The policies of the US, UK governments, and Pakistan in the training of terrorist militias from 1977, directed against the Afghan governments were intertwined. The Pakistani elite benefited from aid received from the United States and NATO powers to implement a US-UK-led NATO strategy. Pakistan was also gaining profit from the growing narcotics trade, and from the permanent political instability in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was one of the few governments to oppose the admission of Pakistan into the United Nations, initially denying diplomatic recognition to the state of Pakistan created by British Imperialism in order to fragment India politically along religious lines, and be able to contain it, and to keep both India and Pakistan permanently politically and economically destabilized, controlling both by playing the religious card, encouraging the dependency of both the elites of Indian and Pakistan seeking scholarships, education, employment, residency and citizenship for their progeny in the Anglo-Saxon world and in the five eyes; while keeping both countries in a runaway arms race profitable for US, UK and NATO arms corporations.

The Emir of Afghanistan protested because there is a part of the territory of Afghanistan in the  North West Province in Baluchistan and in Baltistan and Gilgit, that was unjustly seized by the British during the Anglo-Afghan wars, and unequal treaties were imposed in the aftermath,  and were illegally handed over to Pakistan instead of being returned to Afghanistan. Britain had always been hostile to Afghanistan, in view of Afghanistan’s national resistance against the British Empire and the humiliating defeat inflicted on the British whose entire army in the first military expedition on Afghanistan was wiped out, except one man. The Emir declined to accept the British demarcated Durand Line as the boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Historically the Pashtun population of Afghanistan resided on both sides of the northwest Frontier Province across the Durand Line, which as a consequence of the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, became partly Afghan territory and partly  Pakistani. This was a calculated British plan to divide the Pashtun population between the two states in order to weaken their influence in both countries. The Pashtun people led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his ‘Red Shirts’ stridently opposed the British imposed partition of India, declaring that the Pashtuns of the Northwest Frontier Province desired to opt not for Pakistan, but for a united Indian Union. This was unacceptable for British strategy. The Northwest Frontier Province now (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) was forced out of India, by British machinations and handed over to Pakistan.

There was extensive cooperation and collaboration between the United States, UK, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia and their Intelligence Agencies, to deliberately misinterpret and distort religious tenets among barely literate young Afghan fighters, the former ‘Taliban’ as these recruits were called;  unable to read and understand the Quran written in Arabic, as the majority hailed from impoverished Pashtun families, impacted by the civil war in Afghanistan, recruited for yet another terrorist militia from among Pashtun refugees and other impoverished  Pashtun families in the Northwest Frontier Province; trained in religious seminaries and training institutes set up on the AfPak border, for yet another round of so-called ‘religious wars’ in  Afghanistan; this time against the Mujahideen government, and the Dari speaking Shia Hazaras, Turkmens, Uzbek, Tajik people, and their Warlords, equally adherents of Islam. 

In furtherance of the interests of the US UNOCAL energy company and other US Companies and the political interests of the UK and Pakistan, the sectarian divide between the Pashtun leadership of Taliban and  Shia  Hazaras, Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik minorities among others, was deliberately encouraged and widened, to orchestrate an unbridgeable divide; to consolidate the support of the Taliban among the dominant Pashtun population of  Afghanistan, to establish authoritarian and central political control over the entire country. The former Taliban was projected as a Wahhabi, austere religious movement; instilled with an irrational messianic zeal and a patriarchal violent anti-women moral code.

The nature of the hastily compiled religious texts had seriously tragic consequences, influencing the violence unleashed by the former Taliban, indoctrinated by distorted texts. The nature of the indoctrination and its source is astonishing. The texts to instruct, inspire and create the militias of the former Taliban to prepare them for fanatical and violent governance,  were printed by the University of Nebraska in the United States, based on clerical preaching of the ‘Wahhabi’ school, a clerical project of Saudi Arabia, encouraged, patronized and spread to South Asia, and other regions during British Colonial Rule. Wahhabism associated with the name of a religious preacher, is an extreme and intolerant ideology, condemning Shia and other streams of Islam as heretics; opposed to all aspects of the fine arts, poetry, art, and music, to photography of the human face and image; and the architectural and Sufi tradition of constructing mausoleums. Wahhabis are fanatically intolerant of archeological history of the past, demolishing all monuments associated with this history; enforcing the pre-Islamic tribal criminal justice practices of the region of Saudi Arabia; substituting spiritualism and compassion of Islam, with a fanatical approach to religion, wholly antagonistic to the preaching of the Prophet of Islam (peace be unto him) who enjoined: “Let there be no compulsion in matters of religion.” 

The well trained and equipped former Taliban militia, flush with funds provided by the CIA, MI6, ISI, and the Saudi Intelligence Agency, took over several provinces entering Kabul in 1996, resorting to indiscriminate violence in order to control the population imposing a Wahhabi political, social and religious order on Afghanistan. A theocratic state similar to Saudi Arabia was established, with institutionalized discrimination against Dari-speaking minorities, the Shia Hazaras, Turkmen, Uzbek, and Tajiks. Women were banned from all public employment, except in the medical and nursing professions in segregated hospitals. Women could not venture out of home without a body and face-covering ‘burkha’ and without being accompanied by a male relative; any woman found violating the moral code of adultery was stoned to death. The political objective was totalitarian control of the population, to convert Afghanistan into a centralized theocratic state, a controlled space for the economic and political interests of the US, UK, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The segregation of women from the public space also achieved the purpose of better authoritarian control. If half of the Afghan population comprising women were locked down and excluded from political activity, only the other half were required to be watched and kept under surveillance.

The government of the former Taliban was equally short-lived, alienating many sections of the Afghan population. Poverty and violence increased in the cities and in rural areas. Refugees from Afghanistan fled to Iran, to Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, Republics of the former USSR, for asylum and employment. Some were given refuge in India. During the attack on the Iranian Consulate General of Afghanistan at Mazar-e-Sharif, by a contingent of the former Taliban in 1989, 11 Iranian diplomats and a representative of the Press Agency of Iran were killed, as the Taliban militia schooled in Wahhabi ideology were opposed to Iranian political and religious influence in Afghanistan among the Shia Hazaras and the Dari speaking minorities, the Turkmen, the Uzbeks, and Tajiks. The situation became intolerable; leaders of all persecuted groups began regrouping as the ‘Northern Alliance’.

Contradictions developed rapidly between the government of the Taliban and the US and UK Intelligence Agencies. The Taliban based on its strict moral code correctly introduced measures to reduce the cultivation of poppy and the manufacture of narcotics, including opium, heroin, and amphetamines, alarmed that more than one million people out of a population of 21 million were seriously addicted.  Whereas the CIA, MI6 and ISI, and warlords in the Northern provinces were increasingly dependent on the lucrative revenues of poppy cultivation and the narcotics trade to fund their operations. NATO governments used the trade in narcotics for enormous profits, laundered by financially fragile US and European Banks, and other financial institutions.

Another important reason for the conflict between US commercial economic interests and the former Taliban was the failure of the UNOCAL Company prospecting for an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan into Pakistan and onwards, to succeed in its commercial negotiations with the Taliban government, despite the visit of Taliban leaders to Washington DC and even to Disney land in Florida. The UNOCAL Company with influence in Washington DC was incensed when the Taliban commenced negotiations for a pipeline with another company.

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The former Taliban leaders who perceived a different course from what was chartered for them by the US-UK-led NATO occupation had to be deposed and dispersed. The fragility of the US economy, with several US Companies teetering and bankrupt, including Enron, led the United States to require a new geopolitical strategy for the seizure of resources of several countries in quick succession to bail out the US companies and banks, by waging an ‘endless wars on terror’. This strategy was designed by neo-conservatives or the ‘Neo-cons’ as they are known is: ‘The Project for the New American Century’ which included the possibility of the use of bio-warfare. This project was supported by both the Republican and Democratic parties in the US, and by the Labor and Conservative parties in the UK, who after the demise of the British Empire have closely associated themselves with the US Empire which they run by proxy, using the Anglo-Saxon and allied elite within the United States, as instruments of their policies articulated through diverse Think Tanks and Foundations including the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations). The global corporate media serving the financial interests of Wall Street and London City was directed to orchestrate this war strategy as a global ‘War on Terror’ to camouflage its real objectives. The recent statement of former Prime Minister Tony Blair on behalf of the British elite, calling for the pursuit of the ‘endless war on terror’ in Afghanistan with commitment, echoes the sentiments of the arch colonialist and British imperialist Cecil Rhodes who believed that colonial occupation was a way to overcome Britain’s economic problems by the occupation of vast territories in Africa and other continents. Britain finds it difficult to abandon the Imperial project, the ‘Great Game’ which it has pursued for centuries, the loss of soldiers of the US and five eyes is of no consequence to the British elite which includes its Zionist Bankers.

The 9/11 alleged terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was the pretext for the ‘War on Terror’ against seven countries, with Iran, Iraq and North Korea threatened as the ‘Axis of Evil’. The alleged attack on the World Trade Center Towers carefully analyzed by many, including a few Intelligence Agencies and by architects and engineers in the United States, appears to have been a false flag operation. None of the individuals alleged to have carried out the attack were citizens of Afghanistan, they were citizens of countries in the Arab world from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, among a few other countries. None of them were adequately trained pilots for such maneuvers, apart from the nature of the structures of the World Trade Center Towers which were not vulnerable to such attacks. The crumbling of an adjacent tower that was not attacked was a controlled demolition. US military aircraft were not scrambled against the planes alleged to have attacked the World Trade Center Towers.

Despite serious flaws in the official narrative, President Bush (Jr.) and his government claimed that the attack on the United States was masterminded by Osama bin Laden given a safe haven in Afghanistan by the former Taliban at Tora Bora, and that the United States had no alternative but to launch a ‘crusade’ against Afghanistan, as it had become a safe haven for terrorists who had to be smoked out from their hideouts. Successive Presidents Obama, Trump, and now President Biden have maintained this fictional version, to camouflage the real objectives of this war. The truth is that Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, a CIA, MI6, Saudi and ISI asset, was in charge of the al Qaeda of Arab foreign fighters, embedded with the former Taliban, assisting their logistics on the AfPak border and in Afghanistan along with the ISI, aiding the US Empire. Osama Bin Laden was on dialysis treatment for kidney failure at the time the World Trade Center towers were attacked on September 11, 2001, and had not organized the attacks, neither had the former Taliban. The only civilian aircraft allowed to fly out of the US in days immediately after 9/11, were those flying out the Saudi Arabian elite. The Saudi Ambassador to the United States Bandar Abbas was a close friend of the Bush family, as was the Saudi monarchy recruiting Arab fighters for the al Qaeda at the request of the CIA, funding the training of the al Qaeda and the former Taliban on the AfPak border.

Pakistan acquiesced and assisted in the military dispersal of the former Taliban government bombed and hunted out of Afghanistan. President Musharaff later publicly stated that Pakistan had no alternative but to cooperate with US military plans to attack Afghanistan and disperse the Taliban, as Pakistan was threatened by Washington that unless they cooperated, Pakistan would be bombed into the ‘Stone Age‘. Pakistan was hunting with the hound and running with the hare, as a direct consequence of its duplicitous policy against the Afghan people and nation. Even as people in the Afghan countryside were being bombed into the stone age by US-Uk-led NATO forces, Taliban fighters on the ground were killed, others captured and tortured in prisons by the CIA in Afghanistan, and by a rendition in other countries, including in prisons in Guantanamo Bay. Some of the Taliban leaders managed to escape to other countries in the region and to Pakistan. A few leaders were jailed, and others were handed over to US military forces to prevent reprisals on Pakistan.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 merciless Drone warfare was first unleashed on the AfPak border, purportedly to hunt former Taliban fighters and terrorists in the border areas of Pakistan, including Waziristan. A dark and murky chapter began. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed by drone warfare on the AfPak border, in Afghanistan, and in Waziristan, and in US, UK, Saudi and Israeli wars in the Middle East, including in Yemen, which is ongoing.

Daniel Hale, a 33-year-old Drone operator for the US military, was recently jailed by a Court in the United States for 45 months, for revealing classified documents officially reporting that 90% of those killed by Drone warfare operated by the US military agency were innocent. Daniel Hale justified his action maintaining: “I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the innocent.”

Pakistan’s leadership, those responsible from 1977 onwards for the covert and overt wars on Afghanistan, are accountable internationally and to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, for the training of terrorist militias, including the ‘al Qaeda’, the Arab foreign fighters for deployment against different countries and regions, for killing millions, for the economic devastation of Afghanistan, for the drone warfare on innocent civilians both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as much as the US-UK-led NATO forces, for the wars of aggression, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

Earlier in 1971, even before the tragic intervention in Afghanistan, the then military government of Pakistan emboldened in its alliance with the United States and some other countries planned the massacre of intellectuals, academics, students, and those supporting the national liberation struggle; committing genocide in Bangladesh. Bangladesh proceeded to try and convict those of its own citizens including leaders and members of fanatical Wahhabi political parties, such as the Jammat-e-Islami, collaborators of the Pakistan army, who committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the people of Bangladesh, in the official War Crimes Tribunal held in Bangladesh. Some prominent leaders of the Jammat-e-Islami received death sentences which were upheld by the Bangladesh Supreme Court. More than 3 million people of Bangladesh Hindus and Muslims were massacred and half a million women were raped by the Pakistani army and its collaborators.