Personifying Friendship and Terror

The man on the left is Jalaluddin Haqqani. He was aided back in the 80s by the CIA in his battles with the Soviets in Afghanistan. He even helped form the post-war government back then. He visited the Reagan White House, and was claimed to be “goodness personified” by Charlie Wilson (Wilson was played by Tom Hanks in a biopic that re-wrote history to say that it was US aid instead of the mujahadin that won the 1980s Afghanistan war).

He is also the prime suspect in the planning of a very successful suicide bombing around the new year that took out seven CIA employees in Afghanistan.

This incident is just the latest example of failed US relationships with dangerous men all the way from Haiti to East Timor, west to east, north to south.

Afghanistan has supposedly slipped out of US hands, so to speak. Looking at the failure of the intelligence community coupled with the complete breakdown of communication with local communities, it’s quite safe to say that the US is in a pickle.

Hearts and minds – reminds me of Al Hurra (no doubt the name was supposed to conjure up the victorious “hooray” or “hurrah.” It’s also the sound of someone hoarking a bit of phlegm). Al Hurrah was a 24-hour TV news channel set up by the US to set Arab minds at rest. It also reeks propaganda worse than a Mussolini-era Italian newspaper. Word on the street according to the dozen or so Arabs that watch the channel for ironic purposes is that it is soon to be shut down.

Not that the US really cares about these failures. Every time someone pins the US on something, the nation seems to move on to devastate a different region. It seemed far less than a decade ago that the US was invading Afghanistan after the towers went down. All of a sudden, it switched to Iraq, and then back to Afghanistan, but with Pakistan on the side somewhat.

The next switch, if one were to guess from current posturing, is towards Yemen. At the tail end of 2009, a Nigerian man supposedly attempted to blow up an American aeroplane in-flight. The US immediately linked him to Yemen.

It was one hell of a hyper-elongated link: the fellow spent a short amount of time in that country. A summer, to be exact; though apparently that’s all it takes according to the Washington Post. The Post and other American media outlets jumped on-board to make the necessary links. If you check the Post’s article here, you’ll see the usual “profile of a disturbed man” piece that papers put together after incidents like these. No one has yet accused Muslim UK clerics of having infused the lad with hate towards the west. Yet.

Only after pointing fingers at the Middle East for a week did the US finally blacklist Nigerians, meaning that anyone from that country will be thoroughly searched upon travelling to America. For some mind-boggling reason, the US also added Cubans to the list of black-listed people.

Last week a Yemeni minister claimed that around 300 Al Qaeda insurgents were holed up in that country. Of course, I expected US armies to have been in Sana’a by now as a consequence of this remark. However, Yemen has made it clear that it will take care of this mess alone, without US intervention.

By that, the government meant with the help of around $130 million worth of military aid from the US.

With the other problems that Yemen faces, it’s hard to imagine all the money going toward fighting Al Q. I’m not talking about problems like the rampant poverty or thousands of refugees floating around the country (Yemen would never use war money for that), but the rebellions swelling in the south and east.

How Al Q got so strong in Yemen is a story in itself. Yemen, other than being Bin Laden’s ancestral home (whether he likes it or not), is also where several groups of fleeing Al Q boys congregated, swelling their ranks with a recent prison break. The group was never really a threat until the US noticed that certain spots were getting bombed that were not the typical Houthi Shi’ite or South Yemeni rebel targets. More importantly, President Saleh never really wanted to attend to Al Q with so many, many other groups directing their hate vibes towards him.

Yemen is also quite literally the poorest country in the Gulf Middle East. Al Hurra might tell you at this point that it is the dwindling oil supplies that causes this poverty, but the real reason is far deeper. Being an autocrat, President Saleh has installed some of his favourite cronies to top posts. The result is that there are barely crumbs left in the cookie jar. Basically, nothing can develop because of the amount of money that gets raked off the top of each project. For instance, the army boasts 100,000 troops. Impressive. Except that a good many of those are ghost soldiers that crooked commanders create on paper; the commanders then pocket the non-existent soldiers’ wages and enlistment cheques.

What all of this shows is that the world has changed drastically after fifty years of US corporate-colonial policy. Whether operatives or entire nations, people are starting to play the US and not just be played.

Next on the list of such countries: Jordan. Being one of the two Arab nations that recognizes Israel, it has also been playing an increasing role in US invasions and dirty plots around the world. Case in point: there were more than seven fatalities in Afghanistan due to the suicide bombing. There were actually eight. One was a Jordanian General Intelligence Dept. spy working with the US operation in Afghanistan – Sharif Ali bin Zeid.

I’m not going to go in detail about the many rewards Jordan gets from helping the US thusly; suffice to say that the country shall enjoy an un-overthrown monarchy for a good long time to come. Only, in a post-bin-Laden era, the US might not be the first to turn on that friendship a few years down the line.