submitted by a NZ reader:
Heaven knows what the New Zealand SAS are doing in Afghanistan
The British journalist Robert Fisk visiting New Zealand this week to promote his new book spoke to a local journalist in Wellington about western military presence in Middle East:
Concerning New Zealand’s special forces, who are based in Afghanistan, he said:
“Heaven knows what they (the SAS) are doing and Afghanistan is a disaster anyway.”
He said New Zealand was under no threat from any country in the Middle East.
“There are no Syrian soldiers on the streets of Wellington.
“(Western nations) have no business to be there, historically it is a disaster. We never have any business there, we’re always going to the Middle East with huge armies.
The morally castrated New Zealand “Defence Minister”, Phil Goff, immediately declared: “I’d say Mr Fisk should talk to the Hazara people whose civic leaders were executed in the market place, whose 2000-year-old cultural heritage, the Bamyan statutes of Buddha, were destroyed.”
Ah, so the New Zealand SAS are not there to protect the poppy fields and the thriving opium business and the drug warlords, they are there playing Bamyan Buddha dolls with the local kids!
The following is an excerpt from The SAS (SPECIAL AIR SERVICE): Prince Philip’s manager of terrorism, by Joseph Brewda.
SAS methods and procedures
According to the British Army handbook, the SAS is “particularly suited, trained, and equipped for counter-revolutionary operations,” with a specialization in “infiltration,” “sabotage,” “assassination,” as well as “liaison with, organization, training, and control of friendly guerrilla forces operating against the common enemy.” From its inception in World War II, Special Air Services was detailed to run sabotage behind enemy lines and to organize popular revolt, at first in North Africa, and then in the Balkans, where another Stirling cousin, Fitzroy Maclean, ran British operations.
At the end of the war, SAS was disbanded, but it was soon revived to crush the Malay insurgency in Malaysia, and the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya. The principle employed was to take over the insurgency from within, and use it to destroy the native population. In his 1960 book Gangs and Countergangs, Col. Frank Kitson boasted that the British were covertly leading several large-scale Mau Mau units, and that many, if not all Mau Mau units had been synthetically created by the colonial authorities. As a result of this practice, 22 whites were killed during the insurgency, as compared to 20,000 natives.
Based on this principle, SAS emphasized recruitment of natives, as it received increasing responsibilities for overseeing counterinsurgency within the postwar empire, as well as organizing insurgencies elsewhere. In New Zealand, 30% of SAS was drawn from the indigenous Maori tribes, later supplemented by Sarawak tribesmen from Indonesia. By the 1960s, New Zealand SAS was active throughout Southeast Asia, organizing tribal revolts against the Burmese government, and stirring similar movements in Northeast India. Similarly, SAS squadrons based in Rhodesia ran the 1960s tribal separatist insurgency in Zaire. They later recruited and deployed natives in terrorist raids in Mozambique and Zambia.
Today, there are three known SAS regiments, comprising 4,500 highly trained commandos in total. Training exercises for 15-man teams simulate terrorist assaults, in order, it is said, to “know the mind of the terrorist.” Such teams are often sent abroad, to train British Commonwealth and other military units in the techniques of terrorist assault, as well as the use of tribal auxiliaries in covert warfare. Through such means, SAS has built an extensive terrorist control capability, especially in its former colonies. Its soldiers currently serve officially in some 30 countries. Full article is available here.
Afghanistan, Opium and the Taliban
JALALABAD, Afghanistan (February 15, 2001 8:19 p.m. EST)
(Source)
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has nearly wiped out opium production in Afghanistan — once the world’s largest producer — since banning poppy cultivation last summer.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation’s largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
“We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,” said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier — a sea of blood-red poppies. (Full report)
End of Taliban will bring rise in heroin
By Richard Lloyd Parry in Islamabad
The Independent (Source)
Date: 19 October 2001
The defeat of the Taliban would result in a surge in opium production, which has beenvirtually halted in Afghanistan by the Kabul regime over the last year, United Nations officials have warned.
A new UN survey reveals that the Taliban have completed one of the quickest and most successful drug elimination programmes in history.
Vice creeps back to Kandahar. Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press – (Source) Image may be subject to copyright.
The area of land given over to growing opium poppies in 2001 fell by 91 per cent compared with the year before, according to the UN Drug Control Programme’s (UNDCP) annual survey of Afghanistan. Production of fresh opium, the raw material for heroin, went down by an unprecedented 94 per cent, from 3,276 tonnes to 185 tonnes.
Almost all Afghan opium this year came out of territories controlled by America’s ally in the assault on Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance. Because of a ban on poppy farming, only one in 25 of Afghanistan’s opium poppies was being grown in Taliban areas. (Full story)
Fisk on Israel-led US Foreign policy:
Having studied for 30 years the United States’ Middle East policies, I can tell you that regardless of whether Barack Obama or John McCain won the upcoming American presidential election, the new president would not bring peace to the area, Fisk said.
“Every time there’s an American presidential election the Arabs say `Ah, maybe there’ll be change in the Middle East. Maybe America will be fairer, maybe it will concern itself with the security of the Arabs as well as the Israelis’.
“And then afterwards there’ll be a war in the Middle East and the President will call upon both sides to exercise restraint and there’ll be billions of dollars of weapons sent to Israel to bomb Lebanon, or whoever they are bombing.
“My experience over 32 years is whoever’s in the White House, the bombs go on falling. And they will.”
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