The Cost of an Afghan 'Victory'
by Dilip Hiro
From the February 15, 1999 issue of The Nation.
Ten 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 enroll 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 neighboring Iran seemed to escape both Brzezinski and
his successors.
In the end, the Soviet Union collapsed, but for reasons that had nothing
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.
uring 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 defense
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 defenses 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 defense 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?
his leads one to take seriously the explanation offered by those defense
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 defense
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 communique 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
slam in the holiest of places, the Arabian peninsula, plundering its
riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its
neighbors, and turning its bases in the peninsula into a spearhead through
which to fight the neighboring 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 airstrikes 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
handwringing. 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
ikely to diminish without a great deal of the United States' money, time
and patience, along with the full cooperation of foreign governments.