Forget the fact that Osama bin Laden is still on the loose and apparently comfortably ensconced in northwestern Pakistan still plotting to attack the US, despite Bush’s pledge once upon a time to to bring him back dead or alive. Forget the fact that the Taliban, the fundamentalist religious extremists who tried to take Afghanistan back to the Middle Ages, imposed its own draconian version of Sharia law in which public executions were held in a soccer stadium, and sheltered Bin Laden while he organized the terrorist plots of 9/11, is back with a vengeance in Afghanistan. Forget everything you’ve ever known about the deep hatred among both Al Qaeda and the Taliban for America.
George Bush has. Right now he’s allegedly engaging in secret peace talks with the Taliban if this report by Asia Times is correct.
KARACHI – The few weeks between the visits to Pakistan of Richard Boucher, the US assistant secretary of state who left last week, and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who arrives on September 10, could prove crucial in determining the fate of Afghanistan.
This is the timeline for secret three-party talks to establish teega (a Pashtu word for a peace deal that resolves a conflict) between the Western coalition forces in Afghanistan (with Pakistan), the Afghan government, and the anti-coalition insurgents of Afghanistan. The first round of talks has already begun in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, Asia Times Online has learned.
The outcome of the talks will to a large extent decide the agenda of Negroponte’s visit and the course of the US-led “war on terror” in the region.
The talks are based on previous Pakistan-inspired efforts to secure peace deals between the insurgents and the Western coalition in specific areas in Afghanistan with the longer-term goal of incorporating the Taliban into the political process both in Kabul and in provincial governments.
And why would Bush do this? Why would an American President, the man who can never refer 9/11 often enough, the Commander in Chief in our “War on Terror,” agree to negotiate with known terrorists, violent religious extremists who hate our guts and who supported assisted and went to war to protect the people who killed 3000 Americans? Our sworn enemeies in other words.
Well, it has to do with oil and gas, of course:
(cont.)
Coalition efforts in Afghanistan include substantial development and reconstruction projects, but these have been hampered by the insurgency. A key project is a regional oil and gas pipeline project worth US$10 billion that will run from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan, the TAP, and possibly on to India, on which work is to be started in the near future.
A US company, International Oil Co (IOC), recently won the contract from Pakistan to construct the 2,200-kilometer pipeline over the next three years. In a statement, IOC said matters relating to security in Afghanistan and insurance guarantees had been finalized. The preferred route is the southern one, via Herat and restive Kandahar province.
Clearly, peace deals with the Taliban would help ensure the viability of such projects.
I would be sick to my stomach over this, but I’ve lost the capacity to be shocked. Bush is willing to talk peace with the Taliban in order to get security for an American company to build an oil and gas pipeline. That about says it all for the Bush administration’s priorities in its self declared War on Terror. I’d like to see how the right wing media megaphone and blogs will spin this. Provided they ever mention it at all, of course. See no evil, hear no evil …
Bus and oil. Oil and Bush. Why we fight, ladies and gentlemen. Why our men and women in the armed forces get wounded and die each day. Why Iraq has been turned into a wasteland. Why we are now talking with the enemies who attacked us on 9/11. So it goes in Bush’s American Empire.