March 6, 2005
COMMENTARY: Four Years Later: Sy Hersh’s ‘Evil Airlift’ of Pakistanis from
Afghanistan May Help Connect Some ‘New Great Game’ Dots
By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
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| Seymour M. Hersh
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Sy Hersh, a Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist, wasn’t the first reporter to mention the extraction of hundreds – maybe even thousands – of Pakistani fighters from Kunduz: Michael Moran of MSNBC in a report datelined ”New York, Nov. 29, 2001” wrote that “in the past week, a half dozen or more Pakistani air force cargo planes landed in the Taliban-held city of Kunduz and evacuated to Pakistan hundreds of non-Afghan soldiers who fought alongside the Taliban and even al-Qaeda against the United States.”
In his January 2002 New Yorker article (see link below to read the complete article), Hersh stated that the U.S. military may even have directly co-operated in the airlifts, according to the article, which is based on Hersh’s conversations with intelligence officials and senior military officers. Hersh writes that two sources said the U.S. central command was ordered to establish a special air corridor to guarantee that the rescue flights could proceed safely.
"Unhappy is not the word," said an analyst who worked with Delta Force, the commando unit charged with destroying Taliban bases on the ground, describing the army's reaction to the order.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied that this occurred, but both Moran and Hersh say they have witnesses to the “evil airlift.” Hersh claimed the November 2001 evacuation of the formerly Taliban-held Afghan city “slipped out of control,” allowing al-Qaeda fighters to join the exodus.” Since Pakistan created the Taliban in the 1990s, with the aid of the Clinton administration, the airlift makes sense.
Lutz Kleveman’s “The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia”
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 287 pages, $24, 2003 hardbound, 2004 paperback)
reminds us that oil – "the devil’s tears” – is behind just about everything
that takes place in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Caspian Basin,
Chechnya, Georgia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Whoever defends the
concept “Intelligent Design” has a lot of explaining to do to tell us why
any “intelligent designer” would put so much gas and oil in such an unstable
part of the world.
But Kleveman’s book, a lively, readable combination travelogue and a more serious, less satirical version of P.J. O’Rourke’s “Holidays in Hell” or “Peace Kills,” reminds us that the presence of oil and gas is itself a cause of instability. Only a few countries -- Great Britain and Norway come to mind – appear to have been spared the evil effects of oil discoveries off their coastlines. They’re both secular democracies. Oil and gas and massive corruption go together like the proverbial love and marriage. Nigeria and Venezuela come to mind as regions outside the Middle East and Central Asia afflicted by the “devil’s tears.”
The “New Great Game” that Kleveman refers to is a nod to the original Great Game, fought from about 1840 to 1907 by Russia and the British Empire over spheres of influence in central Asia, including Afghanistan. Kleveman reminds us that Alexander the Great was the last military occupier of Afghanistan to escape relatively unscathed. The Soviet Union suffered tens of thousands of deaths in their 1979 invasion and subsequent occupation of the tribal country.
The Afghan connection, as the thirty-something German-born Kleveman points out, involves a proposed pipeline from the oil-rich Caspian Sea basin straight south through Afghanistan to the Pakistani deep-water port of Gwadar – necessary because Afghanistan is landlocked. The proposed pipeline, Kleveman writes, is a U.S.-favored alternative to a Russian-supported proposed pipeline from the Baku area across the Caucasus to the Black Sea port of Poti and then southwest to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, conveniently located a few miles from the heavily fortified Syrian-Turkish frontier.
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| Lutz Kleveman
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Both Russia and the U.S. have troops and fighter and bomber planes in the “stans” – the former republics of the Soviet Union that became independent in 1991 and 1992. They are Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The U.S. has combat troops, Kleveman writes, in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.
“These first U.S. combat troops on former Soviet territory have dramatically altered the geostrategic power equations in the region, with Washington trying to seal the cold war victory against Russia, contain Chinese influence and tighten the noose around Iran,” Kleveman wrote in The Nation in 2004.
The countries – all them predominantly Muslim countries and brutal dictatorships of one kind or another – have vast resources of oil and gas—coveted by another New Great Game player, China. China was a net exporter of oil and gas in 1992 and is now an importer, fueled by consumer demand for automobiles and factories manufacturing everything that used to be made in good old U.S. of A.
A fearless reporter – especially in the light of the fate of Danny Pearl of the Wall Street Journal and the hundreds of journalists who’ve been killed or kidnapped in the region – Kleveman visited all the countries, including Iran, which wants a pipeline of its own, terminating in the Persian Gulf port of Bandar Abbas. Kleveman lives in New York and writes for several publications, including the Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, CNN, The Independent, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit.
Critics may say that reducing the struggles in the region to a fight over control of gas and oil is an oversimplification, but Kleveman’s well written book certainly makes a good case for the argument. Sometimes the simplest explanation is the truest. Allies, alliances, partnerships are very fluid and temporary in the best of times and are even more so in the worst of times.
Web sites: www.groveatlantic.com (“The New Great Game”).
Web site: www.amazon.com
Link to Hersh’s story: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020128fa_FACT
Kleveman’s web site: http://www.kleveman.com
