20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

In North Africa, another notable U.S. adversary was a recurrent target of Islamist violence in the 1990s. Specifically, al-Qaeda assets were directed against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. A whistleblower from Britain’s MI5 revealed that, in 1996, MI6 officers attempted to use Islamist militants to assassinate the Libyan head of state. The operation failed, with Qaddafi unharmed and a number of militants killed in the process.[37]
Muammar Qaddafi, a major target of the “deep state” after he nationalized Libya’s oil. [Source: biography.com]
The Crucial Pre-9/11 Years
Strobe Talbott [Source: wikipedia.org]
Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, there was disagreement over Central Asia in the mid-to-late 1990s. A relatively dovish side was represented by Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott. In a July 1997 speech, Talbott explicitly warned against any sort of Central Asian “Great Game,” proposing instead the promotion of mutually beneficial cooperative arrangements in the region.[38]
Also in that same year, Pentagon and CIA elements were using NATO to effect, contra-Talbott and the State Department, a “forward strategy” in Central Asia. Under the auspices of the NATO Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, the U.S. military nurtured “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region” by launching a series of training exercises with Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz military forces.[39]
As we wrote in December 2020,

These CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment of U.S. combat forces. A deputy assistant secretary of defense, Catherine Kelleher, cited “the presence of enormous energy resources” as a justification for American military involvement.[40] Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard singled out for its geopolitical importance,[41] became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises.[42]

NATO collaboration with Uzbek soldiers as part of the Orwellian named Partnership for Peace Program. [Source: nato.int]
While the energy angle is clearly discernible in these operations, counterterror was also a pretext for U.S. intelligence activities in the region. Building from the foundational 1997 arrangement, the CIA had been working with the U.S. military and Uzbek military/intelligence forces with the ostensible aim of apprehending Osama bin Laden in neighboring Afghanistan.[43]
Uzbek soldiers during parachute training at Fort Bragg in 1997. The country’s leader at the time, Islam Karimov, was known for his brutality. [Source: wikipedia.com]
In hindsight, 1998 was the year when matters became even stranger. To put a finer point on the energy angle: Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney that year declared that he “[could] not think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”[44]
Dick Cheney [Source: edition.cnn.com]
The U.S. fixation on Central Asia transcended partisanship. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated before an audience in Tashkent, “While you are geographically distant from the United States, you are very closely connected to our most vital national interests.” Presumably, Albright was obliquely referring to the $8 billion that U.S. oil majors had invested in Central Asian oil and gas.[45]
Petroleum tanks in Kazakhstan. [Source: asiasociety.org]
However, the U.S. military and intelligence presence in the region increasingly came to be overtly predicated on counterterror operations. Yet, at the same time—similar to the U.S. operations in Bosnia a few years earlier—the ostensible Arab Afghan/al-Qaeda arch-enemies of the U.S. were in the Balkans acting in ways that furthered U.S. geopolitical goals.
Soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). [Source: ocnal.com]
Specifically, al-Qaeda forces were working in concert with the U.S.-backed terrorist/mafia organization known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). U.S. military intervention in Kosovo took place through most of 1998 and the first half of 1999. Interpol in 1999 reported that an elite KLA unit in Kosovo was being led by Muhammad al-Zawahiri—a top al Qaeda lieutenant and the brother of current al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.[46]
Muhammad al-Zawahiri [Source: counterextremism.com]
The Zawahiri-KLA issue is something that the 9/11 Commission should have investigated and explained. Besides the Kosovo-al-Qaeda angle, an honest investigation would have looked into the U.S.-Azeri-al-Qaeda connections. The links represent important historical background, given that Baku, Azerbaijan, was one of the main hubs for al-Qaeda around the time of the August 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.[47]
The 9/11 Commission, pictured above, omitted many important things from its investigation. [Source: lawfareblog.com]
While all of this was taking place in the years preceding 9/11, the U.S. and its oil majors were trying to strike a deal for a pipeline through Afghanistan. Notably—and as we detailed in our previous article—the Taliban failure to arrive at a workable pipeline deal acceptable to the U.S. coincided with further U.S. military and intelligence operations geared toward Afghanistan.
In 1999, two CIA counterterrorism officials—Cofer Black and Richard Blee—negotiated a deal with Uzbekistan.[48] This new liaison agreement apparently expanded upon the 1997 arrangement and expanded the targets to include not just bin Laden, but the Taliban government as well.[49]

• Cofer Black [Source: kyivpost.com]
  
• [Source: historycommons.org]
  

Also, in 1999, CIA’s Richard Blee met with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and agreed to lobby Washington for increased support for Massoud. Massoud’s remote mountain redoubt of Panjshir was vital to American planning, because by this time it was the only major area not yet dominated by the Taliban. But Massoud himself presented problems to many in Washington.  
Ahmad Shah Massoud [Source: sharddhuhere.wordpress.com]