Wars and Empire | Page 6

is an "inevitable" momentum of history."
Why this sudden flurry of historiosophic ruminations?
According to Stratfor, the strategic forecasting consultancy, "for Beijing, the only way to stymie the fourth phase is through promoting multilateralism; barring that, China must be prepared to confront the United States in the future, and U.S. history can give some guidance ... Thus, Beijing continues to focus on the concept of multilateralism and the legitimacy of the United Nations as the best ways to slow or even disrupt U.S. expansionism. At the same time, Beijing is preparing to face a future confrontation with the United States if necessary."
When its economy matures, China wants to become another United States. It has started emulating America two decades ago - and never ceased. Recent steps include painful privatization, restructuring of the banking system, clamping down on corruption and bad governance, paring down the central bureaucracy, revamping the military and security apparatus and creating mechanisms for smooth political transitions.
China plans to send a man to the moon. It invests heavily in basic science and research and development. It is moving gradually up the manufacturing food chain to higher value added industries. It is the quintessential leapfrogger, much of its cadre moving straight from the rustic to the plastic - computers, cellular phones, wireless and the like.
Ironically, it could never have made it even this far without its ostensible foe. Thousands of bright Chinese students train in the United states. American technologies, management, knowledge, capital and marketing permeate Beijing's economic fabric. Bilateral trade is flourishing. China enjoys the biggest share of the world's - in large part American - foreign direct investment flows. Should the United states disintegrate tomorrow - China would assuredly follow.
Afghan Myths
An Interview with Anssi Kullberg
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
Anssi Kristian Kullberg is presently employed as a researcher for the Legal and Country Intelligence Service, Western and Central Asia Desk, at the Finnish Directorate of Immigration. This interview represents his personal views only and not those of his employer. On Black Tuesday, 11th September, he was in Kyrgyzstan, on his way to the notorious Ferghana Valley, in a reconstruction of the late Finnish Marshal C.G.E. Mannerheim's intelligence expedition to Turkistan and China in 1906-1908.
Q: Was the Taliban the creation of Pakistan? Can you tell us about its formation and how was Russia involved in it?
A: The Taliban was not a creation of Pakistan, although Pakistan was among several states that contributed to the genesis and development of this peculiar movement. It is true that the Taliban (which was established only as late as in 1994 as a religious movement) had a significant influx from Pakistani madrassas. But the Taliban is not only an extreme religious movement, but also an ethnic Pashtun one. The Pashtuns are a bit less than half of Afghanistan's population, but in Pakistan there are 16 million resident Pashtuns plus 3 million as refugees. There are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan nowadays. The "Pakistanis" involved in Afghanistan are in fact Afghans.
The role of the Pakistani Islamist opposition in the formation and support of the Taliban is widely recorded. But more important are those who made it a military power. This is where Russia enters the game, too. In order to understand the Taliban, we must recall the background situation in Afghanistan ever since the events in 1970s.
The Taliban is not monolithic. Even less so is the Northern Alliance. Neither were the Afghan communists united. This was made evident by the internal power struggles following the ousting of King Zahir Shah in 1973. Daoud was overthrown and killed by communists in 1978. But the communists were divided into the Khalq faction, favored by China, and the Parcham faction, favored by the Soviet Union. In 1978 it was the Khalq faction that took over, but their more moderate leader Nur Mohammed Taraki was overthrown and killed by the hardliner Khalq communist Hafizullah Amin. In 1979, the Soviet Spetsnaz murdered Amin and replaced him with the Parcham follower Babrak Karmal, who was close to the KGB. Then the Soviet army invaded.
The communist secret service Khad (KhAD), whose leaders were Karmal and Sayid Mohammed Najibullah, was actually an Afghan branch of the KGB. It had been preceded by the communist secret services of Taraki and Amin (AGSA, KAM), but from 1979 onwards this organization of terror was instructed and trained by the KGB. The culture of terror and the horrible persecution of the civil population continued without a pause from the communist takeover up until the overthrowing of Najibullah's regime in 1992 when Massoud liberated Kabul. Western minds seem to implicitly suppose that when the Cold War was over, the communists and the structures they had created just suddenly disappeared. This is a recurrent fatal misperception especially of the Americans.
According to Professor Azmat Hayat Khan of the University of Peshawar,