[A-List] UNO-University helped U.S. reach out to Taliban (fwd)

[Andre Gunder Frank <franka@xxxxxxx>]

At a public meeting the Univ Nebraska guy talked about the ''four''
players in  Afghanistan. In the ''dicussion'' part, I asked him a couple
of questions about how come he did not mention ''other'' players
in the ''Biug Game'' there. He evaded them. So i asked again, what about
the USA there in general and your Center in particular? Oh, he answered,
we dont do much there - the trouble is that the US does NOT have
any Afghanistan policy!

cheers

ps. the Unical testimony at the House of Representatives itself mentions
 its own-U Nebraska- Taliban ties!




    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

                    ANDRE  GUNDER  FRANK
Department of History			   Home
University of Nebraska Lincoln [UNL]       4440 North 7th Street
612 Oldfather                              Apt. 107
P.O. Box 880327				   Lincoln, NE 68521 USA
Lincoln, NE 68588-0327 			   Tel: 1-402-742 7931
Tel: 1-402-472 3251=direct 2414=Dpt        Fax: 1-402-742 7932
Fax: 1-402-472 8839
E-Mail: franka@xxxxxxx          Web Page: csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 14:14:50 -0500
From: marbelaez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: franka@xxxxxxx
Subject: UNO-University helped U.S. reach out to Taliban



Only a glimpse...



As we plan our programs for the future....
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UNO-University helped U.S. reach out to Taliban
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Afghanistan center hosted officials during '80s, '90s

By Michael J. Berens
Tribune staff reporter

October 21, 2001

Peering at the 60-foot-high faces of four of America's most famous
presidents, the dozen robed and bearded Afghans drew little attention at
the base of Mt. Rushmore in July 1999.

Only bullet and shrapnel scars beneath their heavy attire would be clues
that these visitors were militia commanders, some with ties to Osama bin
Laden and his Al Qaeda network.

For the next five weeks, the men were feted at private parties, escorted on
tours of other local landmarks, including a school and hospital, and given
cash for a shopping mall excursion where most bought scented soaps and silk
stockings.

And just as quietly as they had arrived, the Afghans were shepherded back
to Afghanistan--all expenses paid courtesy of the U.S. government and the
University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Since 1986, spanning the early years of post-Soviet occupation to the
oppressive regime of the Taliban, the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the
Omaha commuter campus has served as a back door for U.S. intelligence
efforts to expose Afghan leaders to American ideas and democracy.

Even as the anti-Taliban rhetoric in Washington grew harsher in the 1990s,
the university center provided a softer approach to foreign policy, an
approach that was often awkward, occasionally controversial and,
ultimately, a failure.

The university hosted parties for the Taliban and then filed briefings to
the U.S. State Department. School officials distributed thousands of
textbooks to Afghan children that reflected a government-approved version
of history depicting women as second-class citizens. Encouraged by
Washington, the school worked with a U.S. oil company to try to persuade
the Taliban to grant valuable oil pipeline rights in Afghanistan.

The goal was to provide Afghan leaders, particularly members of the
Taliban, with a taste of America in the hope that they might become U.S.
allies.

The Afghans continued their trips to America even after sanctions against
the Taliban were implemented by the U.S. and other nations.

In November 1997, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright harshly
criticized Taliban leaders as sadistic killers who nailed enemies to
village walls and stoned uncovered women.

One month later, eight key Taliban members, including the foreign minister,
toured the U.S., stopping in Nebraska and Houston, where they visited NASA
headquarters.

They also visited Washington, where State Department officials tried to
reinforce Albright's views.

"We wanted to take advantage to convey this message to them directly, as
well, and that's what we took advantage of these visits for," said Leonard
Scensny, public affairs adviser for the State Department's Bureau of South
Asian Affairs, which oversaw dozens of trips of Afghan and Taliban leaders.

The trips involving senior Taliban officials did little good, he said.
During one meeting with the Taliban leaders, U.S. officials encouraged them
to bring peace to Afghanistan and restore human rights.

The Taliban's reply was curt, Scensny said.

"They said this is God's law. This is the way it's supposed to be. Leave us
alone," he said.

The trips were little more than a blind wager, said Peter Tomsen, a former
U.S. ambassador to Armenia who teaches at the university.

There is no evidence that any of the visitors are assisting U.S. military
efforts in Afghanistan, and State Department records show that many remain
enemies.

$60 million in grants

Since 1986, university and federal records show, the Nebraska center has
received more than $60 million in federal grants to launch educational
programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan and to host visits of key Taliban
leaders and military commanders.

"We were trying to get a foothold in their country by working one step at a
time," said Thomas Gouttierre, dean of the university's international
studies program and director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies.

As an example of the approach, Gouttierre said the university planned to
get rid of the inflammatory textbooks as the Taliban leadership grew more
tolerant. But that day never came, and Gouttierre says the regime must be
overthrown.

"I tried to show them that the state and church could coexist peacefully,"
Gouttierre said. "I think I largely failed."

Gouttierre, 61, spent more than a decade in Afghanistan as a Peace Corps
volunteer and served as director of the Fulbright scholarship program
during the 1960s and 1970s.

"We may have been naive, but it was worthy of a try," Gouttierre said.

UNO Chancellor Nancy Belck said she is "very proud" of the accomplishments
of Gouttierre and the Afghanistan center. Administrators have closely
monitored center activities, and they are satisfied that the independence
of the university was not compromised, she said.

Role criticized

But the Nebraska center's proactive role in molding U.S. policy is rare
among universities, and it left a trail of resentment, anger and
uncomfortable encounters, according to officials from the State Department
and two other federal agencies that directed money to the university.

Shaista Wahab, an Afghanistan native who immigrated to the U.S. in 1981,
oversees the university's collection of 12,000 rare books and manuscripts
about Afghanistan.

Wahab said she became so uncomfortable with frequent visits by Taliban
officials that she would hide in the basement of the library so she
wouldn't have to conduct tours.

"Sometimes, they [center administrators] wouldn't tell me they were Taliban
because they knew I'd make myself unavailable," she said.

"Most of the time the Taliban ministers would stare at the books for a few
seconds, then leave. Most cannot read. They couldn't understand the covers
of the books."

On July 9, 1999, the dozen Afghan leaders who had visited Mt. Rushmore
gathered in a single room with a tape recorder for a landmark meeting that,
for their safety, was to remain confidential.

The group was composed of leaders who worked closely with the Taliban and
Al Qaeda, but also included Afghan leaders who were bitter opponents of the
Taliban, State Department officials said.

They met at the international studies department on the Omaha campus with
Gouttierre, who was fluent in their native language, Dari. He would later
submit the first of eight classified reports to the State Department.

Limiting their contact

Sensitive to public criticism that they might be seen as embracing a
controversial regime, State Department officials tried to minimize direct
contact with Afghan leaders, whose government was not recognized
diplomatically by the U.S. or any other major industrialized nation.

Gouttierre moderated the two-hour session, keeping the peace among the men,
some of whom carried deep-rooted animosity toward each other as well as
toward the U.S., according to transcripts of the session.

A school official agreed to share the transcript with the Tribune on the
condition that the names of the Afghan militia officials not be disclosed,
for fear they might face reprisals at home. Some of the Afghan leaders had
visited the U.S. without the knowledge of their government.

The session provided insight into the origins of the Taliban and its
alliance with Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 suicide
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The officials explained how the Taliban, which began as a movement within
Pakistani religious schools, was exported to Afghanistan by Pakistani
leaders as a way to gain control of a chaotic, impoverished country ravaged
by war.

Dissatisfied with their relationship with the Pakistanis, the Taliban
rebelled against them in the mid-1990s. In response, Pakistan angrily
withdrew most of its military and financial support from the Afghan
government, the Afghan leaders told their Nebraska hosts. Bin Laden, a
Saudi Arabian idolized as a war hero by thousands of young Muslim men,
stepped into the breach, supplying millions of dollars to the Taliban, the
militia leaders said.

Seeking a way to express his fear of the U.S. government, which helped the
Afghans during the Soviet war but then largely withdrew support, one of the
Afghan leaders related a parable.

"Someone saved a sheep from the fangs of a wolf," he said. "Then the person
ate the sheep. The sheep's soul was crying out.

"[It] told the person, `I thought you saved me, but you are the real
wolf.'"

But there also were indications that the Taliban was divided. The most
hard-line faction enforced dozens of new restrictions, particularly
involving women, but also required men to wear beards and follow other
strict customs. Punishment was uniform: death.

Some of the Taliban were so disturbed by the direction of their government
that they were ready to help U.S. efforts to change it, two of the militia
leaders said.

Tomsen, the former U.S. ambassador who teaches foreign affairs courses at
UNO, said the interviews yielded a rich vein of information that could have
helped stunt the growth of Afghan-based terrorism.

A career diplomat who served in Vietnam, China, India and Armenia, Tomsen
worked closely with the Afghan resistance efforts against Soviet occupation
during the 1980s. He said the university was able to serve as a neutral
ground where Afghan leaders of all persuasions could informally pass along
information to the U.S. government. Like Gouttierre, he believes the
intelligence supplied from the meetings was largely ignored.

"The U.S. government can be like a big dinosaur that just keeps walking
along," he said.

Textbook distribution

A particularly embarrassing chapter for the UNO center involved the
distribution of textbooks in Afghanistan.

The $60 million the university received came from the U.S. Agency for
International Development, an independent branch of the State Department.
The money was for the university to establish educational programs
demonstrating the strengths of a democratic society, but that goal never
was realized.

The university program, called the Education Sector Support Project,
flooded Afghanistan with tens of thousands of school textbooks, set up
curriculums for elementary school classes and provided scholarships for
older Afghans to study in Nebraska.

Educating women

Afghan leaders, then representing a loose alliance of seven militias,
mandated that textbooks be laced with heavy doses of Islamic fundamentalism
and militarism. Moreover, the Afghans sharply limited plans by the U.S. to
educate female students and train female teachers.

In a 1989 briefing report submitted to AID, Gouttierre warned that openly
educating women could alienate the Afghan officials who believed women were
inferior to men.

"This type of reform must be left to the Afghans to be solved at their own
pace," he wrote.

Even when he assigned a male instructor to train five Afghan women as
teachers in Peshawar, Pakistan, the instruction had to be done secretly.
The women later taught in Pakistani refugee camps.

Soon, concerns about literacy gave way to worries about terrorism. With
evidence that bin Laden was linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center, the U.S. halted all government-sponsored aid to Afghanistan.

But even when the AID grant to Nebraska was canceled in 1994, the State
Department continued to authorize trips of Afghan officials to the U.S. as
a way to keep some line of communication open, Tomsen said.

Footing the bill for some of these visits was another party with a special
interest in Afghanistan: Unocal Corp., a California-based global energy
company. Although the U.S. had banned foreign aid to Afghanistan, the edict
did not apply to private companies that initiated education or humanitarian
relief efforts.

Visions of oil

By 1997, the Taliban was firmly in control of the country, and energy
companies long interested in Afghanistan as a possible location for oil and
natural-gas pipelines were beginning to make overtures.

Unocal officials envisioned a pipeline that would tap into rich reserves
held by former Soviet republics around the Caspian Sea, then course south
for 1,000 miles through the mountains of Turkmenistan and the deserts of
Afghanistan, snake through Pakistan and into the cargo holds of U.S.-bound
tankers anchored in the Arabian Sea.

In 1997, the only roadblock to the company's plans was the Taliban.

Unocal, along with a consortium of international energy companies and
investors, had secured pipeline rights for Afghanistan's northern neighbor,
Turkmenistan. In November 1997, Unocal officials enlisted the support of
the Afghan studies center in Omaha to help them form a business
relationship with the Taliban.

The company gave the university nearly $1 million to establish job training
programs in Afghanistan that would be overseen by the Taliban, said Raheem
Yaseer, the Omaha center's program coordinator.

"The oil company wanted to generate goodwill with the Taliban without
actually negotiating with them," said Yaseer, who is an Afghan native and a
Muslim religious leader at an Omaha mosque.

Stability sought

In December 1997, Unocal--with State Department approval--obtained U.S.
visitor visas for eight Taliban officials and a Pakistani intelligence
officer.

"The U.S. government was encouraging our engagement there to bring
stability to the country," Unocal spokesman Barry Lane said.

State Department officials confirmed that the agency supported Unocal's
efforts.

The Taliban visitors included Afghans who at the time held important
positions in the government: Mullah Mohammad Ghaus, Afghanistan's foreign
minister; Ahmed Jan, minister for mines and industry; Amir Muttaqi,
minister for culture and education; and Din Muhammad, minister of planning.

As guests of Unocal, the Taliban officials were flown to the company's
Houston offices for four days of meetings. They also toured NASA
headquarters south of Houston, spent several hours at a shopping mall and
attended a party at the mansion of an oil company vice president. The group
spent two days at the University of Nebraska.

Back in Afghanistan, the university was building its training program on a
56-acre plot in Kandahar that had once been used by the State Department as
an outpost for AID.

Once the Taliban approved the plan, the university rebuilt more than a
dozen one-story buildings that had been destroyed during the Soviet
occupation into classrooms to teach wiring, carpentry and welding skills,
Yaseer said.

Even though Unocal said the initiative was a humanitarian effort, criticism
of the program was voiced at the company's annual stockholder meeting in
Los Angeles in 1999. Led by the Feminist Majority Foundation, several
women's rights groups staged protests and accused Unocal of cutting secret
deals with the Taliban.

"We were suspicious that women's rights would be sold out for oil," said
Beth Raboin, spokeswoman for Feminist Majority, an Arlington, Va.,
non-profit women's rights group formed in 1981.

Yaseer said the goal of the center's program was "training people to be
pipeline workers if it was ever built." He estimates the university
provided 450 men with a trade that allowed them to become independent and
earn a living.

Recognizing that the country was politically unstable, Unocal also used the
university to reach out to anti-Taliban groups of the Northern Alliance.

Yaseer said the United Nations supplied a cargo plane for transportation to
rebel areas near the city of Baniyan, where a class was conducted for 25
women who wanted to be teachers. While the Taliban would not permit women
to be trained, the rebel groups had no such restrictions.

Unocal withdraws

Unocal withdrew from the international consortium in late 1998 following
the bombings of the two U.S. Embassies in Africa.

The terrorist attacks, which killed more than 200 people, also were linked
to bin Laden, who was being harbored by the Taliban.

Lane said Unocal tried to educate many factions in Afghanistan about the
financial benefits of oil and gas pipelines. No deals were ever made
because the country was too unstable, he said.

No longer receiving money from AID or the oil company, the Omaha center
closed its programs in Afghanistan. The center still has an office in
Peshawar with 12 employees whose salaries average about $150 a month. In
addition, the center pays the salaries of three guards to patrol the
Kandahar compound.

>From his second-floor office in the Arts and Sciences building at UNO,
Gouttierre said he hopes to return to a country he has never really left.

Despite the sometimes-awkward alliances with the Taliban, the university
reached thousands of Afghan residents with the hint of a better life
through education, he said.

The center has been unable to track the whereabouts of most former visitors
from Afghanistan, Gouttierre said. In fact, he is not sure whether the
Kandahar compound is still standing since the U.S. bombardment.

"I've always felt the university could conduct education programs and be a
partner with our government," he said. "If I were not involved in these
kinds of efforts, who would be?"


Copyright (c) 2001, Chicago Tribune


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