"Terrorism" and Blowback: A Chronology
by Janette Rainwater, Ph.D.

Part One: Afghanistan, 1747 to the present

1747   Ahmad Shah Durrani becomes the chief of the Afghan Pashtun tribes. [He freed the Pashtun areas of what is now Afghanistan from Iranian rule, and then went on to acquire territory from the deteriorating empires to the west and east--- the Safavi dynasty in Iran and the Mughals in India. At the height of his conquests in 1762 his empire included all of present-day Pakistan, parts of northern India and the area around Meshed in Iran. The southern boundary was the Arabian Sea and included the port of Karachi. Nyrop, Richard F. and Donald M. Seekins, Afghanistan, a country study (1986), pp. 13-19.]

1839-1842    The First Afghan War is one of the first acts in the "Great Game," so named by the British (and romanticized by Rudyard Kipling) to describe the spy games played by the British and Russian intelligence agencies as the spheres of influence of the two empires moved closer and closer to an ultimate clash in Afghanistan. [Ahmad Shah's domain had started disintegrating even before his death in 1772. The British took advantage of the continuing wars of succession to install a puppet government in Kabul with ex-shah Shuya replacing Dost Mohammed (who had proved reluctant to expel the lone Russian agent from Kabul and give up all claims to Peshawar (which the Sikhs now controlled.) The British excuse was that India's welfare required a trustworthy and stable ally on its border. Shuja was unable to gain the support of the other Afghan chiefs who rose up against him and the British. The garrison of 15,000 men was forced to make a humiliating retreat to India from Kabul with Afghan tribesmen picking them off at every pass. Most died, one man survived the march unscathed, and a few were taken prisoner. Meyer, Karl E. and Shareen Blair Brysac, Tournament of Shadows (1999), pp. 82-110; Nyrop, pp. 22-29.]

1878-1881    The Second Anglo-Afghan War starts when the imperious Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, delivers an ultimatum to Emir Sher Ali to accept a British mission in Kabul. [The proponents of the Forward Policy were in power in Britain with the ascension of Disraeli as Prime Minister in 1874. They believed that Afghanistan must be taken over as a buffer state against the encroaching Russian expansion into Central Asia. (The Russians had taken Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868 and a year later were at the banks of the Amu Darya River, the northern boundary of present-day Afghanistan. British Liberals, on the other hand, felt that the natural boundary of India should be the Indus River in western India, now Pakistan.) The British invaded in November, 1878 and quickly occupied half the country. Sher Ali's regent signed the Treaty of Gandamak to prevent British occupation of the remaining provinces. The British agreed to pay annual subsidies, Afghanistan relinquished control of its foreign affairs and accepted the presence of the Residency. The British believed all was well, but in September, 1879 the bewildered Resident refused to pay some 2000 Herati mercenaries who then stormed the Residency, killing all the British. Lord Lytton sent an army to avenge the massacre; hundreds of Afghans were executed on little or no evidence. These reprisals spurred an army of 10,000 tribesmen to march on Kabul. The British were saved by recognizing Abdul Rahman Khan as Emir--- a claimant who ironically had been living in Russia and was sponsored by Russia! Back in Britain, Gladstone won the1880 election by turning it into a sort of plebiscite on Disraeli's imperial wars: "The sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own." This sentiment didn't appeal to Her Majesty, but middle-class Britons approved. Britain's gains from the war (and the expenditure of £12 million) were the Khyber Pass, the Kurram Valley, and the control of Afghanistan's foreign relations.  In both Afghan wars the British were able to defeat the poorly-equipped Afghan army, but were ultimately forced out by tribal uprisings.  Nyrop, pp. 30-34, 291; Meyer and Brysac, pp. 177-201.]

1893    Abdul Rahman Khan is forced by the British Indian government to agree to the "Durand Line" as the boundary between Afghanistan and India. [This placed more than half of the Pashtuns in India, a decision that was protested then and by succeeding generations.  Nyrog, pp. 37-38.]

1907    The "Great Game" ends with the Anglo-Russian Convention. [The former competitors, now united against the rising influence of Germany, divided Iran into two spheres of influence. Russia could occupy the north and Britain the south and east should Iran be threatened by a third party. Both countries pledged not to occupy Afghanistan nor interfere with its internal affairs.  Nyrog, p.40.]

May, 1919    The new king of Afghanistan, Amanullah, starts the Third Anglo-Afghan War when the British refuse to acknowledge the complete independence of Afghanistan. [After a month the parties went to the negotiating table. The British were unwilling to engage in another land war after the slaughter of 1914-1918, and the Afghans were suffering from the British air bombardments of Kabul and Jalalabad. Afghanistan got control of its foreign affairs and quickly established relations with the Soviet Union, Iran, Britain, Turkey, Italy and France. The question of the control of the Pashtun tribes living in India was not resolved. Amanullah traveled far more extensively than any king before him. He was particularly intrigued with the reforms that Kemal Ataturk had instituted in Turkey and tried to copy them. Western dress was required in Kabul, and secular education was begun (for girls also.) The veiling and seclusion of women was discouraged, and slavery and forced labor were abolished. A constitution, civil rights, a legislative assembly and a court system were established. He probably tried to do too much too fast, as some tribal chiefs, the religious leaders, and elements of the army rose up against him. He abdicated in 1929, went into exile with his family and, out of anger and sorrow, forbade any of them to ever set foot again in Afghanistan. Nyrop, pp. 41-46.]

1933    King Nadir Shah of Afghanistan is assassinated. His son, Zahir Shah, born 1914, ascends to the throne for a reign that will last forty years. [However, the country was basically governed for the first twenty years by Zahir Shah's two uncles and for the next ten by his cousin, Mohammed Daoud Khan.  The uncles, wishing to avoid dependency on either Britain or the Soviet Union, turned to Germany for the needed aid and expertise to build factories, roads, hydroelectric plants, and communication facilities.  By the beginning of World War II Germany was Afghanistan's most important foreign country.  Yet Afghanistan declared neutrality during the war.  It acquiesced to a British-Soviet demand to expel non-diplomatic Axis personnel from the country by expelling non-diplomatic personnel from all the belligerent nations.  After the war Prime Minister Shah Mahmud relaxed the strict press censorship and a "liberal parliament" was elected in 1949.  Kabul University started a student union which fostered political debate and produced plays that criticized both Islam and the monarchy.  The government then cracked down, closed the opposition newspapers, outlawed the student Union, and arrested many opposition leaders.   Nyrog, pp. 48-57; Griffin, Michael, Reaping the Whirlwind (2001), p. 88; Cooley, John K., Unholy Wars (1999), pp. 10-11.]

1934    Afghanistan joins the League of Nations.  The United States recognizes Afghanistan.  Nyrog, p. 50.

1947    The British withdraw from India. As a result, the Afghani government revives its old claims to land now in Pakistan and extending as far as the Arabian Sea.  [Pakistan rejected all "Pashtunistan" and "Baluchistan" claims. Afghanistan responded by casting the sole negative vote against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations, and continued funding the rebel Pashtun warlords on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line.   Pakistan would retaliate with border closings and other interference with the transit of goods from landlocked Afghanistan to India.  The conflict escalated after Daoud Khan became prime minister in 1953 and emphasized the Pashtunistan issue.    Nyrog, pp. 51-56; Cooley, p. 10.]

September, 1953    Mohammed Daoud Khan becomes prime minister in an intra-family transfer of power that involves no violence. [His ten-year tenure was noted for the foreign policy turn to the Soviet Union, the completion of the Helmand Valley project which radically improved living conditions in southwestern Afghanistan, and tentative steps towards the emancipation of women.  (He required his wives and those of his cabinet members to appear in public unveiled.) His obsession with Pashtunistan and his hostility to Pakistan proved disastrous to the economy.  (The grape and pomegranate harvests had to be air-lifted to markets in India in 1961 and 1962, thanks to Daoud's severance of diplomatic relations with Pakistan.)  Nyrog, p. 58-62.]

1956    Having been rebuffed by the US for both sales of arms and loans, Afghanistan turns to the Soviet Union for aid to equip and train the army and air force as a defense against provocations by the Pakistanis. [Within a few months the USSR had sent jet airplanes, tanks, heavy and light artillery for a heavily discounted price tag of $25 million. By 1973 the Soviet Union had invested a billion dollars in the army and infrastructure of Afghanistan. They built a modern highway from Kabul to Soviet Tajikistan, a giant air base at Bagram, and pipelines for natural gas. Afghan officers received training in the USSR and Eastern Europe, and Russian became the military language of the country. Nyrop, p. 293; Cooley, pp. 10-11.]

September 27, 1962    President Kennedy meets with Afghanistan's Foreign Minister, Prince Naim, and tells him "the United States is a long way off [from Afghanistan] and even though it is very anxious to help it can at best play a limited role." Anshutz, J. Bruce, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation (1986), p. 28.

March, 1963    King Zahir Shah ousts Daoud as prime minister, as his anti-Pakistan policies have ruined the economy and the family agrees that Daoud must go.  Zahir Shah takes control of the government himself and institutes a parliamentary democracy.  [The Afghan constitution of 1964 gave women equal rights, including the right to vote and the right to an education. Wearing of the veil was discretionary. (The Loya Jirgah that approved the constitution included six women.) There was partial freedom of the press, and the country's infrastructure was transformed thanks to the influx of foreign aid. Family-planning clinics for women were opened in 1968. The constitution also mandated that all inhabitants of Afghanistan of whatever ethnic origin were "Afghans."  Before that only Pashtuns were known as "Afghans." Nyorg, pp. 62-65; Griffin, pp. 64, 88; Goodwin, Jan, Price of Honor, p. 89; Richter, "Revolutionary Afghan Women", zmag.org; Cooley, p. 11.]

January 1, 1965    Twenty-seven Afghans, mostly university lecturers and civil servants who have been meeting clandestinely for some time, take advantage of the more liberal atmosphere to form the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). A nine-man central committee is elected with Nur Mohammad Taraki as Secretary General and Babrak Karmal as his deputy. The platform and suggested reforms are very similar to those of King Amanullah. [In the autumn elections half of the PDPA candidates standing for election were elected. All four were from what would become the Parcham faction; one was a woman, Dr. Anahita Ratebzad, the close companion of Babrak Karmal. Only twenty progressive candidates were chosen for the 218-seat parliament unlike the "liberal parliament" of 1949. The tribal warlords, two-thirds of them illiterate, had recognized the political advantage of a parliamentary seat and had campaigned vigorously.   Edward Girardet, Afghanistan, The Soviet War (1985), p.96]

1972    Drought and famine cause the deaths of over 100,000 Afghanis. Relief funds from abroad are mishandled by the king's son-in-law, General Abdul Wali. Cooley, p. 11.

July 17, 1973    While King Zahir Shah is abroad in Italy in one of his many absences (this one for medical treatment), he is deposed by a coup, a relatively peaceful one with only eight fatalities.   Daoud Khan, the former prime minister, is installed as leader of the country. [Junior officers of the Afghan army who had been trained in the Soviet Union carried out the coup, with some assistance from the Parcham (the flag) wing of the Afghan communist party, but Daoud was in the background pulling the strings. King Zahir Shah was not unhappy to be able to remain in Rome where he became a pensioner of some unnamed Arab state. Daoud immediately abolished the monarchy and named himself the president of a one-party republic.  Reneging on his promise to make progressive reforms, he ran a repressive regime with hundreds of arrests and  political executions of leftists (including members of the Parcham who had helped him gain power) and Islamists (religious extremists.) He lessened the country's dependence on the Soviet Union and went to India, Saudi Arabia and newly-oil-rich Iran for aid.  Surprisingly, he did not renew the Pashtunistan issue; relations with Pakistan improved thanks to interventions from the US and Iran. His administration and the army squelched a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement whose leaders fled to Pakistan. There they were supported by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and encouraged to continue the fight against Daoud. These men --- Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and Ahmad Shah Massoud --- would later be major leaders of the mujaheddin. Nyorg, pp. 67-72; Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (2000), pp. 12-13; Griffin, pp. 17, 88; Cooley, pp. 11-12.]

Late 1977    As part of a worldwide review of Embassy categories, the United States downgrades its embassy in Kabul to the lowest category of mission, Class 4. [Obviously the State Department felt that Afghanistan was a country of little relevance to US interests. Amstutz, p. 29.]

April 19, 1978    The funeral of Mir Akbar Khyber, a key leader of the Parcham party who had been assassinated two days before, turns into a rally with close to 30,000 communists from both factions of the PDPA (Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan) attending and listening to stirring speeches by Nur Muhammed Taraki (Khalq) and Babrak Karmal (Parcham).    [This was the third political assassination in nine months.  Daoud, concerned both by the size of the crowd and the reconciliation of the two formerly warring factions of the PDPA, ordered wholesale arrests of the leadership of both factions.  Nyorg, p.72. Girardet suggests that Khyber was murdered by the Khalqis to provoke revolt and also get rid of a prominent Parchami. Girardet, p. 103.]

April 27-28, 1978    Afghan soldiers sympathetic to the Khalq (the masses) faction of the Afghani communist party overthrow the government and release the arrested PDPA members. Daoud and most of his family are killed resisting the coup; several thousand people die in the fighting. Nur Muhammad Taraki is installed as president; his two principal deputies are the Columbia University-educated politician, Hafizullah Amin (Khalq), and Babrak Karmal.  This ends the control of the country by the Durrani clan who had been in power (with one very brief interruption) since 1747.

[Daoud's police had been so slow in making the arrests that Amin, by using his children as couriers, had been able to arrange this coup which had already been planned for a later date. (Historians differ on whether the Soviet Union was taken by surprise or whether the USSR was aware of the plot and did nothing to stop it.) The PDPA quickly instituted a number of reforms: The mortgage debts of the peasants were canceled. (A third of them were were tenant farmers who were obliged to turn over half of the year's crop to the landowner.) A major literacy program was begun in Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi. (The illiteracy rate for rural inhabitants was 90.5%; for women, 96.3%, meaning that a woman was four times less likely to be able to read than a man.) Bride-price was prohibited and women were given freedom of choice in marriage. There was universal free education and schooling for girls became compulsory.  Many hospitals were built (an 80% increase by 1985) and health services were provided to the peasants for the first time. Daoud's 1977 constitution was annulled and a series of decrees were substituted.  One called for "revolutionary military courts," another declared the equality of all Afghan ethnic groups and took away citizenship for all surviving members of the royal family.   Nyorg, pp. 213- 234; Girardet, pp. 103-104; Cooley, p. 12; Rashid, p. 13; Workers World, October 10, 1996.]

Summer-Autumn, 1978    There are violent protests over some of the reforms which challenge Afghan cultural patterns, especially land reform and the emancipation of women.  The Khalq faction takes over all the important government posts; the Parcham cabinet members are sent abroad as ambassadors.  (Babrak Karmal goes to Prague.)  Nyorg, pp. 231- 234.

February 14, 1979    US Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs is kidnapped by several armed members of a Maoist group and held hostage for the release of several of their imprisoned colleagues.   [Afghan security forces attacked the hotel room where Dubs was being held. Both he and his captors were killed in the crossfire.  President Jimmy Carter, who had been demanding that the situation be negotiated, was indignant, slashed the aid progam from $27 million to $5 million, and further reduced the diplomatic representation to chargé d'affaires.  Prior to this Amin had been trying to increase US participation in the country as a counter-balance to the Soviet influence.  Girardet, p. 114; Nyrog, p. 237.]

March 28, 1979    There is a major revolt in the province of Herat against the Taraki regime possibly fomented by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, capitalizing on the resistance to the enforced participation of women in the government literacy programs. (Herat is predominantly Shi'ite Moslem; the rest of Afghanistan is mostly Sunni.)  [The Soviet military advisors were major targets of the outraged mobs; 50-100 Soviets were killed, some tortured exquisitely.  The government recaptured the city, killing nearly 5000 Afghans. Most of the air force had defected by this time. When Taraki called out the air force, only a few pilots were willing to bomb the people of Herat. Those who refused were executed.  

Taraki and Amin asked the Soviet Union for "two or three battalions" to protect communication lines and the Bagram airfield. The USSR attempted to tamper the Khalqis' radicalism, urging attendance at mosques, inclusion of Parchamis and non-communists in the government, and a halt to the unpopular land reform movement. Most of this advice was ignored; the insurrections and the political executions continued.  There were all the trimmings of a police state— curfew, foreigners restricted to a radius of 35 miles around Kabul, and a secret police, AGSA, trained by the East German SSD. As a result, fewer and fewer UN technicians and other internationals were willing to remain in Afghanistan. In March, 1979 Amin took over as prime minister, but Taraki remained in the government as president. Nyrog, p. 234-238; Girardet, pp. 115-121; Amstutz, p. 39; Cooley, p. 12.]

April 4, 1979    In Pakistan the somewhat populist president, Zulfilcar Ali Bhutto, is overthrown and hung on the orders of General Zia al-Haq. [Zia initially canceled elections indefinitely, but was soon forced to allow local elections of individuals but without party labels. Ali Bhutto's western-educated daughter, Benazir, took over the leadership of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and was able to get many of the party faithful elected. She traveled abroad and promoted international aversion to Zia. The discovery that Pakistan was secretly constructing a facility to enrich uranium (in violation of the 1976 Symington Amendment) caused President Carter to stop military aid and impose economic sanctions in April. Zia, thus isolated, was ripe to find a "good war" to regain American support. He and the chief of ISI, his secret service, General Akhtar Rahman Khan, would find that opportunity with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Cooley, pp. 52-54.]

Friday, April 20, 1979    Afghan armored troops accompanied by 20 Soviet advisors move into the small farming community of Kerala in eastern Afghanistan. They call the men, all unarmed, to assemble in a field for a jirga to discuss the recent mujaheddin attacks on a military garrison. The women and children are sent into the mosque. When the men refuse to shout pro-communist slogans, the shooting begins. Bulldozers appear and proceed to plow the bodies into the soft earth; some are still alive and visibly moving. All the while a photographer is taking pictures that will be shown to demonstrate what happens to peasants who collaborate with the mujaheddin. (The people of Kerala are suspected, correctly, of furnishing food, shelter and ammunition to the rebels.) Next the soldiers enter the mosque and rip the chadors off those men who had thought to disguise themselves as women. [An estimated 1170 unarmed males were massacred— a larger number than the massacres at Lidice or My Lai. All the women and children plus the 100 men who managed to avoid the massacre, left within hours for Pakistan, across a river and over some mountains. The community of Kerala, once numbering 5000, was deserted. Girardet, pp. 107-110.]

July 3, 1979    President Carter, at the urging of his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, signs a secret directive for clandestine assistance to enemies of the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan. Cooley, pp. 13, 19-22.  [This, of course, was six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Brzezinski admitted this in 1998 to a rather shocked French interviewer: "We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we consciously increased the probability that they would .... Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap. You want me to regret that?"  When the interviewer asked if he regretted having supported the Islamic fundamentalists and given arms and advice to future terrorists, Brzezinski replied: "What is more important to the history of the world... the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" Interview with Vincent Javert in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, January 15-21, 1998, p. 76, translated from the French by Bill Blum.]

September 9, 1979    An Amnesty International report claims there is widespread torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and that 12,000 political prisoners have been held without trial since the April, 1978 coup. Amin denies these charges.  Nyrog, p. 241.

September 14, 1979    After a second failed attempt by Taraki and the Soviets to assassinate him, Amin enters Taraki's office with a band of soldiers and has him arrested.  [Two days later it was announced that Taraki had resigned his posts for "health reasons." A small newspaper notice on October 10th indicated that he had died of a "serious illness."   According to Arnold, he was strangled and suffocated by three members of the presidential guards service. Nyrog, pp.238-239; Arnold, Anthony, Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Perspective (1981); Cooley, p. 17.]

September 26, 1979    A secret report prepared for President Carter describes the deteriorating political situation in Pakistan and questions whether the rule of General Zia al-Haq will last out the year. Much of Pakistan's GNP is going to their nuclear development program, yet the country is asking for a rescheduling of their huge international debt. "Another problem in the US-Pakistani relationship is in the unchecked expansion of opium poppy cultivation in the tribal areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border."  [Despite this negative assessment the Carter government continued the covert funneling of arms and supplies to Pakistan's ISI (secret service) which then sent about 50% to the seven principal Islamic fundamentalist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan which they were training and equipping. Cooley, pp. 58-59.]

November 4, 1979    Blowback in Iran: Islamic militant students invade the US Embassy in Tehran and hold 52 personnel hostage in retaliation for the US extension of hospitality to the deposed Shah Reza Pahlevi. [It would be 444 days before they were released.]

December 12, 1979    At a secret meeting in the Kremlin the decision is made to invade Afghanistan at Christmas despite the strenuous objections of the three key generals. [The leaders believed that Taraki, before his overthrow and murder, had been undermined by Amin's "personal dictatorship," that Amin was in cahoots with the US Embassy, and that Pakistan and the CIA were encouraging and equipping the ultra-right Muslim opposition. They were afraid that the Americans would try to destabilize their Muslim republics of Central Asia and that they wanted Pakistan and Afghanistan as anti-Soviet bases to replace those in Iran (lost earlier that year with the overthrow of the Shah.) Cooley, pp. 13-19.]

December 24, 1979    The Soviet Army enters Kabul and installs a puppet government. Babrak Karmal, the leader of the Parcham faction, is made president. Rashid, p. 13.

December 27, 1979    The Soviets assassinate Amin, as planned at the Kremlin meeting. (They first reported that he had been "accidentally killed.") Cooley, pp. 17-18

January 4, 1980    President Carter announces some measures to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—   a partial embargo on US grain sales to the Soviet Union, a major cutback on fishing rights in US waters, and no more licensing of American technology. He tells the Senate to shelve consideration of the SALT II arms reduction treaty. He hints that the US may boycott the Olympic games to take place that summer in Moscow. The next day Brzezinski leaves for Cairo and Islamabad to secure agreements:

September 22, 1980    President Saddam Hussein of Iraq resurrects some old boundary differences as an excuse to go to war with Iran.  [Iraq had been nervous about its Shi'ite neighbor ever since their Islamic revolution the preceding year. Two-thirds or more of Iraqis were Shi'ites, although most of the government heads were Sunnis (and usually from Hussein's home town of Takrit.) The agreement made with the shah in Algiers in 1975 for both sides to refrain from fomenting the Kurds against the other nation was no longer in force under the new regime. Hussein anticipated a brief war that would result in Iraq's hegemony in the Persian Gulf. Initially Iraq was successful, but Iran was able to regroup its forces and the war became a stalemate with fearful numbers of casualties on both sides. Unwilling to see the Shi'ite state become the victor, both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia gave huge sums of money to support secular (but Sunni-dominated) Iraq. Toward the end the United States supplied weapons and the intelligence that served to defeat their enemy, Iran. Additionally, the US signed a five-year economic and technical agreement and granted Iraq $1 billion in food aid. In July, 1988 Ayatollah Khomeini was forced to accept the UN terms for a cease-fire without conditions. Farouk-Sluggett, Marion and Peter Sluggett, "Iraq and the New World Order" in Ismael, Gulf War and the New World Order (1994), pp. 278-279.]

January 20, 1981    Ronald Reagan is inaugurated as the 40th president. (Television gives the American public the split-screen spectacle of the inauguration ceremony plus the arrival of the Embassy captives just released by Iran.)   William Casey, the new head of the CIA, enthusiastically adopts the covert operation in Afghanistan started by Brzezinski, Carter, and Carter's DCI, Stansfield Turner. [The Black Budget cost of the first year under Carter had been $100 million. Rep. Charles Wilson (D-TX) of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee called this "peanuts" and, with several other anti-communist hawks, saw to it that Black Budget funds for the covert operation in Afghanistan quickly quadrupled. More weapons and better weapons were procured. Under a super-secret SOVMAT program (probably unknown to Pakistan's Zia) phony corporations bought huge quantities of weapons from Eastern European governments, including latest-model Soviet tanks and radar systems for fighter planes. The New York Times has estimated that the US and Saudi Arabia supplied nearly $6 billion worth of weapons to the Afghani "freedom fighters." (Other countries supplying funds or arms were Egypt, France, Israel, Great Britain, Iran, China and Japan.) Large sums went to the recruitment, training and maintenance of Muslim zealots from many countries including Algeria, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Great Britain, Morocco, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and the United States. An early and enthusiastic recruit was the wealthy Saudi national, Osama bin Laden, who had been suggested to the CIA by the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki Ibn Faisal Ibn Abdelaziz. Bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda, set up recruitment centers in the major Arab countries. He paid for the transportation of these recruits to training centers in Pakistan and Afghanistan and subsidized their support. His construction and engineering skills were utilized to build roads, tunnels, hospitals, storage depots and secure bases hollowed into the mountains. Most of the training was done by Pakistan's ISI in camps built by the CIA in Pakistan and border areas of Afghanistan. The trainers were trained at the CIA "farm" in Virginia where they learned the latest techniques of arson, demolition, and assassination.] Cooley, pp. 60, 106-119; New York Times, 24 August 1998; Reeve, Simon, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism.

June 30, 1981    General Maxwell Taylor, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, refutes the notion that the Soviet Union is planning to go to war against the United States: "They have conventional forces in close proximity to virtually all their national interests that may require defense. From their World War II experience, their leaders know how devastating conventional war can be. They also know that nuclear war would be many more times destructive, that they would lose in a few hours more than they lost in four years fighting the Germans. They could not afford to fight or even win a strategic war with the United States. In so doing they would so paralyze the nation as to make it easy prey to nearby neighbors-- wolves ready to take advantage of a stricken bear. Such enemies would include Chinese, Afghans, Turks, Germans and Poles beyond Soviet borders and non-Russians within."

September 23, 1981    The Afghani covert operation is blown to the American public when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat brags on the Today show about Egypt's contribution. When asked why he was doing this, he replies "because they are our Muslim brothers and are in trouble." Cooley, p. 38.

February 11, 1982    In a secret memorandum Attorney General William French Smith exempts the CIA from its legal requirement to report on drug smuggling by any of its assets or clients.  [Canny CIA Director William Casey, remembering the lucrative heroin tie-in with the Vietnam War, had fought a secret battle to secure this exemption. Almost from the beginning of the covert op in Afghanistan it had been "arms in, drugs out" despite the Carter administration's efforts to run a drug-free war. With Reagan that changed. The FBI, instead of the DEA, was put in charge of the anti-drug program in the United States, so any previous DEA-CIA information-sharing ended. A blind eye was turned to the Afghani warlords who controlled the Khyber Pass and other transit routes to Pakistan through which military supplies and newly-trained mujaheddin must pass. Western supplies of heroin from Central Asia increased ten-fold in the decade of the war, soon surpassing Southeast Asia as the principal source. And the drug was no longer coming out as raw opium or blocks of morphine; heroin-processing laboratories sprang up in both Pakistan and Afghanistan displacing Marseilles and Hong Kong as the principal refining centers.  (Casey also needed the exemption for the covert operation against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to protect the CIA officials working with cocaine-dealing contras.  In 1995 the Clinton administration rescinded the exemption with no fanfare; this action did not become public knowledge until 1998.)

The war took a recess each year at poppy harvesting time when the indigenous soldiers on both sides would go home to help harvest their crops. Soviet soldiers, frustrated with fighting a guerrilla war for which they had not been trained, quickly became addicted to the easily available drug, just as American GIs had in Vietnam. It can't be proven, but possibly that was part of the CIA scheme (as had been suggested to Casey and Reagan by the head of the French CIA and even given a label--- "Operation Mosquito.")  Cooley, pp. 126-139, The Consortium, June 1, 1998, pp. 2-4.]

November 10, 1982   Leonid Brezhnev dies; he is replaced by Yuri Andropov as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. [Andropov tried to arrange a negotiated peace in Afghanistan with the United Nations. The Reagan administration was monumentally distrustful, and pressured the Pakistanis to escalate the conflict. The Soviet Union responded with more soldiers, more weapons, and more brutality against the mujaheddin.]

November 1984    The US restores diplomatic relations with Iraq (broken since 1967) despite Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops. [President George H. W. Bush and others in the National Security Planning Group had been active in a project to help Iraq build an oil pipeline to the Jordanian port of Aqaba in reaction to the Iranian blockade of Iraq's Persian Gulf ports. The Reagan Administration had secretly allowed Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt to transfer howitzers, Huey helicopters, bombs and other weapons of US manufacture to Iraq. Waas, Murray and Craig Unger "In the Loop: Bush's Secret Mission, The New Yorker, November 2, 1992, p 70.]

March 11, 1985    Mikhail Gorbachev is elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union following the death of the geriatric Konstantin Chernenko. [In April the party agreed to his program of perestroika, or restructuring of the soviet system of government. Gorbachev again approached the UN to broker a way for the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan without leaving the nation in jeopardy. The United States refused to countenance any of these proposals and further escalated the support for the mujaheddin. Some of the bloodiest years of the Russo-Afghan war followed.]

July 1985    Stingers: The CIA begins supplying some of the closely-held Stingers to Pakistan's ISI, largely due to the lobbying efforts of Representative Charles Wilson (D-TX). [These highly effective heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles turned the tide of the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. With their kill rate of 75%, the skies were soon clear of Soviet and Afghan aircraft, enabling the guerrillas to trap the government forces inside a few cities and military camps. "We were handing them out like lollipops," a US intelligence official told the Washington Post. Many Stingers quickly reached the black market where a weapon that cost the US $35,000 fetched a price of $100,000 to $300,000. Some were bought by the Chechens for their war against Moscow; others went to the Azeris for the struggle for Nagorno-Karabakh. It is estimated that 30-70 Stingers were acquired by Osama bin Laden. Cooley, pp. 109, 172-174; Goodwin, Jan, Caught in the Crossfire (1987), pp. 48-49.

]March 1987    Hekmatyar's mujaheddin cross the Amu Darya River and launch rocket attacks against villages in the USSR's republic of Tajikistan in an operation promoted by CIA chief William Casey. Casey also gives increased support to the ISI program to recruit radical Muslims, especially Arabs, to come to Pakistan to fight with the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. [General Zia wanted to make Pakistan the center of the Muslim world, the Reagan administration wanted to demonstrate that the entire Muslim world opposed the USSR, and the Saudis were happy to get rid of their dissidents. None of these principals foresaw the blowback that has resulted. Rashid, p. 129.]

April 1988    Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev announces that a phased withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan will begin May 15th, to be completed by 2-15-1989.

August 17, 1988    The mysterious plane crash of a Pakistan Air Force C-130 kills General Zia, General Akhtar Abdel Rahman Khan (the former head of ISI and Zia's most probable successor), US Ambassador Arnold Raphel, US Brigadier General Herbert Wassom (defense attaché in Islamabad), eight Pakistani generals and the air crew. [The party had been viewing the test demonstration of a tank the Pentagon was hoping to sell to Pakistan. The plane dove and struck the ground shortly after takeoff. The Pakistani board of inquiry came to the (unpublished) conclusion that the pilot and crew had been knocked out by a chemical agent, such as a fast-working nerve gas, colorless and odorless, that had been secreted on the plane in some small container such as a thermos or soft drink can. The exact agent was never determined since the authorities at the military hospital were ordered not to perform autopsies Zia had survived six previous attempts at assassination, including a missile fired at his plane. His enemies were myriad---- the Bhutto family, the USSR, India, KHAD (the Afghan KGB), and elements of the Pakistani military. Mohammed Yousaf points out that only the CIA and KGB had access to such a nerve poison. For geopolitical reasons at least, the United States engaged in a coverup of the deaths of two high ranking American officials. A US air force inquiry (and Raphel's divorced wife, Robin Raphel, later Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Ambassador to Tunis) maintained that the plane had a faulty hydraulic system.

The retired head of ISI's Afghanistan bureau believes that the US was not sorry to see Zia go. With the war winding down, the US was hoping to curb the power of the Afghan Islamists such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani and install a more moderate group of Afghanis (waiting in the wings in Peshawar) into any new government in Kabul. General Zia attempted to subvert this maneuvering. He and the ISI also opposed the attempts of the CIA to funnel arms and supplies to the mujaheddin directly, bypassing the ISI. (In 1990 the CIA did take over.) Cooley, pp. 225-226; Mohammed Youssaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap (1992), pp. 8-19.]

February 15, 1989    The last Soviet soldier crosses the Amu Darya River bridge and leaves Afghanistan on the promised day. [Two million people died during the nine years of the Soviet occupation.  One out of eight Afghans was left dead, and five million Afghans, or one out of three in the population, became refugees in Pakistan and Iran.  The departure of the Soviet army left Najibullah's government weak and unprotected. The Mujaheddin, now under the command of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but still funded by the United States, started shelling all the major cities, killing many thousands of civilians.]

August 2, 1990    Iraqi forces invade Kuwait in a ten-hour blitzkrieg and set up a provisional government. [Kuwait had been demanding immediate repayment of its wartime loans to Iraq (which Iraq regarded as an insult to Arab "unity.") Iraq accused Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil by slant-drilling into a field that overlapped the two countries and conspiring with other oil-producing countries to keep prices low. Iraq had considered Kuwait historically to be a part of its Basra province ever since Britain had drawn the "line in the sand" in 1920 to form the Kingdom of Iraq (with a sheikh imported from Mecca.) Iraq now needed a deep-water port for ships that had been ordered from Italy. Sluggett, p. 284.]

August 8, 1990    The first detachments of United States soldiers arrive in Saudi Arabia ostensibly to defend the country against a supposedly imminent invasion from Iraq. Critics point out that Saddam Hussein has no dispute with the Saudis and most of his troops are deployed along the border with Iran. [Ever since FDR's historic meeting in February, 1945 with King Ibn Saud there has been an unwritten agreement that the United States will have access to Saudi Arabia's oil in return for protection of the kingdom from its enemies, external and internal, an arrangement respected by all subsequent presidential administrations. Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (1991) pp, 403-405; Klare, Michael T., "The Geopolitics of War", The Nation, November 5, 2001.]

November 29, 1990    The UN Security Council votes 12-2 on Resolution 678, authorizing the use of force against Iraq unless it withdraws from Kuwait by January 15th.

January 12, 1991    Thousands of protesters march in European cities in protest against the portending war in the Persian Gulf: 100,000 in Paris, 100,000 in Rome, also London and 70 cities in Germany.

January 12, 1991    War against Iraq: Congress, after an historic debate over whether to give sanctions time to work as opposed to authorizing the use of force, votes to go to war with Iraq, 250-183 (House) and 52-47 (Senate). [Never before has Congress been so divided over a vote for war or "authorization of force." 42% of the House and 47% of the Senate were opposed; whereas for World War II there was one dissenting vote and in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Gulf of Tonkin, 8 and 2 dissenting votes respectively.]

January 15, 1991    24-hour vigils are held in cities throughout the United States to protest against the US attack on Iraq.

January 16, 1991    Operation Desert Storm begins as the US-led allied forces start the Persian Gulf War with an air offensive against Iraqi installations in Iraq and Kuwait.

January 26, 1991    I00,000 march in Washington demanding an end to the war against Iraq, a protest that is ignored by most of the media.

February 24, 1991    The US-led alliance begins the ground war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

February 26, 1991    Its forces virtually surrounded by General Schwartzkopf's "Hail Mary" surprise maneuver, Iraq announces it is withdrawing from Kuwait. Washington says it will continue the war. [Thousands of Iraqi soldiers are buried alive as the US First Mechanized Infantry Division, using plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers, seals over the men and equipment in 70 miles of trenches. Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1991. In the final hours of the "Hundred Hour War" American pilots bombed and strafed the lines of defeated Iraqis straggling toward Baghdad. They made comments for reporters such as: "a turkey shoot," "like shooting fish in a barrel" and "they were sitting ducks." These callous remarks made the rounds in the Middle East. American "doves" were horrified by the slaughter; the "hawks" were enraged that the troops had not been allowed to roll on to Bagdad and capture Saddam Hussein. Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1991. A1.]

February 27, 1991    After an even 100 hours of ground war, Bush declares victory over Iraq, says Kuwait is liberated and orders allied combat to cease at midnight. A permanent cease-fire will depend on Iraq's release of all prisoners and Kuwaitis detained in Iraq and compliance with all the UN resolutions on Kuwait including acceptance of responsibility to pay compensation for war damages. [[Three hundred American lives were lost. 25% of the deaths and 15% of the injuries in Operation Desert Storm were due to "friendly fire" ---a rather cynical oxymoron--- which is the highest figure for any US war and is attributed to the inability to identify friendly vehicles in the haze and smoke of the desert. .Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1991. The number of Iraqi casualties will probably never be known, thanks to the unreliability of the Iraqi media and the massive number of desertions. The most-quoted estimate of 100,000 killed in action and 300,000 wounded in action (forced from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency in May, 1991 by an FOIA inquiry) is disputed by military analyst John G. Heidenrich who, extrapolating from the number of wounded who were captured, postulates a much lower number of less than 10, 000 killed in action and fewer than 1000 civilian deaths. Foreign Policy, Number 90, Spring 1993, pp. 108-125. As of 1996, the US was spending $50 billion a year to maintain a military presence in the Persian Gulf (including the newly-created Fifth Fleet) and to enforce the blockade of Iraq.]

April, 1991    Osama bin Laden and several of his faithful lieutenants move the operation of Al Qaeda to Khartoum, Sudan. He increases his fortune with shrewd investments in agriculture and banking. Bin Laden directs operations aimed at de-stabilizing the not-sufficiently-Islamic governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria. He is particularly incensed that the "infidels" (American soldiers) continue to occupy the "land of the two holy places" (Saudi Arabia). Cooley, pp. 120-121.

December 17, 1991   The Soviet Union is dissolved; many of the republics, led by Russia, join together in the CIS. Many others, especially in Central Asia, become independent nations.

January 13, 1992    OIL: Bridas, an Argentinian oil and gas company, is awarded exploration rights in the Yashlar block in eastern Turkmenistan for a 50-50 split of production profits. This energy-rich but landlocked country is happy that a western country is willing to help them capitalize on their new independence from the USSR. [Bridas obtained a lease on the Keimir block in western Turkmenistan the following year, and the company spent US$ 400 million in exploration. Oil was exported from Keimir at the rate of 16,800 barrels a day by 1994, and massive gas reserves were discovered at Yashlar that were more than double the size of Pakistan's gas reserves. On March 16, 1995 Bridas signed an agreement with President Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan for a feasibility study of a pipeline through Afghanistan to supply energy-starved Pakistan. (Two years earlier Niyazov and his consultant, former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, had tried unsuccessfully to soften Washington's prohibition of a much shorter and more practical pipeline route through Iran.) Rashid, pp. 157-162.]

March 1992    General Abdul Rashid Dostum defects from Najibullah's government, taking his Uzbek militia with him to join forces with Hekmatyar's mujaheddin. (Vijay Prashad dates this as the beginning of the Northern Alliance.) "Forward into the Past", zmag.org.

April 1992    The Mujaheddin enter Kabul. A cease-fire is achieved with Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani of the Jamait-i-Islami recognized as the head of the guerrilla coalition and of the country. Prashad, "Forward into the Past". For the first time in 300 years (with one brief exception) the Pashtuns are not the country's rulers. (Rabbani and his commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, are Tajiks.) The mujaheddin close schools and health clinics. They stop women from working. (Up to this time women constituted 40% of the doctors in Kabul, 70% of the schoolteachers, 60% of Kabul University professors, and 50% of the university students.) Armed groups beat, rape and murder women. Richter, "Revolutionary Afghan Women", zmag.org.

August 1992    The civil war resumes as Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-Islami fight the Rabbani regime with more civilian casualties. Prashad.

 March 1993    In the Islamabad Accord Rabbani continues as president of Afghanistan; Hekmatyar will be prime minister. [However, the terror continued with Hekmatyar shifting allegiance between Dostum / Ahmed Shah Massoud and Rabbani. In the background was a growing coalition of mullahs and students from madrassas (religious schools) who were deeply appalled by the massive violence of the warring mujaheddin factions and their departure from the original religious purity of the jihad against the Russians. They became known as the Taliban (plural for talib, or student of Islam). Their leader was Mullah Mohammed Omar, described by Rashid as "a poor village mullah with no scholarly learning and no tribal pedigree," who had been chosen for his especial piety rather than any leadership ability.

By the time the civil war ended, 45,000 civilians had been killed and 300,000 had sought refuge in Pakistan. So that initially the Taliban, when they entered Kabul in September 1996, were welcomed with relief by a devastated citizenry. Prashad; Rashid, pp. 19-26, 42, 199.]

March 12-19, 1993    Blowback in India: A series of bombings in Calcutta and Bombay kill over 300 people and injure more than 1200. Targets include the Bombay Stock Exchange, Air India offices and other financial symbols selected to avenge the earlier destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu extremists. [The perpetrators were Kashmiri fundamentalist Muslims who had fought in the Russo-Afghan war, using weapons diverted from the CIA-ISI pipeline. Many had been trained at the Afghani Zawar camp by Hekmatyar (who also was instrumental in smuggling the weapons into Kashmir.) The bombings were supported by the ISI and the bin Laden organization in what was described during the 1994 trial as a "proxy war, terrorism sponsored by a neighboring hostile country." Cooley, pp. 228-23. Ahmed Rashid notes that India came close to persuading the United States to declare Pakistan a "state sponsor of terrorism" for these and previous terrorist acts of the Kashmiri mujaheddin. Pakistan's response was to move their bases out of Pakistan and into eastern Afghanistan. The Jahalabad mullahs and the Taliban were reimbursed for the support and training of the militants; private Islamic parties such as Osama bin Laden were encouraged to contribute. Support of the Taliban was a big policy shift for Pakistan whose relations with the power structure in Kabul had been semi-hostile in earlier times. Relations had been severed in 1955 and again in 1962 over Afghanistan's push for a "Greater Pashtunistan." Rashid, p. 186. ]

March 10, 1994    Silvan Becker and his wife, two German secret agents who are surveilling terrorists in North Africa for the counter-espionage Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, are assassinated near Surt, Libya. [Although the Libyan government immediately suspected Bin Laden, it was not until March 1998 that Libya filed a warrant for the arrest of Osama bin Laden and three accomplices. Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La vérité interdite (2002), pp. 137-138.]

April 7, 1994    King Fahd of Saudi Arabia announces that Osama bin Laden has been deprived of his Saudi citizenship for behavior that "contradicts the Kingdom's interests and risks harming its relations with fraternal countries."  [Pressure had been put on the king by Egyptian President Mubarak, Yemen and Interpol. Also about this time bin Laden was supposedly disowned by his extensive and influential family in Saudi Arabia. Bergen, p. 89; Cooley, p. 123. The Saudi government also froze his assets within the country. However, it is clear that he continued to receive funds from his share of the vast family fortune. He seems to have had some temporary cash-flow problems in the 1994-1998 period, but after the East Africa bombings and the sympathy engendered by Clinton's retaliatory strike, funds for financing his terrorist ventures were no longer a problem. In 1999 Khalid bin Mahfouz was placed under house arrest in Saudi Arabia for allegedly transferring funds from the family's bank to charities that front for bin Laden. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 101-104.]

October 12, 1994    The Pakistani transport and smuggling mafia essentially hire the Taliban to wrest control of the crucial border town of Spin Baldak from Hekmatyar and his bandits who are charging exorbitant tolls. The Taliban are successful, losing only one soldier out of the 200-man contingent. Part of their booty is a large munitions depot containing 18,000 Kalashnikovs and several vehicles. Rashid, pp. 27-28.

November 4, 1994    The Taliban emerge as a significant military and political force after they rescue a Pakistani convoy that has been captured by warlords in the Kandahar area who are demanding a large ransom, a share of the convoy's profits, and Pakistan's pledge to stop support of the Taliban.  [With the loss of only a dozen men the Taliban routed the warlords, hanged the commander from the barrel of his tank and proceeded on to capture Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city. Then they cleared the chains from all the toll roads, making it safe for Pakistani commerce and smuggling.

By December, 1994 ten thousand Afghani and Pakistani Pashtuns who had been studying in madrassas rushed to Kandahar to join the Taliban. The majority were very young, between 14 and 24. As described by Ahmed Rashid, they were the displaced youth of the war who had grown up in refugee camps with their only education being that of the madrassa where they studied the Koran "as interpreted by their barely literate teachers [who had no] formal grounding in maths, science, history or geography. Many of these young warriors did not even know the history of their own country or the story of the jihad against the Soviets.... They had no memories of their tribes, their elders, their neighbours nor the complex ethnic mix of peoples that often made up their villages and their homeland.... They were literally the orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat." Rashid, pp. 28-29, 31-32.]

October 21, 1995    OIL: Bridas officials are stunned when they witness Turkmenistan's President Niyazov sign an agreement with Unocal and its partner, Delta Oil Company (owned by Saudi Arabia) to build a pipeline through Afghanistan, thus essentially abrogating Turkmenistan's earlier contract with Bridas. [Also present at the New York meeting was Henry Kissinger, a consultant for Unocal and another former Secretary of State. Unocal had become interested when Bridas offered the company a share in the pipeline consortium. Niyazov saw Unocal as a wedge for involving the United States in his country's development (and as an old Soviet apparachnik he had no compunctions about breaking contracts.) The US saw the Afghanistan route as a way to prevent Turkmenistan from becoming dependent on Iran and also to bar Iran from access to the potentially valuable Southeast Asia energy market.

In the Spring of 1996 the United States pressured Prime Minister Bhutto to change her allegiance from Bridas to Unocal. Her failure to comply was "one of the factors" in her downfall, according to the Herald of Pakistan. The gas price finalized by Pakistan and Unocal under Bhutto's successor, Nawaz Sharif, was ridiculously low, so low as to prohibit competition. However, the Taliban was not included in the negotiation. The transit fee of fifteen cents per cubic meter was not acceptable to them and they continued to favor the Argentinians. Bridas, although banned by Turkmenistan from exporting oil from its leases, continued with plans for the pipeline and concluded an exclusive agreement with the Rabbani government.

Bridas sued Unocal in federal court for US$ 15 billion in damages and began international arbitration against Turkmenistan for breach of contract. The Texas district court dismissed the case in 1998, saying the dispute should be adjudicated by Turkmenistan and Afghanistan rather than the US. The International Court of Arbitration in Paris awarded Bridas US$47 million. In December, 1998, following the US bombardment of Afghanistan and the anti-Taliban campaign of the Feminist Majority that was directed against Unocal, the company withdrew from the pipeline consortium. Feminist Majority President Eleanor Smeal: "How can women be safe anywhere if some governments can carry out gender apartheid with impunity?" Rashid, pp. 160-180; Herald (Pakistan), June, 1997.]

November 13, 1995:    Blowback against USA in Saudi Arabia: A joint US-Saudi military facility in Riyadh is blown up by a truck bomb, killing three US civilians and two soldiers and injuring 60 others including civilian passersby. [The Saudis arrested and beheaded four Saudi men before they could be interrogated by the Americans. Three of the men had fought with the mujaheddin in Afghanistan; all four admired and supported Osama bin Laden. Rashid and Reeve believe the government acted so swiftly to avert knowledge of bin Laden's involvement and his links to important Saudis. Shortly thereafter, the Saudis gave Osama bin Laden a warning: four Yemeni mercenaries opened fire with their AK-47s on his house in Khartoum. Bin Laden was not touched, but two of his guards and three of the mercenaries were killed in the gunfight.] Cooley, p. 220; Rashid, pp. 183-184; Reeve, pp. 184-185; Bergen, p. 87.

January, 1996    A special "bin Laden task force" is established within the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. This includes personnel from operations, intelligence and science/technology directorates. [They investigated his links with other militants and interfaced with counterterrorist colleagues in Britain, Germany, Israel, Italy and France. In their analysis of the sources of his funding, they concluded that "large sums were still flowing into bin Laden's accounts from businessmen and senior politicians in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar." Reeve, pp. 184-185.].

May, 1996    Osama bin Laden, his wives and about 150 supporters leave Khartoum and fly to Jalalabad, Afghanistan on a chartered C-130 plane. [Following a second unsuccesful attempt on his life Saudi officials flew to Sudan to threaten Sudanese President Hassan al-Turabi if he continued to harbor Osama bin Laden. The Saudis were joined by the US and Egypt. Turabi was unwilling to give up Osama even though Sudan had handed over Carlos the Jackal to the French two years before. Instead, Turabi asked bin Laden to leave. It took awhile for CIA analysts to realize what a mistake they had made, as Afghanistan would offer a much more impregnable base of operations. (The Shah of Iran had made a similar mistake when he pressured Iraq to expel Ayatollah Khomeini in October, 1978; France gave the cleric a much better base for preaching his sermons and distributing his audiotapes.) Rashid, pp. 185-187; William Shawcross, The Shah's Last Ride, p. 116.]

May 12, 1996    On "60 Minutes" Leslie Stahl discusses the sanctions against Iraq with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Stahl asks, "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?" Albright replies, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price— we think the price is worth it." Most Americans are unaware of this quote (or if they watched the program, have forgotten it.) But you can bet your bottom dollar that every Muslim in the Middle East over the age of 15, literate or not, has heard it. And that it was used in the bin Laden-Taliban recruitment pitch.

June 25, 1996    Further Blowback against USA in Saudi Arabia: A 5000-pound truck bomb explodes at the Khobar Towers, a housing complex for the US military in Dhahran, destroying the entire front of the building, killing 19 American servicemen and wounding about 400.The blast was so powerful that it was felt twenty miles away in Bahrain. [Telephone calls were intercepted by the NSA from Ayman al-Zawahiri and others congratulating Osama bin Laden, who later expressed his feelings in a 1997 interview with Hamid Mir: "Only Americans were killed in the explosions. No Saudi suffered any injury. When I got the news about these blasts, I was very happy….I would like to say to the Saudi people that they should adopt every tactic to throw the Americans out of Saudi territory." (He was angry that the Saudis had admitted American troops to the country during the Gulf War and incensed that they still remained there, despite promises made to him to the contrary.) The Saudis blamed the attack on Iran or Iranian-financed Shi'ites from the eastern part of Arabia. (Bergen writes that their arrest of six hundred Afghan Arabs suggests that they suspected bin Laden was responsible.) On June 21, 2001--- just before the expiration date for indictments on attempted murder and conspiracy charges--- the US indicted fourteen members of Hezbollah (thirteen Saudis and one Lebanese) for the Khobar bombing. No Iranian officials were named in the indictment, although the indictment indicated that "elements of the [then] Iranian government inspired, supported and supervised members of Saudi Hezbollah." FBI Director Louis Freeh refused to say how many suspects were in custody or in what country. One suspect, Hani Sayegh, the Saudi suspected of blinking his car lights for the "all clear" signal to the bomb truck, was in US custody for two years, 1997-1999, before being sent to Saudi Arabia where he has been held incommunicado. Amnesty International has protested his treatment, fearing he will be tortured and beheaded after an unfair trial. Bergen, p. 88; www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/o6/21/khobar.indictments/index.html;www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/06/21/khobar.sayegh/index.html

As with the previous attack, the FBI was not allowed to interview any of the suspects, thus escalating the suspicon about Saudi support for Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden..The US changed the air base for the flights to Iraq from Dhahran to the more distant desert base of al-Kharj. A few weeks later the FBI and Mary Jo White, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York initiated the grand jury investigation of bin Laden which would led to his indictment for international terrorism. Reeve, p. 187; Cooley, pp. 220, 224.]

September 26, 1996    Final Victory for the Taliban: The Taliban, supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, enter Kabul a few hours after the army chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud, gives orders for a withdrawal from the city. [The Clinton administration had quietly favored the Taliban over the Rabbani regime because the Taliban were virulently anti-Iran and therefore more likely to cooperate in an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea that would bypass Iran. Within hours of Kabul's capture the US Department of State announced that that it would establish diplomatic relations with the new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, a statement that was quickly retracted. State Department spokesman Glyn Davis said, however, that the US found "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's imposition of Islamic law--- they were just "anti-modern" and not "anti-western." A Unocal executive told the wire services that the pipeline project would be easier to implement with the Taliban in power.] Rashid, pp. 44-49, 166.

September 27, 1996    In one of the first acts of the victorious Taliban, ex-president Najibullah and his aides are dragged from the UN compound where they have had asylum for four years. Najibullah and his brother are tortured, publicly executed, and left hanging in front of the palace for over a day to the horror of the world.  [Under the Taliban there is "peace," but at what a price. Women are even more restricted, required to wear an all-covering burqa, forbidden to work, and isolated in their homes. Only three countries recognize the regime— Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.]

September 28, 1997     Emma Bonino, the European Community Commissioner for humanitarian affairs, arrives in Afghanistan accompanied by journalists and officials of NGOs. During their visit they are arrested and held at gun point for four hours for having taken photographs of female health workers. [Although the Taliban foreign minister later apologized for this "incident," the press reports and Bonino's statement on the miserable state of women, education and public liberties caused the final revulsion of the world against the new regime in Kabul. The Taliban's opposition, however, was winning few supporters: ten thousand people had been killed in the May to August offensive against Mazar-e-Sharif led by General Rashid Dostum and there had been numerous reports of torture. Brisard et Dasquié, pp. 50-51; Agence France-Presse, September 29, 1997; www.developments.org.uk/data/profile98.htm.]185.]

February 1998    Osama bin Laden meets with senior fundamental Muslim leaders from Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Arab North Africa. They set up an "Islamic Struggle Front" dedicated to fighting "the Jews" (meaning Israel and its friends and allies.) They issue a fatwa declaring it to be legitimate to kill any American, military or civilian. Cooley, p. 224.

March 16, 1998    First Arrest Warrant for Osama bin Laden:  Libya issues an international arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden and three accomplices, accusing them of the murder of two German nationals and the possession of illegal firearms. [The warrant was not issued internationally by Interpol until April 15th and then with date and description of the crimes omitted. Brisard and Dasquié speculate that this warrant was virtually ignored thanks to the hostility of Great Britain and MI6 toward Muammar Qaddafi for his overthrow (September 1, 1969) of the government of their protegé, King Idriss, and the subsequent nationalization of the properties of British Petroleum. Some failed attempts to overthrow Qaddafi (with some close associates of Bin Laden!) left MI6 with considerable egg on the face. Brisard and Dasquié , pp. 135-143; Stephen Dorril, MI6 (2000), pp. 735-738; Irish Times, November 19, 2001.]

May 26, 1998    Osama bin Laden holds a press conference in Afghanistan in which he announces that there will be "good news in the coming weeks." [In an interview on ABC News two days later he predicted a "black day for America." He called for the deaths of all Americans: "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians: they are all targets." On June 12 the State Department issued a warning: "We take those threats seriously and the United States is increasing security at many U.S. government facilities in the Middle East and Asia." No mention of Africa, although Ambassador Prudence Bushnell had twice warned the State Department of the extreme vulnerability of her Nairobi embassy to terrorism and to crime, thanks to its location at a busy downtown intersection with no setback from the street. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 105-107, 109.]

May 28, 1998    ABC interviews Osama bin Laden in "Talking with Terror's Banker." Bin Laden calls for the murder of all Jews and all Americans, wherever they may be. Americans, he says, are the biggest thieves and worst terrorists in the world. He vows to destroy the Saudi family and drive them from the "land of the two holy places" in retaliation for their desecration of the land by admitting the American military into the country and allowing them the use of bases from which to bomb other Muslims. He praises and halfway admits responsibility for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the uprising against the American forces in Somalia in 1993-1994. Cooley, p. 116.

May 30, 1998    An earthquake registering 6.9 on the Richter scale devastates an area of northern Afghanistan near the border with Tajikistan. Over 4000 are killed and many thousands more injured and made homeless. An earlier 6.1 quake in the same area (February 4) had killed 2500, injured nearly a thousand and left over 8000 homeless. This only adds to the misery of the two decades of warfare and the year-old drought.

End of July, 1998   The Taliban force the non-governmental organizations to leave Afghanistan. Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié, Ben Laden: La vérité interdite, p. 54.

August 7, 1998    Blowback in East Africa--- Operation Holy Kaaba and Operation al-Aqsa:  Truck bombs are exploded almost simultaneously at the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. The timing is considerately set for 10:30 to 11 AM, a time when observant Muslims would be in their mosques praying and off the streets. [In Nairobi 247 people died, in Dar-es-Salaam, 20. Over 5000 people were severely wounded; some were blinded, some suffered severed arms or legs. With the synchronicity of the suicide bombings, the Osama bin Laden network was immediately suspected. And indeed the plan had been organized by Mohammed Sadeek Odeh, a Palestinian from Jordan who had been installed in Mombasa, Kenya as a "sleeper" since 1994 and whose prosperous fishing business had been financed by Al Qaeda. One of the Nairobi suicide bombers, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali escaped the blast, but his injuries enabled hospital doctors to identify him. His subsequent confession led to the arrest of 18 others, including men who were supposed to carry out even more devastating bombings in Kampala, Uganda at the same time. (Al-'Owhali also told US investigators that bin Laden's next operation would be an American warship in Yemen. Bergen, p. 183.) Odeh was arrested in the Karachi airport by an alert immigration official; he subsequently confessed details about the operations and was deported to the United States to stand trial. The master mind of the operation, Haroun Fazil from the Comoros islands, remains at large. (He is described as being fluent in Swahili, Arabic, French and English and "very good" with computers.) Fazil, Odeh and the other senior members of the plots all left Africa before the actual explosions. Of the five men indicted for the Tanzania bombing, only Khalfan Khamis Mohamed is in US custody. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 105-114; Reeve, The New Jackals, pp. 198-201; Cooley, pp. 7, 215-216.]

August 8, 1998:    Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing: Hundreds of civilians are among those killed when Taliban forces capture the city of Mazar-e-Sharif in northwestern Afghanistan, the only major city still controlled by the Northern Alliance. [In the days that followed there were house-to-house searches for men and boys who were Hazaras, Tajiks or Uzbeks. Amnesty International estimated that at least 8000 civilians were summarily executed either as they were being taken from their homes or while in transport to the jail. Many women and girls were raped and abducted. The Hazaras were especially singled out, as they are Shi'ites and considered infidels by the super-orthodox Sunni Taliban. Ten officials at the Iranian embassy and an Iranian jounalist were also slain. "The Massacre in Mazar-i Sharif," Human Rights Report, Vol. 10, No. 7, November 1998; Amnesty International , September 3, 1998.  Historical Note: There was no "tut-tut" forthcoming from the US government on these atrocities of the Taliban, yet the US would go to war against Serbia a year later for far less grievous acts alleged against their Kosovar citizens.

August 20, 1998:    Retribution in Afghanistan and Sudan: In "Operation Infinite Reach" President Bill Clinton orders as many as 75 Tomahawk missiles fired from US Navy ships onto three of Osama bin Laden's training camps located near Khost and Jalalabad, Afghanistan. (One of the "smart" missiles lands in Pakistan!) He also orders the demolition of Al-Shifa in Khartoum, Sudan's major pharmaceutical factory, on the mistaken assumption that the plant is owned by bin Laden and is manufacturing nerve gas. [When pressed, the administration cannot offer credible evidence that the factory was indeed making chemicals for biological warfare. And the government was surprised that the Islamic world would demand proof of bin Laden's culpability for the 9-11-2001 attacks?  In this period Clinton was under fire for his affair with Monica Lewinsky and skeptics believed these bombings were as much for "Wag the Dog" as for retribution against bin Laden. Osama was not killed in the operation. He had been warned just hours before the strike, allegedly by someone within the Pakistani ISI, that the CIA was tracking him by his phone calls, so he went incommunicado and was hundreds of miles to the north when the missiles hit. (Also the evacuation of American personnel from Kabul and Pakistan in the days preceding tipped him off.) Later he was heard to broadcast on the radio, "By the grace of Allah, I am still alive." Twenty or so men (of five different nationalities) died. The complex was flattened, but was rebuilt within two weeks. The next day Mullah Omar, the spiritual and political head of the Taliban, condemned the attacks and announced that he was giving kind and friendly refuge to Osama (héberge avec bienveillance). There were two important unintended consequences of these strikes:

September 20-21, 1998    Ahmad Shah Massoud's United Front forces fire a series of rockets into the northern part of Kabul, killing over 100 people. One hits a crowded night market. The International Committee of the Red Cross calls the attacks "indiscriminate"; Massoud denies targeting civilians. Human Rights Watch, October 2001.

February 1, 1999    Under Secretary of State Strobe Talbott meets with several representatives of the Taliban in Islamabad, Pakistan. He brings proofs of bin Laden's complicity in the East African embassy attacks and an official demand for his extradition to the United States. After this, he hints, the US may recognize the Taliban government. Brisard and Dasquié, pp. 57-58.

July 19, 1999    The first meeting of the UN-sponsored "6 + 2" meetings convenes in Tashkent, Uzbekistan to discuss the future of Afghanistan. [This had been arranged by Lakhdar Brahimi after considerable visits to heads of state worldwide. The six neighbors of Afghanistan---Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, China, and Pakistan--- sent representatives; Russia and the United States were the other two countries. Taliban representatives were there as observers; the month before the FBI had placed Osama bin Laden on its "ten most wanted" criminals list. Brisard and Dasquié, pp. 58-60.]

October 5, 1999    Pakistani General Khawaja Ziauldine meets with Mullah Omar to ask for the extradition of Osama bin Laden and finds that Omar is "ready to cooperate." [This effort from Pakistan was the result of the July 4th meeting in Washington of President Clinton with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in which Clinton arranged for a delay of several weeks in the removal of the Pakistani military from Kashmir who were advising the Islamist groups there. Brisard and Dasquié, pp. 60-61.]

October 12, 1999    The government of Prime Minister Sharif is overthrown by a military coup in response to Sharif's order to the ISI on the 7th to close all the fundamentalist Muslim training camps in Pakistan, especially those in the frontier tribal zone close to the border with Afghanistan. The new head of state is General Pervez Musharaf. Brisard and Dasquié, p. 61.

October 15, 1999    The UN Security Council votes Resolution # 1267 enjoining the Taliban to extradite bin Laden and "foreseeing" very heavy sanctions in case of non-compliance. Brisard and Dasquié, p. 62.

December 14, 1999    Millennium Bomb Plot Aborted: An alert Customs agent at the Canada-US ferry crossing in Port Angeles, Washington arrests Algerian Ahmed Ressam when his rental car is found to be loaded with explosives. [Ressam was part of a GIA-Al Qaeda operation that was planning to blow up the Los Angeles airport during peak holiday traffic at New Years. Two of his accomplices were quickly arrested in Montreal and New York City, Mokhtar Haouari and Abdelghani Meskini. A third, Abdelmajid Doumane, escaped to Algeria. PBS Frontline, "Ahmed Ressam's Millenium Plot;" Cnews, March 22, 2002; Los Angles Times, August 29, 2001; "Y2K bomber still talking, sentence delayed," CNN.com, April 1, 2002; Reeve, The New Jackals, pp. 3-4.

January, 2000    Al Qaeda Summit Meeting in Malaysia: A dozen of the top leaders of Al Qaeda, posing as tourists, meet at a condominium in suburban Kuala Lumpur presumably to discuss strategy and make future plans.. Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, "The Hijackers We let Escape," Newsweek, June 10, 2002.]

January 20, 2000    Karl Inderfurth, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Asia, journeys to Islamabad where he meets with the new Prime Minister Musharaf, Taliban Minister of Information Amir Khan Muttaqi and Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan, Saeed Mohammed Muttaqi, to discuss the extradition of Osama bin Laden and the normalization of relations between the international community and the Taliban government. [Two days earlier UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, had named a new person responsible for Taliban affairs, Fransesc Vendrell, with the title of Special Representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, in the expectation of increased activity for the "6+ 2" group. The White House in this same period disbursed $114 million for humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. Brisard and Dasquié, pp. 63-64.]

September 27, 2000    An aide for the Taliban Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abdur Rahmin Zahid, meets with representatives of the State Department at the Middle East Institute in Washington. He confides that the religious authorities have created a special commission to investigate Osama bin Laden's responsibility for the embassy bombing; he is optimistic about his eventual extradition. [In this same period counter-terrorism chief Michael Sheehan met with a Taliban delegate, Abdul Hakim Mudjahid. A month later, on October 18th, Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering acknowledged the work of the "6 + 2" group and also the continuing negotiations with the Taliban. On November 2nd Fransesc Vendrell was able to announce to his superiors that the Taliban and the Northern Alliance were working on a peace plan under the aegis of the "6 + 2" group. People were confident that a coalition government with "moderate" Taliban was truly possible and that bin Laden would be extradited and Afghanistan stabilized. But---- after the débacle of the American election, the diplomatic climate changed mysteriously. No more negotiations, no further discussions under the guidance of the "6 + 2" group. "En moins d'un mois, l'équilibre diplomatique entre les taliban et les Occidentaux s'est rompu….pour on ne sait quelle raison." Brisard and Dasquié, pp. 65-68.]

October 12, 2000    Further Blowback in Yemen: Sailors aboard the USS Cole, in the magnificent harbor of Aden for a brief refueling stop, return the waves of the occupants of the small fishing boat minutes before it pulls alongside and explodes, its load of C-4 blasting a 40 x 60 foot hole in the reinforced steel hull of the Cole. [Seventeen sailors were killed, thirty-nine were wounded, and the damage inflicted would cost the Pentagon $240 million. The contract with Yemen for refueling privileges had been signed in December, 1998 a few months after the warning from al-'Owhali that Osama bin Laden was planning to bomb a warship in Yemen. Peter Bergen indicates that there were two reasons--- the Navy didn't have enough oilers and so needed a port and the State Department hoped to woo Yemen, an ally of Iraq, into its "war against terrorism." The mastermind for the plot was a bin Laden deputy, Mohammed Omar al-Harzi who, like the intellectual authors of previous terrorist plots, fled the vicinity before the actual event. The Yemeni authorities were only minimally more cooperative with the FBI than the Saudis had been, much to the frustration of FBI agents such as John O'Neill. Yemen arrested six or so men who were directly involved with the Cole attack, but understandably refused the FBI's request to investigate and interview certain members of the government and an army general related to President Salih. According to a Yemeni newspaper, "It was clear from the start that the accessories to the attack would be tried and executed, but the people inside Yemen who financed it, and used their power to facilitate it, would never be brought to book." Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 167-169, 184-193.]

December 12, 2000    Addressing the Judiciary Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, Michael Sheehan denounces the Taliban, accusing them of supporting terrorism and calling on the international community to apply new sanctions against Kabul. [On the 19th the UN Security Council obliged with a reinforcement of economic sanctions against Afghanistan and a freeze on part of their financial assets. Brisard and Dasquié, p. 68.]

January 29, 2001    Four days after the inauguration of the new administration Dick Cheney, ex-CEO of Halliburton, sets up an Energy Policy Task Force to help him make policy decisions. [On May 16th he issued a brief summary of the secret meetings which was too brief to satisfy Congress. On the 10th of September the General Accounting Office demanded that the White House reveal and publish the details of the program devised by the Energy Policy Task Force and the names of the people participating. As of this writing (June 16, 2002), the White House has not complied. Brisard and Dasquié, pp. 71-72.]

February 5, 2001    The Taliban use the pages of the London Times to invite the new administration in Washington to resume negotiations. Laila Helms, the PR person for the Taliban, expedites the visit of Mullah Omar's roving ambassador, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, to the United States. (She is an Afghan by birth and the niece of former CIA director, Richard Helms.) Brisard, p. 69, The Times (UK), February 5, 2001, p. 21.

February 12, 2001    Nancy Soderburg, the American ambassador to the United Nations, states that, at the request of Fransesc Vendrell, the United States will seek to "find a way to have a continuing dialogue on humanitarian issues with the Taliban." [Between April 19 and August 17 she made four trips to Kabul and Kandahar for discussions with the Taliban. In the same period the "6 + 2" meetings resumed under the sponsorship of the UN with Vendrell presiding, but with a change in personnel. The individuals attending were now people with no official positions in their current g