Under “Windfalls of War” title
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Center for Afghanistan Studies
Omaha, NE 68182-0006Phone: (402) 554-2376
Fax: (402) 554-3681
http://www.unomaha.edu/~world/cas/
Profile
Company Principals
Contract History
Political Contributions
Background
The University of Nebraska at Omaha is home to the Center for Afghanistan Studies, which was established in 1972 and is currently the only academic program in the United States exclusively concerned with Afghanistan affairs. It receives almost all of its funding from outside sources; the university pays for several employees’ salaries.From its start until 1978, UNO participated in an exchange program with Kabul University. But after the 1978 pro-Soviet coup, the Afghanistan programs stopped.
It wasn’t until 1984 that the Center received its first USAID contract to provide educational training programs and facilities to Afghan refugees. The Center continued the educational programs until the mid 1990s, receiving more than $60 million from USAID.
Although USAID funded the Center’s educational and training efforts in Afghanistan, the CIA helped to design and implement the overall program in an effort to strengthen resistance against the Soviet occupation.
“The CIA was involved in a kind of covert assistance to the resistance to fight against Soviets,” Raheem Yaseer, assistant director, told the Center for Public Integrity.
The Center, with USAID funding, established offices in Pakistan to train and educate Afghan refugees, who had formed seven mujahedeen resistance groups. Yaseer said the Center’s educational work helped the resistance against the Soviet occupation.
“We helped all of these seven parties with school supplies, developing curriculum, paying teachers, teacher training and manpower training,” Yaseer said. “They were taught about love for the country, love for freedom, hating the Soviet occupier.”
The Soviets left Afghanistan in February 1989.
In October 1997, Gouttierre told the Omaha World Herald that the CIA was involved in the overall program but did not directly provide money to him or the Center.
For 10 years, the Center received most of its Afghanistan education project funding from USAID. But after Congress ended government-sponsored aid to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, USAID stopped funding the Center. Still, it wasn’t without funding for long.
In 1997, Unocal, an American oil company, stepped in with an offer.
Unocal hoped to facilitate a business relationship with the Taliban in order to promote a natural gas pipeline project. The company was the development manager for the seven-member Central Asia Gas pipeline consortium that also included Saudi Arabia’s Delta Oil, Indonesia Petroleum, three other companies and the Turkmenistan government.
Unocal offered the Center an up-to-two-year contract worth as much $1.8 million to train Afghan men to build pipeline, which would run from Turkmenistan through a Taliban-controlled portion of Afghanistan to Pakistan, where it would be marketed. The pipeline could also be extended into India.
“For its land-locked Central Asian neighbors, Afghanistan is a strategically located ‘commerce corridor’ to the Arabian Sea,” Marty Miller, Unocal’s vice president, said in prepared testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997. He testified at a hearing before the subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asia Affairs when the CentGas project was still underway.
“They [Unocal] wanted to pave the road and create a good feeling,” Yaseer told the Center for Public Integrity. “They gave us about $900,000 [up to $1.8 million for two years] to conduct man power training and train people in crafts, carpentry, masonry, electric and building.”
As the Center for Afghanistan Studies began training civilian men, it also invited key Afghan officials to visit the university. In December 1997, Unocal sponsored a meeting that brought Taliban ministers to the United States, including the minister of mines and industry, the minister for culture and information and the minister for planning. The Taliban’s U.N. representative also joined the visiting group. During their stay, they went to Unocal’s facilities in Texas, visited the State Department and toured the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In May 1998, two Taliban ministers again visited the university on a Unocal-funded trip. Public outrage over the partnership soon erupted.
On June 1, 1998, women’s rights organizations, including the Feminist Majority, the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Alliance for Peace and Freedom in Afghanistan, voiced their concern at a Unocal stockholders meeting. Newspapers nationwide covered the issue. Four days later, Unocal announced it would not renew its contract with the Center.
On Aug. 7, 1998, al Qaeda operatives bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. Soon, Unocal announced that it would put the pipeline plan on hold.
In a press release announcing the withdrawal from the project, Unocal said it would, however, continue to provide “humanitarian support and skills training to Afghanistan through CARE and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.” The oil company added that neither program was designed to provide pipeline construction skills training.
The Center trained 400 Afghan men before Unocal unexpectedly pulled out of the contract.
“They were hot for it then, but they gave up,” Yaseer said of Unocal. “But [the 400 Afghan men] all have their own businesses now, so it was a useful program.”
Yaseer said the Center hopes to work with whomever ends up building the pipeline by training Afghans in vocational skills. He said the pipeline project is very complicated now because more companies are interested in being part of the consortium.
“If American companies get it, probably we will have a chance,” he said. “We will just be interested in training in vocational skills and increasing their chances of getting employment with the pipeline.”
Although the 1997 contract with Unocal ended, public scrutiny and questions about the university’s connections to the Taliban continued, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists attacks.
On January 29, 2002, as the U.S. bombing campaign on Afghanistan slowed down, USAID awarded the Center $6.5 million to provide books and training for Afghanistan’s interim government to resume schooling. The Center, which has a textbook publishing operation in Pakistan, was to print 8 million books and train 4,000 teachers for an estimated 750,000 students by the schools’ starting date, March 23.
USAID employee Chris Brown told the Omaha World Herald that the Center was uniquely positioned to meet the textbook challenge. After USAID stopped funding the Center in 1994, Thomas E. Gouttierre, dean of International Studies and Programs and director of Afghanistan Studies at UNO, had continued to raise money privately in order to keep the Pakistan publishing operation open. Thus, in 2002, the Center was already prepared and ready to start printing the textbooks.
However, the content of the books, which UNO developed in the 1980s with USAID funding, had to be censored. Critics contended the books’ content, which included drawings of guns, bullets and mines, promoted and strengthened an era of jihad violence. So before distributing any more of the books to Afghan students, workers at the Pakistan operation started a “scrubbing” effort to remove violent pictures and references.
Yaseer said the Center printed and delivered about 15 million books on time.
But even without the violent images, the content of the books sparked controversy because they still contained Muslim tenets and verses from the Koran. Organizations that receive USAID funding must prove that tax dollars will not be used to advance religion. A U.S. federal appeals court had previously ruled in a 1991 case that taxpayer funds could not be used for religious instruction, even overseas. But according to the Washington Post, the Bush White House defended the religious content, saying its presence was necessary because Islamic principles permeate Afghan culture. USAID officials also publicly defended the religious material.
In 2003, the Center lost the USAID contract for Afghan educational textbooks and teacher training. The money went, instead, to Creative Associates International Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based, private company.
“We were very disappointed,” said Center director Thomas Gouttierre, whose organization has been involved in Afghanistan education projects since 1973. “We invested our hearts in Afghanistan over a long period of time.
“Maybe it’s possible that AID was looking for a different approach that they thought would be provided by a for-profit. The trends seems to be in favor of for-profits.”
Yaseer said efficiency and quality are secondary to politics in the process of selecting companies and organizations to perform work in Afghanistan. “It depends on who knows who in the administration, USAID and the State Department,” said Yaseer, who worked as an English professor at Kabul University during the Soviet occupation.
“Universities try their best to recruit professionals, but these belt[way] bandits look for surcharges and just grab anybody that comes in handy.”
Though the Center did not get a new contract, Yaseer said it had money left over from the 2002 contract and received a no-cost extension from USAID to continue training teachers from its office in Afghanistan.
“I don’t think that we’re going after that particular [contract] again,” Gouttierre said. “Afghanistan is going through some changes.”
Gouttierre, the Center’s director, lived and worked in Afghanistan for 10 years as a Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbright fellow. He also coached the Afghan National Basketball team and served as senior political affairs officer for the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission to Afghanistan in 1996 and 1997. Gouttierre met Yaseer in Kabul in 1964.
Gouttierre was also a member of the Afghanistan Relief Committee, a private, tax-exempt group founded by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Robert Neumann and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs’ wife, Mary Ann Dubs, in 1980 to help Afghan refugees.
The Boston Globe reported in 2001 that “The Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha has longstanding ties with Washington policymakers and collaborates regularly with intelligence.” Gouttierre told the paper in a Nov. 25, 2001 interview, “We’re at war. I’m an American, and the American government is leading this war. If we have some knowledge or analysis that could be of advantage, we should be forthcoming.”
In 2001, UNO spent a total of $60,000 lobbying Congress, the White House and other agencies on budget and appropriations, science and technology, and education. In 2002, UNO spent a total of $120,000 lobbying Congress, the White House and other agencies on the same issues. For its lobbying efforts in both years, UNO hired Washington, D.C.-based firm Van Scoyoc Associates Inc.
Afghanistan contracts
The State Department is funding two of the Center’s current projects in Afghanistan.Under a $512,000, 11-month State Department contract, the Center is bringing female Afghan teachers to the United States for training. In October 2002, a group of 13 Afghan teachers, all women, spent five weeks in Nebraska and one week in Washington, D.C. A second group of 12 female teachers is expected to arrive in the States October 29, 2003.
The State Department also gave the Center $60,468 in July 2003 to re-establish the Afghan Fulbright exchange program, an international educational exchange program that President Harry Truman signed into law in 1946. The contract calls for the Center to recruit and prepare 20 to 40 Afghan college graduates who will come to the U.S. to study at various universities for six months to one year. It has been 24 years since Afghans had access to the Fulbright program.
The Center for Afghanistan Studies is also using USAID money, remaining from a $6.5 million contract it received in 2002, to continue its field office in Kabul, which “has a small staff which can be readily incorporated into projects intended for reconstruction of Afghan education at the present or in the future,” according to the Center’s Web site. Currently, the field office staff is training teachers.
Government ties
Thomas E. Gouttierre, the director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies, is an old friend of Zalmay Khalilzad, President’s Bush’s nominee as ambassador to Afghanistan and a former paid adviser to Unocal. While working for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Khalilzad conducted risk analysis for Unocal for the proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. Gouttierre also coached Khalilzad’s basketball team at Habibia high school in Afghanistan. That team, as well as teams from various Afghan colleges, helped to form the Afghan National Basketball Team in the early 1970s.During the December 1997 Taliban visit to the United States, Khalilzad joined the group for its trip to Unocal’s facilities in Texas. In 1997, Khalilzad, Gouttierre and Marty Miller, Unocal vice president, testified together before the Senate Foreign Relations Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs subcommittee.
In July 1999, Gouttierre gathered with a dozen Afghan leaders for a confidential meeting, after which he submitted the first of eight classified reports to the State Department.
Peter Tomsen, a former U.S. ambassador to Armenia who teaches courses in American foreign policy and Eurasia at UNO, was President George W. Bush’s special envoy on Afghanistan with the rank of ambassador from 1989 to 1992. He was also the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the State Department, United States deputy chief of mission to China from 1986 to 1989 and the director of the State Department’s Office of India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldive Affairs from 1983 to 1985.
In October 2001, Tomsen told the Chicago Tribune that when UNO hosted Afghan and sometimes Taliban officials’ visits, it served as a neutral ground where Afghan leaders, who often disagreed with one another, could informally give information to the U.S. government. According to the Chicago Tribune, “Since 1986, spanning the early years of post-Soviet occupation to the oppressive regime of the Taliban, the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the Omaha commuter campus has served as a back door for U.S. intelligence efforts to expose Afghan leaders to American ideas and democracy.”
Thomas E. Eighmy, research associate for the Center for Afghanistan Studies, is a retired USAID officer.
Ronald Roskens, who is a former UNO chancellor , was the director of USAID in the first Bush administration.
—Brooke Williams
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<> “A” is for Allah, “J” is for jihad
By Davis, Craig
Publication: World Policy Journal
Date: Monday, April 1 2002
http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resources/workplace-health-safety/1089578-1.html
Picture above is translated as follows: {ONE EXAMPLE OF THOUSANDS}This page is from a third-grade language arts textbook dating from the mujahidin period. A copy of the book was purchased new in Kabul in May 2000.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj02-1/Davis.pdf
Selected quotes
….In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Education Center for Afghanistan, located in Peshawar, Pakistan, and operated by the Afghan mujahidin (holy warriors), published a series of primary education textbooks replete with images of Islamic militancy. These schoolbooks provided the mujahidin (who, after a ten-year struggle, drove the Soviet occupying forces from Afghanistan in 1989) with a medium for promoting political propaganda and inculcating values of Islamic militancy into a new generation of holy warriors prepared to conduct jihad against the enemies of Islam. Consider the following introduction to the Persian alphabet in a first-grade language arts book:
Alif [is for] Allah.
Allah is one.
Bi [is for] Father (baba).
Father goes to the mosque…
Pi [is for] Five (panj).
Islam has five pillars…
Ti [is for] Rifle (tufang).
Javad obtains rifles for the Mujahidin…
Jim [is for] Jihad.
Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. Our brother gave water to the Mujahidin…
Dal [is for] Religion (din).
Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam…
…..
One of the responsibilities of the mujahidin-operated Education Center for Afghanistan
was to write, print, and distribute textbooks. The ECA was funded by the Education Program for Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), under a $50 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development that ran from September 1986 through June 1994……
This essay is drawn from a longer, unpublished analysis, “Nationalism, Revolution, and Jihad: Images
of Violence in Afghan Primary Education Textbooks,” the research for which was made possible by
a David L. Boren graduate fellowship. The author would like to thank Jamsheed Choksy, Paul Losensky, and M. Nazif Shahrani for their comments and insights.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj02-1/Davis.pdf
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