LIFE IN TALIBANISTAN, Part 1, Throw these infidels in jail ['Degree Zero of the Reconquista']

Asia Times ^ | Sep 2, 2010 | Pepe Escobar

[fight_truth_decay]

"A decade ago it was a sad sight at the University of Kabul to witness a group of eminent professors at what was once one of the best centers of learning in the world being subjected to the sermons of a mediocre madrassa student who never finished the equivalent of primary school. This was Baudrillard's degree zero of culture, remixed by the Taliban." - Pepe Escobar

Dear reader: let's sit back, relax, and take a trip down memory lane to prehistoric times - the pre-9/11, pre-YouTube, pre-Facebook world.

Ten years ago, Taliban Afghanistan - Talibanistan - was under a social, cultural, political and economic nightmare. Arguably, not much has changed. Or has it?

Ten years ago, New York-based photographer Jason Florio and myself slowly crossed Talibanistan overland from east to west, from the Pakistani border at Landi Kotal to the Iranian border at Islam Qillah. As Afghan aid workers acknowledged, we were the first Westerners to pull this off in quite a while.

Those were the days. Bill Clinton was enjoying his last stretch at the White House. Osama bin Laden was a discreet guest of Mullah Omar - hitting the front pages only occasionally. There was no hint of 9/11, or of the invasion of Iraq, or of the "war on terror", or of the rebranding of the AfPak war, or of a global financial crisis. Globalization ruled, and the United States was the undisputed global top dog.

The Clinton administration and the Taliban were deep into Pipelineistan territory - arguing over the tortuous, proposed Trans-Afghan gas pipeline.

[fight_truth_decay]

Also

LIFE IN TALIBANISTAN, Part 2, Sept 3
The degree zero of culture

By Pepe Escobar

This is the second article in a three-part report.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LI03Df03.html

" UBL in 1988 set up his data bank including all the jihad warriors and the nebulae of volunteers who flowed through the training camps; that was "al-Qaeda" ("the base"). How Bin Laden fired his first anti-American projectile in Somalia, in 1993. How he moved to Sudan, then to Afghanistan. How he issued his declaration of jihad against America, in 1996. And how delocalized, interconnected cells across the world had adopted the spectacle of terror to seduce sections of those poor masses deserted from the Great Capitalist Banquet.Over a year before 9/11, America was already imposing to the world's psyche the image of Osama bin Laden as an inexplicable, pathological criminal; the degree zero of terror. But the Peshawar elders were already telling me, in their own way, that Bin Laden, recluse as a hermit, was in fact more like the degree zero of the Reconquista [..sounds like Ground Zero, the Recapture], Islam's shot at reconquering its primacy."

Part 3
Next: LIFE IN TALIBANISTAN, Married to the mob, Sept 4

[Nateman]

How long before we get leaders who can say the obvious out loud: "Islam is evil"