Ironically "the high-profile missile strikes functioned to present bin Laden throughout the Muslim world as America's most feared enemy, which is exactly the status he'd been aiming to achieve through his terror campaign."
An interesting perspective:
Britannica.com
"Blowback": How the Afghan War Gave Rise to Today's Mideast Terrorist Networks
Oct. 30, 2000
by Tony Karon, special to Britannica.com
The most telling visitor to Yemen in the days after the bombing of the USS Cole was probably Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki bin al-Faisal. His arrival is taken as further evidence in support of what most observers suspect whenever a high profile target associated with the United States is attacked these days: that the perpetrators are likely to include veterans of Afghanistan's anti-Soviet "jihad." As head of Saudi intelligence for the past two decades, Prince Turki is certainly the region's acknowledged expert in tracking terrorists. In fact, much of his expertise may derive from the fact that Prince Turki played a central role, alongside the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence services, in efforts to recruit, train, and deploy Arab volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1989.
When three of the key figures in the World Trade Center bombing turned out to have been trained at camps set up with U.S. assistance in Afghanistan, it was called "blowback"--spy slang for unintended consequences of a covert operation. But by the time Osama bin Laden, the Saudi financier who'd been the key organizer of the "Afghan Arab" legions, declared a global jihad against the U.S. in 1998, it was clear that "blowback" from Afghanistan was neither isolated nor exceptional. Indeed, by helping to arm, train, and organize a global battalion of radical Islamist warriors, the U.S. had sown the wind. And over the past decade it's begun reaping the whirlwind.
Terrorism always has a political context, and it can't be comprehended--or properly countered--without an awareness of that context. Knee-jerk responses actually can exacerbate the problem. Take the 1998 cruise-missile strikes on targets said to be associated with Osama bin Laden following the east Africa embassy bombings as an example: The alleged chemical weapons factory in Sudan turned out to have been a pharmaceutical plant, whose owner is currently suing for compensation in a Washington, D.C., court. The tent camps in Afghanistan that were attacked may have been associated with bin Laden, but the majority of the men killed there were Kashmiris training to fight India. And the high-profile missile strikes functioned to present bin Laden throughout the Muslim world as America's most feared enemy, which is exactly the status he'd been aiming to achieve through his terror campaign.
Terrorism has been a fact of Middle Eastern political life since the late 1960s, but its character has changed significantly over three decades. Early on, radical Palestinian factions used spectacular acts of violence--hijackings, bombings, hostage-taking, and assassinations--to force the world to remember the plight of their forgotten people. Terrorism is not a form of warfare, of course, as much as a brutal form of propaganda. Unlike guerrilla armies, who are confined by territory and generally target an enemy's army, the terrorist's object is not to cripple his enemy's army but rather to spread fear and doubt in his civilian population and to inspire the terrorists' own followers by appearing to "avenge" perceived injustices.
Its growth in the 1970s and '80s depended on the backing of states in the region, who used terrorism to project power by proxy. Libya, Syria, and Iran, for example, were prepared to fund and host Palestinian and other terrorist splinter groups in exchange for those groups occasionally carrying out operations on behalf of their sponsors. But such sponsorship inevitably carried the risk of economic and military backlash from the U.S. and other Western powers, and by the 1990s state-sponsored terrorism was on the wane. Ten years ago the man occupying the headlines reserved for Osama bin Laden today was the Palestinian maverick Abu Nidal. But nobody hears about Nidal anymore.
Still, despite the demise of state sponsorship, terrorism remained a weapon used by regionally based guerrilla and opposition movements--Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Palestinian Hamas movement, Egypt's Islamic Jihad and Gamaat al-Islamiyah, and Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front and Armed Islamic Group kept it very much in the headlines. Each was dedicated to a specific local objective--the Lebanese to expel Israeli occupying forces; Hamas to destroy the peace process and Israel along with it; the Egyptians and the Algerians to challenge their countries' authoritarian secular regimes, which had taken a strong-armed approach in trying to quash dissent.
But the bin Laden network sought to articulate local movements into its global jihad, which it appears to have managed to do with both the Algerians and the Egyptians. Hezbollah remains distinct, however. Its Shi'ite Muslim theology and backing by Iran puts it on a different ideological track from the bin Laden networks, whose Sunni fundamentalism and close ties to the Taliban movement in Afghanistan--sworn enemies of Tehran--might be obstacles to cooperation.
Unlike these local groupings, bin Laden's "Al Qaeda" network is an international terrorist confederation that owes no loyalty to, nor is particularly dependent on, any state, and yet has been able to draw militants from a number of localized Islamic insurgencies into a worldwide jihad against the United States. Like a transnational corporation, its structures have spanned all borders and its identity has had a supra-national appeal to fanatical Muslim malcontents everywhere. And the supreme irony may be that this nemesis that now stalks America all over the globe is partly of its own making.
In order to even up the odds of the Afghan tribesmen fighting the Soviet invaders, the CIA had helped solicit men and material support from throughout the Arab world for the jihad against the communist infidels. But most of the recruits came from radical Islamist opposition movements whose leaders saw the jihad not only as a holy duty but also an opportunity to gain invaluable training and combat experience for some of their best militants. Of course their governments were only too happy to "export" such elements, even flying them over. The CIA planners who helped implement this strategy may have been too focused on communism to see the bigger picture. Iran, of course, already had announced an Islamist challenge to U.S. influence in the Mideast, but it may have been assumed that the more conservative Sunni Islam that prevailed in most of the Arab world was unlikely to spawn a similar radical political challenge.
By the end of the Afghan War, bin Laden's "Arab Afghans" were a stateless international army numbering some 3,000-5,000 men, whose prime enemy would soon become not the Soviets, but the United States. For those who'd fought to expel the infidel in Afghanistan, the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia propping up an authoritarian and unpopular regime and making war on Iraq was no more palatable. Nor was Washington's support for Israel and for the authoritarian secular regime in Egypt.
U.S. involvement with the Afghan Arabs ended abruptly in 1989, when the Soviet Union began to collapse, and the outcome in Afghanistan no longer mattered to Washington. But the Arab Afghans stayed on to finish the job, and even after the overthrow of the erstwhile Soviet-backed regime in 1991, they maintained their training camps near the Pakistani border.
The "Afghanis," as they were known in the Arab world, certainly weren't welcome home after the war. The regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia knew full well that the men who'd fought in Afghanistan were battle-hardened Islamist warriors whose wartime experience had made them even less likely to reconcile with the pro-Western status quo in those countries. As bin Laden and his Arab Afghans railed against the Pax Americana that had descended on the Arab world after the Persian Gulf War, they found themselves hounded out of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries.
So bin Laden found himself heading a skilled, battle-hardened crew of cosmopolitan warriors imbued with a fiery religious militancy and ready to fight the perceived enemies of Islam anywhere in the world. His personal fortune--accumulated by inheritance in one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families--and his ability to raise funds from peers throughout the Arab world allowed the Arab Afghans to remain together and to redeploy themselves to assist Muslims under fire in Bosnia, Chechnya, and in Islamist insurgencies as far afield as western China and the Philippines. They maintained their bases in Afghanistan and set up new ones in the Sudan, Yemen, and cells everywhere from Tajikistan to New Jersey.
The scale of that networking was reemphasized recently when a group of Abu Sayyaf fighters in the Philippines seized a number of Western holiday-makers in Malaysia and held them for more than a month on the Philippine island of Jolo. Although the Abu Sayyaf are campaigning for independence for the Muslim region of Mindanao, one of their key demands was the release of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef. And the connection was about a lot more than long-distance admiration: Abu Sayyaf's founders had fought alongside Yousef in Afghanistan, and his trial revealed that he'd spent two years in the Philippines with them, during which time he'd planned attacks on U.S. airliners.
Bin Laden's primary grievance remains with the Saudi Royal family, which he derides as corrupt, illegitimate, and un-Islamic, particularly since they allowed U.S. troops onto the Arabian Peninsula. His goal is to overthrow them and replace them with an Islamic state strictly based on religious law. His most important allies, the Egyptian Islamist groups, have a similar starting point in their own country. But U.S. support for both those regimes and for Israel creates the recipe for an ideology that ties local Islamist grievances into an international campaign against the United States. And with the United States having declared him its most hated enemy, bin Laden's networks may be the biggest beneficiaries in terms of volunteers and financial support of the wave of Arab anger at the United States and Israel spawned by the current violence.
Tony Karon is a writer and editor for Time.com in New York. His last article for Britannica.com was "A Shattered Peace," a report on the breakdown of the Mideast peace process.
(c) 1999-2000 Britannica.com, Inc |
