Blowback theatlantic.com
I've noted this here article before. Blowback is sort of an unpopular concept to bring up, but Santayana's chestnut sort of requires it. This article from 5 years ago is frightening in its prescience. On the various Muslim governments everybody likes to dump on these days:
SIXTEEN years have passed since the CIA began providing weapons and funds -- eventually totaling more than $3 billion -- to a fratricidal alliance of seven Afghan resistance groups, none of whose leaders are by nature democratic, and all of which are fundamentalist in religion to some extent, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. Washington's financial commitment to the jihad was exceeded only by Saudi Arabia's. At the time the jihad was getting under way there was no significant Islamist opposition movement in Saudi Arabia, and it apparently never occurred to the Saudi rulers, who feared the Soviets as much as Washington did, that the volunteers it sent might be converted by the jihad's ideology. Therein lies the greatest paradox of the bombing in Riyadh: it and the explosions in Peshawar and Islamabad could well prove to be part of the negative fallout -- or "blowback," in intelligence parlance -- of the U.S.- and Saudi-orchestrated Afghan jihad.
The bombings -- the first such terrorist attack in Saudi history, and among the worst in Pakistan's -- were the clearest warnings yet of an ominous escalation in the conflicts between the governments in Cairo and Riyadh and their Islamist foes. And the carnage in Islamabad -- the fourth attack against the Egyptian govrnment abroad in recent months (Mubarak narrowly survived an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa) -- indicated that Egypt's militant Islamic groups, facing an increasingly vengeful crackdown at home, were transferring their four-year-old war to the international front. U.S. policymakers were stunned. In less than a week the vulnerabilities of three of Washington's pivotal regional allies had become clear.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan had all served U.S. interests during the jihad Afghanistan; none appears able to cope with its aftermath. Mubarak's anger was palpable when he told me, months before the bombings, that he laid the blame for Islamist terrorism squarely on Pakistan, for, in his words, failing to "clean up" Peshawar and its environs. Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's bewilderment after the bombings was evident, as she once again faulted the United States and the CIA, which she accused of continuing to finance Pakistan's radical Muslim clerics and fundamentalist groups. As for the rulers of Saudi Arabia, whose princes and foundations, ironically, remain the leading benefactors of many of the militant Islamic groups in a shortsighted attempt to placate the kingdom's expanding fundamentalist constituency, they seemed shaken out of their placidity. And government officials in all three capitals began to wonder, as they redoubled their efforts against terrorism, whether the Islamists could still be contained.
On the Saudis and bin Laden in particular:
About a thousand Saudis had fought in the jihad. Largely funded and supported by their government, they came from good and wealthy families. I asked the diplomat what, in his view, made the Saudis different from other Islamists who came to the jihad.
"Their government sent them," he responded. "It was the patriotic thing to do. But when these guys got there, they met others and began to network; they found a whole new world out there. And despite their wealth, they were underemployed, frustrated, an accident waiting to happen -- and it did. Also, unlike the others who went to Afghanistan as members of Islamic groups -- Gama'a, Al-Jihad, Hamas, and the like -- there were no organized Saudi groups. That's what makes these guys very different: they set up the networks when they came home."
Other U.S. officials agree, and warn that despite the Saudi government's efforts to blame the usual regional suspects -- Iran, Iraq, and Sudan -- for the car bombing, the Islamist discontent in Saudi Arabia is real, and the movement is basically homegrown.
One of its most charismatic and powerful champions is Osama bin Laden, the billionaire scion of a leading Saudi family. Fervent and devout, he was described to me by one U.S. intelligence official as "a religious fanatic with enormous wealth -- a man with a vision, who knows precisely how he wants to convert that vision into reality." Bin Laden worked closely with Saudi intelligence and with Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, in funding the jihad, and eventually came to Peshawar as a mujahid himself. There he befriended Gulbaddin Hekmatyar and Sheikh Omar, and fought with the forces of Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf. He now divides his time between Khartoum and London, where he owns opulent estates, and he places his formidable wealth at the disposal of militant Islamic groups around the world. Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, Bin Laden's brother-in-law and a Saudi financier, was a prime conduit for funding militant Islamic groups in the Philippines, Filipino officials assert; and, according to U.S. investigators, there is evidence that during the mid-1990s, when Khalifa was the head of the Islamic Relief Agency -- a quasi-government Saudi charity -- in the Philippines, he had contact with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, alleged to be the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in New York.
Three years ago, at U.S. urging, the Saudi government stripped Bin Laden of his citizenship because of his "irresponsible behavior ... and his refusal to obey instructions issued to him." When I asked a U.S. counterterrorism expert what this meant, he replied, "Osama was warned by Saudi intelligence: Do nothing against us and we'll leave you alone." Bin Laden ignored the warnings, and the Saudis began running intelligence operations against him and his entourage in Khartoum; at the time of the Bush Administration -- presumably with U.S. knowledge -- they had secretly dispatched hit teams with a contract on his life. When the U.S. military headquarters in Saudi Arabia was blown apart, the expert said, "Osama bin Laden was the first guy who came up on the radar screen in Riyadh."
Some months earlier, when I asked Hosni Mubarak about Bin Laden, he winced. "He wants to take over the world," he said. "He's a megalomaniac." Mubarak then expressed both annoyance and concern about what he saw as the passive attitude of Western governments, particularly those of Britain, Germany, and the United States, in permitting militant Egyptian Islamic groups to operate freely from their soil. But he voiced his greatest concern -- rage, really -- about Peshawar and the veterans of the jihad.
Dumping on the Saudis is quite popular around here. But they had some help in creating bin Laden. I don't have any great fondness for recently invented monarchies, but the alternative isn't exactly appealing either. |
