Hillary wants us to ignore the dream of MLK and judge her not by the content of her character, but by her gender. These are some of the reasons why:
In the 1990s, with Hillary Clinton as First Lady and “partner in power” of Bill Clinton, the US supported the efforts of oil company Unocal to cooperate with the Taliban to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan. Meetings were being held for that purpose up to September 11, 2001. There was also a telephone company interested in Afghanistan.
Unocal’s pipeline project would have brought natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan by crossing through Afghanistan.
Unocal CEO John Imle estimated that the company spent between $15 and $20 million on its Central Asia gas pipeline (CentGas) project, including on efforts to lobby the Taliban.
Unocal also equipped the Taliban with advanced technologies, such as satellite phones.
“…Unocal –– had very close relations with the Taliban. They took their leaders on junkets to their home bases, they gave them substantial help in the form of office equipment, and they gave medical treatment to many of their leaders. Unocal set up a training school for the Taliban in Kandahar.”
“[W]hen a Clinton official was reminded that the Taliban persecuted women, he said, “We can live with that.”
A “strong campaign [was] waged by rights activists in America, particularly the Feminist Majority led by Eleanor Smeal and Mavis Leno, which lobbied Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright very fiercely to stop the Unocal project and come out against the Taliban’s repression of women. [But] the Clinton administration viewed the Taliban’s rise favorably… [because, in addition to other strategic reasons] the U.S. wanted to build this pipeline. There was a lot of support from the Pentagon and the State Department for the Unocal effort.”
The result of the campaign? Silence from Hillary Clinton as her oligarch cronies courted, supported, and coordinated with the Taliban.
Mysteriously,
“…as it became clearer that Taliban policy-makers were beginning to lean toward Bridas [a non-US oil company] by late 1997, the Clinton administration responded by suddenly paying heed to human rights/women’s rights groups who had been protesting Taliban conduct for the past two years.”
This is, as Professor Deepa Kumar illustrates, “colonial feminism”: pretending to care about women’s rights, human rights, etc., when it serves the purposes of imperio-terrorism.
“In November 1997, after years of relative quiet, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly condemned the Taliban’s treatment of women… [but] it was only when absolute [US] control of that oil was challenged that the Taliban regime was openly discredited…” (ibid.)
“[In] August 1998, … the US embassy bombings in East Africa (attributed to Usama bin Laden) prompted [Bill] Clinton to… call for the Taliban to expel Bin Laden. Interestingly, the latter’s presence in Afghanistan since 1996 had not stalled the courtship of the previous years” (ibid).
The US had also been sanctioning Pakistan, but Bill removed the sanctions to befriend Pakistan so the planned pipeline could run through its territory to the coast. (ibid)
In 2001, Hillary finally criticized one US citizen for “supporting” the Taliban: John Walker Lindh, a former US soldier who was tortured in US custody (see here). Clinton made this statement long before his trial, itself a major ethical violation (also committed, for example, by Obama against Chelsea Manning). Research indicates that this poor soldier is the only person Hillary the elitist has condemned as a “traitor” for association with the Taliban. She not only does not condemn, but goes out of her way to support, US government officials and corporate executives who, on record and openly under her husband’s regime, supported and worked with the Taliban, and in fact she made efforts to do so herself.
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Afghanistan had been stable in the late 1970s and had featured strong women’s rights, until the US, as it did in Nicaragua and many other places, assembled a proxy army to conquer the country. After intentionally contributing towards the deaths of about two million people (a high US official, Brzezinski, said the US wanted to give the USSR, which was backing the stable Afghan government, “its Vietnam”) and helping to bring the Taliban to power, including through printing propaganda, and then, when the Taliban was uncooperative, pushing it out of power and killing thousands, the US got an agreement from the newly US-installed Karzai dictatorship to build gas pipelines running from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, to Pakistan’s coast. More info here.
For this next phase of the pipeline endeavor, Hillary Clinton, now secretary of state, offered her personal guarantee of US government backing to Chevron to increase Chevron’s credibility in pursuing the Afghanistan gas pipeline project, while she publicly advocated for a massive increase in the US invasion of Afghanistan. During her tenure, the US increased its presence from 30,000 to 100,000 militants or more, killing thousands in the process.
“…both Chevron and Exxon-Mobil … expressed interest in TAPI [the pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan].” However, Turkmenistan wanted a firm signal that the US government was committed. That signal came from Hillary Clinton. The president of Turkmenistan received “a letter backing Chevron’s project from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”(Wall Street Journal)
After Clinton guaranteed US government backing for Chevron to build the pipeline, Obama sent his own personal letter to the president of Turkmenistan, backing Chevron and “emphasizing a common interest in helping develop Afghanistan and expressing [his] support for TAPI [pipeline] and his desire for a major U.S. firm to construct it.” (WSJ)
The Taliban later came back to prominence, and Hillary Clinton again tried to work with them to push through the pipeline deal.
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Considering her record of plutocratic terrorism against Afghanistan and identical record against Libya (which is revealed in leaked emails) and numerous other countries, is it any wonder that Hillary has always supported US genocide against Iraqis, who live in one of the most oil-rich countries in the world?
Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Updates on Twitter. Author’sessay ‘The Agility of Tyranny: Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter’.
