Your Tax Dollars at War
During the 1980s, Washington funneled $3 billion to Afghanistan's anti-Soviet jihadis. Decades later, the blowback continues.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
As a university student in the late 1960s, Hekmatyar was notorious for spraying acid in the faces of female students. "He was a nasty guy," remarked Graham Fuller, former Kabul bureau chief for the CIA, which gave Hekmatyar $600 million in the 1980s. "He spent a lot more of his time fighting other mujahideen than killing Soviets." A close ally of Osama bin Laden, Hekmatyar led the Islamic Party, one of the most violent, anti-Western mujahideen factions. During a stint as prime minister, he ordered the shelling of Kabul, reportedly killing 25,000 civilians in 1994. When the Taliban took the city in 1996, he fled to Tehran, but his outbursts against the Karzai regime and the US proved so embarrassing that the Iranians sent him packing. In 2002, the CIA tried to take him out in a drone air strike, but Hekmatyar survived to fight alongside the Taliban. He has sworn to do battle "till the last drop of blood moves in my body."
Yunis Khalis
Khalis, the "godfather" of Nangarhar province, led a rival branch of Hekmatyar's Islamic Party and served as chair of the US-backed coalition of anti-Soviet mujahideen. In 1988, he led a delegation of jihadis to the United Nations, where he met his benefactor, President Ronald Reagan. But in 2003, he turned around and declared jihad against US forces in Afghanistan. Khalis died in 2006 at age 87, but his legacy lives on via his violent disciple Jalaluddin Haqqani and Haqqani's son, Sirajuddin, who operate guerrilla bases in North Waziristan.
Sources: CIA, DOD, CRS, UNODC
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf
The one-time leader of the jihadist Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan, Sayyaf has received hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi funding in addition to CIA aid. Revered by Wahhabists, he was a key mentor to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as well as bin Laden. Together, Sayyaf and bin Laden built a network of training camps and bunkers around Jalalabad that was eventually used by Al Qaeda. As a member of the Afghan parliament, Sayyaf is now pushing for amnesty for jihadists.
Sibghatullah Mojaddedi
Mojaddedi, moderate by comparison, likely scored CIA backing during the anti-Soviet jihad and in 1989 became president of the Islamic interim state of Afghanistan, in which capacity he met with George H.W. Bush. These days he's busy attempting to reconcile the Karzai government with the Taliban and Hekmatyar.
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Taxpayers........
Oil prices used to be sky high, and then everyone got a bit of a break when they plummeted along with retail sales and the rest of the struggling economy. If anyone thought they were going to keep getting discount gas, well they had better think again because oil prices are beginning to rebound, and there's going to be more family lending so that the average taxpayer and such can get to work every day – again. Big Oil is the largest and most profitable industry on earth (6 of the 10 biggest corporations are oil companies) and they will never worry about payday loans the way their customers do, no matter how low the oil prices are.
AlQaeda is broke
Perhaps the greatest of all financial news was that Al Qaeda is broke, or at least is rumored to be. I don't think a lot of people understand the history of the Middle East conflict, from the Med to India - as it is long and very convoluted. Yes, Jimmy Carter and Reagan both gave arms, aid, and money and training, and a lot of it to the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets, and then once the Soviets were out they set about setting up their own little totalitarian Muslim theocracy, but in the short sight of those two commanders in thief (like that?) they thought it was win win because they were fighting the soviets, even though the CIA had the intel that showed by the late 70s that the USSR was going to collapse by the end of the 1980s. It wasn't Reagan who defeated the Soviets, they did it to themselves! They were pumping billions of Rubles a year into North Korea and Cuba - Cuba was getting something on the order of 10 million Rubles per day - and meanwhile, Reagan and Carter both ran up enormous national debts in military spending that we weren't ever going to NEED in the first place! And it gets better from there - it was CIA intervention that deposed Mossadegh, the democratically elected leader of Iran, to establish the Shah, who was wildly unpopular and led to the theocratic dictatorship that they have today, and we certainly didn't do anything to oppose the Ba'athists, because they were antagonistic to the Iranians, and during the 80s we sold arms to BOTH sides of that conflict, and gave that money to the Contras, who would have established a Central American military dictatorship, but was supported by Reagan because they - like Pinochet and Noriega - were friendlier to US economic interests, i.e. letting American businesses do whatever they wanted because the government would have been willing to be bought off. Yeah, our tax dollars at work. I feel soooo much safer. Time and again, it appears that the biggest threat to American Freedom has nothing to do with what's going on in poor countries thousands of miles away, the biggest threat to our freedom and our prosperity is in Washington DC.
