According to the BBC, a worldfamous bestselling book has been updated. The author is Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who writes for The Washington Post, the BBC, the International Herald Tribune, the Daily Telegraph and many other media outlets. His book, Taliban, has just been reissued on the 10th anniversary of its original publication. I have never had the honour of meeting or contacting Rashid, and this article is not meant to be an advertisement in any way. But Taliban is indeed an exciting and informative book, which I used in my PhD about US foreign policy and oil resources. After the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, the country suffered from a civil war among the many armed factions and warlords. When Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996, the American media declared that Taliban would be an anti-American force, due to human rights abuses and the fact that they were harbouring Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. In secret, however, Washington (and Tel Aviv) supported Taliban, for several reasons. First, the Sunni Taliban would be a counter-force against Shi'ite Iran, which Washington considered a terror-sponsoring state. Second, Taliban would help eradicate the heroin trade, on which the Afghan economy greatly depends. (They did manage to significantly decrease opium cultivation by the year 2000). Third, as they defeated the warlords, Taliban managed to unite and stabilise about 90 per cent of Afghanistan, and Washington needed this stability to help it construct an American-led gas pipeline project, to carry gas from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, to Pakistan and India (the TAPI pipeline). Thus, secret negotiations were held between Washington and Taliban over the gas pipeline, and handing over bin Laden to the Americans. However, these negotiations did not lead to any real agreement. The negotiations were temporarily cut off after al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, but they were resumed in early 1999. The negotiations then ended with the September 11 attacks and the American invasion of Afghanistan. This is one of the techniques of American strategic deceit. It declares that a certain group is its enemy, but it would not mind cutting secret deals and negotiations with it, and it is all done for the sake of strategic and economic gain. It was a very similar story with Washington's business deals with Saddam Hussein before he invaded Kuwait. (Washington never declared that Saddam was an enemy before he invaded Kuwait, but the principle remains the same). One of the initial goals of the American invasion of Afghanistan was to defeat Taliban and eliminate its force. However, as the US found itself in a quagmire in Afghanistan (as it was distracted by the costly war in Iraq), it changed the goal from defeating the Taliban to merely weakening them. Now, however, even this is hard to achieve. Washington now finds itself forced to encourage talks between the pro- American Hamid Karzai Government and the Taliban movement. Taliban is a good book and I would advise anyone with an interest in international politics to read it. Unfortunately, the Arab Knowledge Report 2009 (published by the UNDP) says that the average Arab reads very little compared to people in other societies. A UN report published in 2008 says that the average Arab reads only four pages of literature per year, while the average American reads 11 books (not pages) per year and the average Briton eight books.
