Why History Matters in the Middle East...and Always!

Part I

Why Afghanistan?

Afghanistan Overview

A little smaller than Texas 28.4 million people 80% Sunni and 19% Shite Landlocked with mostly desert and mountain Islamic Republic headed by President Karzai Society is organized around kinship (family and

tribe) as well as religion First language for most is Dari

Afghani History Many different invasions and rulers have

controlled the area from Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan

During “The Great Game” it is fought over by the empires of Great Britain and Russia in the 1800s

Current boundaries (Durand Line) are established by Russia and Great Britain (1880-1901)

Britain keeps control of Kabul until the Third Anglo-Afghan War when the British surrender in 1919 (Independence Day)

History continued...

Experiments with democratic reforms lead to many assassinations of kings

Monarchy abolished by a military coup in 1973 and a republic is declared

Communists overthrow and kill prime minister in a coup (tortured, imprisoned and murdered traditional elite also) in the summer of 1978

By October of 1979, Soviet Union has put their own man in charge in hopes of cementing Communist control (intervenes in a civil war)

Mujahideen resist and in 1984 receive support in the form of weapons and training from the U.S.

Enter Osama Bin Laden...

Osama Bin Laden's Biography clip

Bombing of the World Trade Center

February 26, 1993The occasion was marked by a mass at historic St. Peter's Church in Lower Manhattan and a moment of silence at Ground Zero at 12:18 p.m., the same time the truck bomb exploded February 26, 1993.

Four of the six people killed in the attack worked for the World Trade Center's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Most of the victims were having lunch in their basement office, adjacent to the parking garage where terrorists parked their explosives-laden van.

Bob Kirkpatrick, 61, Steven Knapp, 47, and Bill Macko, 57, were mechanical supervisors for the transportation agency. Monica Rodriguez Smith was Macko's secretary. All were killed in the bombing.

The fifth and sixth victims were Wilfred Mercado, 37, who worked for the Windows on the World restaurant atop the North Tower and was checking in food deliveries in the basement, and John DiGiovanni, 45, a dental salesman who was in the parking garage when the bomb exploded.

~CNN article “New York Remembers 1993 WTC Victims” published in 2003

U.S. Embassy Bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998

Life sentence for U.S. embassy bombers

KHALFAN KHAMIS MOHAMED

October 18, 2001

A judge Thursday imposed life sentences against the four men convicted in the only U.S. trial to date against followers of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.

Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a 28-year-old Tanzanian, had been found guilty of carrying out the truck bomb attack at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998, and murdering the 11 people who died there. Mohamed rented the house where the bomb was assembled and TNT was ground for it.

Also sentenced were Mohamed al-'Owhali and Mohamed Odeh, the two men with a hands-on role in the suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya on the same day as the Tanzania attack. They were convicted of murdering the 213 people killed in that blast. Al-'Owhali is a 24-year-old Saudi and Odeh is a 36-year-old Jordanian.

Wadih el Hage, a 41-year-old naturalized American of Lebanese descent, was also sentenced to life. He is a longtime aide to bin Laden. El Hage was convicted of taking part in a conspiracy to kill Americans and to destroy U.S. property. He left Kenya a year before the bombings and was never accused of having a direct role in the attacks.

"Today's sentence sends a message," said U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. "The United States will hunt terrorists down and will make them pay the price for their evil acts of terrorism."

At the sentencing, Odeh, speaking Arabic, said: "To Allah we belong and to him we return. May God help me in my calamity and replace it with goodness. On God I rely and in him I put my trust."

Security was tighter than usual at the U.S. District Courthouse in Manhattan for the sentencing of the men convicted in the only U.S. trial to date against followers of bin Laden. Additional checkpoints and more U.S. marshals were added outside the courthouse, and pedestrian access around the block had been restricted.

U.S. officials believe bin Laden masterminded the September 11 attacks that brought down the World Trade Center.

Anthony Ricco, Odeh's attorney, said an appeal would be made and attorneys will be "litigating the issues we raised here." Of the trial, Ricco said that "it sends a more important message to our country, that we are a country of laws."

The nearly simultaneous embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured another 4,500 people.

USS Cole Bombing in 2000

Almost ten years later the US got its man...

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7364600n