On March 16, 2016 WikiLeaks launched a searchable archive for 30,322 emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton. The emails were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. The final PDFs were made available on February 29, 2016.
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A letter from Clintons’ top advisor Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton in November 2009, describes the views of William Murray, former station chief of CIA in Pakistan. Murray was one of the members of a small CIA team that directed the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation.
Murray describes a complete failure of the US strategic goals in Afghanistan. He gives a picture of a military establishment that seeks to maintain an open front in the country, requesting for more US troops. It appears that focusing on Bin Laden and al Qaeda was not the primary mission, neither, of course, transforming Afghanistan into a democratic society.
As Murray characteristically says: “We went there to get al Qaeda and get Bin Laden. We didn’t go there to get the Taliban. We’ve shifted goals and we’re trying to build a government in Afghanistan with a person who represents a small portion of the people and is corrupt.”
This view perfectly fits to an analysis by Eric Draitser of stopimperialism.org . As Draitser describes: “While the western media was replete with stories of ISIS and Taliban factions fighting together under the Islamic State’s banner, it has become clear since then that, rather than a collaboration between the groups, there has simply been a steady migration of fighters from the Taliban to ISIS which, if the stories are to be believed, pays much better. In fact, the last few months have demonstrated that, there is in fact competition between the two, and that Taliban and ISIS groups have fought each other in very intense battles. […] Such skirmishes have now become a regular occurrence, pointing to a growing war between ISIS and Taliban factions. Increasingly, the war is being transformed from one waged by the Taliban against the Kabul government and its US and NATO patrons, into a war with competing groups fighting each other for supremacy on the battlefield and in the political life of the country. […] it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that ISIS is to a large degree an asset of the US and its western allies. As if one needed further confirmation of this point, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, himself no stranger to the machination of US intelligence, bluntly declared just last month that ISIS could not possibly have expanded into Afghanistan ‘without a foreign hand, without foreign backing.’”
Murray’s view also justify Kadir A. Mohmand on the real purpose of the US presence in Afghanistan: “The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is really about the U.S. and NATO having direct access and control over Afghanistan’s vast untapped Rare Earth Elements (REEs), which are worth trillions. These REEs are vital to the manufacture of technology and defense systems. The U.S. sent down geologists with special operations forces into the REE deposits of the Helmand region at the start of the invasion. The U.S. even knew about these REEs deposits before the war. I believe control of the REEs is the real reason for the invasion, continued occupation and covert war and genocide against the Afghan villagers.”
Key points:
• The Afghanis hated the Arabs, hated them during the war against the Soviets. It’s mythology they liked them, built by the press. You can’t get the press to get off the blowback theory. Bin Laden, I doubt if he ever fired a gun in anger. He was there when I was there. He was engineering projects, roads, bridges and medical teams. But there was no big Arab fighting force.
• Milt Bearden and I met with Pakistani generals who contacted us in 2007 at their request, met with the key general from ISI who created the Taliban. The message to us was that the Brits shouldn’t go into Helmand. They had thrown them out in 1880 and they would never accept them back. No one listened. I’m in contact with those people all the time. So is Milt. They don’t believe us anymore. The US military has its own objective. They think we are fighting against Islam. The Afghanis will never perceive we are a secular society.
• The military reinforces the same things over and over again. We’re literally fighting the people. The problem is not the number of troops. It’s a failed mission. The Afghanis believe we are there to stay. That is the thing they will never accept. They will allow armies to go through and even stay for a few years, but not stay forever. I pity the president on his choices. He’s torn by the military, with their typical just-give-us-the-troops. I don’t see how to make this work.
• We went there to get al Qaeda and get Bin Laden. We didn’t go there to get the Taliban. We’ve shifted goals and we’re trying to build a government in Afghanistan with a person who represents a small portion of the people and is corrupt.
• To me the message would be, we came to get AQ, this place can never a launch pad for terrorism against the West. Say we’ll be out four months after we get Bin Laden. The Taliban are telling people we are there to stay forever. We talk about democracy, etc. They don’t care. They care about the way of life. It’s as simplistic as it gets. We can’t afford to restructure that society. McChrystal is a military commander. He is going to solve the problem with more troops. We are exactly where the Soviets were in ’86. We are hunkered down in large encampments, we sweep down, they lure us into ambushes.
• The problem is not the number of troops. It’s a failed mission. We don’t talk about Bin Laden anymore. We’ve never declared our objectives in a way the Afghan people understand. Too much talk about democracy and nation building. Obama should say we’re here to get the people who disturb the international peace. I’d internationalize it. This is the whole world’s problem. The AQ is a plague. What we want to achieve is the destruction of AQ and then we’ll withdraw. You can make a deal they won’t support AQ figures in the future. In Pakistan, it’s hopeless. I sat in on every discussion on the decision that led to cutting off aid in 1990. There was no doubt of what they were doing. Never once did a single Pakistani official deviate from saying that they were not making nuclear weapons. Every discussion began with a lie.
Full letter:
http://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/7378