While many Americans
believe that their foreign policy promotes democracy, liberty and justice
across the globe, much of the rest of the world does not recognize this as the
goal. What is the source of this disconnect?
In the wake of the Cold War, the
Even the CIA itself
acknowledges that terrorism is the consequence of previous
In the
A briefing on some of
the
1953 : The
During the early 1980s, the
Before the CIA
assisted the current network of “fundamentalist” terrorist organizations for
its own purposes during the Afghan war in the 1980s, only a few tiny isolated
groups existed.
Starting in 1979, the
In the Afghan War,
the U.S. backed those who sought to foster an international movement to spread
Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to
destabilize the Soviet Union (This fact helps explain why Russia is now
amenable to U.S. intervention, they want to rid themselves of the “Muslim
problem” that has created unrest in Central Asian states adjoining
Afghanistan).
The US, through the
CIA, financed the mujahudeen, who we
then called “freedom fighters,” even
when they were doing things like chopping off the heads of captured Russian
soldiers. Part of the purpose was to create a powerful counterweight to the
ideology of communism, and the CIA believed that fundamentalism was that
counterweight: it wanted to demonstrate that the entire Muslim world was
fighting the Soviet Union alongside the Afghans and their American financers.
This was a mercenary army recruited from a variety of states including Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, North Africa.
A U.S.-Saudi-Pakistan
alliance financed, trained and armed 30,000 or more. Recruiting of
fundamentalists was financed and supervised by the CIA and carried out through
Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI. U.S
($5 billion + spent) and Saudi -supplied weapons and cash were launched, with
the most important rebel movement handled by the CIA, who dispensed money to
Pakistan-based intelligence camps that trained the “freedom fighters” in
terrorist tactics and indoctrinated them with fanatic religious ideology.
Muslims recruited in the U.S. were trained for duty at U.S. CIA camps; some of
these are implicated in 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies. Osama bin Laden was
the nominal leader of 4000 volunteers from Saudi Arabia. In 1989 he took charge
of a division of the ISI that got the most CIA support and training.
U.S. made stronger
alliances with dictatorships of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in order to carry off
the plan, including alliances that built ties between the CIA and drug
trafficking and the wealthy Saudi royal families. The CIA also condoned
Pakistan’s ISI (see below) involvement in drug trafficking as a means to raise
money for the anti-Soviet resistance. U.S. policymakers recognized that much of
the funding of the war was gained from heroin sales that was financed by
addicts in the U.S., but explicitly looked the other way when U.S. DEA officials
pointed this out.
Keep in mind that
this policy originated at a time when the U.S. was demonizing the Iranian
fundamentalists, calling them antithetical to the American way of life. US-run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe
beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically
denouncing the “Islamic revolution” that toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran in
1979). The multi-national network now in place was to a significant extent of
the CIA’s making.
When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the U.S. abandoned the region, leaving it bombed out, mine-filled and in extremely impoverished conditions, with little infrastructure. There was no rebuilding of the area that was desperately needed in the aftermath of a devastating war. Arabs who had fought in the war had a heightened political consciousness that made them think that Saudi Arabia and Egypt were just as much “client” regimes of the U.S. as had the Najibullah (pro-Soviet) Afghan regime had been of Moscow. Now they had the guerrilla as well as high-tech (CIA-funded) skills to combat these states
For 3-4 years after
the Soviet Union and U.S. abandoned the region, internecine warfare over
control of Afghanistan continued.
Pakistan, with U.S. and Saudi Arabia’s support, backed the Taliban (a
political/religious sect which developed out of Pakistan’s religious schools,
the original base from which the mujahudeen
were recruited). By 1996, the Taliban took power and imposed a harsh
fundamentalist regime on the urban areas of Afghanistan. Poverty and drought
keeps the people of Afghanistan (80 percent of the population is subsistence
farmers outside the urban areas) incapable of revolting against this regime.
Farmers have turned to growing opium as a last resort against starvation.
Evidence suggests
that the U.S. “tolerated” the Taliban until 1998 due to the oil and gas
reserves in the Central Asian republics. In 1996 when the Taliban took
power, the U.S. response was initially
optimistic. Taliban officials met with Unocal Corporation officials in Texas,
with the quiet support of U.S. government officials. Unocal offered a generous
cut of the profits from a deal to run pipelines through Afghanistan to the
Central Asian Republics of the former USSR.
Pakistan and Turkey were key allies for the U.S. corporate minions in
this venture. With this in mind a U.S.
diplomat remarked that Taliban rule
would be similar to Saudi Arabia: “there will be pipelines, an
emir, no parliament…We can live with
that”. This prospect fell through, but it is a very telling demonstration of
U.S. interests in the region that preceded the 9/11 events. Only after the 1998 embassy bombings did the
U.S. undertake a policy of retaliation, including bombing of Afghanistan and a
Sudanese pharmaceutical plant to get Bin Laden and other supporters of the
Taliban. Still, the Bush administration started payments in April 2001 on $46
million to Afghanistan under the War on Drugs.
The allegiance of
many in the region to bin Laden was crystallized when he called for the removal
of U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia. He declared that Saudi Arabia, the
birth and death place of the Prophet
Mohammed, was being desecrated and used as a puppet of the U.S., just as
Afghanistan had been a puppet regime of the Soviet Union.
Saudi Arabia, one of
the U.S.’s strongest allies in the region, is a fundamentalist, repressive
regime, at least as repressive as Iraq (and far less generous to its people
with oil money proceeds). Saudi Arabia is dominated by Sunni fundamentalists,
with factions of its royal family loyal to the Taliban. The wealth of the
nation is spent on palaces of luxury for the small number of families that
control the country.
Saudi Arabia has 1/4
of the world’s known oil reserves. The U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia was forged in 1945, when President Franklin
Delano.Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi
regime. FDR made a bargain with Ibn Saud: if the King would guarantee unlimited
access to Saudi oil, the U.S. would protect the Saudi Royal family against its
external and internal enemies. The U.S. relied initially on Britain for this
assistance, but since 1972, U.S. has had a continuous policy of protecting the
Saudi regime. In fact, it was the fear that Iraq would invade Saudi Arabia that
prompted the Gulf War, not the invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. presence in the
Gulf is intended to prevent any attack on Saudi Arabia, and in turn, Saudi
Arabia serves as a client state of the U.S. Its oil money is placed in U.S. and
British banks.
U.S. military forces
stationed the holy land of Islam seems an affront to many Saudis. In 1990, Bin Laden asked King Fahd of Saudi
Arabia to fight Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Fahd instead allowed the U.S. to
manage the war, then allowed U.S. to station troops there permanently. Bin
Laden declared that the U.S. was occupying Saudi Arabia, thereby attracting
many Saudis to his cause.
Saudi Arabia is an
autocratic regime, with no freedom of the press, no political parties.
Dissenters are arrested and jailed or executed (or exiled if from a wealthy
family like bin Laden). The wealth of the nation is spent on palaces and luxury
for the families in control of the nation, while it has no plans for a future
without oil for the rest of its citizens (a misnomer, since they have no
citizen rights). It allows no dissent, suppressing protest with an the Saudi
Arabian National Guard. An internal security force, SANG is almost entirely
armed, trained by the United States, largely through a network of military
contractors. In 1981, freedom fighters
in the Saudi regime rose up, staged a revolt. SANG crushed it. Ronald Reagan
declared “I will not permit [Saudi Arabia] to be an Iran.” In other words, the U.S. would not allow
dissent to flourish in a client state.
The CIA and
Pentagon’s own planning document shows the US is planning for future wars in
Saudi Arabia (it is in the top 3 on the list of potential wars) Here is another
effect of blowback: when populace rises up against dictatorship and blames U.S.
for its repression. Yet currently U.S. sells more arms to Saudi Arabia than to
any other single nation. The arms we provide now might be used in future wars
against us. This relationship is never questioned in Congress, because of the
power of the Military Industrial Complex. Thus oil money finances U.S. military
industrial complex.
U.S. policy for 50
years has been to cultivate links between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf States, rather than encourage Pakistan to make peace with neighboring
India, its enemy for 50 years. From 1979-1988, the U.S. found Pakistan quite
useful for its proxy war in Afghanistan. Carter administration made deals with
and funded General Zia, a dictator, who had ambitions to dominate the region,
and who used his power to suppress the influence of Sufi mysticism, an
anti-fundamentalist doctrine with hundreds of years of history in the region.
The CIA was well aware of, but turned a blind eye to,
the sale of heroin to finance Pakistan’s contribution to the war. The number of
heroin addicts increased from 130 in 1977 to several million by 2000. The Pakistan-Afghani drug trade accounts for
60 percent of the U.S. heroin trade.
The CIA funded and
supported the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence service) method of producing
fanatical warriors for the Afghan front.
2500 religious boarding schools (madrassas) taught a distorted Islamic
doctrine and the use of sophisticated weapons and the making and planting of
bombs. From this base, the ISI and CIA selected the most promising students who
were sent for more specialized training at secret army camps. This is the
origin of the Taliban, which has had influence in Pakistan since this period.
After the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Pakistani government, now under
Prime Minister Bhutto, unleashed the Taliban onto Afghanistan, in part in order
to rid Pakistan of its influence. Backed by Pakistani Army commando units, the
Taliban took control within 2 years. Sectors of the Pakistani army and ISI are
loyal to the Taliban. Other wings of the Pakistani army have created extreme
Sunni fundamentalist battalions. There are no constitutional rights for women.
There were more than 1000 “honor” killings of women in 2000.
Pakistan has nuclear
arms. The U.S. refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty encourages
Pakistan and India to refuse to sign the pact as well. Now the U.S. is seeking to enlist the support
of Pakistan, an admitted terrorist enclave, in order to fight the Taliban. The
U.S. will change its resolutions and doctrines that have defined Pakistan as a
rogue state for its own immediate purposes, but such a policy is fraught with
folly, as the history above amply illustrates.
Beyond the issues of
terrorism lies the issue of oil. The U.S. has counted on the support of
Pakistan and Turkey in its plan for building pipelines by U.S. oil companies
wanting access to oil in the former Soviet Union central Asia republics.
The U.S. is the arms
supplier for Israel, and these arms have kept the Palestinian population in
check, resulting in 725 deaths, mostly
Palestinian, in the past year alone.
Israel was founded in
1948, the fulfillment of the Zionist movement after the devastation of WWII.
The original 1947 partition plan suggested that the territory be divided in
half, one half for Palestine, one half for Israel. But through terrorist
strategies, (led by Menachim Begin), Israel gained 78 percent of the area. The
state of Israel was created by displacing the Palestinian Arab population,
which was also struggling to establish a state (Palestine). Palestinians became
refugees, either forcibly expelled or leaving to avoid the fighting
(terrorism!). In 1967, Israel invaded and seized the Gaza Strip and West Bank,
the rest of the original partition area. The recent conflict is over the
efforts to establish Israeli settlements in these occupied territories, in
violation of Geneva Conventions and UN resolutions. Most Arabs decry U.S.
military assistance to Israel’s war against the Palestinians, and support the
Palestinian quest for their own state. The U.S. has played a large role in the
refusal of Israel to compromise on the issue.
Is it foolhardy to
suggest that the U.S. should uphold the values of democracy and freedom? Anything less certainly compromises the
U.S.’s claims to moral and political superiority. Anything less will make us
more susceptible to violence in our “homeland”. In addition, if we do not
address the world’s increasing inequality of wealth, the U.S. will continue to
be vulnerable to terrorists. It is true that Osama bin Laden is wealthy. But
the turn toward fundamentalism and terrorism comes from those who find the
West’s claimed policy of democracy and freedom shallow and hypocritical. The
boys who have been recruited to the madrassas and other religious schools in
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are those whose have no other means of sustenance and
education.
The control of oil
remains the center of U.S. security policy in the region, and, indeed, the
immediate reason for bin Laden's following is the stationing of U.S. troops in
Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War. This stationing involves more than access to
oil, it involves troops to protect U.S. corporations interests in the region,
including Dick Cheney’s former employer Halliburton.
Most highly
recommended sources for evidence of the above: www.fpif.org, Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, Michael Klare, Resource Wars,
Alexander Cockburn, Whiteout, www.gwu.edu/nsa,