An Appeal to Silent Academics

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/30746

by Abid Ullah Jan
(Saturday May 27 2006)

Leading experts both in the East and the West are requested to give the following facts some serious thought before continuing support of the illegal war and occupation of Afghanistan with their words or with their continued silence.

It is always the academic circles, which pave the way and provide final legitimacy to acts of aggression on the part of politicians and military leaders or pave the road for peace. In the present day world, most of the academic experts in international relations and political science are either silent or have put Afghanistan on the back-burner in the sense that they have accepted its occupation perfectly legitimate.

This act of granting legitimacy to occupation of Afghanistan is the root of all subsequent problems. Leading experts both in the East and the West are requested to give the following facts some serious thought before continuing support of the illegal war and occupation of Afghanistan with their words or with their continued silence.

What is illegal, irrational and illegitimate will remain so, regardless of the political rhetoric and support of the military power behind it. Might never makes a wrong right. In the end, the silent and vocal supporters of the illegitimate occupation of Afghanistan will be condemned in the pages of history as accomplices of modern day fascists.

It is not just the matter of present. The so-considered leading lights in the academia will be tested on the basis of the consequences their directly or indirectly supporting a war of aggression and occupation of Afghanistan.

There is unimaginable amount of evidence available to prove that the United States could not possibly decide on and launch a war of aggression against Afghanistan in a matter of 25 days. Planning and implementing an invasion of this scale takes resources, human effort and, most importantly, time.

The easy-to-reach conclusion, even for those who do not believe in the official story of 9/11, is that the United States administration was motivated by the desire to procure and protect natural resources in Afghanistan. They, however, ignore the fact that Afghanistan has existed for a long time and that the United States could access natural resources in Afghanistan and elsewhere through other means. There was no shortage of ways to go about the oil and gas pipeline projects that Unocal and Halliburton sought to build across Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The question is: “Why did the United States administration wage a war of aggression against Afghanistan?” More importantly, why was this pipeline so important as to deliver a serious ultimatum through a United States Official, Tom Simons, telling the Afghan government (via the Pakistani delegation acting as their interlocutors): “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs”?[587]

Lee Coldren, a member of the United States delegation, confirmed the broader outline of the American position at the meeting in which this ultimatum was made: “I think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action.”[588] One must not forget that these discussion and threats were made months before 9/11.

Niaz Naik, a former foreign secretary of Pakistan and a member of the Pakistani delegation in the July 2001 talks in Berlin, recalls that he was told that Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisors were already in place. He was told that Uzbekistan would also take part and 17,000 Russian troops were also on standby.[589] In the face of all these facts, we must be fooling ourselves if we continue to believe that the United States had all these war plans in place and were threatening the Taliban with “carpet bombing” just because of oil and pipelines, or that Afghanistan is invaded and occupied as a consequence of 9/11. What if there was no 9/11? What would have been a convincing justification of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan without the 9/11?

When the argument that the United States invaded Afghanistan because of oil and energy needs turns on its head, others resort to concluding that it was the horror of 9/11 that forced the United States into launching a “defensive” war on Afghanistan. The aforementioned facts show that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11, and that getting Osama was not a good-enough justification for invading and occupying Afghanistan for an indefinite period. The invasion was planned before 9/11 and 9/11 was too sophisticated an operation for people living in caves in Afghanistan to put together and successfully implement to the last detail.

Everyone who loves peace on this earth earnestly wishes that this was a war for natural resources or it was in retaliation for 9/11. But, unfortunately, this is not the case. The emerging reports show that the motive was to not allow Muslims to get united as an Ummah and live by Islam.

We could have given the warlords the benefit of the doubt and considered it a war on Al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. However, the almost weekly statements from Rumsfeld, and others, with the mention of “Caliphate” can hardly leave anyone in doubt regarding the motives of the modern-day crusaders. Note the frequency of Bush and Rumsfeld statements calling the war on Iraq a war on Caliphate in the months of October and November of 2005. For example, Rumsfeld repeated the same story at a Department of Defense briefing, CNN Late Edition, CBS’s Face the Nation, PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer and many other news shows.[590]

These statements are good enough to expose the real motives of the modern-day crusaders. However, if someone still has a problem with understanding the main goal of the crusaders, he or she would need to go beyond the visible fronts and stated objectives of the war on Afghanistan. In fact, it is the religious ideology and crusading spirit that motivate the overt and covert warlords. The overt warlords openly challenge Islam and its main sources: the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The covert ones are those who, in the garb of liberal analysts and reporters, present the same point of view and promote the same war on Islam in the name of “a war within Islam” and a “war of ideas.”

The religious warriors mostly stay behind the scenes. However, they provide moral inspiration to the apparently secular warlords, the neo-cons and the institutions that condemn everything remotely related to Islam, let alone those who openly declare, like the Taliban, to establish an order on the pattern of Prophet Mohammed (pbuh).

The covert warlords, who conceal their affiliation with the religious front, are the ones who played a lead role for many years in distorting the reality with consistent lies and misconceptions about the Taliban. While hiding behind the façade of mock neutrality, liberalism and secularism, they paved the way for the invasion of Afghanistan. As a result, even today, everyone criticizes the war on Iraq and very few talk about the illegal and illegitimate war on Afghanistan. At the same time, even long-time left-leaning critics of U.S. foreign policy have accepted the official story of 9/11.

Behind the shield of this legitimacy, the initial encounters of the 21st century crusade are going on in Afghanistan. The overarching goal of this struggle appeared in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (May 30, 2004) under the title: “Millionen gegen Mohammed” (“Millions against Mohammed”).[591] The by-line reads: “Der Vatikan will weltweit die Ausbreitung des Islam stoppen” (“The Vatican Wants to Stop the World-wide Propagation of Islam”).

That is the overall goal. The rest that we hear, such as eradicating fundamentalism, radicalism, political Islam, and Islamism, are plain ruses, used as labels to fool the world and achieve the overall goal. Taliban happened to be the first victims of the 21st century crusade against Islam.

Of course, the architects of the final crusade want to stop the propagation of Islam and undermine all possibilities that would give Muslims an opportunity to establish an Islamic model of governance. However, the Islamophobes could not stand up and say openly that they do not want the Taliban to work for the establishment of a model Islamic society and ways to govern by Islamic rules. They needed to follow some strategic course and use specific tools to gradually demonize the Taliban rule, divide Muslims in general and Afghans in particular and prove that governance by Islamic principles is the most inhuman way to living life, and has no place in the “civilized” world.

The silence over the occupation of Afghanistan is a clear evidence of the success of this strategy of the modern-day crusaders. The source of inspiration for the religiously inspired warlords has been the ultimate objective behind invading Afghanistan, which according to Welt am Sonntag’s report is to contain the “aggressive religion” of Islam and at the same time “spread the Christian faith.” Here we see why the covert neo-cons in the media, academia and politics try to hide behind the façade of secular democracy and liberalism. The Taliban government was far more broad-based and inclusive than the American-backed regime since their departure from the scene. Yet the Taliban had to be “smoked out” in the name of democracy because not everyone would have jumped on the bandwagon for war if the crusaders had launched the war in the name of crushing Islam and planting the flags of the Christian faith in every living heart.

The fundamentalist Christians’ war for establishing the “dominion of God” had to begin from somewhere. Afghanistan was the best place to begin the crusade with crushing what Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian called “the Taliban’s experiment to build the world’s one true Islamic state.”[592] Author and educator George Grant,[593] founder of Franklin Classical School in the United States, was Executive Director of Coral Ridge Ministries[594] for many years. He explains in The Changing of the Guard, Biblical Principles for Political Action:

“Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less... Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land—of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.” (pp. 50-51).

Fast as the world was being moved to undermine Islam, it was still not fast enough to match the timescale demanded by those who are awaiting the second coming of Jesus and the establishment of the dominion of God. And the Muslims’ interest in the experiment in Afghanistan was gathering by the day. Social scientists, businesspeople, social workers, scientists and people from all walks of life were rushing to rebuild Afghanistan and assist the Taliban in materializing the dream of establishing an Islamic society and Islamic state in true sense. This was leading to the birth of an international Islamic movement.

Besides the unrelenting anti-Taliban propaganda, something of enormous magnitude was being orchestrated—something that devastated the collective human mind with fear, horror, and insecurity. This is what we saw in America on 9/11. Subsequently war of aggression was offered as a solution and the masses accepted it wholeheartedly. It advanced the Islamophobes’ agenda in a colossal leap almost overnight.

A growing number of American analysts are reaching the conclusion that the mind-numbing 9/11 atrocities were an “inside job.” In fact, this “inside job” was the beginning of the final crusade for the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical imprisonment of humankind. People in the position of authority in the United States, the people who made 9/11 attacks possible, were definitely religiously motivated. Their religious motivation forced them into launching the final crusade with butchering their own people and destroying their own assets. In their view, the end they were looking forward to justified the means they applied to begin the latest crusade. Many people consider oil as a factor for this fanaticism.

However, sane minds do not go fanatic to this extent for securing oil and other resources. More death and destruction will unfold as the so-called “free world” unites to use the threat of “terrorism” to justify a war against a people it chooses to take the rap just for being Muslims. The reason for keeping Muslims away from the Qur’an is that Muslims may not be living by the Qur’an because it has the guidance for establishing a just socio-political and economic order as opposed to prevailing injustice, exploitations and disparity on local and international levels. From the crusaders’ perspective, anything that challenges the status quo of the present order, or becomes a hurdle in the way of those who want to establish the Christian version dominion of God, must be eradicated.

End Part I