After the American-backed support of the revolutions in the Middle East, Ukraine, and support of Islamist movement in Central Asia and parts of Siberia, US General John Nicholson now claims that Russia is supplying weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan to fight the Americans:
Russia is supporting and even supplying arms to the Taliban, the head of US forces in Afghanistan has told the BBC.
In an exclusive interview, Gen John Nicholson said he’d seen “destabilising activity by the Russians.”
He said Russian weapons were smuggled across the Tajik border to the Taliban, but could not say in what quantity. Russia has denied such US allegations in the past, citing a lack of evidence.
But the new claims come at a sensitive time in Russia’s ties with Nato powers.
Britain and Russia are locked in a dispute over claims that Russia was behind an attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter on UK soil using a deadly nerve agent.
Meanwhile a US Congressional Intelligence Committee has just published a report concluding that Russian provocateurs meddled in the 2016 election.
“We see a narrative that’s being used that grossly exaggerates the number of Isis [Islamic State group] fighters here,” Gen Nicholson told BBC News. “This narrative then is used as a justification for the Russians to legitimise the actions of Taliban and provide some degree of support to the Taliban.”
“We’ve had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial support provided by the enemy. We’ve had weapons brought to this headquarters and given to us by Afghan leaders and said, this was given by the Russians to the Taliban,” he continued. “We know that the Russians are involved.”
Much of Gen Nicholson’s career has been spent in the conflict in Afghanistan. He narrowly escaped death when his office in the Pentagon was destroyed by one of the 9/11 planes and the US campaign in Afghanistan has shaped his career ever since.
He believes this direct Russian involvement with the Taliban is relatively new. He says Russia has conducted a series of exercises on the Afghan border with Tajikistan. “These are counter terrorism exercises,” says Gen Nicholson, “but we’ve seen the Russian patterns before: they bring in large amounts of equipment and then they leave some of it behind.”
The implication is that these weapons and other equipment are then smuggled across the border and supplied to the Taliban.
The general admits it is hard to quantify how much support Russia is actually giving the Taliban, but senior Afghan police officers and military figures have told the BBC that it includes night vision goggles, medium and heavy machine guns as well as small arms.
Afghan sources say these weapons are likely to have been used against Afghan forces and the Nato advisers who support them on some combat missions.
However, Russia is not an obvious ally of the Taliban. The Soviet Union fought a bitter war against the US-backed mujahedin after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Many of those same mujahedin fighters joined the Taliban when it was formed during the civil war that followed the humiliating Russian withdrawal in 1989.
The Taliban’s enmity towards Russia was enduring, says Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network: “The Taliban always castigated the Northern Alliance for dealing with Russia,” she says.
It may be that now Russian and Taliban interests are becoming more closely aligned, she speculates.
President Trump has been pressuring Pakistan to sever its links with the Taliban. In January he suspended hundreds of millions of dollars of security aid after complaining on Twitter that Pakistan had “given us nothing but lies & deceit” and accusing it of providing “safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan”.
The Taliban is also keen to distance itself from Pakistan and demonstrate that it is an independent force. That makes finding new funding lines and international backers important.
Russia, meanwhile, denies providing weapons or funds to the Taliban but has admitted that it has had talks with the insurgent group. It justified that on the basis of the shared opposition to the Islamic State group, which has been trying to establish a base in the north-east of Afghanistan.
However Russia may well believe there are wider geo-political benefits to be had from supporting the Taliban.
When I asked Gen Nicholson whether he thought that Russia was fighting a proxy war against America in Afghanistan he didn’t address the question directly.
“This activity really picked up in the last 18 to 24 months,” he replied. “Prior to that we had not seen this kind of destabilising activity by Russia here. When you look at the timing it roughly correlates to when things started to heat up in Syria. So it’s interesting to note the timing of the whole thing.” (source)
The Taliban was a creation of the CIA program Operation Cyclone, which was one of the longest and most expensive CIA operations in history, lasting from 1980 to 1987 and costing billions of dollars. Operation Cyclone involved a coordinated effort between the CIA, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan whose purpose was, in the words of Department of Defense representative Walter Slocombe, “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire,” referring to the American loss in Vietnam. The program involved the USA using a network of individuals, groups, and companies to create an “Islamic” resistance movement in Afghanistan by drawing on militants from across the Muslim world and then giving these militants training, money, weapons, ammunition, food, and intelligence.However, the Islamic militants that the CIA created later became known as the “Taliban” or “students” of Islam, and took over Afghanistan.
The USA, Israel, and Saudi Arabia created the Taliban as a weapon to use against the Russians. It was not an “organic” creation at all. There was a group of “resistance fighters” fighting to Soviets in Afghanistan, but the later manpower from outside of Afghanistan that was brought in, the money, weapons, and training was purchased and distributed by taxpayer monies from abroad and without it, the Afghan resistance would have easily collapsed.
Texas Congressman Charles “Charlie” Wilson was central to organizing Operation Cyclone, as he acted as a liezon between the various Muslim, Israeli, Afghani, Congressional, and business interests involved in the operation. Operation Cyclone was a “success” because it did compel the Soviets to over-spend and consume resources to their detriment, and they eventually withdrew. The 2007 movie Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks, tells the story of Congressman Wilson’s involvement in Operation Cyclone, and shows footage of American giving weapons to Muslim terrorists and then those same terrorists going out and murdering Russians:
Bin Laden also had extensive ties to the CIA as well.
Given how the Taliban was as US-Israeli-Saudi creation, that the US government continued to be intimately involved with the Taliban up through the “September 11th Terrorist Attacks,” how likely could it have been that a major, coordinated attack involving several airplane hijackings was not known about? It is impossible that the CIA did not know about 9/11 because the people who causes the events of 9/11 either were trained by assets or were themselves assets.
We have said before that throughout history, Islam is loved by governments because the religion is so evil, brutal, and deadening to the mind that it makes those who practice it into easily manipulated pawns, at least for a time. By either coordinating, permitting, or assisting the events of 9/11, the result was the same, for the violence of Islam was transferred into a renewed American militarism abroad.
It has been 17 years since 9/11, and in spite of the claims that America is fighting a “war on terror,” the threats of terrorism have only increased. After invading Afghanistan, which the USA still has maintained an occupying presence in, she has been involved in the destabilization and overthrow of Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and curiously, Ukraine. Wherever America has gone, there also has followed with her Israel cheering for more militarism against her personal enemies such as Iran, while at the same time both overlooking, ignoring, or brushing off the support of terrorism by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
While Charlie Wilson was the most famous person associated with Operation Cycles, its chief coordinator, Michael Vickers, is of greater interest, for not only was it Vickers who designed the strategy for the Afghan war of the 1980s, but he also organized the “War on Terror” and the ensuing American destruction of foreign governments as he admits in a 2007 article:
Today Vickers’s plan to build a global counterterrorist network is no less ambitious. The plan is focused on a list of 20 “high-priority” countries, with Pakistan posing a central preoccupation for Vickers, who said al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the country’s western tribal areas are a serious threat to the United States. The list also includes Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia and Iran, and Vickers hints that some European countries could be on it. Beyond that, the plan covers another 29 “priority” countries, as well as “other countries” that Vickers does not name.
“It’s not just the Middle East. It’s not just the developing world. It’s not just nondemocratic countries — it’s a global problem,” he said. “Threats can emanate from Denmark, the United Kingdom, you name it.”
The plan deploys a variety of elite troops around the world, including about 80 to 90 12-man teams of Army Special Forces soldiers who are skilled in foreign languages and at working with indigenous forces. Today, those forces are heavily concentrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, but as their numbers grow, they will increase their presence in other countries.
“The war on terror is fundamentally an indirect war. . . . It’s a war of partners . . . but it also is a bit of the war in the shadows, either because of political sensitivity or the problem of finding terrorists,” Vickers said. “That’s why the Central Intelligence Agency is so important . . . and our Special Operations forces play a large role.” (source)
The entire “War on Terror” as well as the “Refugee Crisis” has nothing to do with Islam, terrorism, refugees, or “invaders.” These are the superficial effects meant for the public to either cause a reaction or distract the masses from the real issue, which is the expansion and consolidation of the power and influence of those who control the finances and industrial machinery which run the world and who are also in control of the US government.
Since the USSR was the US’s greatest competitor and the USSR backed Communism as the preferred political philosophy, the US government chose to support ultra-nationalists and ethnic nationalists as a countering force but who hold to the same socialists beliefs as the communists. The series of programs through which this operates is called Operation Gladio and it began immediately after the Second World War. The National Socialism that the USA supposedly “defeated” in Germany was again backed in Germany as soon as victory was declared for the Americans, after which America chose to “remove the brain” from Germany through the sub-program of Operation Paperclip, whereby Nazi scientists who committed many heinous war crimes (such as executing bizarre and evil human experiments) were brought to the USA and given high-level positions in government on the condition that the communicate the knowledge they gained for the Reich.
Just as 9/11 was used to generate a public reaction that was parlayed into support for international American militarism, the refugee crisis in Europe was manufactured intentionally through the continual destabilization of Middle Eastern and African nations, after which the migration to Europe was and continues to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars from the US and Germany in order to try to use the natural dysfunction that the Muslims will bring in order to revive nationalism and militarism.
Russia has her own refugee crisis taking place right now that is not being discussed at all. In Russia, massive numbers of people are migrating from the Central Asian republics due to extreme poverty and few employment prospects. Since the Central Asian republics were part of the USSR, the move can be regarded as less “drastic” than coming from the Middle East or Africa to Europe, but the consequences are no less dire. Due to the fact that Slavic Russian have very few children yet high abortion rates, that the family unit is weak and in many places non-existent, and the Central Asian peoples, many of whom are culturally Muslim yet have stronger family units, more children, and lower abortion rates, there is a danger that Russia might be subverted from within.
President Putin has worked to integrate the Muslims into Russian society, but with mixed success. His actions show he is attempting to accommodate the Central Asians and their beliefs as much as possible but without changing Russian society to the point of its own collapse. It is also the reason why Russia has in comparison with the USA seldom used military force over the last decade when intervening in local issues, because given Russia’s size and history, she is always going to have some problem in some part that needs to be dealt with. It is in Russia’s interest to keep peace along her borders as much as possible, especially since she is in a weakened state. The USA, on the other hand, has been supporting Islamic terrorists such as ISIS as well as the “rebels” in Western Ukraine, and if Russia used force to deal with them the USA would attempt to use it as a reason to further conflict, including a possible war, with them.
The Taliban is a CIA asset. It has been an asset for almost 40 years. It’s well documented. Surely Russian agents have tried to manipulate the Taliban just as the American have admitted to manipulating countless documented and many not documented political and social movements around the world.
It’s near impossible that Russia is “arming the Taliban”.
But what if they are?
Well, in the case that they are- and one should not rule out all possibilities- then does it not seem interesting that, once again, the very Frankenstein created by American, Israeli, and Saudi interests has now turned against them?
What goes around…