Reality Check (Nov. 5, 2001)
In response to calls to "do something" to punish the Bosnian Serbs from the air for shelling Sarajevo [in 1992]. I laid out the same military options [to newly-elected President Clinton] as I had presented to Pres. Bush. Our choices ranged from limited air strikes around Sarajevo to heavy bombing of the Serbs throughout the theater. I emphasized that none of these actions was guaranteed to change Serb behavior. Only troops on the ground could do that. Heavy bombing might persuade them to give in, but would not compel them to quit. -- Colin Powell, MY AMERICAN JOURNEY (1995), p. 561
Gen. Powell understands the meaning of limited war. He fought one in the Gulf War. Officially, he won it. His enemy in that war is still in power. He understands that a limited engagement is doomed to failure. A war should be fought to win. This means an all-out commitment.
Americans don't want to fight an all-out commitment. They want war on the cheap -- a K-Mart kind of war. They want to fly flags, drop bombs, and get a tax cut. Meanwhile, our enemies are willing to die to destroy us. The degree of commitment is asymmetric. So is the time frame. Our enemies think in terms of centuries.
But won't our special forces do the job on Osama bin Laden in a nice, quick, surgical attack? Not according to America's most decorated living American veteran, Col. David Hackworth (10 silver stars, 8 purple hearts, distinguished flying cross). In an article published in the British journal, THE GUARDIAN, Hackworth spelled out our situation in all the grim details. Killing bin Laden is not enough. It will not end this war.
Last August, Hackworth made another prediction. Outlining three scenarios of future terror, he described a terrorist gas attack at the Indianapolis sports arena, killing 4,000. Hackworth set the date at June 4 2005; the terrorist responsible? Osama bin Laden. He concluded: "The chances are eight out of 10 that we will see a devastating terrorist attack from abroad within the next 10 years. Up to now we've been relatively lucky. But this kind of luck can't last... This dude [Bin Laden] ain't gonna give up. Neither will a thousand fanatics like him. It's a mistake to believe you can stop a terrorist movement by taking out its leader. You can cut off the head, but the body will still live on."Consequently, Hackworth does not get overly excited by Bin Laden's fate. "He's got many, many fall-back positions, but he's a hard guy to hide. He's going to come in, in his Mercedes or his four-wheel drive; if people in the local village know he's there, the word is going to go out. He's got 30m bucks on his head; if you're an Afghan or Yemeni and you're making a dollar a week, $30m is a hell of an enticement. I wouldn't want to be in his sandals. But he's more the figurehead than the principal military planner; it's like getting rid of Saddam Hussein -- there are other rattlesnakes that are even worse."
Hackworth then offered a blistering analysis of today's Politically Correct military. Here is his assessment of the prospects for this war:
"We are in round one -- which is not even over -- in a 30-round fight. I think my grandkids, who are five and eight, will be in college before we're in round 30. It's going to be a very long war, not like a war we've fought before."
Americans are hoping for a miracle: a war that will be over by Christmas. The President has said that this won't be the case, but the big debate in Congress this week is between those who favor cuts to help the Christmas buying season (Democrats) and those who favor sending a few billion dollars in rebates to the auto industry (Republicans).
Americans want a surgical strike. Here is Powell's assessment of surgical strikes:
In 1991, I was asked why the US could not assume a "limited" role in Bosnia. I had been engaged in limited military involvements before, in Vietnam for starters. I said, "As soon as they tell me it's limited, it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell me 'surgical,' I head for the bunker." I criticized the pseudo-policy of establishing a US "presence" without a defined mission in trouble spots. This approach had cost the lives of 241 Marines in Lebanon. (MY AMERICAN ADVENTURE, pp. 543-44).
What conclusion do I draw from this statement? This: we are now in the tar baby in Afghanistan, with or without B-52s. We will have to commit ground troops. Capturing or killing bin Laden is not the half of it. To limit this war to capturing bin Laden would be about as sensible as going to war with Iraq, but only to the border of Kuwait, leaving Saddam Hussein in power.
President Bush says we are not going to get involved in nation-building in Afghanistan. What kind of Tooth Fairy foreign policy is this? We have been involved in nation-building in Afghanistan ever since the CIA started bankrolling Hekmatyar and the Taliban in the 1980's. We created this monster. To kill it, we will have to reverse 50 years of American foreign policy in the Middle East -- a foreign policy based on oil.
The President's speech to Congress on September 20 drew a line in the sand. He told other nations -- obviously, Middle Eastern Muslim nations -- they are either with us or against us in fighting terrorism. Sign up or ship out. Fish or cut bait. Or else.
Or else what?
What he did not say, and what Americans don't want to think about, is that the Al-Qaeda and its associated Islamic networks have unofficially sent the same all-or- nothing demand: "them or us." Every Muslim leader in the Middle East knows this. They know that they are dead men walking if they become known as lackeys of the United States. This has placed the leaders of Islamic nations on alert: they must choose the most likely winner in this war, the same way leaders in villages in South Vietnam had to choose in 1965-75. Then they must structure their foreign policies accordingly.
A rational Arab leader will look across the international landscape and will ask himself (and his senior security officers) three questions:
1. Which side is in this for the long haul?
2. Which side is closer to me geographically?
3. Which side do my people favor?
If you were, say, Qadaffi, what would your answer be?
The Secretary of Defense says that we are going to keep on bombing during the month of Ramadan. If we do, this will create a major problem for the top political leadership of the Islamic Middle East. The United States is already hated by the masses of Arabs, not to mention the Iranians. Their governments are increasingly trapped between U.S. pressure -- "Go along to get along" -- and pressure from below: "Go along with America, and you'll be assassinated." These leaders today are going through the motions of providing minimal and grudging support for the U.S., but that is because the war has only just begun. The longer it drags out, the more that Islamic revolutionaries will be able to paint a picture of the Great Satan as a heathen nation that Allah has lured into a disaster.
Basically, here is the story in Afghanistan: the U.S. can't locate a guy on a dialysis machine in a cave, a guy who got treatment for two weeks in an American hospital in Dubai. Last July, the U.S. was paying his Taliban protectors "stop the poppies" protection money.
The story of bin Laden's hospital stay was reported last week in LE FIGARO. I cannot imagine a hotter story, yet U.S. newspapers are pretending that it's not newsworthy -- "not worth pursuing." An Israeli Website has translated the full article from LE FIGARO (Oct. 31). This should have been front-page news in every newspaper in America, the lead story on every network. But it doesn't fit the official government version. The people therefore don't have a right to know. Or, as we might put it, "All the news that fits."
Arriving from the airport of Quetta, Pakistan, Osama Ben laden was transferred upon arrival at Dubai airport. Accompanied by his personal doctor and faithful lieutenant, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahari (though on this latter, the testimony of the eyewitness was not formal), as well as by four body guards and an Algerian nurse, Bin Laden was admitted to the American Hospital, a building of glass and marble situated between Al-Garhoud Bridge and Al-Maktoum bridge.Each story of the hospital has two VIP suites and around 15 rooms. The millionaire Saudi was admitted to the renowned department of urology headed by Dr. Terry Callaway, an expert on kidney stones and male infertility. In the course of several telephone calls, Callaway did not wish to respond to our questions.
In March of 2000 the weekly journal, Asia Week, published in Hong Kong, raised questions about Ben Laden's health, stating that he suffered from a serious physical problem and more precisely that he was in danger due to a kidney infection that had spread to the liver and required the care of a specialist. According to legitimate sources, Ben Laden had delivered to a post in Kandahar a mobile dialysis machine sometime in the first part of the year 2000. According to our sources, "this trip for reasons of Ben Laden's health" was not the first. Between 1996 and 1998, Osama ben Laden went to Dubai several times for health purposes. . . .
Throughout his stay in the hospital, Osamma Ben Laden received visits from many family members and Saudi Arabian and emirate personalities of status. During this time, the local representative of the CIA was seen by many people taking the elevator and going to Ben Laden's room. . . .
There's more. Click through. Read the whole piece.
[2005 Note: This site is gone, but the story is widely reported on the web. But the story went down the official U.S. memory hole. It is as if a follow-up proved that the story was a hoax. No such investigation took place, nor will it.]
The CIA has responded to this story. Here is the official explanation.
"Complete and utter nonsense," said Anya Guilsher, a spokeswoman for the Central Intelligence Agency. "It's false, and I told Le Figaro that, too."
That's it? That's it.
This story is now getting coverage internationally, but not in the United States. Go to http://www.daypop.com. Search for the following words:
CIA Laden hospital dubai
Consider the implications of this report. Bin Laden had a $5 million price tag on his head. The CIA knew where he was, yet it did nothing. What did that CIA agent and bin Laden discuss?
This story opens many cans of worms for the U.S. government. So, the government is doing its best to pretend none of this happened. The fully captive media is cooperating. This information suppression strategy will probably work. The "limited" war will go on. The average American will never hear about any of this. Such is democracy. What the people don't know can't hurt the Powers That Be.
The President in his September 20 speech to Congress talked of war against terrorism in general. This was obviously a big slice of prime time baloney. If this were a war against all terrorism, the U.S. would be invading Ireland or at least planning to. The Air Force would be planning surgical strikes on Dublin. The Irish Republican Army is a murderous terrorist organization. There are also Basque terrorists in the Pyrenees. There are terrorists everywhere.
The worst ones are our allies.
The Kosovo Liberation Army, which we supported in our air war in Kosovo, is a drug-running Islamic terrorist organization that is one of the main outlets for the opium produced in Afghanistan. This has been reported in the major media. The BOSTON GLOBE ran a story on the KLA as a major drug distributor (June 3). Interpol thinks the KLA controls as much as 40% of the European drug market.
In a WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE story published last week (Nov. 1), the author describes the links between the Al-Qaeda organization and Balkan Islamic terrorists -- links that go back a decade. The following should be known by every American. It is known by hardly anyone.
THE BALKANS' uncharacteristically silent exit from the world stage as the most prominent international hot spot of the last decade belies its status as a major recruiting and training center of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. By feeding off the region's impoverished republics and taking root in the unsettled diplomatic aftermath of the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, al Qaeda, along with Iranian Revolutionary Guard-sponsored terrorists, have burrowed their way into Europe's backyard.For the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans, including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia. This has gone on for a decade. Many recruits to the Balkan wars came originally from Chechnya, a jihad in which Al Qaeda has also played a part. . . .
The overnight rise of heroin trafficking through Kosovo -- now the most important Balkan route between Southeast Asia and Europe after Turkey -- helped also to fund terrorist activity directly associated with al Qaeda and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Opium poppies, which barely existed in the Balkans before 1995, have become the No. 1 drug cultivated in the Balkans after marijuana. Operatives of two al Qaeda-sponsored Islamist cells who were arrested in Bosnia on Oct. 23 were linked to the heroin trade, underscoring the narco-jihad culture of today's post-war Balkans.
These drug rings in turn form part of an estimated $8 billion-a-year Taliban annual income from global drug trafficking, predominantly in heroin. According to Mr. Bodansky, the terrorism expert, bin Laden administers much of that trade through Russian mafia groups for a commission of 10% to 15% -- or around $1 billion annually. . . .
With the future status of Kosovo still in question, the only real development that may be said to be taking place there is the rise of Wahhabi Islam -- the puritanical Saudi variety favored by bin Laden -- and the fastest growing variety of Islam in the Balkans. Today, in general, the Balkans are left without the money, political resources, or institutional strength to fight a war on terrorism. And that, for the Balkan Islamists, is a Godsend.
You might conclude from this article that our allies, the KLA, are ruthless terrorists and enemies of Western civilization, undermining the West with drugs and subversion. That would be a correct conclusion. We backed the bad guys -- absolutely the worst guys -- in Europe in the Balkans war. After the war ended, the U.S. threat of "no more foreign aid" to Serbia pressured the new Serbian government to turn Milosovic over to the World Court for trial. "We got the bad guy!"
As the old poem goes, 'Twas a famous victory.
As I have previously reported, for the last year and a half, the U.S. has been paying the Taliban to stop growing opium. Our government has used the United Nations as the distributor of our tax money, as the State Department has admitted.
[2005 Note: The State Department has dropped this document down the memory hole. However, the $43 million payment by the U.S. in May, 2001, is well known. For evidence, see the report on the Cato Foundation's website.]
The Taliban kept its part of the bargain until September 11. On that day, the Taliban reversed itself. It is back in the world markets, crossing the supposedly blocked borders to deliver drugs. How is this possible? Because the Taliban never got rid of its inventory.
THE ECONOMIST, the most respected economics magazine in the world, on October 18 ran a detailed story on the Taliban's drug trade.
In the 1990s, when other forms of farming fell victim to an endless round of internecine wars, Afghanistan greatly increased its cultivation of opium. In 1989, the country produced nearly 1,200 tonnes. A decade later, the harvest had almost quadrupled to an estimated 4,600 tonnes. But by June 2000, in a bid for respectability, the Taliban had started to work with the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP), and banned the growing of opium. The ban slashed this year's harvest to a mere 185 tonnes, the lowest level in living memory and a 95% drop on the previous year. All that ended after September 11th, when the Taliban abruptly stopped co-operating with the UN.By now only a few weeks of the autumn sowing season are left, and the American-led bombing campaign -- particularly heavy around Kandahar, an important opium-growing region -- will have disrupted the business. The ban, too, still remains officially in force. So it is hard to predict how big next spring's crop will be. But there are signs that the Afghan government is releasing on to the international market some of the vast stockpile of opium which has been built up during a series of bumper harvests. UN officials believe that 2,800 tonnes of opium, convertible into 280 tonnes of heroin, is in the hands of the Taliban, the al-Qaeda network of militant Islamists, and other Afghan and Pakistani drug lords.
The Taliban is filled with illiterate men. They are not stupid men. They are merely illiterate. They can't read, but they sure can count. They are businessmen, unlike the highly educated bureaucrats in the U.S. government who decided to pay the Taliban to stop raising poppies. "You mean they didn't stop raising opium? You mean they stored the stuff and took our money? You mean they are now going to rake in billions now that the jihad has begun? Gosh all whillikers, we never thought of that possibility." Harvard guys. Yale, too. Brilliant. Economic dolts.
So, how does the war against terrorism look in the Balkans, now that the flow of drugs has begun to flow again? THE ECONOMIST describes the situation.
Less than an hour's drive from Vienna is the town of Graz, which serves as a sort of nodal point for connections to the Balkans. This year's October festival was a jolly, bucolic spectacle. But it was not difficult to spot, among the brass bands and folk-dancing, the furtive figures of heroin dealers from northern Albania, plying their trade with white-faced addicts.Even these sad little transactions have consequences for places hundreds of miles away, says a senior UN police officer who helped to seize two truckloads of weapons -- destined for the ethnic-Albanian rebels in Macedonia -- at the border between Montenegro and Kosovo this year. He estimates that the anti-aircraft missiles, grenades and anti-tank rockets he captured were part of an arms deal worth around $4m. At least some of that was raised by selling, say, 20 kilos of heroin on the streets of Austria or Switzerland.
The President is miffed because liberal American columnists have written that the war against terrorism has not gone well. Yet the extent to which this war has not gone well is barely discussed in the liberal news media. This war has been one long Keystone Cops operation for at least a decade.
We have now sent in the B-52's. Well, we sent then into Vietnam, too. How much good did they do? This isn't a job for a B-52. It's a job for a team of well-paid Islamic guerrillas on our unofficial payroll. We have had the Taliban on our payroll. Why not the anti-Taliban? If Islamic insiders aren't in a position to get bin Laden, we are in big, big trouble. The war will go on indefinitely. He is seen throughout the Middle East as the man who got even with the United States. He is becoming a celebrity. The longer that he evades capture or assassination, the more powerful his image will be.
CIA money created the Taliban. The U.S. has also bankrolled Hekmatyar, the anti-Western bin Laden of the Northern Alliance. We have literally gone to war on behalf of Al-Qaeda's favorite drug distributors, the KLA. We have paid protection money through the UN to the Taliban, so that the Taliban could inventory a three-year supply of opium. The CIA knew where bin Laden was for ten days last July: in an American hospital in Dubai. From at least March of this year, the Bush Administration planned an invasion of Afghanistan, but bin Laden now looks like the heroic initiator of jihad in the eyes of Middle East Islamic radicals because of September 11. In short, we have been suckered over and over by Islamic terrorists for a decade. The liberal media do not dare to tell the whole story in a series of front-page articles.
The war is not going well? Are the media serious? We have been losing this war -- and it is surely a war -- ever since Desert Storm reversed the Reagan-Bush policy of buying a quarter of Iraq's oil exports and sending millions of dollars annually in agricultural aid.
The best short summary I have seen on how that war got started was published in THE STARS & STRIPES, the military newspaper. The United States policy was ludicrous in the months preceding the Gulf war, which Saddam launched eight days after our Ambassador told him that the U.S. had no opinion regarding Kuwait. Our military leaders never saw it coming.
Up to the very last minute, while analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA argued that a full-scale invasion seemed imminent, U.S. military leaders didn't believe it. Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Gen. Colin Powell: "They're not going to invade. This is a shakedown."On July 31, Chairman Powell chaired a meeting in the "tank," the Joint Staff's secure conference room, to discuss the situation in Iraq. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the region, had flown up from his Tampa headquarters to give his assessment of the situation. DIA hard-liners said there was little doubt that an attack into Kuwait was imminent. Schwarzkopf didn't agree. Like Kelly, he thought Saddam was bluffing, seeking to extort concessions from Kuwait. A senior Kuwaiti military official had told Schwarzkopf that they weren't even going to go on alert so as to not "play Saddam's game and give him an excuse to attack."
According to an Air Force oral history, "Heart of the Storm," when the meeting broke up, "The mood around the table was 'Ho hum, thanks for the briefing, Norm. We'll try to attend your retirement next summer.' Seven thousand miles away in sand and darkness, Iraqi tankers were fueling for the push into Kuwait. When dawn broke, they would be rolling south."
Our ambassador's verbal go-ahead persuaded Saddam Hussein to start a war eight days later. The United States lost that war. Saddam is still in power, despite the war and despite U.S. trade sanctions that have killed at least one million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children.
The following exchange occurred in a "60 Minutes" segment, "Punishing Saddam" (airdate May 12, 1996): CBS Reporter Lesley Stahl (speaking of post-war sanctions against Iraq):"We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright (at that time, US Ambassador to the UN):
"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."
Stahl won both an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia journalism award for this report, but Albright's comment went virtually unremarked in the U.S. (though it received considerable attention in the Middle East). Within six months, Madeleine Albright was unanimously approved by the Senate as U.S. Secretary of State.
When you demonize an enemy such as the President tended to do with Saddam Hussein and others did -- and frankly I did it from time to time because it was useful putting a face on this crisis -- but, in so demonising him, by the President and the rest of us, you raised expectations that you would do something about him at the end of the day.But we never had a plan that said we were going to go to Baghdad and actually remove this guy from power the way we removed Noriega from power in Panama. Because we had no international authority for that, we had no agreement within the coalition, especially the Arab members of the coalition, that we would do such a thing. They were anxious to see Iraq stay together, the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, Saddam gone preferably but the son of Saddam, figuratively, or another Sunni leader emerge to hold this country together and so that the country's not so prostrate that Iran could walk over it.
This is how the United States fights wars. We fight K-Mart wars on the cheap. We prefer the illusion that we have won these wars, that one limited victory doesn't lead to the next war. And when we lose one of these wars, as we lost in Somalia, everyone in power agrees to forget about it. Go to the CIA FACTBOOK for 2000. Look up Somalia. Lo and behold, there is no mention of the U.S. invasion in 1993. Only a United Nations "humanitarian effort" is mentioned. Orwell's memory hole is still with us.
Now we're dealing with invisible fanatics who are quite willing to die in order to keep a billion Muslims from forgetting about our inability to win wars. These fanatics are drug runners. The West's drug addicts are bankrolling their operations. We can expect to win the war against terrorism as soon as we win the war on drugs.
President Bush says it's an all-or-nothing war against terrorism, meaning a limited group of terrorists -- al- Qaeda -- but not their allies, especially in Kosovo. If we take him at his word, this is a war that you and I will not see the end of in our lifetimes.
Investors today don't believe this. Basically, they haven't a clue as to what Islamic radicalism is, or the time perspective of Islam's confrontation with the West. If Americans think North Vietnamese had a long-term view, they are clueless as to what this war will mean for America. The markets reflect this.
When this war really gets rolling, the markets will respond to this amazing idea: "War is bad for business." Wars that cannot be won by a Politically Correct military of young men and women are especially bad for business. This is no K-Mart war. This is the real thing. This time, it's going to be fought on American soil.
Meanwhile, the military is not telling us what really happened in the failed ground attack on the Taliban on October 20. It was a near-disaster. Read Seymour Hersh's report.
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