of unelected tech executives play a role in high-stakes global affairs.

One way for the Taliban to try to gain Afghans’ trust is to appear to be a legitimate government on social media, and the internet companies are trying to figure out how to handle it. 

Facebook has for years banned Taliban-related accounts as part of its three-tiered policy for “dangerous organizations,” and the company said this week that it would continue to remove Taliban accounts and posts that support the group. That includes a help line for Afghan citizens on WhatsApp, which Facebook owns. (The Taliban now control a country, but they aren’t allowed to start a Facebook group.)

Citing U.S. sanctions on the Afghan Taliban, YouTube said it would also remove accounts it believes are operated by the group. Twitter doesn’t have a blanket ban but told CNN that any posts or videos must comply with rules that prohibit what it considers hate speech or incitements to violence. My colleagues Sheera Frenkel and Ben Decker found examples of pro-Taliban social media accounts and posts that sprang up despite those bans, including a Facebook page that called itself a grocery store but posted pro-Taliban messages in recent days. 

Those U.S. internet companies are guided by the laws of their home country and those of the countries in which they operate, and they take their cues from the international community. But ultimately, these are private companies that must make their own choices. 

It was Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that decided in January that the words of President Donald J. Trump might inspire additional violence if they were blared on their sites. Twitter had to make a choice when the government of India ordered it to wipe away what the country’s leadership considered subversive speech and others believed was essential free expression in a democracy. Facebook opted (by neglect rather than an active decision) not to intervene when Myanmar military personnel turned the social network into a tool for ethnic cleansing.

In each case, unelected technology executives mostly in the United States had to make consequential decisions that reverberated for citizens and elected leaders. And unlike governments, internet companies face virtually no accountability to the public if people disagree with their decisions. Citizens can’t vote Mark Zuckerberg out of office. 

There is a long and often ugly history of American companies’ influencing what happens far from home to protect their interests. Media tycoons have helped start wars and elect their preferred candidates. The position of Facebook, YouTube and other U.S. internet companies feels different. Their products have become so widely used that their influence is not really a choice. They must act as diplomats whether they like it or not.

I almost feel a little sorry for the U.S. internet companies. (Almost.) They wanted to change the world, and they did. Now they have become so powerful they must make hard decisions about an imperfect world. They and we live with the consequences.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/technology/facebook-twitter-taliban.html

 

See also: https://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/9596#comment-55609

 

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spilt milk...

CNN has been hit with a wave of anti-war sentiment after publishing a curious piece highlighting the $1 trillion worth of minerals in Afghanistan being left behind that “the world desperately needs.” 

When the US finishes its exit from the country after 20 years, it will be leaving behind valuable, untapped mineral deposits worth a $1 trillion, according to US military officials and geologists in 2010. 

Minerals such as iron, copper, gold and lithium are found in huge quantities there, and have remained mostly untouched due to the unstable state of the nation, something that doesn’t look to be changing as the US continues its chaotic exit from the country amid a Taliban takeover. 

“Afghanistan is certainly one of the regions richest in traditional precious metals, but also the metals [needed] for the emerging economy of the 21st century,” Rod Schoonover, a scientist and security expert who founded the Ecological Futures Group, told the outlet about the deposits

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/532519-cnn-afghanistan-minerals-lithium/

 

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the teleprompter lied...

The Afghanistan Debacle, Zalmay Khalilzad and The Great Reset

 

 BY F. William Engdahl

 

Much of the world is shocked by the apparent incompetence of the Biden Administration in the human and geopolitical catastrophe that is unfolding in Afghanistan. While Biden speaks out of both sides of his pre-scripted mouth, stating that everyone else is to blame than his decisions, then stating “the buck stops here,” only adds to the impression that the once sole-superpower is in terminal collapse. Could it be that this is all part of a long-term strategy to end the nation state in preparation for the global totalitarian model sometimes called the Great Reset by the Davos cabal? The 40 year history of the Afghan US war and the Afghani Pashtun who shaped the policy until today is revealing.

The airwaves of mainstream media across the globe are filled with questions of military incompetence or intelligence failure or both. It is worthwhile to examine the role of the Biden Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation at the State Department, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad. For the one figure who has shaped strategic US foreign policy since 1984 in the Administration of Bush Sr., and has been US Ambassador to both Afghanistan and to Iraq at key times during the US wars there, as well as the key figure in the present debacle, astonishingly little media attention has been given the 70-year old Afghan-born operative. 

The Shadowy Khalilzad

Khalilzad, an ethnic Pashtun born and raised in Afghanistan until High School, is arguably the key actorin the unfolding Afghan drama, beginning with the time he was the architect of the radical transformation under Bush Jr of US strategic doctrine to “preventive wars.” He was involved in every step of the US policy in Afghanistan from CIA training Taliban Mujihideen Islamists (organization banned in Russia) in the 1980’s to the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to the Doha deal with the Taliban and the current disastrous collapse.

The May 8 1992 New York Times reported on a leaked Pentagon draft ,later called the Wolfowitz Doctrine after the Pentagon official under then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Paul Wolfowitz had been charged by Cheney with drafting a new US global military posture following the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to the Times leak, the document argued that, “the US must become the world’s single superpower and must take aggressive action to prevent competing nations—even allies such as Germany and Japan—from challenging US economic and military supremacy.” It further stated, “We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” It was de facto a declaration of unilateral imperialism.

At the time Zalmay Khalilzad worked under Wolfowitz as Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, where he was tasked with drafting the new doctrine, working with Wolfowitz and outside consultants, including Khalilzad’s doctorate professor at the University of Chicago, RAND neo-conservative “godfather”, Alfred Wohlstetter. Wolfowitz had also studied at Chicago under Wohlstetter. This group became the core of the so-called neo-conservative warhawks. Khalilzad once said Cheney personally credited the young Afghani for the strategy document, allegedly telling Khalilzad, “You’ve discovered a new rationale for our role in the world.” That “discovery” was to transform America’s role in the world in a disastrous way. 

Khalilzad’s highly controversial policy proposal, while it was later deleted from the published document by the Bush White House, reappeared a decade later as the Bush Doctrine under Bush Jr., also known as “preventive wars” and was used to justify the US invasions of Afghanistan and later Iraq. 

Bush jr., whose Vice President was Dick Cheney, initiated the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001,urged on by his Afghan adviser, Zalmay Khalilzad, using the excuse that Osama bin Laden, the alleged architect of the 911 attacks, was hiding under protection of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, so the Taliban must be punished. In May, 2001, some four months before 911, Bush National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had named Khalilzad as “Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Gulf, Southwest Asia and Other Regional Issues.” The “other regional issues” was to become huge. 

Khalilzad had headed the Bush-Cheney Transition team for the Department of Defense. His influence twenty yearas ago was enormous and largely hidden from public view. Former Khalilzad boss Wolfowitz was Number Two at the Bush Jr. Pentagon and former Khalilzad consulting client, Don Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary. 

Bush declared war against the Taliban regime for refusing to extradite the Saudi Jihadist Bin Laden. There was no UN role, no debate in Congress. It was the new US doctrine from Khalilzad and Wolfowitz and their neo-con cabal, that might makes right. Here began the 20-year US debacle in Afghanistan that never should have begun in any sane world of rule by law. 

Taliban Origins

The origins of the Taliban come out of the CIA project, initiated by Carter Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1979, of recruiting and arming radical Islamists from Pakistan, Afghanistan and even Saudi Arabia, to wage irregular warfare against the Soviet Red Army then in Afghanistan. The CIA code-named it Operation Cyclone and it lasted ten years until the Red Army withdrew in 1989. A Saudi-CIA asset, Osama bin Laden, had been brought into Pakistan to work with the Pakistani ISI intelligence to draw money and Jihadists from the Arab states into the war. A significant number of radicalized Afghan Pashtun students called Taliban or “seekers” were recruited from radical madrasses, some in Pakistan where the ISI protected them. That CIA war became the longest and most costly CIA operation in its history. By 1984 Khalilzad was in the middle of it all, as US State Department Afghan specialist.

During the latter part of the 1980’s CIA war in Afghanistan, working with radical Islamist Mujahideen and Taliban mercenaries, Khalilzad emerged as the most influential US policy figure on Afghanistan. By 1988 Khalilzad had become the State Department’s “special advisor” on Afghanistan under former CIA head, George Bush Sr. In that post he was the one who dealt directly with the Mujahideen, including the Taliban. 

By then he had become close to Jimmy Carter’s Afghan war strategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Joining the US State Department in 1984 after teaching at Brzezinski’s Columbia University, Khalilzad became Executive Director of the influential Friends of Afghanistan lobby where Brzezinski and Kissinger associate, Lawrence Eagleburger were members. The Friends of Afghanistan, with USAID money, lobbied Congress for major US support to the Mujahideen. Khalilzad also successfully lobbied to give advanced US Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen. During this period Khalilzad had dealings with the Mujahideen, Taliban, Osama bin Laden and what came to become Al Qaeda (a terrorist organization banned in Russia).

In the George W. Bush Administration, Khalilzad was named Special Presidential Envoy to Afghanistan in early 2002, and was directly responsible for installing CIA asset Hamid Karzai as Afghan president in 2002.Hamid’s brother, warlord of the country’s largest opium province, Kandahar, was paid by the CIA at least since 2001. Khalilzad was clearly aware.

Khalilzad himself had reportedly been “selected” by CIA recruiter, Thomas E. Gouttierre, when Zalmay was an AFS exchange High School student in Ceres, California in the 1960s. Goutttierre headed the CIA-financed Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. That would explain his later career rise to extraordinary influence in US Afghan policy and beyond.

Notably, the disgraced current Afghan “President in flight,” Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, the American-appointed “co-president” of Afghanistan, was a classmate of Khalilzad in the early 1970s as an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut, as were both of their future wives. Small world.

By 1996 following several years of civil war among the rival factions of the CIA-backed Mujahideen the Taliban, backed by Pakistan’s ISI, took control of Kabul. The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan by 1996 was a direct consequence of Khalilzad’s arming and backing of the Mujahideen in the 1980s, including of Osama bin Laden. It was no accident or miscalculation. The CIA was in the business of weaponizing political Islam and Khalilzad was and is a key player in that. Khalilzad served as board member of the Afghanistan Foundation during the Clinton years, which advocated that the Taliban join forces with the anti-Taliban Mujahideen resistance groups.

During the end of the Clinton Presidency Khalilzad played a key role in shaping the military agenda of the next President with his role in the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), together with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush and others who played key policy roles in the George W. Bush presidency. After the 911 attacks in 2001 Khalilzad orchestrated the Bush war against Taliban in Afghanistan and became Bush Envoy to Afghanistan. By November 2003 Khalilzad was US Ambassador to Afghanistan where his hand-picked President,Karzai, was installed. In February 2004 Ambassador Khalilzad welcomed US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and a Brigadier General Lloyd Austin in Kabul. Austin knows Khalilzad.

By December 2002 Bush had appointed Khalilzad to be Ambassador at Large for Free Iraqis to coordinate “preparations for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.” Khalilzad and his PNAC neocon cronies had advocated a war to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein since the late 1990s, well before 911. Two years later after the US war against Iraq began, Khalilzad was made Ambassador to Iraq. No one person has been more responsible for the rise of radical Islam terror groups from Taliban to Al Qaeda in those two countries than Zalmay Khalilzad. 

No “Intelligence Failure”

In 2018 Khalilzad was recommended by US Secretary of State and former CIA head Mike Pompeo, to be US “Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation” for the Trump Administration. There was no hint of reconciliation from Khalilzad or Taliban. Here the wily Khalilzad entered into exclusive US-Taliban talks with their exiled envoys in Doha Qatar, the pro-Taliban Gulf state that houses leading Muslim Brotherhoods figures as well as Taliban. Qatar is reportedly a major money source for the Taliban. 

Khalilzad successfully pressed Pakistan to release the co-founder of Taliban, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the key strategist of the Taliban victory in 1996, so that Baradar could lead the talks with Khalilzad in Doha. Then-President Trump reportedly approved that Khalilzad would negotiate in Doha solely with the Taliban, without the Kabul regime present. Baradar signed the February 2020 “deal” negotiated by Khalilzad and Taliban, the so-called Doha Agreement, in which the US and NATO agreed to a total withdrawal, but without any Taliban power-sharing agreement with the Kabul Ghani government, as Taliban refused to recognize them. Khalilzad told the New York Times of his deal that Taliban had committed to “do what is necessary that would prevent Afghanistan from ever becoming a platform for international terrorist groups or individuals.”

This was highly dubious and Khalilzad knew it, as Taliban and Al Qaeda have been intimately linked since the 1980s arrival of Osama bin Laden in Afghanstan. The current leader of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is reportedly alive and in Taliban safe haven inside Afghanistan. In short, this is the “deal” Khalilzad struck with the Taliban for then-President Trump, a deal which was accepted by the Biden Administration with only a minor change stating initially that September 11, 2021 be the date of final US pullout. Talk about symbolism. 

The fall of Afghanistan was not the result of an “intelligence failure” by the CIA or a military mis-calculation by Secretary Austin and the Pentagon. Both knew, as did Khalilzad, what they were doing. When Austin approved the secret dark-of-night abandonment of the strategic Bagram Airbase, largest US military base in Afghanistan, on July 4, without notifying the Kabul government, it made clear to the US-trained Afghan army that the US would give them no more air cover. The US even stopped paying them months ago, collapsing morale further. This was no accident. It was all deliberate and Zalmay Khalilzad was central to all. In the 1980s his role helped create the 1996 Taliban takeover, in 2001 the Taliban destruction, and now in 2021 the Taliban restoration. 

The real gainer in this insanity is the globalist agenda of so-called Davos “Great Reset” cabal who are using it to destroy the global influence of the United States, as Biden domestically destroys the economy from within. No nation, not Taiwan, not Japan, not Philippines, not India or even Australia, nor any other nation hoping for US protection in the future will be able to trust Washington to hold its promises. The fall of Kabul is the end of the American Century. Little wonder the China media is filled with schadenfreude and jubilation as the discuss Silk Road deals with the Taliban.

 

 

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/08/19/the-afghanistan-debacle-zalmay-khalilzad-and-the-great-reset/

 

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more hidden history...

7 lies about Afghanistan


by Thierry Meyssan

 


In covering the fall of Kabul, the Western media are mindlessly repeating seven lies of Western propaganda. By misrepresenting the history of Afghanistan, they mask the crimes committed in that country and make it impossible to foresee the fate that Washington has written for it. And if the Taliban were not the most wicked...

 

French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Joe Biden addressed their nation on the capture of Kabul by the Taliban on August 15, 2021.

 

1.- THE AFGHAN WAR IS NOT A RESPONSE TO 9/11, IT WAS PLANNED BEFORE THE ATTACKS

According to these two politicians, the sole purpose of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was to "pursue those who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and to ensure that al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base for further attacks. »1

 

Naiz Naik was murdered in his home in 2009  

Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister of the Third Reich, is said to have said that "A lie repeated ten times remains a lie; repeated ten thousand times, it becomes the truth." But the facts are stubborn and, whatever Mr Macron and Mr Biden may think, the 2001 war was decided in mid-July 2001, when the Berlin negotiations between the United States and the United Kingdom on the one hand and the Taliban, not the Afghan government, on the other failed. Pakistan and Russia were observers at these secret talks. The Taliban delegation entered Germany in violation of the UN Security Council’s travel ban. After the failure of these negotiations, Pakistani Foreign Minister Naiz Naik returned to his country and sounded the alarm. Pakistan then looked for new allies. It offered China a gateway to the Indian Ocean (what we see today with the ’Silk Road’). The United States and the United Kingdom began to amass their troops in the area: 40,000 men in Egypt and almost the entire British fleet in the Arabian Sea. It was only after this arrangement was put in place that the attacks of September 11th took place.

2. AL-QAEDA IS NOT A THREAT FOR THE ANGLO-SAXONS, BUT AN INSTRUMENT

According to President Biden: "Our mission to reduce the terrorist threat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and to kill Osama bin Laden has been a success.

 

Alexandres de Marenche had imagined how to force the USSR to get stuck in Afghanistan

However, it was the director of France’s foreign secret services, Alexandres de Marenches, who proposed to his US counterpart within the framework of the Pinay Circle2 to provoke a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in order to trap them there3. President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, sought out anti-communist billionaire Osama Bin Laden in Beirut and asked him to lead Arab mercenaries in a terrorist campaign against the Afghan communist government4. Bin Laden was in Beirut to meet with former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, a member of the World Anti-Communist League5. Washington chose Bin Laden for two reasons: First, he was a member of a secret society, the Muslim Brotherhood, which allowed him to recruit fighters; second, he was one of the heirs to the largest construction company in the Arab world. As such, he had the men and know-how to turn the underground rivers of the Hindu Kush into military communication routes.

 

The Independent (London) celebrates Osama bin Laden. At the same time, the Heritage Foundation (Washington), President Reagan’s think tank, was distributing T-shirts bearing his image with the slogan "He fights for our freedoms". 

Later, the same Osama bin Laden served as a military adviser to the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, in 1992-94. His fighters followed him there. They abandoned the name "Mujahideen" for the "Arab Legion". His camp was visited by Russian commandos, who were taken prisoner there. However, before they were arrested, they had time to search his command room and found that all the military documents were written in English and not in Arabic.6

 Osama bin Laden’s Arab Legion marches in Bosnia and Herzegovina  

Later still, Osama Bin Laden used his fighters for one-off operations. He solicited them by choosing them according to his needs from his "roster", in Arabic "Al-Qaeda" (القاعدة).

It is therefore indisputable that Osama Bin Laden was for many years an agent of the United States. However, the latter claim that he turned against them, which nothing, absolutely nothing, proves. In any case, Osama bin Laden was seriously ill. He needed daily care in a sterile room. He was therefore taken care of in the American hospital in Dubai in July 2001, as revealed by Le Figaro7. This information was denied by the said hospital, but was confirmed to me by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyane (the current President of the United Arab Emirates) who assured me that he had visited him there in the presence of the local CIA chief of staff. Finally, Osama bin Laden was treated at the military hospital in Rawalpindi (Pakistan)8 where he died in December 2001. His funeral took place in Afghanistan, attended by two representatives of the British MI6 who wrote a report on the matter.

Also indisputably opposing the theory that Osama bin Laden had turned against his CIA employers was the fact that until 1999 - i.e. after the attacks attributed to him against the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and the US embassies in Nairobi (Kenya) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) - he had a public relations office in London. It was from this office that he launched his Call to Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

The fact that for ten years we have heard and seen recordings of people claiming to be Osama Bin Laden only deceives those who want to believe: the Swiss experts of the Dalle Molle Institute of Perceptive Artificial Intelligence, which at the time was used by the big banks in sensitive cases, were formal. These recordings are forgeries (including the one released by the Pentagon in which he claims responsibility for the 9/11 attacks) and do not correspond to the real Bin Laden. If facial and voice recognition was a speciality at the time, it is now a common technique. You can check for yourself with software that is available everywhere.

After Bin Laden’s death, Ayman al-Zawahiri became the emir of Al Qaeda. He still holds this position. The latter - who had supervised the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat - lived for several years after 2001 in the US embassy in Baku (Azerbaijan).9 He was, at least in that period, the only person who could be considered a terrorist. He was, at least during this period, protected by the US Marines. His current whereabouts are unknown, but there is no reason to believe that he is no longer under US protection.

3- THE US DOES NOT FOCUS ON "COUNTER-TERRORISM", BUT FUNDS AND ARMS TERRORISM 

President Biden explained at length, during his speech on the fall of Kabul, that the United States was not there to build states, but only to fight terrorism.

The phrase ’fight against terrorism’ has been repeated for twenty years, but that does not make it more meaningful. Terrorism is not a flesh-and-blood opponent. It is a method of combat. All the world’s armies can use it in certain circumstances. During the Cold War, the two blocs used it extensively against each other.

Since President George W. Bush (the son) declared the ’war on terror’ (i.e. the ’war on war’), the use of this military technique has been increasing. Westerners first think of attacks in a few large cities, but the worst has been achieved with the creation of small terrorist states in the wider Middle East up to the sinister ’Islamic State of the Levant’ (Daesh) and now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians initially believed the US narrative of events, but they are under no illusion. After 20 years of war, they have understood that the United States does not want to do any good. Washington does not fight terrorism, but creates, finances and arms groups that practice terrorism.

4- THE TALIBAN DID NOT FIGHT A WAR, THEY TOOK WHAT THE US GAVE THEM

Presidents Macron and Biden are playing dumb about the Taliban’s "takeover of Kabul". According to them, "Afghan political leaders have given up and fled the country. The Afghan army has collapsed, sometimes without even trying to fight. But how did they flee, if not with Western military aircraft? And the Afghan army did not "sometimes seek to fight", it was the other way round: it only "sometimes" sought to fight. The Afghan borders were among the most secure in the world. US soldiers recorded everyone’s identity with electronic means, including iris recognition.

The Afghan army consisted of 300,000 men - more than the French armies - who were very well trained by the US, France and others. It was over-equipped with sophisticated equipment. All its infantry had body armour and night vision systems. It had a very capable air force. In contrast, the Taliban has no more than 100,000 men, which is three times less. They are hooligans in sandals and armed with Kalashnikovs. They had no air force - they suddenly have one today with trained pilots from who knows where -. If there had been fighting, they would have been defeated for sure.

The regime change was decided under President Donald Trump. It was to take place on May 1st. But President Joe Biden changed that timetable to change history. He used the delay to set up military bases in the neighbouring countries and send at least 10,000 mercenaries. He has mobilised the Turkish army, which is already present in the country, but which no one is talking about. The latter has already recruited at least 2,000 jihadists living in Idleb (Syria) and continues to hire them.

 

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar receives the allegiance of Rached Ghannouchi (current president of the Tunisian National Assembly) and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (current Turkish president).

It is important to remember that during the war against the Soviets, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was already a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and the leader of a militia, the Millî Görüş (the one that today opens mosques in Germany and France). It was in this double capacity that he came to kneel before Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and future Prime Minister. Hekmatyar subsequently pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, which did not prevent him from running in the 2019 Afghan presidential election under US protection.

The allies began repatriating their nationals several months ago. They thought they would have time before September 11th, or at worst before midnight on August 30th. But Washington decided otherwise by choosing August 15th, the date of India’s bank holidays. This was a warning to New Delhi, which does not appreciate the fact that President Ghani’s Pashtuns are being replaced by those of Emir Akhundzada, even though they support other ethnic groups

 

The scenes of panic we saw at Kabul airports reminded us of those in Saigon during the US defeat in Vietnam. It is indeed quite the same. The Afghans clinging to the aircraft are not mostly translators from Western embassies, but agents of "Operation Omega" set up under President Obama10 . They are members of the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS), counter-insurgency auxiliaries, like the Vietnamese of "Operation Phoenix". They were responsible for torturing and killing Afghans opposed to the foreign occupation. They committed so many crimes that the Taliban were like choirboys11.

Soon we will see a completely different landscape in Afghanistan.

5. THE US DID NOT LOSE AFGHANISTAN TO CHINA, BUT FORCED CHINESE COMPANIES TO ACCEPT ITS PROTECTION

The US has not lost anything in Afghanistan because it does not want to establish peace there. They don’t care about the one million deaths they have caused there in 20 years. They just want that region to be unstable, that no government can control the exploitation of the natural resources there. They want companies, from whatever developed country, to be able to exploit them only by accepting their protection.
This is the Hollywood-popularised scheme of the globalised world, protected by a compound, with special forces going abroad to monitor exploitation sites in wilderness areas.

 

Admiral Cebrowski’s assistant popularised his thinking on how to adapt the US military to financial capitalism

This strategy was developed by Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who had already computerized the US military. On September 11, 2001, it became the way of thinking of the US military staff. It was popularised by Cebrowski’s deputy, Thomas Barnett, in his book The Pentagon’s New Map12.

It was this paradigm shift that President Bush called ’War Without End’. By this he meant that the US would forever be fighting terrorism, or rather forever instrumenting terrorist groups to prevent political organisation in these regions.

Yes, Chinese companies are already mining in Afghanistan, but from now on they will have to pay a price to the US or be subjected to terrorist attacks. So what if it’s a racket?

6- WESTERNERS DO NOT DEFEND THE ENLIGHTENMENT AGAINST OBSCURANTISM, BUT RATHER INSTRUMENTALISE IT

The first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, made us all cry by telling us the story of little girls massacred by the Taliban because they dared to wear nail polish. But the truth is quite different.

When President Carter, Zbigniew Brzeziński and Alexandre de Marenches supported the Afghan Islamists in 1978, they were fighting the communists who were opening schools for girls. Because for them the fight against the USSR’s allies came before human rights. Similarly today, President Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken support the Taliban because, for them, controlling access to the natural wealth of the wider Middle East comes before human rights. And they are doing the same in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

 

Pakistani general Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden, Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, Turkish militiaman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Tunisian religious teacher Rached Ghannouchi are members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The US has not only supported Islamists in war-torn countries. For example, it put General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, in power in Pakistan to use his country as a rear base for anti-Soviet fighters. He overthrew democracy, hanged President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and re-established Sharia law. President Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir Bhutto, who was Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1990s, was also assassinated by the Taliban.

There is no need to go back over the crimes of the Western counter-insurgency, the panic of their collaborators at Kabul airports is enough.

If Islamism and secularism have been used to manipulate the Afghans and to smoke out the West, political life in Afghanistan is not based on these concepts, but first and foremost on ethnic divisions. There are about fifteen of them, the largest of which, the Pashtuns, are also strongly represented in Pakistan. It is still a tribal country and not yet a nation. Other ethnic groups are supported by other countries in the region because they are also present there.

7- FRANCE HAS NOT ALWAYS SUPPORTED US CRIMES IN AFGHANISTAN, BUT ONLY SINCE PRESIDENT SARKOZY

According to President Emmanuel Macron: "President Jacques Chirac, as early as October 2001, decided that France should participate in international action, in solidarity with our American friends and allies who had just suffered a terrible attack on their soil. With a clear objective: to combat a terrorist threat that was directly targeting our territory and that of our allies from Afghanistan, which had become the sanctuary of Islamist terrorism".13

It is a distracting way to erase a characteristic French conflict. In October 2001, President Chirac violently opposed the participation of the French army in the Anglo-Saxon occupation of Afghanistan. He only authorised deployment under UN Security Council Resolution 1386. The French soldiers were indeed under the orders of Nato, but as part of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF). They were only involved in reconstruction assistance. They did not take prisoners, but eventually arrested fighters and immediately handed them over to the Afghan government. It was President Nicolas Sarkozy who changed this status and made France complicit in the crimes of the United States. It is because of this change that France is currently exfiltrating members of the Khost Protection Force (KPF) and the National Directorate of Security (NDS). And it will probably pay the price.

 

Thierry Meyssan

 

Translation 
Roger Lagassé

 

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article213772.html

 

 

GusNote: Bin Laden was NOT assassinated because of 9/11 but as often mentioned on this site he KNEW TOO MUCH and had documents (destroyed in the raid on his house) proving the duplicity of the USA. As wel,l let's not forget the role of Zbigniew Brzezinski (see: on 3 july 1979, the CIA...). It is most likely that duplicate of the Bin Laden documents are in the hands of someone who will use them at the opportune moment....

 

 

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Remember this picture, note Blinken and of course whatizname:

 

bin ladenbin laden

you have been miscommunicated...

The US airstrike that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children, in August was not caused by misconduct or negligence, the Pentagon has found after an “independent review.” No disciplinary action has been recommended. 

It was a communications breakdown rather than any sort of malice or ineptitude, Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami Said suggested in his review, the contents of which were relayed to Associated Press by a senior defense official. He clarified that the breakdown occurred in the process of identifying and confirming the target of the bombing and that, Said had concluded, it had occurred despite “prudent measures to prevent civilian deaths.”

However, Said acknowledged that better communication between those involved in the decision to strike and “other support personnel” might have raised legitimate concerns about the bombing, even if they might not have prevented it.

Said's report seemingly exonerated the Pentagon of any and all responsibility for blowing up a 37-year-old employee of an American humanitarian NGO who was driving with nine members of his family. The report, which apparently has been endorsed by Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, also called for more to be done to prevent “confirmation bias.”Confirmation bias in this case would have led the strike team to cherry-pick the data that supported team members' collective suspicions that the occupant of the car was an Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) terrorist.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, patted himself on the back for several days following what the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” That is, until it was learned that the driver, Zemari Ahmadi, had been working as an electrical engineer for the US-based aid group Nutrition and Education International for more than a decade. At the time of his death, he was carrying water jugs to his employer’s Kabul office, where he was supposed to pick up a laptop, the group has confirmed.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/539299-kabul-drone-strike-negligence-pentagon/

 

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