Good one.
I hope that somebody will tell this story in real detail someday:
But the most important development was the jihad in Afghanistan, following the Soviet invasion of 1979. This was a decoy, planned and used by the US and the Saudis to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, it would marginalise Iran, rendering Saudi Arabia the recognised leader of the Islamist movement worldwide, particularly in the Sunni world. On the other hand, this ‘counter-fire’ to the Islamic revolution would direct the energies of the radical Muslims away from the Great Satan, and against the Soviet atheists that had invaded a Muslim country. For the US, jihad in Afghanistan was a way of inflicting a Vietnam on the USSR, accelerating its demise.
The day that the Red Army pulled out of Kabul, 15 February 1989, ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin wall in November that year. Afghanistan, to a large extent, was the graveyard of the Soviet Union. For the US – or so it was perceived at the time – the jihad in Afghanistan was a bargain. It cost only around $600 million a year. Moreover, no US troops were required. Not only were Afghan mujahedin trained and equipped (under CIA supervision) by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service – more importantly, recruits came from many Muslim countries, such as Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, the southern Philippines and Turkey. These people were, in a way, members of Islamist International Brigades.
This brought about a significant change within the Islamist movement itself. In the 1970s, the recruits would read books by Sayyid Qutb or Maududi. These were easy to read, written in an accessible language, and well adapted to cater for this newly-educated, literate generation. Anyone with a high school qualification could read these, and make up their own minds whether they agreed or not.
In contrast, the training camps in Afghanistan and eastern Pakistan provided a very different type of training for their militant recruits, of two kinds. Firstly, total brainwashing and indoctrination. People were not taught to discuss texts or think about them. They were force-fed the writings of medieval ulema, which they did not understand, but which they knew granted full authority to those in charge of the camps to direct their actions. Secondly, they were trained and equipped in refugee camps for combat, again through Pakistan’s ISI via the tutelage of the US.
Out of these camps (whose students included a then darling of the CIA, Osama bin Laden) developed a new culture of Islamist radicalism, combining the brainwashing, which shaped a very cohesive structure of forces on the ground, and the military training, which induced a particular fascination for jihad. This, in turn, would lead to the creation of a network called al-Qaida. In Arabic, the name means ‘base’, and indeed bin Laden and his like, who were already post-modernists, had put all the names and addresses of foreign militants on their database. This network was both a state-of-the-art system, which could easily link up militants scattered all over the world, and yet extremely cohesive, because of the deep level of commitment.
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