Sounds Like

A collection of sound bites on Afghanistan....then and now.


"What will happen if we withdraw now…"

Soviets in 1980s

"Recently one can often hear …that we 'betrayed' [our] Afghan friends [by withdrawing from Afghanistan] and that, after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, we are not interested anymore in the fate of Afghanistan." (Sovetskaya Rossiaya, 14 April 1990)

"Continuation, and even escalation, of fighting after the withdrawal of Soviet troops …" (Minister of Defence of Afghanistan general Sh. Tanai, Izvestiya, 8 September 1989)


Canadians now

"…pulling troops out of Kandahar would simply open the door to another Taliban takeover. There is also a real danger that the return of the Taliban would lead to civil war..." "unwillingness to grapple with the consequences of withdrawing troops seems common, if not endemic, among those opposing the war…. In the face of the Taliban's history of cruelty, MacDonald argued that withdrawing troops would be a betrayal. …But before raising the call to withdraw troops, we might consider those whose lives have unquestionably improved because of the security provided by international forces. " (This Magazine (Canada), March/April 2007)

Insurgency was/is called…

Soviets in 1980s

"hardened murderers" (Pravda, 13 December 1985)

"… scumbags" (Soviet soldiers and a nurse quoted in Izvestiya, 23 May 1988)

Canadians now

"detestable murderers and scumbags"
(Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier, Globe and Mail, 13 April 2007. Also see "Helping Afghanistan will protect Canada, says top soldier", CBC News, 15 July 2005)



"There is no comparison"

Soviets in 1980s

"If one agrees with people who…are ready to declare Soviet people to be 'occupants' and compare their [i.e. Soviet people's] actions to what Americans were doing in Vietnam, or to what British colonizers were doing in the same Afghanistan, then one has to admit that those 'occupants' were behaving in a very strange ways. They were delivering food and fuel, clothing, agricultural machinery and industrial equipment to the [Afghan] population; they were treating the sick [Afghans], teaching in the educational institutions, building residential houses, supporting work of the vital industrial plants, electric stations and irrigation structures…" (Zhitnuhin & Likoshin, 1990, p.169).

"I would not draw any analogies between our actions in Afghanistan and the American actions in Vietnam. There was no similarity in objectives or methods, nor were the results similar" (Soviet general Varennikov, CNN interview)

Canadians now

"We are not an 'occupation force' as some even here in Canada have stated, but backers of the legitimate Afghanistan government, which was voted in by a huge majority of Afghans who wanted their first democracy in 25 years. (column by Sgt. Russell Strong, CBC News Viewpoint, CBCNEWS, 13 September 2006)

"…comparison of current international efforts [in Afghanistan] and the Soviet invasion in 1979 is totally without merit… To compare today's mission [of Canadian forces in Afghanistan] to the invasion of a totalitarian [Soviet] regime is beyond comprehension" (op-ed "Unfair comparison" by Col. (ret.) M. Capstick, Globe and Mail, 2 December 2006)

On "fighting evil"

Soviets in 1980s

"…we heard shots. Run towards the village. Found three dead on the road: man, woman and a child. They we probably on the way home. This is the evil. That's why we are here - not to allow such [things] to happen." (from the journal of the Soviet soldier in Afghanistan, quoted in Komsomolskaya Pravda, 26 July 1986)

Canadians now

"We believe that we are engaged in a war on terrorism, a war on evil people, just as we were during the First and Second World Wars. We believe that these people have to be brought to justice," (Jay Hill quoted in Toronto Star, 20 April 2007)


On "our troops in Afghanistan"

Soviets 1980s

"We are giving our young years and our lives for peace"(from the journal of the Soviet soldier in Afghanistan, private Yuri Pahomov, published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, 15 December 1989)

"…my son …died a hero" (mother of the Soviet soldier killed in Afghanistan quoted in Krasnaya Zvezda, 17 March 1988)

"[he] died a hero …shielding his comrades from death" (Komsomolskaya Pravda, 25 April 1987)

"…sincere belief in the high meaning of their [Afghanistan] mission." (book "Star over Kabul-city", 1990, Moscow, p.171).

Canadians now

"He died a hero" (friend of Canadian Soldier killed in Afghanistan quoted in thestar.com, Apr 19, 2007)

"[he]… died a hero, he died protecting his fellow comrades" ( message by Jason Carey on the death of Pte. Costall, 3/30/2006, DND website)

"…unwavering belief in the Afghanistan mission" (Toronto Star, 17 December 2006)

SEE:

Kandahar

Afghanistan

War





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Narco Politics

The British alternative is what? More civilian deaths from air strikes?

British diplomat opposes legalized Afghan poppy crop

Britain’s top diplomat in Canada has dismissed a poll, commissioned by the international think-tank that is championing the legalization of Afghanistan’s contentious opium poppy crop, which shows that Canadians overwhelmingly support for the use of Afghan opium for medicinal purposes.

Cary was responding to the release of an Ipsos Reid survey of 1,000 Canadians, conducted on behalf of the Senlis Council, which found that nearly eight in 10 Canadians (79 per cent) want Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get behind an international pilot project that would help transform Afghanistan’s illicit opium cultivation into a legal source for codeine, morphine and other legitimate pain medications for the international market.

Oh so you could do it just that after six years you don't have the infrastructure.....right-o that's why Harper sent our troops into the Opium Fields. The effectiveness of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams can be measured in opium production.

Cary noted that while opium production has been licensed in such places as Thailand and Turkey, it took 15 years to achieve such a system. Afghanistan simply lacks the infrastructure and regulatory framework to cultivate opium legally and to keep it out of the hands of drug dealers, he said.

And for the British who created this problem in the 19th Century in order to expand their Empire to be telling us they oppose legalization, well that is a bit rich isn't it. They have a history of creating infrastructure and regulations for opium production.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization.

Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines.

This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports.

The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history.

Chickens, home, roost.

And after all this is a British problem, which they created back then and again today in Afghanistan.

Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand

The vast increase in opium poppy farming in Afghanistan is indicative of an inability to grasp a basic law of economics

The British government for sure knows how to do one thing. It knows how to help farmers in need. Since it arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 and was put in charge of the staple poppy crop, ministers have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on promoting it. On Monday the United Nations announced the result. Poppy production in Afghanistan has soared since the invasion, this year alone by 34%. The harvest in the British-occupied protectorate of Helmand rose by 50% in 12 months. This is a dazzling triumph for agricultural intervention.

Ministers may deny this was their policy, but they cannot be that inept. They faced a heroin epidemic at home. Suddenly finding themselves charged with controlling almost all the world's opium production, they must have known what they were doing. By alienating farmers and forcing them into the arms of the Taliban, they would drive up illicit production and encourage oversupply. While that would increase heroin consumption in Britain in the short term, as it has done, oversupply would eventually cause prices to collapse. At that point, the British policy of "poppy substitution" with wheat and other crops would start to bite and supply would be stifled. What happened when that stifling drove prices back up again was someone else's concern.

I cannot think of any less daft explanation for a policy that otherwise defies every law of economics. Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister responsible for flooding British streets with cheap heroin, may squabble with his American colleagues over whether poppy eradication is better than substitution, but one thing is certain. Since Nato arrived in Afghanistan, opium has become to the local economy what oil is to a Gulf state. It is roughly 60% of the domestic product and 90% of exports, with productivity per hectare rising by the year.

Those into conspiracy theories might be forgiven for thinking this might also be a policy of the CIA to destabilize Iran by increasing the number of heroin addicts in that country.

Despite US suspicions, Iran - which has one of the world's highest drug addiction rates - argues that it has legitimate interests in combating the influx of heroin and opiates from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. More than 3,000 Iranian police and security personnel have been killed in clashes with drug smugglers along the Afghan border since 1979.

Legalization would of course cure this problem by recognizing drug addiction as a medical problem, a curse of capitalism, rather than a crime.

The year 2009 will mark the centennial of the Shanghai Opium Conference, the first world-wide agreement on the reduction of opium use and production. China, then still an extremely poor feudal nation, was spending most of its foreign exchange on opium it imported through British traders. The British sold their cheap Indian Opium for pure silver to the Chinese, and had almost two centuries of opium fortune-making behind them. The fledgling United States of America tried to conquer a share of the profits in this lavish market, at a time when prohibitionist ideas about alcohol and opium control were expanding all over the globe. It was time for the American Disease to be born.

But don't expect support for that from Bush or Harper. They represent the traditional prohibitionist culture of social conservative Christians. The folks who oppose heroin legalization used to oppose the 'demon rum'.

In later analyses of the history of drug and alcohol controls other names for the American Disease have been coined. The most appropriate one, not tied to any nationality per se, is the 'Temperance Movement'. It was comprised of a collective of local movements prevalent in a group of nations. Later these nine nations would be identified as a special group, the nations where the temperance culture would endorse far reaching control policies in the attempt to regulate medical and recreational drugs. The global impact of these temperance cultures has varied from almost nothing to considerable.

Meanwhile it is telling that not only are Afhgani's the largest producers of opium they are also its victims.

Afghanistan is hooked on opium. The drugs trade has become the largest employer, its biggest export and the main source of income in a land devastated by decades of war. Opium is grown on 10 per cent of the farmland and employs 13 per cent of the population as labourers, guards and transport workers.

The ubiquity of the drug has now created the world's worst domestic drug problem, a crisis threatening to engulf any hope of economic revival. The first nationwide survey on drug use, by the Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, estimated that one million in this nation of 30 million were addicts, including 100,000 women and 60,000 children.

Defending the rights of Afghani women and children, the mantra of the Harpocrites used to justify their warmongering. And their war efforts have resulted in increased addictions amongst women and children. That surely is a measure of success of this mission.




SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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Le silence est d'or

Silence is Golden.

At his first Quebec appearance since two Quebec-based soldiers died in Afghanistan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper nearly completely refrained from commenting on the mission in the war-ravaged country. Harper, who didn't use the word "Afghanistan" in the speech, wouldn't answer reporters' questions afterwards.

The Right Honorable War Monger is embarrassed by pointed questions. And he should be. He can't answer this one.

The wife of slain Vandoo Mario Mercier has said she hopes
he's the last Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan.

SEE:

Kandahar

Afghanistan

War





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Clarification

 Christian was on afghan ground for a little over a month,
when his light armoured vehicle struck a land mine. 

The fact he is dead, and how he died, his vehicle hit a land mine (not and IED, not a Taliban roadside bomb, not a suicide bomber) is less important than getting his regimental colours right.

Final Van Doos soldiers head to Afghanistan
Funerals for Master Cpl. Christian Duchesne and Master Warrant Officer Mario Mercier will be held Friday, near Valcartier.

Department of National Defence

Aug 24, 2007 17:00 ET

DND: Not Only Vandoos

MONTREAL, QUEBEC--(Marketwire - Aug. 24, 2007) - To show respect to the majority of the military personnel currently deployed in Afghanistan, who work in collaboration, but are not part of the Royal 22e Regiment, we want to specify this fact and ask the media's cooperation regarding the diffusion of complete and fair information.

Master Corporal Christian Duchesne belonged to the 5th Field Ambulance, part of the 4th Health Service Group.

The Joint Task Force - Afghanistan (JTF-Afg) Rotation 4 deployed in the summer of 2007 is comprised of approximately 2300 soldiers representing many different professions in the Canadian Forces. The majority of those troops come from over fifty different units and regiments in Canada. A third of them actually belong to the Royal 22e Regiment. Even if the core of these men and women come from Valcartier, many also come from other regions of Quebec and the rest of Canada.

For the complete list of regiments and units comprised in the JTF-Afg, you may consult the following website: http://www.5gbmc.ca/spip.php?article557

SEE:

Kandahar

Afghanistan

War





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Senator Craig's Tearoom

Senator Larry Craig who likes to have sex in public washrooms asserts he is not gay.

"Idaho Senator Asserts: 'I Never Have Been Gay'."

He may be 'technically' correct. Some 'straight' men like to have anonymous sex in public washrooms too.

For over 100 years, police surveillance and sting operations have targeted public toilets - or "tearooms" - frequented by gay men in search of sex.

But tearooms were also frequented by other classes. The washrooms of New York's subway system were "(the) meeting place for everyone," as one man put it. A businessman on his way home to his wife and children in one of the outer boroughs could engage in quick sex at the end of the workday but still not identify as gay.

And somethings never change.....

10% Of Straight Men Have Sex With Men, New York

Almost 10% of men who said they were straight had had sex with at least one man during the last twelve months, according to a new study carried out by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 70% of them were married. Many of these men said they had not used a condom and had not been tested for HIV.

Men who have sex with men (MSM) is a term used mostly in the United States to classify male persons who engage in sex with other males, regardless of whether they self-identify as gay, bisexual, or heterosexual. The term is intended to reference a particular category of people as a risk-group for HIV, and is considered a behavioural category

In a study conducted by Preeti Pathela and colleagues (reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine) nearly 4200 New York City men were interviewed by telephone and asked 130 questions about health-related matters. Embedded in the demographic questions midway through the survey was a question about the man’s sexual orientation. Later, at the end of the survey, each man was asked about the number of men and women with whom he’d had sex during the previous 12 months.

Of the men who labeled their sexual orientation and reported having sex in the past year:

• 85.8% identified as straight and reported sex only with women
• 3.3% identified as gay and reported sex only with men
• 1.1% identified as bisexual and reported sex with men, women, or both.

But:

• 8.9% identified as straight and reported sex only with men
• 0.7% identified as straight and reported sex with women and men.

Combining the last two groups, nearly 10% of the men identified themselves as straight but had at least one male sexual partner in the previous 12 months. About 70% of these men were married. Nearly all reported having sex with only one partner in the past year.

This comment attached to the Wall Street Journal blog on Senator Craig's denial of being gay, makes the same point.

But let’s not have the discussion that America really needs to have: gay men don’t have sex in public bathrooms. They have their gay bars, clubs and websites for that. It’s the straight men traveling on “business” that play footsies in the public johns, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a gay bar or bookstore. Who’s have sex in a public restroom? Your “straight” husband is!!!! LOL I should know. I’ve had sex w/ many “straight” men who were cheating on their families, only to tell me after I took care of their needs…cheating me, their families and themselves. Wake up America. Stop shooting gay folks as scapegoats. It’s the straight men who don’t want to come out of the closet for fear of being labeled queens who are troublemakers.
http://www.williamcastillo.com

Comment by William Castillo - August 28, 2007 at 9:55 pm

However for truly anonymous sex Senator Craig might have considered sticking to the internet where you can have a relationship with a man and remain straight.

The Internet has created a space where people can experiment with their sexuality. Many heterosexual men, who have previously merely fantasized about it, take the plunge and have cyber sex with other men. These are some of the findings in Typing, Doing and Being-­A Study of Men Who Have Sex with Men and Sexuality on the Internet, a new dissertation from Malmö University College in Sweden. Michael W. Ross will defend the thesis on March 10, and the public defense will be the first ever at the Faculty of Health and Society as well as the first in the new research field of Health and Society.

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Opiate Of The Masses

Iran suffers from being the conduit for Afghanistan opium and heroin. It more than any other country is directly affected by the increased narcotic production in Afghanistan.

While the Canadian media hyped the latest UN Drug Report on the increased opium production in Afghanistan quoting the RCMP claim that we are getting more heroin from there than from the old Golden Triangle.

The Golden Triangle; Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. was the result of the CIA's involvement with black ops there during the Viet Nam war as Afghanistan production is a result of CIA involvement during the anti-Soviet offensive. The fact remains that NATO and American operations against opium production in Afghanistan have been a failure because they have no real alternative to the value of this agricultural product a historic crop in the region. A product first used by British Imperialism to spread its power through out Asia in the 19th Century.

However, in Afghanistan as in other parts of the world, in Burma for example, opium has long been at stake in armed conflicts as its trade has allowed these conflicts to be prolonged. As the complex history of opium in Asia demonstrates, opium production and trade have been central to world politics and geopolitics for centuries and the role of the opium economy in Afghanistan does not represent a new trend. In many ways, history reinvents itself.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization. Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines. This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports. The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history. Eventually, opium consumption and addiction also spurred tremendous opium production in China. In response to the Chinese national consumption that drained its silver reserves, China became the world’s foremost opium producer.

This trend emerged first in Laos and in Burma, then in Afghanistan in what came to be known as the Golden Crescent. In both Southeast and Southwest Asia, the Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Communist covert operations and secret wars benefited from the participation of some drug-related combat units or individual actors who, to finance their struggles, were directly involved in drug production and trade. To cite just two, the Hmong in Laos and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan.

Today, Afghanistan’s opium production is the direct outcome of Cold War rivalries and conflicts waged by proxies who helped develop a thriving narcotic economy in the country. Afghanistan has been the world’s leading opium-producing country for years now, with Burma and Laos ranking second and third respectively.

And NATO has not engaged the Iranians in controlling the border and transit points used by the opium producers in Afghanistan. And they will continue to fail until they engage the Iranians as allies in the fight against opium.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a major transit route for opiates smuggled from Afghanistan and through Pakistan to the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Russia, and Europe. The largest single share of opiates leaving Afghanistan (perhaps 60 percent) passes through Iran to consumers in Iran itself, Russia and Europe. There is no evidence that narcotics transiting Iran reach the United States in an amount sufficient to have a significant effect. There are some indications that opium poppy cultivation is making a comeback in Iran, after a long period during which poppy cultivation was negligible. There are an estimated 3 million opiate abusers in Iran, with 60 percent reported as addicted to various opiates and 40 percent reported as casual users. With record levels of opium production right next door in Afghanistan, the latest opiate seizure statistics from Iran continue to suggest Iran is experiencing an epidemic of drug abuse, especially among its youth.

And contrary to the RCMP reports in the press, the United States government report above states that NO Afghani opium is getting into North America. Now do ya think the RCMP may be doing a bit of PR for their pal the PM to justify his war in Afghanistan?

NATO has relied upon American forces practicing large scale opium field eradication supported by air strikes which has led to large scale civilian deaths and friendly fire deaths to NATO forces.

Joanna Nathan
International Crisis Group analyst

Aerial eradication of poppies is not the solution. While some ground-based manual eradication is important as a stick, to discourage particularly new growers, it hits the poorest hardest. Aerial eradication can be too indiscriminate and would enrage a large sector of the population possibly driving them into the arms of the insurgents. On the other hand the proposal to license opium for medicinal use is unfeasible at this stage. Most of the drugs grown in Afghanistan are in Helmand which they haven't been able to stop when it is completely illegal. How would you then insert a massive licensing bureaucracy there and stop those who continue to grow for the black market? The price differentials would be so large there would be no incentive to grow for a licensed market.

The American war on opium production, like the rest of its Afghanistan mission, has been a failure, since it is America's allies in Helmand Province that turn out to be the opium producers themselves.

Eradication in Helmand

This season, the governor of Helmand asked the AEF to eradicate in Helmand. Despite making progress due to the AEF's heavy use of mechanized eradication, insecurity and waning political will hindered the AEF's efforts. Helmand will likely continue to be Afghanistan's largest opium cultivating province. Any future eradication strategy for Helmand needs to first account for security and political will.

It should be noted that 75% of the opium poppy cultivation in Helmand is new cultivation that did not exist two years ago. By definition, then, at least 75% of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who lack licit economic alternatives-two years ago these farmers were doing something else.

In other words, the vast majority of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who have been growing poppy for generations and lack economic alternatives. The reality is that cultivation has expanded rapidly in the past two years as opportunists have scrambled to exploit Helmand's lawlessness for profit. Many of Helmand's poppy growers are wealthy land-owners, corrupt officials, and other opportunists. Helmand's land is fertile; infrastructure and access to markets is good, and alternatives to poppy are available. Moreover, if Helmand were a country, it would be the fifth largest recipient of U.S. development aid in the world, having received over $270 million in USAID funds in recent years. Opium poppy grown by wealthy land-owners and corrupt officials funds the insurgency. There is no reason to avoid eradicating their poppy fields aggressively.

SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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Outing BP

A scandal occurred this spring when the British CEO of BP, British Petroleum, the British petrol giant which branded itself as green; Beyond Petroleum 'its a start', Lord Browne was outed for being gay, and supposedly lying about it in court.

The reality is that his resignation had less to do with covering up his homosexuality then covering for BP. Which had not gone Beyond Petroleum as a result of Lord Browne's corporate decisions but had become a Bad Player in the oil business.

British Petroleum used the cover of a post-Hurricane Katrina refinery bill in Congress for a sneak attack on legal protections against supertankers in Puget Sound. Reps. Jay Inslee and Dave Reichert thwarted it.

You will remember that BP had faced a number of oil field scandals prior to the outing of Lord Browne by his Canadian lover and rent boy; Jeff Chevalier.

A long list of misfortunes has battered this venerable company, including an explosion at its Texas City, Texas, refinery that killed 15 workers and injured scores more, and protracted outages at other refineries. There was also an Alaskan oil spill resulting from a corroded pipeline, along with 2005 hurricane damage to its big Gulf of Mexico Thunder Horse production platform, which delayed that facility's production start-up.

As if that weren't enough, the company's longtime CEO Lord John Brown stepped down abruptly this spring amid allegations about his private life. And more recently, BP was pressured by Russian authorities to sell much of its stake in a big natural gas field to state-run gas company OAO Gazprom.

Lord Browne the ultimate company man was still that despite his lovers outing of him. The reality was that his corporate maneuvering of BP in the oil business had been less an economic success than a failure in protecting the environment and workers.


As they say here is the rest of the story.

Blackmail, Sex & Corporate Secrets

While much has been written in Britain about the seedier side of the scandal, the critical role that BP and its executives played in it has been largely overlooked. Company officials, for instance, reportedly encouraged the C.E.O. to out himself on one of the BBC’s most popular radio shows, a plan that fizzled when Browne lost his nerve in the studio. Before that, BP leaders were secretly enlisted to serve on the board of Chevalier’s company, which was underwritten by Browne. And in the end, the disclosure of corporate secrets was as much a concern to Browne as the revelation of his homosexuality. The threat that internal BP matters might be leaked led Browne to lie in a court statement, which in turn led to his humiliating resignation and public shaming. Among the secrets Browne wanted to protect: He was considering relocating BP overseas—a potential economic ­disaster that would have been a huge blow to Britain’s corporate psyche—and he placed a dollar value on the heads of his workers in the event that they were injured or killed in an accident. In one memo, company executives gamed out different disaster scenarios for BP, comparing them to the outcomes in The Three Little Pigs.

Now the company is trying to right ­itself under a new C.E.O., Tony Hayward, who has taken over amid a growing outcry over BP’s shoddy environmental and safety record, which Browne managed to keep as secret as his private life.
Throughout the 1990s, he made a series of acquisitions that won him enormous praise in Britain and heralded the consolidation of the major oil companies. It seemed novel then that British ­Petroleum grew not by increasing its oil exploration and development but by taking over American oil companies such as Standard Oil of Ohio and Amoco. The BP-Amoco merger was the largest of its kind and launched the company into the big leagues overnight. When Exxon bought Mobil the next year, Browne quickly retaliated by purchasing Atlantic Richfield for $32 billion.

Browne was also, like any great C.E.O., a P.R. genius. In 1997, to the horror of many of his oil-industry peers, Browne admitted in a speech that he ­believed global warming was real. He then hired a San Francisco firm to ­rebrand British Petroleum and come up with a new corporate slogan. The old BP logo was replaced with a green-and-yellow sunburst, and ads suggested that BP now stood for . . . Beyond Petroleum. It was a masterstroke: BP had only $100 million invested in solar power at the time of the renaming, compared with at least $10 billion invested in conventional energy. But thanks to BP’s green logo and green C.E.O., its reputation as a green company flourished.

Browne was not quite so popular in the U.S., where experience on the ground is more important than a taste for fine art. “They pounded their chests a lot, but they didn’t know how to run refineries,” a former Amoco employee says of the BP executives. Because refineries are among the most intricate and dangerous workplaces on the planet, the old-timers feared that the BP ­executives’ ignorance would compromise safety, especially as BP cut jobs and budgets to reduce redundancy and raise profits for shareholders. (Similar allegations would later take center stage in the Texas refinery explosion lawsuits.) Other executives were skeptical of the hierarchical management structure at BP; they particularly complained about the handpicked “turtles” (named after the mutant ninja variety), who served as interns to Browne and were supposedly fast-tracked to replace other executives. There was also something known internally as the promise: a written business plan that could be used against employees who didn’t meet their projected goals. “They would use it to cut your throat if you failed,” a former engineer explains. Gradually, the company’s culture became less about innovation than intimidation. Fearful of losing their jobs, few spoke up about deteriorating conditions at some of the refineries. Behind Browne’s back, employees nicknamed him the “elf,” an acronym for “evil little fucker.”

Browne had his critics outside the oil industry too. The company was accused of committing human rights violations while building a pipeline in Colombia, and concerns were expressed about North Sea pollution. Greenpeace selected Browne for its Best Impression of an Environmentalist award. Matt Simmons, whose Houston-based Simmons & Co. is one of the largest investment-banking businesses serving the energy sector, was deeply skeptical of Browne’s 1999 prediction that, because of a worldwide market glut, oil prices would never reach $40 a barrel. “There was a vision of unreality in John Browne’s business plan,” Simmons says. “That generally works until you slip up.”

No one would dispute that Texas City, Texas, is a very long way from St. James’s Square. It is a rough-and-tumble blue-collar town on the Gulf Coast, where people know all too well that refinery work is often life threatening but just as often the only work available. On March 23, 2005, something went very wrong at BP’s Texas City refinery, the third largest in the U.S. An aging tank used to separate gas and fluid overflowed, filling the air with flammable vapor. A driver unwittingly left his truck running, igniting a fireball that by the end of the day had killed 15 people and injured more than 200. Not surprisingly, the blast led to the launch of hundreds of multimillion-dollar lawsuits and several investigations, including one by a commission that former secretary of state James Baker headed. A probe by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board specifically blamed BP’s closed culture for the explosion. In 2006, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the company $21.3 million, the largest penalty of its kind ever issued.

That wasn’t all that would befall BP. The next several months brought a cascade of problems, almost all blamed on lax oversight and poor management. In March, 200,000 gallons of crude leaked out of a BP pipeline at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, forcing the company to partially shut down a major field. The pipe, it turned out, hadn’t been cleaned in years. In April, the U.S. Department of Labor fined BP for unsafe operations in an Ohio refinery. Also during this time, the company was unable to capitalize on its Thunder Horse offshore oil platform—the world’s largest—which was damaged during Hurricane Dennis in 2005. And in June, the government charged some of BP’s traders in Houston with trying to manipulate the price of propane in the Midwest and Northeast.

All these incidents inevitably prompted this question: How could a company that was supposed to be a model of corporate citizenship have gone so wrong? The answer that emerged was simple, and the weakness of Browne’s highly praised policy of acquiring big companies and instituting massive cost cuts was suddenly, fatally exposed. Instead of putting excess cash into maintenance and safety, the executives in London had ordered the company to “bank the savings.” But as plaintiffs’ attorneys have alleged, a rubber band can be stretched only so far before it breaks. BP led the industry in refinery deaths from 1995 to 2005. For 10 years, there was a fire a week at the Texas City plant, and many were afraid to work there, fearing that disaster was imminent. As an employee explained in a survey, “No one here in management cares. . . . We have been very lucky so far with this.” At the same time, the arrogance of BP executives was easily recognizable. One memo, prepared for a meeting held before the Texas City explosion, insisted on cost cuts, a familiar refrain at the plant: “Which bit of 25 percent don’t you understand??? We are going to be wasting our time on Monday unless you come prepared to commit to a 25 percent cut.”

In the end, Browne lied less to save his image than to save the image of his company. It’s notable, for instance, that there was no talk of resignation when word first emerged that the press had its hands on Chevalier’s story. Only after Browne learned that the corporate secrets could leak did he finally decide to step down.

Browne’s early departure will not prevent continued legal battles for BP, but it is perhaps as close to a sacrificial act of love as Browne is capable of, and it has allowed the company to start fresh. Though Browne also resigned from the board of Goldman Sachs, he still works for Apax Partners, a global private equity firm, and goes to his office when it suits him.

And as usual in the corporate world despite his fall from grace Lord Browne has landed on his feet.

FORMER BP boss Lord Browne has walked away with a pension worth just over £1million a year.The disgraced peer tops the list of 100 leading execs who look forward to pensions of £200,000 a year or more.

The former chief executive of BP PLC Lord Browne of Madingley has resigned as non-executive chairman of the advisory board of private equity firm Apax Partners to join energy and power private equity specialists Riverstone Holdings LLC.

His appointment at Riverstone Holdings, which specialises in the energy sector, comes almost four months after he quit oil giant BP when it emerged he lied to the High Court during a battle to block stories about his private life.

Lord Browne takes on the post of managing director and managing partner of Riverstone’s European business and will be based in London, where the group is soon to open an office.

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