Source:
New York Times, AFP, Washington Post, IBN LiveExperts now suspect that the turban bomber who killed Burhanuddin Rabbani while claiming to bring a special message from the Taliban may not have been sent by the militia's supreme leader Mullah Omar, or had his approval.
With a range of factions standing to benefit from Rabbani's death, the lack of clarity on the identity of the assassins fans concern about political instability, ethnic tensions and a nebulous insurgency in Afghanistan. -- Katherine Haddon, AFP
First guess goes to an artificial Taliban-clone organization in Pakistan, generated locally by Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI.) $3-billion-a-year U.S. aid to Pakistan depends on terrorism. ISI makes sure there's enough terrorism to justify the money. Quetta Shura was not involved. Initially Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security popped out a press release blaming them, which was run worldwide by Murdoch's rags. More likely the NDS spokesman, Shafiqullah Tahiri, got this from an ISI source with access to the operational details. Same time frame here's Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Senate Armed Services Committee:
U.S. military intelligence has “credible intelligence” that a Sept. 11 bombing that wounded 70 U.S. and NATO troops and a Sept. 13 assault on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were done “with ISI support.” -- WaPo
Read more:
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/r/burhanuddin_rabbani/index.html
You pays your money, you git somethin' for it.
FOLLOW THE MONEY.
There's two big pots of money and one smaller pot of money going to the locals in Afghanistan and Pakistan:
-- The Drug Biz had been dropping approximately $3-billion a year on poppy sources in Afghanistan. By a coincidence, that figure matches
-- The United States dropping $3-billion-a-year on military and civilian government entities in Pakistan.
-- The smaller pot is the Afghan Local Police (ALP), formerly Afghan Public Protection Program (AP3), and direct bribery programs that deal out $500-million in Afghanistan.The Karzai family head the Durranni tribe. This became the largest poppy growing organization when they were spared a 2005 crackdown from the largely-EU International Security Assistance Force (ISAF.)
President Obama reversed the Bush pro-drug policy asap in January, 2009, and changed field orders so U.S. and ISAF got on the same pages.
The EU strategic position is easy to state: Afghanistan is a Drug War. The Kandahar Taliban has no impact nationally, where violence is paid for by the local poppy growers to weaken/deflect anti-drug government police. Effective anti-poppy efforts resulted in a so-called
Heroin Drought across Western Europe from 2010 to present.
Even the massive Russian HIV virus epidemic has been affected.
That presser from Afghanistan's NDS blaming the Taliban's governing committee, the Quetta Shura, for this assassination is starting to look like ISI jumping the shark. For Afghans, foreigners are generally distasteful. Imagine a cruise ship and reverse the attitude 180-degrees. So now the news/rumors out of Kabul runs to the Afghans identifying Pakistan and the leadership of ISI as their # 1 Enemies.
Rabbani and the Peace Council were threatening to remove the Kandahar Taliban from the list of combatants. In fact, Mullah Omar's Taliban had been perfectly happy to take money from Bill Clinton and George Bush through July, 2001, to carry forward the U.S. anti-poppy, anti-heroin War on Drugs. After Binladen participated in 9/11, it was George Bush who changed sides in the War on Drugs. Taliban had arrested Binladen twice in 1999-2000 and offered to try and likely execute "Big Boy" for the African embassy bombings. (Binladen had murdered Muslims, so his execution would have happened same day as the trial.)
When Bush changed sides in 2001, plus calling off U.S. Army & Marines anti-drug tasking, heroin sales exploded to $80-billion-a-year worldwide. The $3-billion getting back to Afghanistan is what led to heavy inter-tribal squabbling and to arms races among their militias.
Obama could not be more different from Bush.
The situation in Afghanistan remains a mess. Drug Biz cartels and locals, ALP/AP3 Afghans with 300,000 SWAT cops in the pipeline, Pakistan ISI, the traditional Supreme Council (inside Afghanistan, some 1,500 local elders), the committee-sized Quetta Shura, ISAF, the U.S. (providing targets for bombs and guns but not speaking the languages and still not using dogs for what is fundamentally a tracking war), and the Karzai government -- it's amazing anybody is alive.My nephew is over there in the Marines.
Beating down the Drug Biz money has opened up a possibility of getting to a normal-for-Afghanistan level of violence. A western style central government ? That's absurd. The Afghans are 90% illiterate and their
national average IQ measures at a basket case level 83. Schools are rare. Genetic selection for read-understand-apply intelligence is unheardof. Afghans are always near the bottom for infant mortality and short lifespans. Everything is a mess.
Hopefully we Americans will continue with sane policy. The continuing Heroin Drought matters for tens of millions of people worldwide.
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