The cost of an Afghan 'victory'

by Dilip Hiro
From The Nation, February 15, 1999

T en years ago, on February 15, 1989, as the last of the 115,000 Soviet soldiers
crossed over from Afghanistan into Soviet Tajikistan, there was quiet celebration in
Washington as well as Riyadh and Islamabad. Officials in these capitals visualized
Moscow's retreat as the first, crucial step in the re-emergence of an independent
Afghanistan ready to ally with the United States. The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance had
played the central role in training, arming and financing the Afghan mujahedeen to
expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

With the Soviet withdrawal accomplished--a severe blow to Moscow in the cold
war--Washington put Afghanistan on the back burner. But the collapse of the Soviet
Union in December 1991 gave a second wind to the mujahedeen movement, which acquired
a momentum of its own. Its seizure of power in Kabul in April 1992, following the
fall of the leftist regime of Muhammad Najibullah, paved the way for the rise of the
Taliban Islamic movement two years later and its capture of Kabul in September 1996.

Today the Taliban controls 90 percent of Afghanistan and rules the country according
to its interpretation of the Sharia, Islamic law--an interpretation that even the
mullahs of Iran find repulsive. Unique in the world, the Taliban regime deprives
women of education and jobs. It has allowed the training camps near the Pakistani
border--originally established by the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence
Directorate (ISI)--to be reopened to give guerrilla training to fundamentalist
volunteers from Xinjiang, China; Bosnia; Algeria; and elsewhere to further their
Islamist agenda through armed actions in their respective countries. The Taliban has
rebuffed Washington's demands that it hand over Osama bin Laden, a Saudi veteran of
the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and a fugitive extremist accused of
masterminding the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam last August, which
killed 257 people, including twelve Americans. The US government has offered a $5
million reward for his capture.

Did the founders of US policy in Afghanistan during the Carter Administration
(1977-1981) realized that in spawning Islamic militancy with the primary aim of
defeating the Soviet Union they were risking sowing the seeds of a phenomenon that
was likely to acquire a life of its own, spread throughout the Muslim world and
threaten US interests?

Perhaps not, but it was not as if they had no choice. When Moscow intervened
militarily in Afghanistan in December 1979, there were several secular and
nationalist Afghan groups opposed to the Moscow-backed Communists, who had seized
power twenty months earlier in a military coup. Washington had the option of
bolstering these groups and encouraging them to form an alliance with three
traditionalist Islamic factions, two of them monarchist. Instead, Washington beefed
up the three fundamentalist organizations then in existence. This left moderate
Islamic leaders no choice but to ally with hard-liners and form the radical-dominated
Islamic Alliance of Afghan Mujahedeen (IAAM) in 1983.

The main architect of US Policy was Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National
Security Advisor. A virulent anti-Communist of Polish origin, he saw his chance in
Moscow's Afghanistan intervention to rival Henry Kissinger as a heavyweight strategic
thinker. It was not enough to expel the Soviet tanks, he reasoned. This was a great
opportunity to export a composite ideology of nationalism and Islam to the
Muslim-majority Central Asian states and Soviet republics with a view to destroying
the Soviet order.
Brzezinski also fell in easily with the domestic considerations of Gen. Mohammad Zia
ul-Haq, the military dictator of Pakistan. After having overthrown the elected prime
minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1977, Zia was keen to create a popular base for his
regime by inducting Islam into politics. One way of doing this was to give aid to the
exiled Afghan fundamentalist leaders in Pakistan.

As for Saudi Arabia, the remaining member of the troika, it had long been a bulwark
of anti-Communism, its rulers lavish in their funding of antileftist forces around
the globe--be it in Angola, Mozambique, Portugal or Italy. The fact that the
population of Afghanistan was 99 percent Muslim was an additional incentive to
Riyadh.

The US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance's financing, training and arming of the
mujahedeen--recruited from among the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan--was
coordinated and supervised by the CIA. The day-to-day management rested with
Pakistan's ISI. All donations in weapons and cash to the campaign by various
sources--chiefly Washington and Riyadh--were handled by the CIA. These amounted to
about $40 billion, with the bulk coming from the United States and Saudi Arabia,
which contributed equally.

The volunteers underwent military training and political education. Both were
imparted by the ISI. In the political classes the mujahedeen were given a strong dose
of nationalism and Islam. The fact that the Soviets were foreign and atheistic made
them doubly despicable. The intention was to fire up militant Muslims to fight Soviet
imperialism. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles in the later stages of the
jihad, the mujahedeen made a hash of Soviet helicopter gunships, a critical tool of
the USSR's counterinsurgency campaign.

From the start the ranks of the Afghan mujahedeen were complemented by non-Afghan
volunteers eager to join the anti-Soviet jihad. The very first to do so was Osama bin
Laden, then a young civil engineering graduate from an affluent family of
construction contractors in Jidda, Saudi Arabia. He devised a scheme encouraging
non-Afghan Muslims to enrol in the jihad. The 30,000 who did so in the eighties
consisted of an almost equal number of Arabs and non-Arabs. Bin Laden, who attracted
4,000 volunteers from Saudi Arabia, became the nominal leader of the Afghan-Arabs. He
developed cordial relations with the heads of the more radical constituents of the
IAAM, including Mullah Mohammed Omar of the Hizb-e-Islami (Khalis group), who was
later to emerge as the Taliban's supreme leader. Besides participating in guerrilla
actions, bin Laden constructed roads in mujahedeen-controlled areas and refurbished
caves as storage places for arms and ammunition. Working closely with the CIA, he
also collected funds for the anti-Soviet jihad from affluent Saudi citizens.

On the wider propaganda front, Brzezinski's successors continued his intensive radio
campaign (through Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe) to arouse and heighten Islamic
consciousness and ethnic nationalism in Central Asia in order to undermine the
Moscow-directed Soviet system. The glaring contradiction of the US policy of
bolstering Islamic zealots in Afghanistan while opposing them in neighbouring Iran
seemed to escape both Brzezinski and his successors.

In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed, but for reasons that had nothing to do with
the interreligious or interethnic tensions among its citizens, which the US
policy-makers had tried to engender in Muslim-majority Central Asia and Azerbaijian.

Following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan-Arabs, including
bin Laden, began drifting back to their homes in the Arab world. Their heightened
political consciousness made them realize that countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt
were just as much client regimes of the United States as the Najibullah regime had
been of Moscow. In their home countries they built a formidable
constituency--popularly known as "Afghanis"--who combined strong ideological
convictions with the guerrilla skills they had acquired in Pakistan and Afghanistan
under CIA supervision. Having defeated Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan, they felt,
naively, that they could do the same to US imperialism in say, Saudi Arabia, with its
strong links to Washington since its inception in 1932.

During the 1990 Kuwait crisis, the stationing of more than 540,000 non-Muslim US
troops on the soil of Saudi Arabia--considered sacred as the realm containing Mecca
and Medina, the birth and death places of the Prophet Muhammad--angered many pious
Saudis, especially the ulema (religious scholars). They argued that under the Sharia
it is forbidden for foreign forces to be based in Saudi Arabia under their own flag.
Their discontent rose when, having liberated Kuwait in March 1991, the Pentagon
failed to carry out full withdrawal from the kingdom.

Among those who protested vocally was bin Laden, who established a formal committee
that advocated religious-political reform. In 1993 King Fahd created a Consultative
Council, all of whose members were appointed by him and served in a merely advisory
capacity; this step failed to pacify bin Laden. During the Yemeni civil war of
April-July 1994, when Riyadh backed the Marxist former South Yemeni leaders against
the government in Sana, bin Laden condemned the official policy. The authorities
stripped him of his Saudi citizenship and expelled him from the country.

But bin Laden's banishment (to Sudan) did not deter other Islamic radicals from
pursuing their agenda. In November 1995 they detonated a bomb at a Saudi National
Guard base in Riyadh, killing five US service personnel stationed there. Of the four
Saudis arrested as suspects, three turned out to be "Afghanis." They were found
guilty and executed.

However, what put the US military presence in Saudi Arabia in the limelight was the
truck bombing on June 25, 1996, outside the Al Khobar complex near the Dhahran air
base. The explosion killed nineteen American servicemen and injured more than 400.
This occurred a few weeks after bin Laden had arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan,
which he was forced to leave when its government came under pressure from Washington
and Riyadh.

Bin Laden then called for a jihad against the Americans in Saudi Arabia. "The
presence of American crusader forces in Muslim Gulf states...is the greatest danger
and [poses] the most serious harm, threatening the world's largest oil reserves," he
said. "Pushing out this American occupying enemy is the most important duty after the
duty of belief in God."

After the Al Khobar bombing the Saudi authorities grudgingly admitted the presence of
some 5,000 American troops on Saudi soil. They were part of the force in charge of
170 US fighters, bombers and tank-killers parked in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and
Bahrain. Well-informed Saudi watchers, however, put the number of American servicemen
in the kingdom at 15,000-20,000, including several thousand in civilian dress, based
in Dhahran, Jedda and the defence ministry in Riyadh.

What is the basis of the US military presence in Saudi Arabia, and what are its aims?
When on August 6, 1990, King Fahd invited US troops to his kingdom, it was to bolster
Saudi defences against the threat of an Iraqi invasion following Baghdad's occupation
of Kuwait. Once the US-led coalition had expelled the Iraqis from Kuwait, this
mission was accomplished. So there was no more need for foreign troops, nor was there
any official explanation for their presence.

The unofficial explanation is that the purpose of the US warplanes stationed in Saudi
Arabia is to enforce the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. This rationale is flawed in at
least three respects. First, since Washington has publicly acknowledged defence
agreements with Kuwait and Bahrain, why not limit the stationing of warplanes to
those countries and exclude Saudi Arabia because of its special religious
significance to Muslims worldwide? Second, the southern no-fly zone was not imposed
until August 1992, seventeen months after the end of the Gulf War, ostensibly to
prevent Saddam Hussein's regime from persecuting the Shiite population of southern
Iraq--so this could not have been the reason American aircraft were stationed there
before that time. Finally, with one or two aircraft carriers of the US Fifth Fleet,
headquartered in Bahrain, permanently plying the Persian Gulf, is there really a need
to station US warplanes on Saudi soil--and thus provide fuel to the likes of bin
Laden, who claims that the kingdom is "occupied" by US troops in the same way
Afghanistan was by Soviet soldiers?

This leads one to take seriously the explanation offered by those defence
experts--such as former Middle East specialist at the London-based International
Institute of Strategic Studies--who claim inside knowledge of joint Washington-Riyadh
strategy devised and implemented after the armed uprising in Mecca in November 1979.
In case there's an antiroyalist coup, they say, the United States would need
seventy-two hours to marshal its full military might to reverse the coup. For many
years the Saudi defence ministry has been purchasing sophisticated weapons systems,
chiefly from the United States. But the Pentagon was reportedly alarmed by the
account of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the US-led coalition in the Gulf
War, that suggested the Saudi military, especially the air force, was incapable of
operating the sophisticated weaponry it possessed. Thus the presence of US military
officials at key Saudi military facilities is considered indispensable in order to
insure swift coordination and secure communications in case of an emergency.

It was against this background that bin Laden and his acolytes articulated the thesis
that their country was occupied. Since then the events in the Persian Gulf, centered
around relations between Iraq and the United States, have strengthened the views of
Islamic militants. In the midst of the deepening Baghdad-Washington crisis of
February 1998, which resulted in the build-up of a US armada in the Gulf, they
published an assessment that applied to the entire Middle East.

On February 23,1998, under the aegis of the International Islamic Front (IIF), Shaikh
bin Laden, Aiman al Zawhiri (of jihad al Islami, Egypt), Abu Yasser Ahmad Taha (of
Gamaat al Islamiya, Egypt), Shaikh Mir Hamzah (of Jamiat al Ulema, Pakistan) and Fazl
ul Rahman (of Harkat al jihad, Bangladesh) issued a communiquÈ laced with the kind of
language used earlier against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

"For more than seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in
the holiest of places, the Arabian peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its
rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbours, and turning its bases in
the peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim
peoples," it stated.

"Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the
Crusader-Zionist alliance, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the
horrific massacres...Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious
and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention
from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there."

Then came the fatwa (religious decree): "The ruling to kill the Americans and their
allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it
in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the Al-Aqsa
Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order
for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to
threaten any Muslim [again]. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God,
'And fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,' and 'fight them
until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in
God.'" This was open season on Americans to all those who agreed with the IIF's
stance. Following the Washington-London air strikes against Iraq in mid-December, bin
Laden called on Muslims worldwide to "confront, fight and kill" Americans and Britons
for "their support for their leaders' decision to attack Iraq." Earlier, spurning the
US demands to hand bin Laden over to Washington, the Taliban government had proposed
that the evidence against him be passed on to it so that he could be tried in
Afghanistan under Islamic law. The United States refused to cooperate. So in late
November, the Taliban supreme judge declared bin Laden innocent.

A decade after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the mood among US and Saudi
decision makers has turned from quiet satisfaction to perplexed hand wringing. In the
words of Richard Murphy, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and South
Asia during the two Reagan administrations, "We did spawn a monster in Afghanistan."
The "monster" of violent Islamic fundamentalism has now grown tentacles that extend
from western China to Algeria to the east coast of America, and its reach is not
likely to diminish without a great deal of the United States' money, time and
patience, along with the full cooperation of foreign governments.

Regards
Karl Carlile (Communist Global Group)
Be free to join our communism mailing list
at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/