AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! in Exile's War and Peace Report, as we broadcast just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers once stood. I'm Amy Goodman.

Long after Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1979, the country remained in violent upheaval. Many Afghans who opposed the fundamentalist Islamic regime of the Taliban, which took power in 1996, support the Northern Alliance party, or the mujahideen. But others say the Northern Alliance is responsible for as many human rights abuses and physical destruction as the Taliban and the invading Soviet forces are. The Afghan Northern Alliance is made up of an ethnically and religiously disparate group of rebel movements, mainly non-Pashtun ethnic groups. Pashtuns are the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan.

General Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the alliance, was killed earlier this month, just two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Massoud made a series of alliances with former opponents, some of whom the Taliban had driven into exile. Massoud’s death might well have meant the end of the alliance, if the bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon had not inspired possible U.S. moves to take military action against Osama bin Laden and his Taliban backers. The alliance’s political leaders are confident now that their enemy will be eliminated, and have stated that they’re willing to fight alongside the Americans against the Taliban.

We’re joined now by Noor Delawari, who fled Afghanistan for the U.S. the year Afghanistan’s monarchy was overthrown. In 1993, Noor Delawari traveled to Italy with California Congressmember Dana Rohrabacher to meet the former Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who ruled Afghanistan for 40 years. At the meeting, Afghanistan’s former king launched a peace initiative for Afghanistan which describes its aims as ending the Afghan conflict, appointing a head of state and establishing a transitional government.

We’re joined on the phone now by Noor Delawari, an advisory board member of the Afghanistan Foundation, as well as Sonali Kolhatkar, who’s vice president of the Afghan Women’s Mission, and Jim Ingalls, on the board of directors of the Afghan Women’s Mission.

Well, let’s start off with Noor Delawari. We did just hear in the last few days that the U.S. government had sent representatives to Italy to meet with the king to talk about — and this was reported in British newspapers — the possibility of the king returning and being supported by the Northern Alliance and taking power in a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan. Is that true?

NOOR DELAWARI: That is true. There has been a meeting — still there’s a meeting going on in Rome with the former king. There are representatives from the United Nations, and also a group of U.S. congressmen are about to go to meet with the former king this week. The former king himself has never said that he will go to Afghanistan. However, he has introduced a mechanism, the Loya Jirga, which is an Afghan traditional way of electing — resolving major issues in the country. And that has been tested for almost a thousand years. So, that, we believe, is very crucial at this time, while the Northern Alliance, I think, will help, particularly the Americans, to keep the collateral damage at minimum, or the life of those American service military personnel who might be landing in Afghanistan. They need logistic help from someone. The Northern Alliance will be helpful.

However, I, as an Afghan American, do not believe that the Northern Alliance would be a solution to come and take over and offer a government for the people. However, they, in the past, have agreed to this process of Loya Jirga, or the Grand Assembly. I think their help at this time will be meaningful. Also, they have, you know, without — I heard some people, they don’t like them, you know, for whatever reason. Let’s say that without Northern Alliance, today Taliban would have had the entire country, and it would have been very, very difficult for anybody to go after the terrorists in Afghanistan.

And we have the — as far as I’m concerned, the terrorists, bin Laden and his 20,000 people, as John Cooley said, they had — their root is back in mid-'80s. But particularly, that's something I don’t hear that much, that the Taliban are the products of certain foreign countries’ plans, and going back to mid-’80s, creating these madrassas in Pakistan. The purpose of these madrassas were to train Talib for — at that time. So, these young men were taken from the Afghan refugee camps and put into these kind of crash courses, not Islamic, but militant Islamic schools. So they would use Islam against the Soviet Union at that time, against communism.

So, when the Soviet Union ended, and then these Talibs were all there, during the time when they established these madrassas in Pakistan. And it was an agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia. I think John Cooley touched on that. There are money coming to helping the resistance in Afghanistan. Part of the money was coming to earmark for the establishment of these schools in Pakistan. The man who was — the money was coming from private sectors and collected in mosques and places in Saudi Arabia. And that money was being distributed to these young Talibs, to the madrassas. By whom? By Osama bin Laden. And so, he had his contacts established at that time, when the Soviet Union so prematurely withdrew from Afghanistan, because, if you go back, their documents shows that the United States and other countries who were helping the mujahideen, they were thinking that this will go for a long time, up to 20, 25 years.

AMY GOODMAN: Noor Delawari, I want to bring Jim Ingalls into the discussion — 

NOOR DELAWARI: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: — on the board of directors of Afghan Women’s Mission. You wrote a piece in Z Magazine about the Northern Alliance. Can you talk a little about your perspective on the Northern Alliance and whether you think the U.S. should support it?

JIM INGALLS: Hi. Yes. Well, my piece in Z Magazine was actually about the sanctions on Afghanistan. And what it — one of the conclusions that resulted was that the Northern Alliance was essentially given tacit approval by the U.N. Security Council in imposing sanctions on only the Taliban and not the opposing factions, who are also guilty of just as many human rights abuses and commission of violence within Afghanistan.

One thing that I think maybe listeners aren’t aware is that the Northern Alliance has been essentially given a very good PR in an interesting way by the U.S. government and by its media, because, as John Cooley mentioned, during the 1980s, the Northern Alliance were separate factions of the mujahideen, which were fighting for the United States and others to end the Soviet occupation. When the Soviets left in 1989, the mujahideen groups began attacking the city of Kabul, attacking other parts of Afghanistan that were held by the Soviets’ puppet regime. And soon after, when the puppet regime collapsed, one of the groups seized Kabul, Massoud’s group, under President Rabbani, and the groups, most prominently Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s group, began attacking Kabul. And Kabul, at the end of the Soviet occupation, was still standing. By 1994, it was completely in rubble, and that was after mujahideen rocket shelling, using weapons that the U.S. supplied. And the U.S. government essentially ignored it. This is when, according to Cooley, the U.S. government kind of abandoned the Afghan — the mujahideen. At the same time as abandoning them, the U.S. media coverage completely dropped, by a factor of about five — I’ve measured it — five articles to one. In the time when the Soviets were there, the media coverage was tremendous. When the mujahideen were destroying Kabul, media coverage was near zero. So, this is, effectively, a PR for the Northern Alliance.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you want to respond to that, Noor Delawari?

NOOR DELAWARI: Yes, of course, because, first of all, mujahideen were all forces fighting the Soviet Union. There was no — Ahmad Shah Massoud was the strongest mujahid who fought the Soviet Union independently, particularly independent of Pakistan. What you’re referring to, certain atrocities committed, yes, I am aware, and there’s been wide — it was publicized, that the government which was responsible to look after Afghanistan after the Soviets’ withdrawal was made in Pakistan, in Lahore. It was sent to Kabul under the command — under the command of President Mojaddedi. And then, Massoud or the Northern Alliance had very little to do with the security of people in Kabul. Massoud was named at that time as the defense minister. In the same time, when they came to Kabul, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, which was another head of one of the factions in Pakistan, he came and started to take over from the — from, first, Mojaddedi, and then Rabbani’s people. But let’s be clear on it: There were two groups of mujahideen. The ones who were — the real mujahideens were those from Afghanistan, like Massoud. We should not hold him responsible for the killing, for the atrocities committed. Let’s go back at this time and in recent times, that Northern Alliance, which is made of several groups of mujahideens, some of these were not part of the government which was established in Pakistan.

AMY GOODMAN: Sonali — 

NOOR DELAWARI: So, the —

AMY GOODMAN: Let me get a response from Sonali Kolhatkar, vice president of the Afghan Women’s Mission, as to the human rights record of the Northern Alliance and how it’s perceived on the ground in Afghanistan.

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Yeah. Well, you know, definitely, as Mr. Delawari says, Massoud was more independent of Pakistan than any of the mujahideen factions. He was also the most moderate of all the mujahideen factions. It’s important to note that the party that got the most funding from the United States, about half the funding and weapons and training, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s party, who was the most extreme. And I can talk a little bit about that later on.

But coming back to Massoud, you know, he’s certainly not innocent of crimes against humanity. They aren’t as vast as the rest of the mujahideen. But just an example, in the year following the takeover of Kabul or the entrance of Massoud into Kabul in 1992, in February of '93, Massoud attacked Kabul, bombing Hekmatyar's bases. And, in fact, some of the worst atrocities have been reported to be committed on February 11th, where they entered a suburb of ethnic Hazara people, killing up to a thousand civilians, beheading people, shoving them down wells. I mean, this is documented in several books. One particular one that I can name is Michael Griffin’s book, Reaping the Whirlwind. And, you know, certainly he’s not guilty of killing tens of thousands of people, but, you know, on the order of a few hundred to a thousand, and probably more than that. And, you know, this is often referred to as his biggest mistake kind of thing. So, you know, and he was a very, very charismatic figure, certainly a leader in terms of the way in which he tried to get the mujahideen to work with one another and to form some sort of coalition. But I think it’s very important to just be clear here and get a perspective on who these people were. These are guerrilla fighters that were funded by the United States to fight off the Soviets, not in any way trained or prepared to rule a country or in any way prepared to kind of — to be responsible for the country, for running the country as a whole.

And it’s interesting to think of what’s going to happen when the Taliban are beaten, if they are beaten, because you just have to go back and look at what was happening before the Taliban came into power. In 1996, when they came into power, the four years preceding that, the mujahideen were fighting one another in a terrible way, as Jim mentioned, really destroyed Kabul, about 45,000 civilians killed. This is happening before the Taliban came into power. And this kind of destruction, this kind of complete meltdown of infrastructure allowed, in a sense, the Taliban to come and take over with the ease that they did. What’s to say that these people aren’t going to turn upon themselves and fight one another once more, now that they’ve got the backing of the United States once more? We see sort of this repeat of history. And the Afghan people —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Sonali, we’re going to have to continue this discussion in the coming days, and we’ll also be having you on to talk about women in Afghanistan, an extended segment that we will be doing tomorrow. But that does it for today. Sonali Kolhatkar and Jim Ingalls are with the Afghan Women’s Mission, Noor Delawari, an advisory board member of the Afghanistan Foundation and president of Delawari international banking system and chair of the Afghanistan Relief Organization.

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