UN to pull half of its staff from Afghanistan

[Winehole23]

UN Sending 600 Staffers Out of Afghanistan

UN Rethinking Central Asia Role, Threatens Total Pullout

by Jason Ditz, November 05, 2009



The United Nations announced today that it will be removing 600 foreign staffers from Afghanistan, more than half of the total number in the nation, in response to last week’s attack against UN workers in Kabul.


The mission chief Kai Eide cautioned that there was no guarantee that the UN would remain into Afghanistan into the future, and said that while the intention right now is to eventually return those staffs, they might ultimately withdraw from Afghanistan entirely.


The move comes just days after the UN announced that it was withdrawing entirely from Northwestern Pakistan, citing the growing threat of violence to staffers there.


It seems that the United Nations is very much re-examining its role in Central Asia, after nearly a decade of presence backing the US invasion of the region, and little developmental progress to show for it.

[clambake]

reagan would have bolted, too.

[Nbadan]

IT'S THE PIPELINE, STUPID

Murray asserts that the primary motivation for US and British military involvement in central Asia has to do with large natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. As evidence, he points to the plans to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan that would allow Western oil companies to avoid Russia and Iran when transporting natural gas out of the region.

Murray alleged that in the late 1990s the Uzbek ambassador to the US met with then-Texas Governor George W. Bush to discuss a pipeline for the region, and out of that meeting came agreements that would see Texas-based Enron gain the rights to Uzbekistan's natural gas deposits, while oil company Unocal worked on developing the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline.

"The consultant who was organizing this for Unocal was a certain Mr. Karzai, who is now president of Afghanistan," Murray noted.

Murray said part of the motive in hyping up the threat of Islamic terrorism in Uzbekistan through forced confessions was to ensure the country remained on-side in the war on terror, so that the pipeline could be built.

"There are designs of this pipeline, and if you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you'll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It's what it's about. It's about money, it's about oil, it's not about democracy."

The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline is slated to be completed in 2014, with $7.6 billion in funding from the Asian Development Bank.

Murray was dismissed from his position as ambassador in 2004, following his first public allegations that the British government relied on torture in Uzbekistan for intelligence.
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