The War Diaries

A billboard of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the outskirts of Tehran. Although the U.S. has been in outright conflict with Salafi-jihadism for twenty years now beginning with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center which involved Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, American policy can often feel stuck in ‘Argo’ in its relentless pursuit of a post-Shah, Shia-ruled Iran and its proxies. Iran is governed by principle peculiar to modern Shi’ism known as velayat-e-faqih, “the guardianship of the jurist” which is a complete anathema to Sunnism’s al-Salafiyya-al-Jihadiyya doctrine. ©1999 Derek Henry Flood

New York- It’s been twenty long years since Eyad Ismail, Ramzi Yousef and co drove that Ford Econoline Ryder rental van through the Holland Tunnel from Jersey City and parked a massive urea urea nitrate bomb in the parking garage of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Today was a quiet anniversary of an event largely forlorn in America’s national collective conscience in the shadow of the much more dramatic 9/11 attacks.

That wintry day two decades ago, the United States faced the beginning of a poorly outlined struggle against the decentralized doctrinal ideology of al-Salafiyya-al-Jihadiyya [Salafi-jihad]-a form of Islamism that articulates violent means to achieve political gains.

One of the points about the Sunni jihadi attack on New York in the winter of 1993 is that it marked an unexpected pivot from the perceived threat of highly centralized millenarian Shia revolutionaries and resistance terrorism epitomized by the rise of the clerical regime in Iran in 1979 and the formation of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982.

This suited America’s so-called ‘moderate’ Sunni or Sunni-dominated allied nation-states just fine. These regimes could be free to espouse anything from the export of the Wahhabiyya strain of Salafism that serves at the state theology in Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the Marxist-tinged radical Arab socialism emblematic of the Hizb-al-Ba’ath (Ba’ath Party) or the post-Nasserist-turned-personality cult regimes of Egypt and the Maghreb. That was of course until these ideas either collided with American foreign policy as in the case of Iraq or collapsed under their own weight as in the case of Tunisia.

A friend who was stationed for the U.S. State Department in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province-where the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing took place-and later Bahrain, privately hinted to me this view of the Shia threat had changed little at least in some official channels even while the U.S. was propping up a succession of Shia prime ministers in its Iraq project and its Special Forces had fought alongside Shia irregulars to oust the Taliban in northern Afghanistan.

But while the United States has done a great deal to degrade Ba’athism by invading Iraq in both 1991 and 2003 and aiding Syrian rebels bent on demolishing the Ba’ath in Syria at present, for instance, American foreign policy still remains fixated on Iran and Hezbollah and would still not dare challenge the vitriolic Wahhabism prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula. Though it is a fool’s errand to pit absolutist wings of Islam’s great schism against one another for purely hypothetical purposes, it has been transnational Salafism that has attacked the American homeland in 1993 and 2001 and in East Africa in 1998 and Yemen in 2000. If the two fronts of radical Islamism were simplistically made analogous to the space race, Khomeini may have successfully launched Sputnik first, but it was bin Laden who put a man on the moon.

We should be reminded that the 1993 attack was connected to 9/11 through the common thread of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed (KSM as he came to be referred to in intelligence jargon-inflected reporting) who is currently in the pre-trial hearing phase of the never ending, apparently never closing saga at the sweltering detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Though Yousef and the other 1993 plotters were not known to be formally pledged members of a then fairly embryonic al-Qaeda, they certainly were connected to the Peshawar-based jihadi nexus borne out of the CIA and Saudi funded anti-Soviet jihad that took place west of the Durand Line. The radicalization of the Masjid al-Farooq in Brooklyn and its refugee center-cum-Office of Services set-up visited by Abdullah Azzam was a definite factor in the 1993 plot. While the trial of the five accused al-Qaeda men in Cuba (KSM, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi) is referred to by the United States government as a “9/11 trial” In sense, it dates back the events of 1992-1993 in Brooklyn and Jersey CIty involving the men linked to KSM and the original plot against New York City.

Though there are conflicts about some of the precise specifics, one of Omar Abdel Rahman’s sons, Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman was nabbed (by the CIA, the Pakistanis or a mix of the two) in Quetta, Pakistan around the time of KSM’s apprehension when Pakistani authorities were hunting KSM. Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman is now a free man back at home in Egypt after having been listed as one of the CIA’s “ghost prisoners” (as was KSM) in 2005. He was released by the Mubarak regime in 2010.

KSM was apprehended in Rawalpindi, Pakistan ten years ago (though alternate sources may say he was actually captured in Quetta a month prior and the news of his arrest delayed by Pakistani authorities). His and four other co-conspirators’ painfully deliberating preliminary hearings has been described as being in “discord.” From what information does come out of the proceedings, it has partly the air of a circus what with Walid bin Attash (a.k.a. Khallad) making multiple outbursts about violations of attorney-client privilege and his defense lawyer wrapped in “a black abaya out of respect to the religious sensibilities of her client” according to a Guardian report.

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg describes the awkward goings on at Guantánamo as primarily focused on the ways in which the five suspects were captured and the conditions under which they were detained before being exfiltrated from “black sites” to the American naval base on Cuba’s southeastern coast. In other words, these proceedings are not about 9/11 .

A tourist shop just dozens of meters from the site of the former World Trade Center selling a model of the original Twin Towers. ©2013 Derek Henry Flood

Half a world away from the shop in New York City, a similar shop near the base of Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia selling metal models of Southeast Asia’s twin towers. ©2010 Derek Henry Flood

An ethnic-Tajik teenage fighter from Jamiat-i-Islami/Shura-i-Nazar on the front line between Khanabad and Konduz on November 15, 2001. These fighters, labeled “rebels” by the media at the time even though the Taliban government was only recognized by 3 states in the international community, were under the command of the now deceased Muhammed Daud Daud (whom certain reporters wrote up as Daud Khan at the time). Daud, who late became a top police chief for northern Afghanistan, was killed in what was purported to be a Taliban suicide bombing on May 28, 2011 at the Takhar provincial governor’s office in Taloqan. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

New York- On February 5th, I participated in a Huffington Post Live discussion entitled “Engaging The Taliban” (featured below) after the trilateral meeting between David Cameron, Asif Ali Zardari, and Hamid Karzai at the British Prime Minister’s country residence outside London. The topic concerned the withdrawal of NATO and ISAF troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 and the idea of some kind of vague peace deal with the Taliban midwifed by Pakistan and meant to take place in Qatar. That talk inspired my lengthy article in today’s edition of Asia Times Online (at left).

Afghanistan, once a byword for forgotten backwater, has had its war become internationalized to the absurd point where even a good number of tiny non-NATO, non-Western nations like Georgia (desire to join NATO), the United Arab Emirates (business interests, Islamic hearts-and-minds credibility), and Tonga (pressed by the UK) have inserted troops. And nations like these have done so in the context of their very diverse, often non-overlapping agendas.

For Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun ethnicities who house a sense of collective victimhood, this is the equivalent of having the fox guarding the hen house. Despite US troops and intelligence officers partnering up with warlords who were deemed “legendary” in the earliest days of Operation Enduring Freedom, there are certainly no angels among any of Afghanistan’s warlords of all hues despite a certain amount of rather theatric press reportage at the time. But renewed political power for the Taliban, whose enemies believe it would use to gain military power in the theater of Afghanistan’s gun-barrel politics, would be the surefire catalyst for a retro-themed civil conflict.

Some factional military leaders especially those of the Jamiat-i-Islami/Shura-i-Nazar type whose 1980s and 1990s-era leadership has suffered a string of assassinations attributed to the Taliban such as Burhanuddin Rabbani and Muhammed Daud Daud in 2011, may likely be content to exact retribution in some form. Abdul Rashid Dostum– another sworn enemy of the Taliban who knows that he is on their target list–could easily fully remobilize his Junbesh-i-Milli militia when push comes to shove.

But the risks for the integrity of the Pakistani state have changed entirely since the Taliban swept in Kabul in 1996. The creeping Talibanization of Pakistan creates an entirely different calculus. Additionally anti-Shia/Hazara violence in Balochistan being carried out by Lashkar-i-Jhangvi seems to be at an all-time high, a dire crisis which Pakistan’s political leaders refuse to effectively address. All sorts of Taliban factions are now operating in Karachi, Pakistan’s commercial capital, and inflaming tensions with the very territorial, virulently anti-Pashtun Muttahida Qaumi Movement which portrays itself as the guardian of mohajir identity in southern Sindh Province.

Part of the advantage of Pakistani hegemony over Afghanistan in the 1990s was that Islamabad could have groups that it was funding or manipulating outside of its territory. Afghanistan was relegated to an obscure, abandoned backwater that was essentially a free-fire zone for regional proxy warfare. States from all over Eurasia were dragged into Afghanistan’s internecine battles.

Following 9/11, the Afghan morass brought into most if not all of the armies of the Western world. At the same time, Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus was ejected after the fall of Konduz in late November 2001. Now as the West and its allies clamor for the exits, Pakistan, Iran and other regional powers will be forced to reassess their role in the future of Afghanistan. And it does not look promising. The Pentagon would like to leave a residual number of troops behind for training and “support” missions pending an as yet unspecified status-of-forces agreement being worked out with Kabul.

Though the United States ending its combat mission in Afghanistan has made a big splash in the news, there has already been an attrition on Western troop numbers. Dutch troops packed up and left Uruzgan Province in August 2010 when the Netherlands enfeebled coalition government collapsed over the issue. The Dutch ditched their Australian partners in the home province of Mullah Muhammed Omar which created a vacuum that had to be filled by American troops. The French, now deployed in Mali in what is perceived as being a more immediate to France’s national interests, entirely abandoned their combat mission in Kapisa Province in November 2012. The final French combat troops then departed Afghanistan altogether in December 2012. New Zealand plans on pulling out the majority of its troops from Bamiyan Province by April of this year.

In the understated words of noted Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai: “2014 and the Western withdrawal will not mean Pakistan’s problems are over.”

New York-Obama’s impending visit to Burma in the context of America’s “pivot” to Asia in this so-called “Pacific century” (in contrast to the previous Atlantic century epitomized by the formation of NATO etc) raises a lot of grave human rights concerns, many of which in the case of Burma have festered for decades. Obama will attempt to make America’s presence felt in Southeast Asia during the upcoming East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh.

The Bangladesh government refuses to help these children and the Burmese government refuses to recognize them as citizens even as it comes out of the shadows of international economic isolation. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

In 2008, I traveled to the border town of Teknaf on the border of Burma’s Rakhine State (aka Arakan State) to document the festering Rohingya crisis at the junction of South and Southeast Asia. My visits to the fetid refugee camps south of Teknaf, Bangladesh culminated in From South-to-South: Burma’s Stateless Minority Under the Tip of Globalization’s Spear and my visit to the Rohingya migrant community in Karachi, Pakistan’s squalid Korangi Town area resulted in From South to South: Refugees as Migrants: The Rohingya in Pakistan.

As the tide rose on the Naf River, the camp became a toxic mix of disease and human waste. Every day. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

I was covering the Rohingya issue, which began in earnest with ethnic pogroms in 1991, before it became to relatively hotter topic than it is now in 2012. Trying to bring attention to the crisis either here at the UN headquarters or down in DC on Capitol Hill was essentially a fool’s errand. To think that POTUS would be visiting Burma at that time (or any other time in modern history) seemed absurd.

Hell on earth. I will never forget my treks around the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh’s deep south. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

Now everyone from CNN to the International Crisis Group is trying to catch up to speed and sound alarm bells on the world’s most persecuted, stateless people who are enduring a campaign of ethnic cleansing in part to make way for the development of offshore transnational natural gas projectson the Arakan coast. And the fact that international attention is being brought to these pogroms is a good thing, shame that it takes killings and displacements of thousands for it to come to the fore.

A Rohingya refugee girl from Burma’s Rakhine State waits to have her id created at a Medecins Sans Frontieres-assisted camp in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Division. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

A key reason the Rohingya keep being killed and pushed out into the sea is that they are a stateless people. The insidious Burmese regime that tells the world it is gently democratizing continues to insist that these poor unwanted souls are ‘illegal migrants’ while the Sheikha Hasina administration in Dhaka cruelly maintains that the Rohingya are ‘economic migrants‘ that it cannot be responsible for aiding while its own citizenry go without. The Rohingya exist between the guns of the Tatmadaw (the Burmese military) and the Bangladesh Rifles (Border Guard Bangladesh). The Rohingya are hemmed in by a difficult geography with their only remaining option to try and reach refuge in Thailand by sea. Many of them then drown in unsound vessels and rough seas.

A gaunt Rohingya woman who was fortunate enough to find temporary shelter in southern Bangladesh. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

As China and India, and now the United States, compete for economic and political influence in Burma, there has been no indication that the persecution of the Rohingya will be tamped down. The array of ethnic questions burning on the country’s periphery have been alight since independence from Britain in 1948-less than six months after the dissolution/independence of British India-have not been quelled with the re-introduction of Burma onto the world stage. Just because superficial change such as the return of Coke and Pepsi have taken place in no way beens that the Tatmadaw will not continue their brutal policies of scorched earth pogroms and enslavement. They may end up being emboldened.

A refugee gets employment as a day laborer building…a new refugee camp. An endless cycle of statelessness. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

New York- While Americans in many quarters erupted with both joy and relief that Barack Hussein Obama was reelected POTUS while right-wing ideologues and extremists (which may simply be cover for racism in some quarters) constantly harping on the just-around-the-corner reemergence of so-called (though debunked) ‘American exceptionalism‘ pronounced the country politically dead, there was a disquieting dearth of serious foreign policy debate among American voters expressed in the mainstream media.

I decided to post these heretofore unpublished images of clandestine soldiers from 11 years ago in a small effort to demonstrate just how long Americans have been at war in Afghanistan. I blacked out their eyes in photoshop to give the images that whole cloak and dagger ‘redacted’ look.

An American Special Forces soldier from an Operational Detachment Alpha unit mills through a curious crowd of men and boys (no females) after the Toyota Landcruiser he was riding in blew out a tire. Note that his uniform is distinctly devoid of rank or any other military insignia. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

American soldiers continued to be killed in Afghanistan throughout the election cycle with another solider reportedly killed in an insurgent attack in Uruzgan Province less than four days before the election. America’s two principal Anglosphere military allies, the UK and Australia, also continued to withstand troop deaths in the lead up to Obama’s second term as president. While numerically small in light of US fatalities, they are comparatively significant in relation their respective population sizes vis-a-vis the United States.

The US has lost a total of 286 troops in Afghanistan this year alone according to iCasualties.org and there are still nearly two months left of 2012 with a total of 2150 since 2001.

And let us not forget that Afghans in the ANA and ANP keep dying too.  In the name and manner attacking Afghan security forces, the insurgency continues to slaughter a number of hapless civilians as well. Somehow though, grave human rights violations are either cast aside in an election cycle or even rendered ‘unpatriotic’ when showing concern for such deaths abroad causes natural friction with Americans who have swaddled themselves in the unevolved retrograde tenets of isolationism in the context of an incredibly difficult economic crisis at home.

An American Special Forces soldier looks on as several Afghan mechanics replace the tire on his white Landcruiser in Mazar-e-Sharif while the prisoner uprising-cum-massacre at the mud crenellated fort of Qala-e-Jangi was raging. Look how tall these guys are! They were towering over the locals with every step. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

The question remains: what will another Obama term do to actually end not the war per se, but end American involvement in Afghanistan? While the President trumpeted the withdrawal of American combat troops Operation New Dawn, the 2010 successor to Operation Iraqi Freedom that most Americans were entirely unaware of, there are still tens of thousands of armed contract soldiers in Iraq who are at best woefully under regulated. In effect, the United States IS still in Iraq though under a different guise.

The struggle for Iraq has in no way ended. Insurgent attacks on Iraqi security forces and Shia civilians continue to be successfully mounted. If and when the United States withdraws its vast combat forces from Afghanistan, it is highly likely that the 1990s civil war fault lines will be reignited to some degree but with the influx of newer arms and better vehicles. America may leave Afghanistan at the midway point of Obama’s second chance in office, but there is little indication an American president can actually “end” the war in Afghanistan.

Will Obama’s little publicized Iraq solution be a template for a planned 2014 Afghan pull out? Of course the reality of Iraq’s human geography is far different than that of Afghanistan. Iraq’s highly urbanized population lay mostly along the north-south veins of the Tigris and al-Furat (Euphrates) River whereas Afghanistan continues to remain a primarily decentralized rural demography. In essence Iraq has things to protect-oil infrastructure, diplomatic installations and local governance institutions which require continued defense. This is where the contractors come in. Afghanistan has far fewer such ‘target rich’ features but nonetheless the contractor business model is humming along at the fractured juncture of South and Central Asia, despite its disturbingly low profile.

Guns-for-hire coupled with the increasing presence of armed aerial drones mean that America’s notoriously bloated globe spanning military profile remains undiminished even under successive democratic administrations.

The fort of Qala-e-Jangi, site of the November 2001 Taliban prisoner uprising that left hundreds of captives dead, pictured in 2008. The fighters had surrendered after being surrounded during the battle of Kunduz and were brought to the fort by order of Abdurrashid Dostum’s Junbish-i-Melli troops. Things quickly went south as we were to find out. When I visited the site these many years later, it evoked a painterly, bucolic feel with cows nibbling on verdant grass and children playing at the base of its mighty walls. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

Zabiullah Mujahid, the vociferous Taliban spokesman, threw in the Islamic Emirate’s two-cents following the close of Tuesday’s polls hoping to appeal to Americans pragmatically: “Obama has realised that the Americans are tired of the war and the backbreaking costs of the war…Therefore, he should pullout the occupying forces from our country as soon as possible and prevent the deaths of more Americans.”

Leo Villareal’s BUCKYBALL installation in Madison Square Park. Seems like an obnoxious display of power when thousands in the city are still without electricity (although its LED tube lighting may use relatively little wattage it looks abrupt when considering those on the city’s forsaken periphery).  ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

New York- So weird. A week ago today I was getting thrown around Long Island City by 90 mph gales as Hurricane Sandy thrashed Queen’s over gentrified littoral while NYPD barked on loudspeakers through sheets of rain not to get near the piers while shooting photos. In the interim, houses were smashed and burned, whole boardwalk areas ravaged and now tens of thousands of people are not homeless from one day to the next. But most of the lasting damage was hyper localized to where people in midtown and uptown areas of Manhattan had their lives interrupted only when the subways were demobilized all over the city as a precaution. I trekked around in an effort to do what I could to document the crisis–with an image from this blog getting selected for New York Magazine’s Sandy portfolio “What We Saw When the Lights Went Out.”

Many, many improvements have been quickly made, particularly in the areas of Manhattan that were politically and economically prioritized. But in the outskirts of the so-called outer-boroughs, people may likely freeze tonight, out of sight, out of mind from the rest of this city. People will shiver in the cold shadow of tomorrow’s mega ego election where a wobbly incumbent  who’s carried out highly dubious extra-judicial assassinations of American citizens in Yemen, faces off against a “weird Mormon billionaire” as an old friend of mine put it (though he’s only worth a paltry reported $250 million).

As largely toothless idioms like “the new normal” and neologisms like “superstorm” were thrown around all week by politicians and media figures, significant change will not occur until long outdated thought paradigms are cast aside forever, a highly unlikely proposition. Americans have been brainwashed for the last decade that Sunni terrorism of the Salafi-jihadi strain is the biggest threat to their survival (or messianic Shia Twelver state warfare from Iran if one is a Likudnik).

This narrative is only remotely believable if one narrowly views the struggle for and within humanity as amongst various interpretations of monotheisms. Rubbish. The fundamental threat to human survival is a catastrophic misreading of the environment, human and animal evolution, and the development of the solar system we inhabit. The media and politicos are extremely unhelpful in this regard describing the violent characteristics of a terrifying natural occurrence like Sandy using terms like “deluge” and “biblical proportions.”

Not to say these forces in the world are not genuine threats but they are a mere blip during the long evolutionary march of history. The terror wars have spawned a vast and mostly unregulated and hence unaccountable security industry that is now here to stay. Fear Inc. has been very profitable for some but has provided little palpable public benefit beyond those personally enriched by constantly over stating imminent threats on the horizon. In this period, the global  environmental crisis has carried on untended to as the proverbial ‘elephant in the room.’ Developing a smarter, faster drone air force to chase finite  ”bad guys” in the world’s ungoverned geography is far less challenging than confronting large scale glacial meltdown and rising sea levels.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo encapsulated my point perfectly the other day with this quote: “[Utility companies] They’re regulated by the public service commission. The utilities were not created in the Bible. They’re not in the Old Testament. They’re not in the New Testament. God never said, ‘New York shall have these utilities forever, and Con Ed is the utility, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s really not in the Bible.” Here is a case of a frustrated, angry political leader–perhaps without giving such a statement much rational forethought–injecting and legitimating Abrahamic themes into the public discourse thereby doing a great disservice to his millions of constituents by obfuscating the real history and nature of…nature.

Figures like Cuomo are not wont to offhandedly riff on the Jurassic Period or the Mesozoic Era during such a public tirade but perhaps they should. Referencing Noah in an era of bitter and confused climate change debate certainly isn’t helpful. Western observers scoff at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for hailing the sought after return on the Mahdi–the promised return of the Twelfth Imam who has been in a state of occultation since he ‘disappeared’ during the year 874 A.D.  But are American leaders pandering to the masses really all that different in this respect?

We need more reasoned, empirical science and far less politicized seance if people are to grasp the environmental threats that lay before them and realize the inherent grand context of such events. It shall be no easy task. The “March of Unreason” continues.

Rather than a nonsensical “deluge,” Hurricane Sandy was part of a continuum of punctuated natural violence that has formed continents and oceans, and played a key role in human evolution and its great migrations. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

MRE marked as a humanitarian daily ration. Packed by illegal migrants in Texas for Tajiks and Uzbeks in Afghanistan, eaten by Western journos and other war tourists. Just another of my war souvenirs.

New York- I’ve been rummaging through my archives from the terror wars era for the last week or two while working on an upcoming project on Syria and have opened a veritable Pandora’s Box in the process. The other day I found a couple of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) from the very beginning of the American-led intervention in the ongoing Afghan civil war in November 2001. These hideously bright yellow packets were being sold by traders in the smuggler’s bazaar of Khawja Bahauddin, the ramshackle town near the border with Tajikistan where Ahmad Shah Massoud had been assassinated on September 9, 2001. These preservative laden bags of glorified junk food were air dropped over ‘friendly’ (i.e. areas controlled by cash-for-allegiance warlords) parts of northern Afghanistan in what was much more a bungled PR campaign than an effective humanitarian effort.

Rural Afghans were puzzled by the squirt packs of peanut butter and stale pop tarts entirely alien to their diet. To put things in the effete terminology used by food nerds today, Afghanistan is a “farm-to-table” society where all food is de facto “organic” even though the whole country is devoid of a Whole Foods.

These plastic bags were carefully labeled in English, French, and Spanish for illiterate villagers that speak Dari, Uzbek, and Pashto, might as well have been artifacts from the Roswell crash. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that more Western journos and CIA types ended up eating these awful things than the Afghans themselves. They were manufactured by a military contractor eager to reap the early buildup of the immediate post-9/11 spending boomlet called The Wornick Company.

The Wornick Company apparently employed undocumented Mexican immigrants to pack these things. An investigation was launched after it was discovered an AQ operative had his sights set on the company’s HQ in south Texas after Wornick ingeniously labeled these packets with their company name and address. Like an AQ for dummies target.

A better holistic strategy would have been to contract an nearby Iranian company (who could have perhaps given honest work to Iran’s own resented Afghan refugees) to package pulao and freeze dried naan, you know, like, food Afghans actually eat not dissimilar to Iranian fare. Laughable as it sounds, something akin to this might have killed two birds with one stone-actually nourishing starving Afghans and engaging Iran economically.

Such a practical initiative could have opened the door to undermining both the clerical regime in Qom and Tehran during Mohammed Khatami’s “Dialogue of Civilizations” era and the still-not-going-away bomb Iran chicken hawks poisoning the present debate  in DC. But the anti-Iran agitators active in Washington today are often one in the same as the men and women who wanted to pull away from Afghanistan in 2002 (and therefore an Iran that was cooperating at the time) to focus Pentagon efforts on Iraq thereby keeping the US pitted against Iran for the foreseeable future. The maintenance of this highly negative staus quo was far  more important for those with a vested interest in keeping hostilities alive and well.

The air dropping of quintessential American foodstuffs into Afghanistan was an ill conceived plan at best and a poor use of tax payer funds. With no follow up measures to coordinate events on the ground, there was no methodology employed to ensure that the food was received by those that needed it most. Meanwhile, the few who happened upon these poorly planned c-17 borne drops would often hoard them and sell them to bazaaris who would then resell them to the strangers in their midst. There was no way to ensure appropriate and even distribution, the thing bona fide unarmed humanitarian NGOs are supposed to be most adept at.

Oh and another story going around at the time was that these clumsy airborne food drops had actually managed to kill a few unsuspecting villagers along the way. I never got to the bottom of weather that was actually true or not because to be honest I was too busy covering the war. But I was never all that comfortable with the idea of armed humanitarians. “Armed humanitarian” is a stark contradiction in terms.

The pacifist European NGOs were careening around with large decals on the side of their Landcruisers showing Kalashnikovs encircled in red with a line crossing them out while the Americans were landing armed helicopters, disgorging bulky helmeted men in camouflage, guns drawn, in the exact same political space. It all seemed like such a bad juxtaposition.

I photographed what was then a very rare daylight landing of American troops in northern Afghanistan. Until this point, the only visual evidence of American action in Afghanistan were sightings of warplanes like the C-130 aircraft high in the sky unloading 15,000 lb BLU-82 ‘daisy cutter’ fuel bombs near Taliban trenches in Dasht-i-Qala and other assorted aircraft painting their voluminous vapor trails across the clear sky. @2001 Derek Henry Flood

For background on the use and origins of the “daisy cutter’ bomb, see here  and here (brief) and here (extensive).

A B52 Stratofortress strategic bomber makes an early morning run from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean toward the frontline between Jamiat forces and Taliban trenches. Soaring over the front line town of Dasht-i-Qala on a cloudless November morning, the B52′s contrails acted as ominous skywriting. Having come from a-just-after-9/11 New York, it gave me a weird feeling to hear the deep subsonic roar of these massive, weaponized planes overhead-especially when realizing you are in a place that has no ordinary air traffic after decades of international isolation. They would wake me from my slumber in the basement of a warlord’s guesthouse where I was holed up. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

For more on the B52 component and other facets of the initial air campaign in Afghanistan, see here and here (brief) and here (extensive).

Enter the armed humanitarians. Andrew Natsios, then chief of USAID, staged a dramatic daylight landing in a duo of Chinook helicopters in Khwaja Bahauddin, Takhar Province, Afghanistan, November 2001. The local villagers and attendant refugees didn’t seem to know what to make of the latest interlopers with an agenda in their country. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

An American soldier accompanying Natsios into the fray of dust and intensely curious Afghan men and boys looks exhausted and dazed. The American landing party seemed to have coordinated their daylight landing with members of Jamiat-i-Islami who arrived with antiquated rifles to keep the crowd at bay along with a French NGO called ACTED that was active in the area. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

An American soldier at the edge of the perimeter as Nastios gives an unannounced press conference to the journos who were still in Khawja Bahauddin that day. After word of the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif spread like wildfire, most people had moved further west to cover what would become the battle of Qala-i-Jangi. I think I was nearly as taken aback as the locals. Until this moment, the American ground presence in Afghanistan was strictly clandestine as far as I knew at the time, obscured in the dark of night. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

As quickly as they came, they left. The USAID chief was spirited away by his solider-guards off into the sunset to what I presumed was back to Uzbekistan. America was playing good cop, bad cop. Dropping bombs on those Afghans it deemed worthy of death and portraying the US government and contractors like Wornick as an aid organization writ large. What were average Afghans to make of all this confused messaging? ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

New York-Going through a storage locker the other day, I dug up a lot of stuff from my personal archives in the early post-9/11 period. I collected lots of odds and ends back then thinking they’d be of historical import down the road. Here we are a decade on and its interesting (at least to me) to reexamine this stuff. Here are scans I made of magazines I collected in 2001-2002.

I believe it is important to collect and document these artifacts in time where we are inundated with so much media and where attention spans seem to be ever shortening. Each new global crisis feels like it obfuscates the previous one. It is almost as if the Arab Spring replaced the global financial crisis (such an inarticulate term) which replaced the terror wars.

This is a visual record of an indelible post-modern tragedy.

This very dramatic title epitomized the mood at that moment. There developed an extreme dichotomy at the time between what were referred to as “the everything changed-ists” versus the “nothing changed-ists.” But don’t judge a periodical by its cover. The bulk of this issue was in fact not dedicated to 9/11, just the first few front articles mostly. Whereas a New York area periodical would have been entirely dedicated to 9/11, shutting out the rest of the news cycle save for perhaps speculating about Afghanistan.

Paris Match, September 20, 2001, “The War: World Trade Center, Tuesday, 9:03 a.m., New York”

Reading the September 12, 2001 edition of the New York Times in Brooklyn. ©2001 Derek Henry Flood

The September 23, 2001 New York Times magazine titled “The Remains of the Day.” A gorgeous, stark illustration of collective loss.

The October 11, 2011 edition of Paris Match “At the Heart of the War” featuring a Jamiat fighter on the front line at Bagram, Afghanistan. World media attention began to shift away from New York and toward Afghanistan when the bombing there began on October 7 of that year.

The September 2, 2002 edition of Der Spiegel titled “The Day that Changed the World.” I got this issue and the Stern below as I was leaving Hamburg, Germany after investigating the lives of the Hamburg cell led by Mohammed Atta in the Harburg district.

The September 5, 2002 edition of Stern titled “New Photos from 9/11.”

The September 11, 2002 edition of Time Europe. I took this from my flight from Hamburg to New York as I was returning home to document the first 9/11 anniversary.

New York Magazine, September 11, 2011, “One Day, Ten Years.”

The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower anchors the southeastern end of what is left of Brooklyn’s historic Atlantic Avenue Arab strip. Rapid gentrification of the neighborhood in the last decade has transformed the area from a lively ethnic enclave into bland real estate developments. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

New York- Yesterday for the 11th anniversary of 9/11 I decided to do something a bit off the beaten path. Though New York City was the site of the attacks, no other part of the ‘planes operation’ timeline is known (to my knowledge) to have occurred in the city’s five boroughs. The closest thing would be when several of the hijackers led by Hani Hanjour moved into an apartment in Paterson and rented mailboxes at Mail Boxes Etc. in Fort Lee and Wayne, New Jersey nearby.

A Chinese man peers warily at my camera from the third floor office which once served as the Afghan Taliban’s makeshift UN mission. Before 9/11 I drove out to this place to try and get an Afghan tourist visa in person but the guys were never there. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

There are however a few tangential, yet important locales that fit into the larger picture. One quietly resides in a nondescript brown brick medical office complex at 55-16 Main Street in Flushing, Queens. This had been the site of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s ‘Mission’ to the UN (not a terribly convenient location for access to Turtle Bay?). I visited this dull building a couple of times in August of 2001 while trying to acquire a visa for Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The State Department ordered the two rather sullen ‘diplomats’ to close the office on February 13, 2001. But when I knocked on their door that summer there was still a sign on the front of the office door in English, Pashto, and Dari that listed it as their mission. And the phone still worked as either Abdul Hakeem Mujahid or Noorullah Zadran (most likely Zadran) would occasionally and very skeptically listen to my queries. I thought about titling this post a Salafi-jihadi tour of New York but of course the Taliban were hardcore Deobandis influenced more by radical Islam in British India than modern Saudi Arabia.

The door of the former Taliban UN mission office in Flushing, Queens. ©2002 Derek Henry Flood

From Flushing I made the long subway trek to downtown Brooklyn in the footsteps of the now long dead Sheikh Abdullah Yusuf Azzam. Azzam was bin Laden before bin Laden was. The original transnational jihadi ideologue, Azzam was born near Jenin, British Mandate Palestine in 1941. He fled to Jordan after the 1967 war when the Israelis began to militarily occupy his homeland. During his radicalization, Azzam was an early adapter to the Salafi interpretation of Islam and preached accordingly. According to New Yorker writer George Packer, the building pictured below was the location of Azzam’s Afghan Services Bureau which was used to recruit volunteers to fight in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad as well as funnel funds there.

The former site of 1980′s era Brooklyn mujahideen front Maktab al-Khidamat (Afghan Services Bureau) at 566 Atlantic Avenue. The front door was plastered with building and construction code violations from the City of New York and nothing appeared to be doing there. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

Next door to the perfume factory is the infamous al-Farooq mosque  (and former al-Kifah Refugee Center) at 552 Atlantic Avenue. It was here that, according to French scholar Giles Kepel, Azzam had kindly requested sympathizers to the jihad to send their donation checks made out simply to “Service Bureau.” Azzam had opened a checking account several blocks northwest of the office and mosque complex at the Independence Savings Bank on the corner of Court Street and Atlantic Avenue (which is now a Trader Joes supermarketin line with the area’s intense gentrification).

Site of the former Independence Savings Bank in Brooklyn (currently a Trader Joes supermarket) where Palestinian Salafi theologian Abdullah Azzam maintained a checking account to channel donations toward ‘Afghan-Arab’ groups fighting the Red Army and PDPA Afghan government forces in the 1980s. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

A 1995 New Yorker article describes how the CIA-linked Azzam as well as the currently imprisoned Omar Abdel Rahman preached at al-Farooq and a rustic masjid in Jersey City called al-Salam. Azzam is most often referenced as Osama bin Laden’s ‘mentor.’ After the conclusion of the Afghan jihad, Azzam and his sons were killed in a bombing in November 1989 while en route to salat al-juma (Friday prayers) at the “Mosque of the Martyrs” in Peshawar’s University Town district. The reasons for Azzam’s killing have never quite revealed themselves. Some believe it was factional infighting amongst the Arab jihadis in Peshawar who were adrift after the Red Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan earlier that year. It has even been speculated that bin Laden himself ordered his henchmen to carry out the bombing.

Whether Azzam is as relevant today to those in the sway of Salafi rhetoric I can’t be sure but it is very likely that Mohammed Atta and other old school AQ core operatives were very much influenced by the writings and speeches of a man with cause who once dined in Brooklyn’s halal eateries and opened a checking account with great ease in an open society.

On a side note, it was on this street that in the fall of 2000 I purchased a shalwar kammez–Pakistan’s national dress–at an Arab store (ie not a Pakistani one) to work on my senior thesis in…Peshawar.

The entrance to the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood just after dusk. A muezzin made the azan (call) for salat al-maghrib (evening prayers) on loud speakers that echoed over the cacophonous traffic. I’d never heard the azan in the United States before. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood

The new WTC tower, known as One World Trade Center, rises from ground zero eleven years after the original Twin Towers’ demolition by Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi. ©2012 Derek Henry Flood