To all the friends I am making here, please read this from msnbc.com and LEARN something, thank you
That decision is coming home to roost.
msnbc.com
Bin Laden comes
home to roost
His CIA ties are only the
beginning of a woeful story
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998 — At the CIA, it happens
often enough to have a code name: Blowback.
Simply defined, this is the term that describes an
agent, an operative or an operation that has turned
on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public
enemy Number 1, is the personification of
blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero
by millions in the Islamic world proves again the
old adage: Reap what you sow.
BEFORE YOU CLICK on my face and call me naive, let
me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to
defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when
supporting one villain (Cambodia’s Lon Nol, for instance)
would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes,
there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake
hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet.
But just as surely, there are times when the United States,
faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the
temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic
extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the
destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of
TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.
BIN LADEN’S BEGINNINGS
T As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly
knows by now, bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction
fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that
money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and
those of its Arab allies around the world.
As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left
Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after
Moscow’s invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front
organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK -
which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside
world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its
unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by
Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services
Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for
conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.
By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of
Afghanistan’s mujahedeen. His money gave him undue
prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of
those who fought and died for Afghanistan’s freedom - like
the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that
tortured nation - were Afghan nationals.
Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of
Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that
Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to
“read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab
volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency
reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for
now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic
militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian
refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable”
partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
WHAT’S ‘INTELLIGENT’ ABOUT THIS?
Though he has come to represent all that went wrong
with the CIA’s reckless strategy there, by the end of the
Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the
agency as something of a dilettante - a rich Saudi boy gone to
war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated
as something of a hero.
In fact, while he returned to his family’s construction
business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional
MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that
included many of the more extreme MAK members he had
met in Afghanistan.
Most of these Afghan vets, or
Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there
became known, turned up later behind
violent Islamic movements around the
world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria,
thought responsible for the massacres of
tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt’s
Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred
western tourists repeatedly in recent
years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the
Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.
Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give
the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and
top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in
the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior
Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making
those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he
would make the same call again today even knowing what bin
Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played
an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he
said.
HINDSIGHT OR TUNNEL VISION
It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden’s
connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its
hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a
Frankenstein’s monster like this.
It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to
oppose the CIA’s Afghan adventures than it was when Hatch
and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998
we now know that far larger elements than Afghanistan were
corroding the communist party’s grip on power in Moscow.
Even Hatch can’t be blamed completely. The CIA, ever
mindful of the need to justify its “mission,” had conclusive
evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of
infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy
director William Gates acknowledged under congressional
questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from
President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued
to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological
capabilities in its annual “Soviet Military Power” report right
up to 1990.
Given that context, a decision was made to provide
America’s potential enemies with the arms, money - and most
importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition
violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.
That decision is coming home to roost. |
