CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Ethnic Map of Pakistan

The video featured on this blog is sample of clips from the documentary film, CONFLICT OF INTEREST, which is still in production, and seeking finishing funds.

THE MISSION

AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: THE REAL STORY sets out to completely change our collective conversation about Afghanistan and Pakistan; to expose propagandist lies; and finally tell the truth about what has been happening in this war ravaged region of the world for more than three and a half decades.


POINT NO. ONE:

The Taliban is a Pakistani paramilitary organization. According to conversations with Afghans in the United States, Europe and Australia, any other description of the Taliban is propaganda. Professor Ehsan Azari, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia states that the Taliban are trained, supplied and financed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency ("ISI"), which does an exceptionally good job of disseminating misinformation and suppressing this basic truth. In a recent conversation, Professor Azari stressed that "peace in Afghanistan can only be achieved by separating the Taliban from ISI," but that this may not be possible.

Professor Azari has stated that the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan, would result in the collapse of the government, followed by renewed civil war, another takeover by the Taliban and a bloodbath against the civilians of that country. Their brutal abuse of power was demonstrated when they controlled Afghanistan in the 1990s, and more recently in the Swat region of northwest Pakistan.

POINT NO. TWO:

When the Pakistani government claims to be fighting the Taliban in the provinces of Pakistan which border Afghanistan, including Balochistan, Northwest Frontier Province (“NWFP”) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (“FATA”), they are in reality fighting Balochi and Pashtun separatist rebels. Official media reports coming out of Pakistan, which are almost always sourced to the Pakistani government and/or military, constantly beat the drum that the Pakistan Army is fighting the Taliban in Northwest Pakistan. However, Pashtun bloggers on larawbar.com complain that well known Taliban are able to reside comfortably within 100 yards of Army outposts, from which they are given "free hands to terrorize and intervene into the personal affairs the citizens." Conversations with Pashtuns reveal that in recent years, hundreds of local leaders in the Northwest Frontier Province ("NWFP") and Federally Administered Tribal Areas ("FATA") have been assassinated and replaced with radical Islamist Taliban, who have been terrorizing the people of the region and who recently instituted Sharia law. It is interesting to note that every time the Pakistani government negotiates a “treaty” with the Taliban, the Taliban receives millions of dollars in compensation. Treaty or contract?

The students of the madrassahs which spawned the Taliban were indoctrinated in the concept of global Pan-Islamism as a method of combating Pashtun nationalism in northwestern Pakistan and keeping Afghanistan unstable, so as to prevent a renegotiation of the Durand Line.

To clarify what is really happening in the conflict zone of Northwest Pakistan, Professor Azari explained that the Pakistan Army is fighting only those small factions within the Taliban which are pan-Islamist and anti-state, i.e., anti-Pakistan. He went on to explain that the Pakistan Army, in concert with Al Qaeda and other Taliban factions, are all three fighting against the Pashtun nationalist militia. Al Qaeda he claims are particularly uninterested in the advent of a Pashtun state because, unlike Pakistan vis-a-vis ISI, the Pashtuns would not continue to give safe harbor to Al Qaeda's Arab militants.

POINT NO. THREE:

U.S. policy with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan has been slanted in favor of Pakistan since the early 1980s for a variety of reasons, but most particularly because key American policy makers, were strategically influenced through ownership stakes in the Badin oil fields in the Punjab and Sindh regions of eastern Pakistan. The individuals included:

1. Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX, Ret.);
2. James A. Baker,III (former Reagan White House Chief of Staff, Reagan Secretary of the Treasury and Bush Sr. Secretary ofState);
   
3. Joanne Herring (former Honorary Consul for Pakistan and widow of Robert R. Herring, owner of Houston Natural Gas, which was later known as Enron); and
4. Quite likely, and most importantly, former Vice President then President George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush.

According Joanne Herring, "We turned to Charlie, cuz he was an old friend of the oil business."

The Badin oil fields were operated by Union Texas Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum ("Oxy") and the Pakistani national oil company in an exceptionally favorable split, whereby Union Texas and Occidental each held a 30% share of the fields. According to Union Texas' former Corporate Controller, this was a honey of a deal. Such a deal begs the question: what did Oxy, Union Texas (and its parent company, Allied Corporation) have to do to maintain this delightfully profitable arrangement?

Simply put, to maintain their sweet deal, U.S. policymakers:

1. Looked the other way while Pakistan trained, armed and used American dollars to finance brutal Islamic fundamentalist cutthroats, including Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Abdul Rasul Sayaf, in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, while moderate Afghan leaders were starved for supplies, and later simply assassinated. The creation of seven Afghan factions, as opposed to a single well-coordinated militia, was part of a long-standing Pakistani policy of dividing and conquering the Afghans;
   
2. Agree to the "Evil Airlift" in November 2001, in which the majority of Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership who were surrounded by Coalition forces in Kunduz, were airlifted to safety in Pakistan. Any Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders who missed out on the Evil Airlift, such as Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, were allowed to escape from Tora Bora, when, against military requests to the contrary, a former Taliban collaborator was given control of the eastern flank of that operation;
   
3. Criminal war lords, with lengthy histories of human rights violations, such as Abdul Rasul Sayaf and Rashid Dostom, were restored to power by the U.S. military in 2001 and installed as part of the Karzai government; and
   
4. Executed "Operation Enduring Freedom" on the cheap, with too few resources and too little manpower to secure the peace and allow for reconstruction in Afghanistan after the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, thereby creating the perfect environment for the Taliban to regroup and re-invade, which clearly they have done.
   

CONCLUSION: According to the Afghans interviewed for this project, there will only be peace in Afghanistan when Pashtunistan and Balochistan achieve independence from Punjabi controlled Pakistan. Punjab is a region of Pakistan which borders India, and the Pakistani military (which runs the country) is dominated by Punjabis. The Pakistani government has long held that control these regions and Afghanistan is necessary for purposes of "strategic depth" in case of an invasion from India, despite the fact that India has long demonstrated a lack of interest in such an invasion. Additionally, the ruling elite of Punjab have been extracting natural resources from Pashtunistan and Balochistan for many years and are very determined to maintain control over these two western provinces. The ethnic and provincial division of Pakistan roughly follows the Indus River, which was the ancient and natural border between Afghanistan and India. Thus, the Indus River would be the logical border between Pakistan, Pashtunistan and Balochistan.

THE HISTORY

In 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, conceived what he called the “Afghan Trap”, a policy designed to lure the Soviet Union into a Vietnam-like quagmire in Afghanistan. Brzezinski’s plan worked. Unfortunately, he neglected to consider the deeper motivations of his Pakistani partners in the scheme and the catastrophic consequences for the Afghan people and the world.

What were those “deeper motivations”? They were, and still are, mostly concerned with the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, known as the Durand Line. The Durand Line was arbitrarily drawn on a map in the late 19^th Century, and it not only divides the Pashtun people in half, it literally cuts towns in half. According to Professor Tom Johnson of the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School, “There are places along the border where you can eat lunch in Pakistan and go to the loo in Afghanistan.” The problem is that the Pashtun people do not recognize the border, and the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan cannot agree on what to do about that. The harsh fact for the people who live in the border region is that, as a result, Pakistan’s goal, since the early 1970s, has been to control Afghanistan, and to keep it and the Pakistani Pashtun region weak and unstable.

THE EVIDENCE

CONFLICT OF INTEREST demonstrates, among other things, how the people popularly credited with aiding the "cause of the Afghans" -- i.e., Charlie Wilson, James A. Baker,III, Joanne Herring and possibly George H.W. Bush -- were, in reality, being strategically influenced through ownership stakes in the Badin oil fields in the Punjab and Sindh regions of eastern Pakistan.

The Badin oil fields were operated by Union Texas Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum ("Oxy") and the Pakistani national oil company in an exceptionally favorable split, whereby Union Texas and Occidental each held a 30% share of the fields. According to Union Texas' former Corporate Controller, this was a honey of a deal. It begs the question: what did Oxy, Union Texas (and its parent company, Allied Corporation) have to do to maintain this delightfully profitable arrangement?

In 1997, Union Texas' assets were purchased by ARCO, a subsidiary of British Petroleum ("BP"). In November of that year, just as the deal was about to close, the entire auditing department of Union Texas Petroleum was assassinated in Karachi, Pakistan, when their car was pulled over 1 block from their hotel, and shot into from two sides. This incident was portrayed in the media as a terrorist attack against Americans (despite the fact that one of the men was a Nigerian citizen); and that said attack was committed by a group which curiously had never been heard of before, and which was never heard from again.

In the film, a former Union Texas auditor who had previously worked in Pakistan and who was close friends with the victims, speculates that if his friends may have discovered evidence suggesting that the Taliban was being supplied with resources from the Badin Fields. Such information would have had a devastating affect on Union Texas' stock price and could have even derailed the entire sale of the company to ARCO/BP.

Finally, CONFLICT OF INTEREST shows the British military has been caught in the past year, not only giving "aid and comfort" to the Taliban, but quite literally training and supplying them in Afghanistan. Could it be that ownership interest in the Badin fields is continuing to exert undue influence with regard to Afghan policy? You be the judge.