Daesh Terror in Afghanistan: A Divide-and-Conquer Operation?

My new Tehran Times article — and a debate with Daniel Lazare

Daesh Terror in Afghanistan: A Divide-and-Conquer Operation?

By Kevin Barrett, for Tehran Times

On Friday, October 15, more than thirty people were killed in a terrorist bombing of the Bibi Fatima mosque in Kandahar, Afghanistan. A week earlier, on October 8, a terrorist bomb devastated the Sayed Abad mosque in Kunduz, killing dozens of people and wounding more than 150. The previous Monday, at least seven people died in the bombing of the Eidgah Mosque in Kabul during the funeral service for the mother of Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Muhajid. All three attacks were claimed by Daesh.

Western media blames “Islamic extremism” for these and similar events. But Daesh, far from being an authentic Islamic liberation group, is actually a tool of anti-Islamic forces. To understand the true role and origins of Daesh, we need to understand the geostrategic imperatives and false flag tactics of the imperialist invaders of the Muslim world.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, perhaps the single most important force behind the post-1979 US presence in Afghanistan, famously wrote: “The three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

Today, a great many nations could be called either tributaries or vassals of the US empire (which might be more accurately termed the Anglo-Zionist empire, the Western bankster empire, or the NATO empire). To the extent that a nation’s banking system is linked to the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and other Western-dominated financial institutions, that nation could be considered one of the empire’s tributaries; while those nations that host US military forces, and/or cooperate with US/NATO military ventures, might be called vassals.

Then who are Brzezinski’s “barbarians”? They are the nations that refuse to be dominated by the empire’s military and financial control systems.

US-occupied Afghanistan was a de facto tributary and vassal from 2001 through 2021. In August of this year it rejoined the ranks of “barbarians” (nations that resist the imperial system). By doing so, it set itself up to be targeted by the empire’s covert operators, whose mission is to “keep the barbarians from uniting.”

The empire will implement its divide-and-conquer strategy against Afghanistan on two levels. First, it will try to foment fractiousness and chaos within the borders of Afghanistan, using false flag operations as its primary tactic. Second, it will try to divide the government of Afghanistan from other “barbarian” nations outside the imperial system.

The empire’s primary tool for dividing-and-conquering Afghanistan is Daesh. Branded “ISIS-K” in English—a name that sounds like a pagan breakfast cereal—Daesh routinely attacks civilian targets with the aim of inciting ethnic and sectarian strife. Though Daesh pretends its goal is to unify the Muslim world, its real objective is precisely the opposite: to “keep the Muslims from uniting,” as Brzezinski would put it. Currently Daesh is being deployed by its controllers to destabilize the Taliban government in Kabul, which has set out to establish a government of national unity under Islam that would be considerably more inclusive than the tribalist Taliban governments of the 1990s.

The empire has unleashed Daesh as a weapon against the Taliban’s unifying efforts. By slaughtering Hazara Muslim worshippers and other innocent civilians, while simultaneously attacking the Taliban, Daesh hopes to turn Shia and Sunni Muslims against each other, while provoking ethnic strife in order to prevent the peaceful unification of Afghanistan.

The empire also hopes that its Daesh mercenaries will wreck Afghanistan’s relations with Iran, and by extension with the Iran-Russia-China bloc that is rising to challenge the empire’s dominance in Eurasia. Daesh’s ferocious pseudo-Sunni sectarianism is not only anathema to Iran, but also alienates Russia and China, which have their own problems with “Islamic terrorism.” While using Daesh to destabilize Afghanistan and ruin relations with its neighbors, the empire also can send its Daesh terrorist shock troops to serve as mercenaries against the Chinese in Xinjiang, the Russians in Chechnya and across Russia’s southern border, and the Iranians and their allies in the Muslim East.

Daesh terrorism also serves as a psychological weapon against Islam in general and the post-1979 Islamic Awakening in particular. Public relations experts and psychological operations specialists know that the best way to discredit a message is to put it in the mouth of a loathsome spokesperson. Today, the noble Islamic concept of jihad, which means “struggle in the path of God,” has been equated in the public mind with the horrific terrorist atrocities of Daesh. In reality, jihad can refer to either the struggle to be a better person (greater jihad) or the struggle to defend the community (lesser jihad). But thanks to false flag terror groups like Daesh, when the non-Muslim public hears the word jihad it thinks of appalling attacks on civilians.

More specifically, Daesh has been tasked by the empire with discrediting Muslim unity. Daesh pretends that is mission is to establish a universal Islamic caliphate. But by using the most mindlessly heinous terrorist tactics imaginable, Daesh creates the impression that only bloodthirsty homicidal maniacs favor Islamic unity. That impression is far from the truth! In reality, polls have showed that roughly two-thirds of the residents of the biggest contiguous Muslim countries favor abolishing national borders and establishing a unified pan-Islamic ummah. And they want to do it peacefully. That prospect terrifies the empire—which, if the Muslim “barbarians” united, would lose its control over the world’s most strategic lands and resources. Even worse, from the empire’s perspective, is that a pan-Islamic ummah would use its energy resources to annihilate the Western bankers’ monopoly on currency, overthrowing the current riba (usury) banking system in favor of an Islamic non-usurious alternative.

Additionally, a unified House of Islam would quickly expel the genocidal Zionist squatters from Palestine. The illegitimate Zionist entity only survives due to the division and fractiousness in the Muslim world. So Daesh divides and subjugates Muslims, and discredits their pan-Islamic unity efforts, on behalf of Zionism as well as imperialism.

When we pray for the victims of Daesh’s terror bombings, we should recognize their status as martyrs in the larger struggle to defend the Muslim-majority lands against invaders and plunderers, as well as in the moral struggle of right against wrong.