Afghanistan peace talks and the debacle of the war on terror
29 January 2019
The Trump administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, on Monday announced the drafting of a “framework” for a peace agreement with the Taliban, against which US troops have been fighting for over 17 years.
Khalilzad has a long record in the elaboration and implementation of the criminal US policies that have led to the deaths of millions of Afghans over the past four decades, while turning millions more into refugees.
In 1979, he served as a close aide to Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser in the Carter administration, in the organization of “Operation Cyclone.” This was the code name for a covert CIA-orchestrated war, which provided billions of dollars’ worth of arms and funding to support the mujahideen, a collection of Islamist militias that would ultimately give rise to both the Taliban and Al Qaeda, in an attempt to topple the Soviet-backed government in Kabul and to draw the USSR into what Brzezinski described as “its own Vietnam.” He continued to work under the Reagan administration to coordinate policy for sustaining this bloody operation.
After a brutal civil war in which the Taliban ultimately established its control over most of the country, Khalilzad signed on as a “consultant” for the energy conglomerate Unocal—now part of Chevron—in negotiating with the Taliban on a deal for a trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline.
In 1996, he wrote a memo insisting that “The Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran. We should… be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction,” i.e., promote deals for big oil.
In 2001, he was one of the…