Argentinian journalist who spent 20 years in Kabul does not rule out possible “secret deal” – Telam

Grassi has spent the past two decades between Rome and Kabul, where he led the media and trained workers.

Argentinian journalist Ricardo Grassi has spent the last two decades between Rome and Kabul, where he has lived for several months a year directing the media and training those who work there, and this experience has led him to argue that with the arrival Taliban in The Afghan capital has launched “secret agreements that will be known in 50 years.”

Grassi’s intuition comes from someone who has information and knowledge of the field, because since he was hired by the European Union (EU) to organize “Afghanistan’s first independent news agency” in 2003, shortly after the invasion of the United States, his passport racked up dozens of income and expenses to land that the Taliban again controlled.

In Kabul, fund the Pajhwok Afghan News agency (“Pajhwok” means “echo” in the Persian Dari-Afghani and Pashto languages) and contributed to the development of the communication group The Killid Group (“Killid” is “key” in Dari and Pashto), a medium in which, he continued, there is “a balanced mix of reporters and reporters”, which must now check whether “the Taliban movement, as they say, evolved into a version talin 2.0 “.

The first news, at that time, gave contradictory indications, because While the Taliban try to be “very friendly” in press conferences with an international presence, at the same time “there are things that are not defined”, for example, what does it mean for the new leaders that women who do journalism must abide by “Islamic law”.

“Afghanistan is not really a state, it is a set of places with very different tribal, ethnic and clan realities”“

Ricardo grassi

For Grassi, there is a confused situation in Afghanistan, because the extreme fear of many people coincides with “a 40% reduction in the number of civilian casualties”According to figures from last week, a fact he was instructed to point out to give dimension to what the end of a 20-year war would mean “to ordinary people.”

Grassi, who in Argentina, he had directed the magazine Montoneros El DescamisadoHe left the country in 1977, settled in Italy and was editor-in-chief of the Rome-based Inter Press Service (IPS) agency; This week, he was in Norwich, Britain, when he learned that the Taliban were entering Kabul.

“Afghanistan is not really a state, it is a set of places with very different tribal, ethnic, clan realities, and in fact the (former) president (Ashraf Ghani, who fled to the Arab Emirates) United to avoid “a bloodbath”, as he declared), he was not ruling the country, he was more or less trying to rule Kabul and sometimes not even “, he remarked in this interview with Tlam.

The role of the United States

The journalist, who spent part of the year in Kabul between 2003 and 2019, said that One of the motivations for the American occupation, as well as the recent withdrawal, is the historic bid for the construction of a gas pipeline which has not been completed so far. and that it is projected to spread from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

“The initial project had been that of the Argentinian company Bridas (of Carlos Bulgheroni), but later it was intervened by a consortium organized by the American oil company Unocal (acquired by Chevron in 2005), which formed a consortium with a company Saudi oil company, and with the support of the State Department, they have twice invited a delegation from the Taliban government to Washington, ”he said.

And to underline the influence that the company (founded as the Union Oil Company of California) has acquired in Afghanistan, he recalled that both “who would later become the president, Hamid Karzai, and the (former) ambassador (from the United States to Kabul)) and (George) Bush’s personal representative, the African-American Zalmay Khalilzad, had been consultants to Unocal. ”

“They are a people of great dignity, dignity with arms, and it is easy to get rid of them,” said Grassi.

On this new stage at the helm of the Taliban movement, Grassi did not hide the uncertainty conveyed to him by the people he knows and who are in Kabul, and at the same time shared the paradoxes that he himself observed while browsing the ‘Afghanistan and wondering “in the days of the Taliban”, when they replied that “the good thing was that there was a state, with a law that was the same for everyone”.

“They said to me, ‘Look, it felt like it was a state, with a law that was the same for everyone, and that was good. And then, of course, there were the very bad things, which were the brutal punishments, like cutting your life off. hand, stone you “, summary.

The Afghan people have a “complex thousand-layered” culture

Regarding the subjugation of women, which alarms the international community and which has given rise to diplomatic declarations – one of which is signed by Argentina – Grassi asserted that the West’s claim to “modify by decree “aspects of Muslim fundamentalism is illusory. on the contrary, he placed his expectation that changes “can be made by those of the place, with courage”.

“When I started to organize the news agency, there was a more or less balanced mix of reporters and women reporters by my side, and they had a lot of drive and even the courage to face the family because ‘They were reluctant to let the girl go to work and come back in the evening, because it is frowned upon in the neighborhood, ”he said.

According to Grassi, the Afghan population, in all its diversity and heterogeneity, “has a culture of complexity like an onion, with a thousand layers”, which is expressed, for example, in that the massiveness of poetry “in its original meaning ”, recited in public as a“ mode of transmission of knowledge ”.

Another feature of Afghan culture, he noted, is the widespread feeling of opening doors, as in the Hindu Kush mountain range “they are extremely hospitable,” although this arrangement coexists with a attentive attitude towards the visitor, “and so what happens, if they feel cheated, they can kick you out or they can kill you”, commented the journalist, amused.

“They are a people of great dignity, dignity plus weapons, and it is easy to get rid of them, because the weapons are part of the furniture of the house, it is a characteristic combination of Afghanistan” added Grassi, who then said that when it came to associating with the Afghans, he always presented himself as “Argentinian and Latin American”.

Between 2003 and 2019, the journalist lived part of the years in Kabul.

– Tlam: Now everyone has become a specialist in Afghanistan.

– Ricardo Grassi: The longer you stay in one place, the less you become a specialist. The specialists usually stay for three months, it seems they got it all, they leave happy and start talking about where they were as if they were doctors. Afghanistan is very special. It has been invaded over the centuries, the American invasion in 2001 is the last invasion, but everyone has been there: the Persians, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, who founded the famous base of Bagram, which will be then used by the Soviets, then the United States, and now the Taliban occupied it. It is a strategic location, the connection point between Central Asia and South Asia. Easy to invade, but afterwards no one can stay …

$ T .: Why do you say there can be a “secret deal”?
– RG: When the United States says “with all the money we spent to train the Afghan army and they all surrendered”, it is clear that something is not understood. Why would they fight in a situation of extreme confrontation? Why would anyone kill and be killed? For the Taliban, it was a march to occupy every city. I think there will have been secret agreements that we will know in 50 years. Moreover, in terms of the trillions that the United States would have spent in Afghanistan, it is very relative. The money that comes out of Washington from a bank then goes to another bank of an American company, or of an American organization, which will do things (rebuild) in Afghanistan.

– T .: The story of Unocal seems to have been written by a Hollywood screenwriter.
– RG: The story is very specific (re). The (former) Ambassador (American in Kabul), who is Afghan-American, is the same who has now negotiated peace with the Taliban in Qatar. His name is Zalmay Khalilzad. The gas pipeline intended to supply Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, due to the war, could not be completed. Now, with the end of the war, which seems to be happening, maybe they will. They will have to negotiate back, but that’s how it is.