A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 1: 1838 to 1876

(This article was previously posted on the Austin-based Rag Blog alternative news blog earlier this year)

The number of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan has increased from 51,000 to between 70,000 and 100,000 since Barack Obama’s inauguration as U.S. president in January 2009. And there are still between 60,000 and 101,000 armed private contractors--as well as 38,000 combat troops in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] from countries other than the USA-- in Afghanistan in 2010. Yet if you grew up in the USA, your high school social studies teacher was likely to know more about the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict than about the history of Afghanistan.

But although no people of Jewish religious background lived in Afghanistan prior to the 19th century, by the end of the 1840s (after the Anglo-Indian army of UK imperialism which had invaded Afghanistan in 1838 was driven out by the Afghan people in the early 1840s) about the same number of people of Jewish background then lived in Afghanistan as then lived in the United States. As Raphael Patai noted in her book Tents of Jacob, “the number of Jews in Afghanistan in the mid-nineteenth century was estimated at 40,000.”

Yet the aim of the UK government’s military occupation of Kabul between 1839 and 1842, during the First Anglo-Afghan War, was just mainly to prop up an ineffectual and unpopular leader named Shah Shuja, whom the UK government had put in power, in place of Afghan King Dost Mohammad Khan, as Afghanistan ’s ruler.

UK troops in Afghanistan, however, found the Afghan people to be opposed to their presence in Afghanistan; and, between 1839 and 1842, there were “increasingly effective armed attacks on the British garrison” in Kabul, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History by Angelo Rasanayagam. The UK troops were soon forced to retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad, “through narrow mountain defiles and passes in the harshest wintry conditions, with the long columns of soldiers” and their civilian camp followers “being continuously shot at and ambushed by ferocious Ghilzai tribesmen from the surrounding hills,” according to the same book. As a result, around 9,500 (including 600 English officers and their families) of the primarily Indian troops of UK imperialism and 12,000 Indian civilian camp followers lost their lives when they were defeated militarily by people in Afghanistan during the 1839-1842 Anglo-Afghan War.

In revenge for being defeated in the First Anglo-Afghan War, however, UK troops returned to Kabul in 1843 and sacked Kabul . But because of its defeat in the 1839-1842 war, the UK government agreed to invite Dost Mohammad Khan to return to Kabul and resume his position as Afghan King. Twelve years later, on March 30, 1855, a treaty of friendship was signed between the UK government and Dost Mohammad’s feudalist government.

The UK government then started to pay King Dost Mohammad an annual subsidy of 10,000 British pounds to help protect its strategic interests in that area of the world. Dost Mohammad remained on the Afghan throne until 1863; and between 1863 and 1878, Dost Mohammad’s son, Sher Ali Khan, was Afghanistan’s ruling monarch.

After the UK army again intervened in Afghanistan in October 1856 to force the Persian/Iranian government troops that had occupied the city of Herat in western Afghanistan to withdraw, the UK government did not openly intervene in Afghanistan’s internal affairs again until 1876. But as the book Afghanistan: A Modern History noted, “when Disraeli became [ UK ] prime minister, the tacit policy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of Afghanistan ended, and was replaced by the `forward policy’…”

(end of part 1. "A People's History of Afghanistan--Part 2: 1876 to 1901" to soon follow).

Remembering 40th Anniversary of Kent State Massacre

May 4th marked the 40th anniversary of the 1970 killing of four students at Kent State University by members of Ohio's National Guard. Barry Levine was the boyfriend of Allison Krause, one of the slain students. In his eulogy for her, Levine described what happened on May 4, 1970 in Kent, Ohio:

"...We stood for a few seconds watching the soldiers move out behind a screen of gas, before deciding to retreat with the crowd of students.

"...A gas cannister landed at our feet, exploding in our faces...

"After a few seconds of recovery, Allison turned in her tracks and froze. She stood in the path of the pursuing troops screaming at the top of her lungs...The hand drawn to her face, holds a wet rag used to protect herself from the gas, and her other hand holds mine, with which I pulled her over the hill and into the parking lot, a safe distance from the troops.

"For several minutes we stood in the parking lot watching these men threaten us with their rifles...And then they turned..."

In his 1981 book Mayday: Kent State, J. Gregroy Payne also noted the following:

"In the fall of 1980, additional information from the FBI investigation on Kent State housed at the National Archives was released to the public. This information revealed that President Nixon instructed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover--who thought the four victims `got what they deserved'--to find information in the fall of 1970 to substantiate the Guardsmen's claims about the incident. Nixon's directive was issued during the FBI's investigation of the incident. Despite the recent shocking revelations, thousands of pages of the FBI report remain classified, therefore, unavailable for public scrutiny..."

(Downtown 4/27/94)

Exxon Mobil & The U.S. Mass Media Historically

In the early 1990s, before Exxon was allowed to merge with Mobil (despite U.S. anti-trust laws which are supposed to prevent corporate monopolies from being created within the U.S. economic system), Mobil was then the U.S. corporation with the largest direct investment in Saudi Arabia. It was then involved in two huge joint ventures with the Saudi Government: a refinery and a petrochemical complex. Each Mobil-Saudi business project cost more than $1 billion to construct.

In addition, 12 percent of Mobil's imported crude oil came from Iraq before Saddam Hussein decided to annex Kuwait's oilfields in August 1990, in his failed attempt to increase his bargaining power with Mobil and the other transnational oil companies at that time.

Coincidentally, in 1990 a member of Mobil's board of directors, J.Richard Munro, was also the then-chairman of the Executive Committee of Time Warner's corporate board.

Mobil had long been represented on the corporate board of Time magazine's parent company. As early as 1967, for example, Mobil's president at that time, Rawleigh Warner, also sat on Time Inc.'s board of directors.

Despite its historic ties to Time magazine, Mobil was not reluctant during the 1980s to take legal action against U.S. mass media institutions over which it had no control. According to a 1988 book by former Time-Life Broadcast Chairman Richard Clurman, entitled Beyond Malice: The Media's Years of Reckoning, in the 1980s Mobil created a new $10 million insurance policy for its top 100 executives "to cover their costs should any of them find a reason to sue for libel" any U.S. mass media institutions that print articles about them which the Mobil executives don't like.

Newsweek magazine's parent company, The Washington Post, was sued for $100 million by then-Mobil President William Tavoulareas in the 1980s, for example, after the newspaper printed a front-page article which, according to Clurman's Beyond Malice book, charged Mobil's then-president "with setting up his 24-year-old son in a multimillion dollar oil shipping business, which profited mightily from its special relationship with Mobil."

In 1987, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. found the Washington Post story on Mobil's then-president "substantially true" and ruled that "an adversarial stance"--even in relation to Mobil--"is fully consistent with professional investigative reporting." When the then-Mobil president appealed this court decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to even consider reviewing the anti-Mobil, pro-freedom-of-the-press verdict.

(Downtown 10/24/90)

65th Anniversary of Nazi Germany's Military Defeat

This May marks the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany's military defeat in Europe, following its launching of a world war which claimed the lives of over 50 milliion people, 50 percent of whom were civilians. After Nazi Germany's military surrender, Hitler's successor as Nazi party fuehrer--Martin Bormann--apparently "made it to South America," according to Martin Bormann: Nazi In Exile by Paul Manning. In 1981, this same book noted the following about the state of the exiled Nazi Party organization in the early 1980s:

"As the Fuehrer in exile guards the party treasury, and keeps a close eye on the investments and corporations controlled through stock ownership by the organization, the leadership in position today remains relatively young and viable...

"The Bormann organization continues to wield enormous influence. Wealth continues to flow into the treasuries of its corporate entities in South America, the United States and Europe. Vastly diversified, it is said to be the largest landowner in South America and through stockholdings controls German heavy industry."

Some of the former Nazis and their collaborators who didn't quickly change into civilian clothes and sneak into Argentina apparently ended up being hired by the U.S. government, after Nazi Germany surrendered militarily. As Blowback: America's Recruitment Of Nazis And Its Effects On The Cold War by Christopher Simpson observed:

"The fact is, U.S. intelligence agencies did know--or had good reason to suspect--that many contract agents that they hired during the cold war had committed crimes against humanity on behalf of the Nazis. The CIA, the State Department, and U.S. Army Intelligence each created special programs for the specific purpose of bringing selected former Nazis and collaborators to the United States. Other projects protected such people by placing them on U.S. payrolls overseas."

(Downtown 4/19/95)

40 Years Ago: Kent State and Jackson State Massacres

May 4, 2010 will mark the 40th anniversary of the firing by Ohio National Guard troops of 67 shots on the campus of Kent State University, after the Guard broke up a student anti-war rally there. As a result of this shooting, four Kent State students were killed and nine students were wounded. Ten days after the Kent State massacre, two African-Americans (Phillip Gibbs and James Green) were killed and 12 were wounded on the campus of Jackson State College on Mississippi, after local police started firing near a student dormitory. Following the Kent State and Jackson State massacres, many U.S. campuses were simultaneously shut down for the rest of the month by mass student protests.

The Kent State massacre came to be symbolized by a photograph of Jeff Miller's dead body, beneath the tortured face of a long-haired woman with outstretched arms. Miller had grown up on Long Island. According to The Kent State Coverup by Joseph Keiner and James Munves:

"Jeff Miller had transferred to Kent State in Jan. 1970, just four months before he was killed. He was a gregarious young man...He had gone to Woodstock and suddenly adopted the youth culture of the late 1960s, wearing a fringed jacket, beads, and headband and spending long hours in his room practicing on the drums.

"His mother saw him off to Kent State an the end of the winter-break, just before his 20th birthday at the end of March..."

After Miller was killed by the Ohio National Guard troops, an Ohio National Guard captain apparently planted a gun on Miller's dead body so the troops could claim they shot Miller in self-defense.

(Downtown 4/19/95)

40th Anniversary of Fred Hampton's Murder

Dec. 4, 2009 marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Illinois Black Panther Party [BPP] leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago. The 1993 book Still Black, Still Strong noted that Hampton and Clark were "murdered in Chicago by police raiders from State Attorney's Office, in cooperation with the FBI," "Hampton, 21, was drugged beforehand by an agent provocateur who had infiltrated the BPP," and "Clark, 22, was killed as he answered a knock on the apartment door." In the same book, an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad appeared, in which the former New York Black Panther Party leader recalled:

"At first it was reported that it was a shoot-out between the Black Panthers and the police, and the police were just defending themselves. But subsequently it was found out that there was only one shot fired by the Black Panther Party members who were in the house...So Fred Hampton's murder became the clearest example of the escalation of the repression of the Black Panther Party."

In an April 27, 1969 speech, Hampton had reminded his audience that "you can jail a revolutionary, but you can't jail the revolution" and "you can murder a liberator, but you can't murder liberation."

(Downtown 11/23/94)

Interview With `Busy Dying' Author Hilton Obenzinger--Conclusion

Besides writing the book, Busy Dying,

http://www.obenzinger.com/books_busyDying.html

Hilton Obenzinger is a long-time Palestine solidarity activist who now teaches writing at Stanford University. Following is the text of a recent email interview with Busy Dying author Obenzinger. (See below for parts 1 to 6).

In recent years, U.S. university professors like Norman Finkelstein and Joel Kovel, who have written books that were critical of Israeli militarism and expressed support for Palestinian national self-determination rights, have ended up losing their academic jobs--apparently due to pressure from the Zionist lobby in the United States. How would you characterize the role that the Zionist lobby presently plays on U.S. university campuses in 2009?

Hilton Obenzinger: The campaign by Zionists to purge campuses of critical views has been going on for decades, and it’s shameful. Finkelstein and Kovel are by no means the first. For example, Breira—Choice--a Jewish peace group--was crushed in the Seventies with McCarthyite type attacks on those who worked in Jewish communal organizations.

I was on a list of people to ban from speaking on campuses in the early eighties – I was honored to be on the same list with Edward Said and Rabbi Elmer Berger and Noam Chomsky, probably the only time I would be on the same list with such luminaries.

When Jewish students at Stanford organized to support the divestment campaign, they were banned from meeting at Hillel until they denounced the “apartheid” label of Israel. They refused, and it’s the same old story.

The Zionist lobby has been focusing on campuses since the late Seventies because they correctly determined that it’s necessary to prevent critical approaches, alternate theoretical and historical frameworks, from becoming legitimate. They want only fringe groups or actual anti-Semites to become the critics of Israel so that they can smear everyone else as “anti-Semites” or “self-hating Jews.”

Now that they have attacked well-known academics like Tony Judt they are even crazier than ever, and even many who consider themselves pro-Israel think they have gone too far. Nonetheless, when you believe they can’t get more fanatical and shrill, they pull something even crazier else off.

I think their approach may be similar to Israel’s military thinking in their attack on Gaza: The military wanted to be regarded as a crazy animal, capable of doing anything, going totally bananas. That was on purpose, the lesson being that if Israel believes it’s provoked, it will unleash widespread, wild violence, and civilians will be chewed up in the IDF's jaws.

Likewise on the intellectual level. It seems absurd to attack Judt or Jimmy Carter, people who are not radical at all, but they are following that wild animal strategy, and any mild-mannered critic will be blown away. When I heard that Netanyahu called Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod “self-hating Jews” because Obama called for a settlement freeze, I thought that it’s consistent with that wild animal strategy.

Academics do resist, and there have been successes. But the fact is that the campaign has been debilitating, and, once again, a distraction from Israel’s on-going colonial project.

My bottom line is simple and not even ideological: Through everything in the past 40 years, Israel keeps doing one thing: they keep building settlements in land occupied in 1967. Rain or snow, storm or drought – intifadas or Oslos – they keep building gated, segregated housing projects on stolen land. Can professors and students object to such outlaw behavior without getting smeared?

If readers find that their local university and local public libraries did not purchase copies of your `Busy Dying' book, how can they obtain copies of your book?

Hilton Obenzinger: They can order from the usual outlets, such as Powell’s Books or Amazon, or they order from the publisher (CHAX). They can also go to a web site a friend made of my work. There’s information on how to order `Busy Dying’ along with other books, including `This Passover or the Next I Will Never Be in Jerusalem’, directly from me. The website is www.obenzinger.com