Reaping What We Have Sown
By David Morris, AlterNet
May 4, 2004
Who is behind global Islamic terrorism? A new book by Mahmood
Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, makes a persuasive case that
the guilty party is the United States. For Mamdani, director of the
Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, the seeds of 2004
were planted in 1979. To be more precise, in July 1979, when Jimmy
Carter, smarting from US setbacks in Vietnam, Iran and Nicaragua,
decided to fight back against the expansion of global communism by
providing secret aid to opponents of the new pro-Soviet government in
Afghanistan.
The Cold War was at its
height. As National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinksi
later recalled, he warned
Carter that U.S. financial
intervention "was going to
induce a Soviet military
intervention." He was right. In
December 1979, the Soviet
Union invaded Afghanistan.
And that set in motion a
series of events that haunts us
to this day.
Carter renewed financial
assistance to Pakistan that
had been cut off because of
that country's dismal human
rights record and its
accelerated nuclear weapons
program. Under Ronald Reagan, Pakistan became the third largest
recipient of US aid, after Israel and Egypt.
The CIA and Pakistan's equivalent, the ISI, became working partners in
an enterprise whose objective was to make Afghanistan Russia's
Vietnam. Among the more influential and aggressive advocates of this
objective was Reagan's assistant secretary of defense, Richard Perle.
The CIA's role was to acquire weapons and specialists in guerrilla
warfare from different countries and deliver them, along with intelligence
and surveillance information on Afghanistan to the ISI. The ISI
transported weapons to the border, supervised the training of Afghan
fighters inside Pakistan and coordinated their operations inside
Afghanistan.
To fight the Russians we did not fuel Afghan nationalism. Pakistan
feared that such nationalism would be led by the 40 percent of
Afghanistan that is Pashtun and could inspire uprisings by members of
that ethnic group in Pakistan. Instead, the United States established
recruitment centers all over the Islamic world: Sudan, Indonesia,
Chechnya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kosovo, Algeria, Iraq.
We created an "infrastructure of terror" that used Islamic symbols to tap
into Islamic networks and communities. In effect, we aided and abetted
an Islamic jihad. The Afghan war, Mamdani observes, "was so
ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle
and more and more as an international religious crusade: a jihad."
The word "jihad" is now used so frequently in the west that most people
believe that calls to religious wars are common in Islam. Mamdani notes
that this is untrue. Indeed only four times in 1100 years has a religious
jihad been used to mobilize Arabs. The last one occurred in 1891 when
Muhammad Ahmed led an uprising against British-Turko-Egyptian
colonialism in Sudan.
The U.S. encouraged a new jihad against Soviet atheism. We
indoctrinated the Islamic recruits with a hatred of the Soviets and, along
with the Pakistani government, taught them how to terrorize and urged
them to do so.
One way was through the education system operated by the
Mujahideen. In these centers, many of the textbooks were paid for by
the U.S. and written by US-chosen contractors. Even math and science
texts contained political messages. One-fourth grade text asked students
to solve the following arithmetic question, "The speed of a Kalashnikov
bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200
meters from a muhahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian's head,
calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the
Russian in the forehead."
"The CIA looked for a Saudi prince to lead this crusade but was unable
to find one", Mamdani notes. "It settled for the next best, the son of an
illustrious family closely connected to the Saudi royal house", Osama bin
Laden.
Osama bin Laden first traveled to Peshawar in 1980. In 1986 he was a
major contractor on the construction of the Khost tunnel complex deep
under the mountains along the Pakistan border. Housed within that
complex were a major arms depot, a training facility and a medical
center for the mujahideen. A little more than a decade after bin Laden's
crew completed construction Bill Clinton used Tomahawk cruise
missiles against it. Today troops continue to fight the remnants of the
Taliban there.
In 1989, the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan. A few months
later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed. The Cold War was over. But a
new war was about to begin. At the end of l989, in the town of Khost,
Osama bin Laden announced the creation of a new organization,
al-Qaeda, "the Base".
"How did the right-wing Islamism, an ideological tendency with small
and scattered numbers before the Afghan War, come to occupy the
global center stage after 9/11?" asks Mamdani. "The answer lies in the
Afghan jihad, which gave it not only the organization, the numbers, the
skills, the reach and the confidence but also a coherent objective."
Mahfoud Bennoune, an Algerian sociologist is more explicit, "Your
government participated in creating a monster...16,000 Arabs were
trained in Afghanistan, made into a veritable killing machine."
Twelve years after the end of the Cold War an L.A. Times investigative
reporter concluded that the key participants in every major terrorist
attack in New York, France, Saudi Arabia and other countries were
veterans of Afghan War.
We were reaping what we had sowed.
Today some of the principal architects of the Afghan jihad are back in
power. Led by Richard Perle and others, they persuaded President
Bush that the only way to destroy the Islamic killing machine we had
created was to establish a foothold in the heart of the Islamic world.
Iraq offered us that chance. On March 20, 2003, almost 25 years after
we confronted the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, we seized that
opportunity. Some 15 months later more than 600 Americans have
died. We've spent more than $200 billion. Trains in Spain, nightclubs in
Indonesia, offices in Saudi Arabia are being blown up. Greece is girding
for a terrorist attack during this summer's Olympics. U.S. political
conventions may take place under military protection.
The Soviet losses in Afghanistan helped speed the end of the Cold War.
But the strategy we used to defeat the Soviets also created the bridge to
a new global war, one that we are finding may be a great deal hotter and
more destructive than the old one.
David Morris is co-founder and vice president of the Institute for
Local Self Reliance in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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