Robert Fisk: Just look how we’ve forgotten the CIA’s secret prisons in Afghanistan

Whenever I'm in Tajikistan, My Mobile Phone Says I'm in Dubai

Just look how we’ve forgotten the CIA’s secret prisons in Afghanistan

By Robert Fisk

December 06, 2008 "The Independent/UK" - - I knew I was in Tajikistan this week when my Lebanese roaming mobile phone welcomed me to "Russia" on arrival at Dushanbe airport. Yup folks, Alpha Beirut really believed I was in Mr Putin's empire. And, wondrous to behold, the phone pinged again when I was on my way to the Tajik town of Panj on the Amu Darya, welcoming me to Afghanistan. An hour later, when I was still in Tajikistan north of the ancient Oxus River – traversed by Alexander, who actually married a Tajik (later murdered, of course) – my mobile pinged once more. This time it welcomed me to the United Arab Emirates.

Forgetting the whole of Afghanistan, part of Pakistan – or a hunk of Iran, depending on your flight path – my mobile actually believed that I was among the gleaming towers of Dubai when I was in one of Stalin's poorest Muslim former republics. It reminded me of how, back in the mid-1970s, a foreign editor on The Times used to keep a spinning globe on his desk as a sign of his global importance and would place the tip of his thumb on the scene of a catastrophe in order to dispatch his nearest reporter to the location. Thus he once sent my predecessor in Lebanon by road to a northern Turkish earthquake on the grounds that – despite a Syrian border crossing for which a visa took a week to negotiate – Beirut was only half a thumb from Trabzon. Ping. Welcome to Turkey.

I suspect this is pretty much how the Bush administration regarded Muslim south-west Asia. One bunch of Muslims in Dushanbe was pretty much the same as another in Kabul or the Emirates. After all, Dushanbe boasts a French air force squadron flying close air support to the Brits in Afghanistan's Helmand province while Dubai welcomes the Royal Navy, the French air force and successive US secretaries of state. Those pesky Muslims are just about covered by a finger and thumb. Why bother with the detail?

An oddly similar parallel has emerged since the election of Obama. During the campaign, President Ahmadinejad of Iran announced that the "Israeli regime" would be destroyed. That's actually what he said in Farsi – not "Israel", though the distinction might appear to be splitting hairs. Immediately, Mrs Hillary Clinton announced that if Tehran attacked Israel, she would "flatten Iran". And now she is to be secretary of state, the Iranians are understandably a little bit angry. Was the new pussycat in the State Department going to take over from the previous pussycat by threatening violence against Iran when Obama supposedly wants "dialogue"?

And a kind of inverted hypocrisy immediately followed. Mrs Clinton, American "officials" let on, should not be taken too seriously because this was an election campaign. Indeed, Obama – putting distance between the mutual recriminations of both Democrat candidates a few months ago – this week blithely dismissed their own election speeches. What he meant was that they both told lies to get votes. Yet the crackpot president of Iran's threat was still to be taken with the greatest seriousness. Not difficult to get the message, is it? The future secretary of state should not be believed when she threatens Iran – but Iran must be taken seriously when it threatens Israel.

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