A couple of good articles from the UK Independent:
On the dangers - at least, in the UK press - of demonising Islam...
For 1,400 years there has been a debate within Islam between liberal and Orthodox approaches. What is clear, in recent years, is that insensitive and clumsy Western interference in the Islamic world almost always strengthens the hands of the fundamentalists and the conservatives against those who represent more liberal and enlightened interpretations of Islam.
Already we are seeing Pakistan being pushed to the verge of an Islamic revolution as its military government is bullied into helping the Americans against their Afghan kinsmen. Insensitive rhetoric of the kind we have seen in the press, and the use by President Bush of the word "crusade", can only strengthen the hands of the Islamists, fatally weakening the secular states of the region. Most Muslim states would support a precise surgical assault on Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network; they would not put up with a large-scale ground war in Afghanistan or Iraq. We must proceed with the greatest of caution. Such a war is much more likely to destabilise the entire region than to achieve the intended aims.
independent.co.uk
and a little detail I'd not seen elsewhere on Saudi links with the Taliban:
[The Saudi] decision, which ended seven years of shameless Saudi support for the most obscurantist and cruel regime in the region, came scarcely a month after the Saudi Royal Family fired the man who did more than any individual to cement the Taliban's power in Afghanistan: Prince Turki bin Feisel al-Saud, the head of the Saudi secret service.
Saudi Arabia's break with the Taliban ends a relationship that embarrassed the Saudis as much as it infuriated the United States – even though it was studiously ignored by US administrations and the American media.
...
Prince Turki had first promoted the Wahhabi Sunni Muslim Taliban – reared in the ignorance of the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan – as adherents to the al-Saud family sect and a counter-balance to the Shia Muslim Hazara tribe of Afghanistan, which was supported by Iran. Wahhabism, a form of "pure" Islam first preached in the 18th century by Abdul Wahab – whose daughter's marriage to an al-Saud sealed the alliance between the theological zealot and the future rulers of Saudi Arabia – enforced strict sharia religious law, which was applied with obsessional relish by the Pashtun-speaking Taliban.
The Saudis had few doubts about supporting them. Mr bin Laden's flight from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1995 placed him under Taliban, and therefore Saudi, control.
independent.co.uk |
