BY NORM DIXON
Both the Taliban and the factions of the Northern Alliance are veterans of US imperialism's last great "crusade", against the Soviet Union and "communism".
Then, as now, Washington dishonestly justified its war against the Afghan people in the name of fighting for "freedom", "democracy" and against "oppression". Yet it knowingly created and fostered some of the most anti-democratic political forces that have ever existed.
US support for the mujaheddin "contras" began soon after the 1978 uprising that brought the left-wing Peoples Democratic Party (PDPA) to power in Afghanistan, and accelerated when Soviet troops entered in December 1979.
Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion into the seven or so mujaheddin factions. The Saudi government matched US contributions dollar for dollar. The Pakistan military regime controlled the distribution of arms and money to the mujaheddin.
The US Central Intelligence Agency, the British Special Air Service and Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency trained thousands of religious zealots in the arts of bomb-making, booby-trap construction and urban and rural guerilla warfare.
'Peace and freedom'
US President George Bush concluded his October 7 address announcing that military action against Afghanistan had commenced with the vow that "peace and freedom will prevail" in Afghanistan.
Washington and London want the world to believe that a coalition of the anti-Taliban warlords and dissident Taliban factions will bring this about.
It is pure fantasy to believe that the Taliban defectors who the US hopes to frighten or bribe into joining the ranks of Bush's Afghan "liberators" will suddenly become champions of peace, freedom and women's rights.
The only condition that Washington is putting on these fanatics is that they reject the policy of harbouring bin Laden and other anti-Western "terrorists". Terrorism directed against rival warlords and the people of Afghanistan will be just fine with Washington and London — just as it was after 1978.
The vicious and intolerant rule of the Taliban, and its role in the growing of poppy and trafficking of heroin, has been widely publicised by the capitalist mass media. But the Northern Alliance's equally appalling human rights record, its terrorism and its drug-running are rarely mentioned.
'Crimes against humanity'
The US-based Human Rights Watch on October 6 warned that "a number of commanders associated with the emerging coalition of opposition forces in Afghanistan have a record of serious human rights abuse" and that "the various parties that comprise the [Northern Alliance] also amassed a deplorable record of attacks on civilians between the fall of the Najibullah [PDPA] regime in 1992 and the Taliban's capture of Kabul in 1996".
"In the years before the Taliban took control ... these parties had divided much of the country among themselves... In 1994 alone, an estimated 25,000 people were killed in Kabul, most them civilians, in rocket and artillery attacks. One-third of the city was reduced to rubble", Human Rights Watch reported.
The monitoring agency also said that while most of the abuses by the Northern Alliance "date from 1996-1998 when they controlled most of the north and were within artillery range of Kabul", abuses have been reported up until late 1999 and early 2000.
"Throughout the civil war ... the major factions on all sides have repeatedly committed serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, including killings, indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling, direct attacks on civilians, summary executions, rape, persecution on the basis of religion or ethnicity, the recruitment and use of children as soldiers and the use of antipersonnel landmines. These violations can be shown to have been 'widespread or systematic', a criterion of crimes against humanity."
Human Rights Watch was particularly concerned that Washington seemed ready to offer military support to Northern Alliance commander General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose forces are poised to capture the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif. Dostum is the leader of the National Islamic Movement (Junbish-i-Islami), a militia of mostly ethnic Uzbeks that mutinied against the PDPA in early 1992, and took control of Mazar-i-Sharif.
In 1997, the Junbush militia withdrew from an alliance it had made with the Taliban to rule Mazar. More than 3000 Taliban prisoners of war were executed. Some were shot, while others were thrown down wells and blown up with grenades.
When the Taliban retook Mazar in August 1998, they massacred an almost equal number of Hazara civilians in retribution.
Jamiat-i-Islami
Another key Northern Alliance faction is Jamiat-i-Islami, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Rabbani was the president of the Islamic State of Afghanistan that was overthrown by the Taliban in 1996.
Until he was assassinated on September 9, the then minister for defence and the Northern Alliance's top military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was the Jamiat-i-Islami's most powerful leader.
Since Massoud's death, he has been lauded by the Western press as a great leader of the anti-Taliban "resistance". His vicious military tactics and the atrocious record of Jamiat-i-Islami have been ignored.
These include:
- in September 1998, Massoud's forces fired rockets into a crowded market in Kabul, killing up to 180 shoppers;
- in March 1995, Massoud's forces captured a mainly Shi'ite Hazara neighbourhood in Kabul. According to the US State Department's 1996 report on human rights, "Massoud's troops went on a rampage, systematically looting whole streets and raping women"; and
- On February 11, 1993, Jamiat-i-Islami forces raided West Kabul, killing more than 100 Hazara civilians.
Other factions that are in, or aligned to the Northern Alliance, include the predominantly Shi'ite Islamic Unity Party of Afghanistan (Hizb-i-Wahdat) led by Muhammad Karim Khalili and the Saudi-backed Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan (Ittihad-i-Islami), headed by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf.
In February 1993, Amnesty International has reported, armed Wahdat and Ittihad terrorists raped and killed 60 women in the Institute of Social Sciences in Kabul.
Highlighting the fact that there are few genuine political differences between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance warlords, the Taliban was able to capture the city of Hazarajat in September 1998 when a Wahdat commander joined forces with them.
Perhaps the most notorious of US President Ronald Reagan's 1980s Afghan "freedom fighters" was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of Hizb-i-Islami. Today, he is in exile in Iran and is not allied to the Northern Alliance.
But in during the 1992-96 civil war things were different. Hekmatyar was Washington and Pakistan's favourite mujaheddin warlord. In 1993, after Rabbani's mujaheddin alliance took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar's forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on the city — killing at least 2000 civilians — until Rabbani agreed to give him the post of prime minister.
The Rabbani-Hekmatyar regime ruled through mass terror. Rape and forced "marriage" of young women by mujaheddin commanders was systematic.
Another former "freedom fighter" now being painted by the Western mass media as a "resistance" leader is one of Hekmatyar's followers, Abdul Haq.
Haq is proud of the fact that he ordered the planting of a bomb at Kabul airport in September 1984 that killed 28 people. Many of them were relatives of students preparing to fly to the Soviet Union, while about 15 were reportedly military officers. Haq said the purpose of the bomb was "to warn people not to send their children to the Soviet Union".
Haq also defended the firing of long-range rockets at Kabul that killed thousands of civilians during its fight to overthrow the PDPA.
"I have to free my country. My advice to people is not to stay close to the government. If you do, it's your fault. We use poor rockets; we cannot control them. They sometimes miss. I don't care about people who live close to the Soviet Embassy, I feel sorry for them, but what can [I] do?", he said.
Fully aware of his record, PM Margaret Thatcher welcomed Haq to Britain in 1986. At the time, Thatcher was denouncing the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the African National Congress as "terrorists".
The British Guardian reported on March 5, 1986 a Downing Street spokesperson saying: "The Afghans don't see themselves as revolutionaries. They're only trying to resist an invader and win back their freedom. The prime minister has a degree of sympathy with the Afghan cause inasmuch as they're trying to rid their country of invaders, which you cannot say of the ANC and PLO."
Drugs
On October 5, the UN office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNDCCP) reported that most of Afghanistan's opium, the raw product from which heroin is produced, is grown in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance.
While the UNDCCCP says that the Taliban has maintained a ban on opium-growing it imposed last year, which resulted in the harvest from the areas it controls dropping from 3000 tonnes to virtually zero, growers in the Northern Alliance's areas harvested about 140 tonnes.
It should not be forgotten that the poppy fields of Afghanistan were well-established before the Taliban took power. CIA and ISI backing of the mujaheddin coincided with a boom in the drug business. By 1991, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world's single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.
The factions that are now the Northern Alliance were up to their necks in the drug trade.
The tiny area of Afghanistan near the Tajikistan border controlled by the Northern Alliance is, according to UNDCCP director Pino Arlacchi, a major corridor for heroin being smuggled to Europe. Around 90% of heroin sold on Britain's streets originates in Afghanistan.
"There are no white hats over there", a US official told the October 5 New York Times in a moment of candour. "If the US tries to find someone whose hands are completely free [of involvement in narcotics trafficking] they are going to have to go thousands of miles."