The Trans-Afghan pipeline was the motive for the US planning for and carrying out an unprovoked, premeditated attack against Afghanistan. 9/11 was the US government’s means and opportunity. If the US government made plans to attack Afghanistan long before 9/11 then the US government could also have planned and carried out the attacks of September 11, 2001.

There is no country that is justified in invading any other country because of the World Trade Center attack of 9/11, but if there were, it would be the Afghans who would be more legally justified in carrying out combative attacks in the US than we would be in killing more innocent people in that nation.

Complete justice would require that the US government pay reparations for initiating these murderous hostilities against a nation that had no part in the attacks of September 11, 2001, nor attacked the US or any other NATO nation before or after 9/11. The US killed far more innocent people abroad than the 3,000 Americans who perished in New York City on 9/11, a day that will long live in infamy.

The problem we face in making sense of these horrible events is bias. We are all naturally biased in favor of “our” side: Americans in favor of their fellow citizens, and foreigners on their own side.

No party should be encouraged to invade the territory of the other. To do so, given that both are strong enough not to be brought to the bar of justice, would only mean the senseless killing of still others, neighbors of the attackers or defenders, whichever is the victim of subsequent hostilities. One and only one of these nefarious characters can indeed be punished for the murder of the others. It is clear that the US must be brought to justice. There are two reasons for this. The minor one: The US killed far more innocent people than did the Taliban or Al Qaeda (the US kept switching stories as to the reason for attacking the innocent people of Afghanistan. First it was Al Qaeda, then the Taliban for harboring an alleged criminal, then regime change, then it was bin Laden and now its about rebuilding Afghanistan - a nation that the US destroyed in the first place). Major reason: The US was the first to engage in murder - spilled innocent blood. The Taliban retaliated, they did not start the war. The Taliban retaliated in self-defense from the illegal attack against their country. The Taliban retaliates today and will continue to retaliate in self-defense of the US murdering of the people of Afghanistan. There is surely a place in hell reserved for those who begin such cowardly acts against a country and its people who justifiably and legally react in defending their country, their country’s people and themselves.

If the U.S. is justified in going into Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden, and other perpetrators and aiders and abetters of the crimes of 9/11 in New York City, then the Afghan people are even more righteous in doing precisely the same thing to the US.

Should the U.S. defend against any further, retaliatory attacks on US soil? Of course. But then, by that token, the Afghanis are entitled to defend their territory against our future and indeed future and even present invasions of them.

If, entirely unprovoked, the Mexican or Canadian armies started to sweep into the US, the U.S. military would be legally and morally justified in rolling them back, warding them off, killing them, and pursuing them to the death back to the evil lairs from which they sprang, so that they could never again launch such an attack. The US military should not have to wait for such an eventuality. Any country could act in this very aggressive manner as soon as there was a real threat, and a reasonable chance of this entirely unwarranted invasion taking place. But, there is absolutely no legal or moral justification for the US to preemptively bomb them, on the ground that, who knows, these nations might one day want to invade us.

The right of self-defense (also called, when it applies to the defense of another, alter ego defense, defense of others, defense of a third person) is the right for civilians acting on their own behalf to engage in violence for the sake of defending one’s own life or the lives of others, including the use of deadly force.

Article 12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Defense of self or of others is an affirmative defense to criminal charges for an act of violence. It acts to provide complete justification when the degree of violence used is comparable or proportionate to the threat faced, so deadly force would only be excused in situations of “extreme” danger. It is this affirmation that gives the Afghan people validity and justification to use deadly force against the US and NATO military forces who have illegally attacked and occupy their country. Every day the Afghan people face “extreme” danger, not from the Taliban or al Qaeda but from US military armed attacks. The Taliban and the Afghan people are the victims, not the US soldiers or the Canadian soldiers or any other NATO soldier.

Justification for self-defense cannot be applied to actions committed after a criminal act has taken place. A rape victim who, after the rape is committed and the rapist leaves, subsequently finds and shoots the rapist, is not entitled to claim self-defense. Most other victims of assaultive offenses are similarly not entitled to this defense if they act in revenge. The US was not legally entitled to claim self-defense for the attacks of September 11, 2001. The attack had already taken place and no new attacks were imminent.

Preemptive self-defense is not explicitly allowed under the U.N. Charter, which only exceptionally permits “self-defense” in the event of armed attack in its Article 51. This particular rationale also challenges the general principle of prohibition of the use of armed force established by Article 2(4) of the Charter. Simply put, it is illegal under the international law and therefore cannot be admissible.

In most states, first-degree murder is defined as an unlawful killing that is both willful and premeditated, meaning that it was committed after planning or “lying in wait” for the victim.

US Code
TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 51 > § 1111
§ 1111. Murder

(a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or any other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, child abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated as part of a pattern or practice of assault or torture against a child or children; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree.

Wilful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated attack of Afghanistan - First Degree Murder

Foreign political accounts published in the British, French and Indian media have revealed that US officials threatened war against Afghanistan during the summer of 2001. These reports include the prediction, made in July of 2001, that “if the military action went ahead, it would take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.” The Bush administration began its bombing strikes on the hapless, poverty-stricken country October 7, and ground attacks by US Special Forces began October 19.

It is not an accident that these revelations have only appeared overseas, rather than in the US. The ruling classes in these countries have their own economic and political interests to look after, which do not coincide, and in some cases directly clash, with the drive by the American ruling elite to seize control of oil-rich territory in Central Asia.

The US and Canadian media has conducted a systematic cover-up of the real economic and strategic interests that underlie the illegal war against Afghanistan, in order to sustain the pretense that the war emerged overnight, full-blown, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11.

The US and Canadian television networks and major daily newspapers celebrated the rapid military defeat of the Taliban regime as an unexpected stroke of good fortune. They distracted public attention away from the conclusion that any serious observer would be compelled to draw, that the speedy victory of the US-backed forces reveals careful planning and preparation by the US military, which had to have begun well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The official US myth is that “everything changed” on the day four airliners were hijacked and nearly 3,000 people were killed. The US military intervention in Afghanistan, by this account, was hastily improvised in less than a month. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a television interview November 18, actually claimed that only three weeks went into planning the military onslaught.

This is only one of countless lies that emanated from the Pentagon and White House about the war against Afghanistan. The truth is that the US intervention was planned in detail and carefully prepared long before the US commercial airline hijackings provided the pretext for setting it in motion. If history had skipped over September 11, and the events of that day had never happened, it is very likely that the United States would have gone to war in Afghanistan anyway, and on much the same schedule.

The United States ruling elite has been contemplating war in Central Asia for at least a decade.

US oil companies had acquired the rights to as much as 75 percent of the output of Kazakhstan new fields, and US government officials have hailed the Caspian and Central Asia as a potential alternative to dependence on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region. US troops have followed in the wake of these contracts. US Special Forces began joint operations with Kazakhstan in 1997 and with Uzbekistan a year later, training for intervention especially in the mountainous southern region that includes Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan.

The major problem in exploiting the energy riches of Central Asia is how to get the oil and gas from the landlocked region to the world market. US officials have opposed using either the Russian pipeline system or the easiest available land route, across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, over the past decade, US oil companies and government officials have explored a series of alternative pipeline routes—west through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean; east through Kazakhstan and China to the Pacific; and, most relevant to the current crisis, south from Turkmenistan across western Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

The Afghanistan pipeline route was pushed by the US-based Unocal oil company, which engaged in intensive negotiations with the Taliban regime. These talks, however, ended in disarray in 1998, as US relations with Afghanistan were inflamed by the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for which Osama bin Laden was held responsible. In August 1998, the Clinton administration launched cruise missile attacks on alleged bin Laden training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The US government then demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden and imposed economic sanctions. The Trans-Afghan pipeline talks languished.

Throughout 1999 US pressure on Afghanistan increased. On February 3, 1999, Assistant Secretary of State Karl E. Inderfurth and State Department counterterrorism chief Michael Sheehan traveled to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister, Abdul Jalil. They warned him that the US would hold the government of Afghanistan responsible for any further terrorist acts by bin Laden.

According to a report in the Washington Post (October 3, 2001), the Clinton administration and Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister of Pakistan, agreed on a joint covert CIA operation to kill Osama bin Laden in 1999. The US would supply satellite intelligence, air support and financing, while Pakistan supplied the CIA Pushtun-speaking operatives who would penetrate southern Afghanistan and carry out the actual killing.

The Pakistani commando team was up and running and ready to strike by October 1999, the Post reported. One former official told the newspaper, “It was an enterprise. It was proceeding.” Clinton aides were delighted at the prospect of a successful assassination, with one declaring, “It was like Christmas.”

The attack was however aborted on October 12, 1999, when Sharif was overthrown in a military coup by General Pervez Musharraf, who halted the proposed CIA covert operation. The Clinton administration had to settle for a UN Security Council resolution that demanded the Taliban turn over bin Laden to “appropriate authorities,” but did not require he be handed over to the United States.

US subversion against the Taliban continued in 2000, according to an account published November 2 in the Wall Street Journal, written by Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser in the Reagan administration. McFarlane was hired by two wealthy Chicago commodity speculators, Joseph and James Ritchie, to assist them in recruiting and organizing an anti-Taliban terrorist cell among Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Their principal Afghan contact was Abdul Haq, the former CIA mujahedin leader who was executed by the Taliban after an unsuccessful attempt to spark a revolt in his home province.

McFarlane held meetings with Abdul Haq and other former CIA mujahedin in the course of the fall and winter of 2000. After the Bush administration took office, McFarlane parlayed his Republican connections into a series of meetings with State Department, Pentagon and even White House officials. All encouraged the preparation of an anti-Taliban military campaign.

During the summer of 2001, long before the United States launched airstrikes on the Taliban, James Ritchie traveled to Tajikistan with Abdul Haq and Peter Tomsen, who had been the US special envoy to the Afghan opposition during the first Bush administration. There they met with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the CIA created Northern Alliance, with the goal of coordinating their Pakistan-based attacks with the only military force still offering resistance to the Taliban.

Finally, according to McFarlane, Abdul Haq “decided in mid-August to go ahead and launch operations in Afghanistan. He returned to Peshawar, Pakistan, to make final preparations.” In other words, this phase of the anti-Taliban war was under way well before September 11.

According to a front-page article in the Washington Post November 18, the CIA has been mounting paramilitary operations in southern Afghanistan since 1997. The article carries the byline of Bob Woodward, the Post writer made famous by Watergate, who is a frequent conduit for leaks from top-level military and intelligence officials.

Woodward provides details about the CIA’s role in the current military conflict, which includes the deployment of a secret paramilitary unit, the Special Activities Division. This force began combat on September 27, 2001 using both operatives on the ground and Predator surveillance drones equipped with missiles that could be launched by remote control.

The Special Activities Division, Woodward reports, “consists of teams of about half a dozen men who do not wear military uniforms. The division has about 150 fighters, pilots and specialists, and is made up mostly of hardened veterans who have retired from the US military.

“For .. 18 months, the CIA has been working with tribes and warlords in southern Afghanistan, and the division’s units have helped create a significant new network in the region of the Taliban’s greatest strength.”

This means that the US spy agency was engaged in illegal covert attacks against the Afghan regime—what under other circumstances the American government would call terrorism—from the spring of 2000, more than a year before the suicide hijackings that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.

The British-based Jane’s International Security reported March 15, 2001 that the new American administration was working with India, Iran and Russia “in a concerted front against Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.” India was supplying the Northern Alliance with military equipment, advisers and helicopter technicians, the magazine said, and both India and Russia were using bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for their operations.

The magazine added: “Several recent meetings between the newly instituted Indo-US and Indo-Russian joint working groups on terrorism led to this effort to tactically and logistically counter the Taliban. Intelligence sources in Delhi said that while India, Russia and Iran were leading the anti-Taliban campaign on the ground, Washington was giving the Northern Alliance information and logistic support.”

On May 23, the White House announced the appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad to a position on the National Security Council as special assistant to the president and senior director for Gulf, Southwest Asia and Other Regional Issues. Khalilzad is a former official in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations. After leaving the government, he went to work for Unocal.

The magazine IndiaReacts reported more details of the cooperative efforts of the US, India, Russia and Iran against the Taliban regime. “India and Iran will ‘facilitate’ US and Russian plans for ‘limited military action’ against the Taliban if the contemplated tough new economic sanctions don’t bend Afghanistan’s fundamentalist regime,” the magazine said.

At this stage of military planning, the US and Russia were to supply direct military assistance to the Northern Alliance, working through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, in order to roll back the Taliban lines toward the city of Mazar-e-Sharif. An unnamed third country supplied the Northern Alliance with anti-tank rockets that had already been put to use against the Taliban in early June.

“Diplomats say that the anti-Taliban move followed a meeting between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and later between Powell and Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh in Washington,” the magazine added. “Russia, Iran and India have also held a series of discussions and more diplomatic activity is expected.”

The original plan involved the use of military forces from both Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as well as Russia itself. IndiaReacts said that in early June 2001 Russian President Vladimir Putin told a meeting of the Confederation of Independent States, which includes many of the former Soviet republics, that military action against the Taliban was in the offing. One effect of September 11 was to create the conditions for the United States to intervene on its own, without any direct participation by the military forces of the Soviet successor states, and thus claim an undisputed American right to dictate the shape of a settlement in Afghanistan.

Two French authors write that the Bush administration was willing to accept the Taliban regime, despite the charges of sponsoring terrorism, if it cooperated with plans for the development of the oil resources of Central Asia.

Until August, they claim, the US government saw the Taliban “as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia.” It was only when the Taliban refused to accept US conditions that “this rationale of energy security changed into a military one.”

By way of corroboration, one should note the curious fact that neither the Clinton administration nor the Bush administration ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban regime. Such a designation would have made it impossible for an American oil or construction company to sign a deal with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.

Talks between the Bush administration and the Taliban began in February 2001, shortly after Bush’s inauguration. A Taliban emissary arrived in Washington in March with presents for the new chief executive, including an expensive Afghan carpet. But the talks themselves were less than cordial. Brisard said, “At one moment during the negotiations, the US representatives told the Taliban, ‘either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs’.”

As long as the possibility of a pipeline deal remained, the White House stalled any further investigation into the activities of Osama bin Laden, Brisard and Dasquie write. They report that John O’Neill, deputy director of the FBI, resigned in July in protest over this obstruction. O’Neill told them in an interview, “the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it.” In a strange coincidence, O’Neill accepted a position as security chief of the World Trade Center after leaving the FBI, and was killed on September 11.

The US government wilfully, deliberately, maliciously, and premeditated every detail of the attack against Afghanistan and the innocent people of Afghanistan. Every detail including the attacks of September 11, 2001. 9/11 gave the US government motive and opportunity to launch their criminal attack against Afghanistan. The least likely explanation of September 11 is the official one: that dozens of Islamic fundamentalists, many with known ties to Osama bin Laden, were able to carry out a wide-ranging conspiracy on three continents, targeting the most prominent symbols of American power, without any US intelligence agency having the slightest idea of what they were doing.