U.S. Politics:
The War Room
Afghanistan Interim Govt.
Dec 30, 2001 Eclipse

Karzai To Head Afghanistan

December 24, 1957
12:00 pm AFST -4:00
Kandahar, Afghanistan
31N32 065E30
No Birth Time Known

Interim Govt. Agreement
December 5, 2001
9:55 am CET -1:00
Bonn, Germany
50N44, 007E05
Asc: 2 Capricorn

Commentary

Starcats, December 21, 2001: Capricorn Ingress

At the time of this writing, Hamid Karzai's installation as head of Afghanistan's Interim Government is about two hours away. Kabul, at 34N31, is just about at the same latitude as Santa Monica, California, my city of residence. Using my compass to orient myself Eastward, I can just about aim myself towards the center of Kabul. I do it for this reason: to send Mr. Karzai my prayers. As reported today on MSNBC news, Warlords from surrounding provinces have already threatened Karzai by phone, and promise to start fighting (renewed Civil War??) in Afghanistan if certain Lords are not given choice positions in the Interim Government. Whether Mr. Karzai likes it or not, the fate of Afghanistan's fragile seed of cohesion rests upon the swiftness and deftness of political compromises Karzai must make.

The Interim Government is born at the Capricorn Ingress (Dec 22, 2001 in Afghanistan); resonates with December 30th's Lunar Eclipse (Cancer/Capricorn axis); and names Karzai "wise man," or "Senex." [Karzai's Saturn ruled Capricorn Sun takes the brunt of all this]. His photo (above) is the epitome of Saturn. Karzai looks as trustworthy as Captain Picard, bald pate and all. As to whether Karzai is disposed towards violating "The Prime Directive" remains to be seen. If so, thou shalt cast no stones. The USA has violated more Prime Directives than the Borg. [Hang tough and read the news articles. Starcats doesn't give you the Barbie and Ken version of anything!]

Pakistan aka The Romulans

I give you this from World Net Daily:

FROM DEBKA INTELLIGENCE FILES
Al-Qaida fighters
airlifted to safety
Daring 5-night operation rescued 3,000 terrorists from Afghanistan

It was just before midnight Nov. 21 when Russian-made Antonov aircraft without markings began landing at the bombed-out airport of Konduz in northern Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance's conquest of the Afghan city was still five days away, and a small group of Pakistani military intelligence officers and soldiers – all of whom had been serving with the Taliban – waited anxiously on a runway, together with a large number of Pakistanis wounded in battle lying on blankets. The planes were coming to take them home.

Around 5 p.m. earlier that day, U.S. bombings of the airport had suddenly stopped. As they waited for the airlift, the Pakistanis understood the rescue of their men trapped in Konduz had been set up in a silent agreement between their government, or commanding officers, and the U.S. Two planes were to touch down every night to pick them up until the evacuation was finished.

But as the airlift began, Pakistani air crews and their passengers were astonished to see they had company on the runways of Konduz – a second fleet of Antonov transports was running a parallel airlift on some mysterious mission.

Military sources have solved the mystery: The planes belonged to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. Under cover of the Pakistani airlift, 3,000 of the group's fighters were secretly lifted to safety from the besieged towns of Konduz and Khandabad about 15 miles to the south. The double airlift lasted five nights. The planes arriving to ferry Pakistani fighters home were closely shadowed by a phantom airlift extracting al-Qaida personnel.

The rescued Pakistanis were flown to air bases in northwest and central Pakistan. The al-Qaida men were taken long distance to the Persian Gulf emirates, landing, according to Gulf sources, in Abu Dhabi and the Somali town of Baidoa.

The al-Qaida fighters were described by several sources in Abu Dhabi as arriving hungry, in rags and without identifying documents. Asked who they were, they claimed to be Pakistani construction workers who had paid out all their savings to reach the Gulf in search of employment. But they soon disappeared, trucked to the Saudi and Yemen frontiers and apparently put down to cross on foot.

On Tuesday, Dec. 18, Yemeni special forces engaged a group of just-landed senior al-Qaida operatives in the al Husoun tribal region of Marib but met fierce resistance and were repulsed after losing 17 men.

At Baidoa, Somalia, too, immediately after landing, al-Qaida partisans mingled with the local Somalis living in thousands of straw and mud huts in the airport environs. Then the trucks came and drove a batch to the Somali-Kenyan frontier. They later continued to Uganda. Others moved through the villages scattered on Somalia's Indian Ocean coast before they, too, disappeared.

The al-Qaida evacuation of Konduz got away behind American backs. But when a similar airlift began two weeks ago at the international airport of the last Taliban-al-Qaida fortress of Kandahar, the Americans caught on in time to stall it by bombing the runways. There was one last al-Qaida escape route that the United States did not manage to plug: across the 1,400-mile long frontier into Pakistan. There, they were driven to small airfields and airstrips in the northwest and flown to the Gulf and Somalia.

According to intelligence sources, U.S. and Pakistani agents are investigating the source of the reports claiming that al-Qaida and bin Laden had concealed themselves in the Tora Bora cave complex and the White Mountains abutting on the Pakistani frontier – to fight to the last man. Those reports may have been part of a deliberate deception. It is now clear that no more than 200 to 300 al-Qaida fighters actually hid up in Tora Bora as bait to misdirect the Pashtun and U.S. Special Forces hunters. Small groups moved from cave to cave to keep the searchers and U.S. bombers occupied and unaware of the main body of the al-Qaida force, which meanwhile escaped into Pakistan.

They, too, were flown on to Abu Dhabi and Somalia. One source even suggests that last week's daylight suicide attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi may too have been part and parcel of al-Qaida's grand escape scheme. According to this theory, the Kashmiri terror group Lashkar-e-Toiba's raid, in which 14 people died, including the five assailants, was intended as a diversion.

Lashkar-e-Toiba is known to be controlled by al-Qaida and pro-Taliban elements in Pakistani military intelligence. The suicide mission was not intended, as India claimed, to carry out a massacre but, according to terror experts, to raise military tensions between India and Pakistan in the hope of reciprocal troop buildups on either side of the Kashmir partition line.

Al-Qaida hoped this would result in the thinning out of Pakistan combat forces stationed on the Afghan frontier to seal it off to escape and divert the attention of Pakistan intelligence away from that frontier, too.

The coast would be then left clear for al-Qaida men to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

U.S. intelligence officers briefing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during his first visit to Afghanistan Tuesday had to admit that the majority of the Taliban's fighting force had vanished and, moreover, the bulk of al-Qaida's fighting force and its commanders, apparently including bin Laden, also got away.

Two Days Ago, Gen. Musharraf Was In Beijing

On Dec 19/20 Gen. Musharraf was in Beijing asking the Chinese for military assistance in its war against India. Duhhhhh! Charts for India and Pakistan.

"How About A Little Fire, Scarecrow?"

Inside the Ring

Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published 12/21/2001

China-al Qaeda nexus
China continued to supply arms to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist even after the group began the September 11 attack on America, says a senior U.S. official. The official said that a week after the terrorist attack, the ruling Taliban and the al Qaeda fighters embedded among them, received a shipment of Chinese-made SA-7 missiles. The shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons are similar to the U.S. Stinger. This official says the shipment raises serious questions about Beijing's pledge to help fight terrorism.

We already know the Taliban and al Qaeda got sizable arms shipments from China, which borders Afghanistan on the north. Opposition forces found huge amounts of Chinese ammunition in the caves of Tora Bora. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says Chinese have been found fighting among al Qaeda.

Earlier this week, Mr. Rumsfeld said eastern alliance forces near Tora Bora made another China-related discovery. "They also interestingly seem to have captured a good deal of Chinese ammunition," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

One U.S. official said the Chinese ammunition may have been left over from the 1980s, when Beijing, along with the United States, was a major supplier of the anti-Soviet mujahideen fighters.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman in Beijing said Tuesday he had "no idea" what Mr. Rumsfeld was referring to in mentioning the large quantities of Chinese ammunition found in al Qaeda caves.

Asked if China had sold weaponry to Afghanistan or neighboring nations, the spokesman said, "the United Nations once adopted the resolution on weapon embargo against Afghanistan, and China has acted according to the Security Council resolutions."

•Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough are Pentagon reporters. Mr. Gertz can be reached at 202/636-3274 or by e-mail at bgertz@WashingtonTimes.com. Mr. Scarborough can be reached at 202/636-3208 or by e-mail at rscarborough@WashingtonTimes.com Washington Times

Put This Together & Wonder

Since China's goal is to become the hegemon of the East and Pakistan's goal is to get the pipeline from the Caspian Sea rolling through its countryside [while making sure India gets none and loses Kashmir in the bargain], who do you think Muslim Pakistan is really aligned with? Confucian China, of course. In point of fact, Afghanistan has everything to fear from Pakistan and China, two powers that eye this fractured nation through the eyes of vultures. In whose interest is it to have Osama bin Laden at large? Who benefits? China and Pakistan. So long as Al Qaeda maintains connection to its symbolic head, the destablizing forces of terrorism operate to the benefit of China and Pakistan.

It should come as no surprise that rumors abound that the attack on India's Parliament could well have been a distracting Pakistani ruse to aid OBL and Mullah Omar's escape. An embarassed White House has changed its tune over the past week. Two weeks ago they swaggered over the U.S. Military's 21st Century spy planes [unmanned drones] and were convinced that OBL and Omar would be caught. Today's news finds Dubya spouting, "We'll get him if it takes years."

Unless I've lost my mind [a distinct possibility], I think the USA has been had. What's worse is that I think Afghanistan may have been "had". Damaged before she's has had her chance to step up to the plate by creating a viable nation-state.

Mars in Pisces applies to a square with debilitating Saturn retrograde at the time of Karzai's installation. The classic grind. The Stalemate. Possibly the most frustrating aspect one can endure.

Pluto squares Mars on Christmas Eve, Karzai's birthday. The classic power struggle. Violent. Merciless.

Before the Loya Jurga (Council of Tribal Elders) is convened at the Cancer Ingress of 2002, Saturn will again oppose Pluto [May 25, 2002]. Merciless. Harsh. Cruel.

If Afghanistan survives up to the Loya Jurga, she would then set her first free elections in over 23 years to be held in 2004. That happens to coincide with George W. Bush's re-election year. Fasten your seat belts. And do offer your prayers to the people of Afghan.

Astro Map/Central Asia/Eclipse

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