Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Afghanistan

  • Pursuing Justice for the Crimes of September 11, 2001 and Reducing the Risks of Terrorism

    After more than three weeks of massive military build-up as well as restraint and diplomatic activity in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and Britain began air strikes on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. The U.S.-British air strikes are being accompanied by small humanitarian airdrops, but have triggered a large increase in refugees. The United States has sought and obtained a condemnation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 from the United Nations Security Council, though the resolutions do not directly authorize the use of force.

    For a number of reasons, the military air strikes by the United States and Britain, with the support of Pakistan and Russia, are likely to aggravate the crisis.

    There is a tension between reducing the risks of further terrorism and carrying out actions to bring the perpetrators of the September 11 crimes to justice. That tension should be explicitly recognized in the organization of a response. Bombing Afghanistan in the context of the massive suffering of the Afghani people has created even angrier appeals to religious war in the region. There is already a great deal of turmoil in Pakistan. A disintegration of Pakistan is possible and creates heightened risks that nuclear materials or warheads might be captured or transferred by sections of the Pakistani establishment to the Taliban and/or the al-Qaeda network. The Pakistani government has had close ties with the Taliban and still maintains relations with that regime. The Pakistani government’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency has played a major role in training and supplying the Taliban. The nuclear implications of that historical relationship for the region, the United States, and the rest of the world are unclear. There is clearly some risk, though its magnitude is difficult to establish in the midst of this crisis.

    The U.S. choice of response to terrorism is raising the risks of wider wars. For instance, there was a terrorist attack in Kashmir on October 2, 2001, when about 40 people were killed. The Indian government has warned that it will attack the Pakistani-occupied portion of Kashmir if there are further attacks, on the same grounds that the U.S. is justifying its air attacks on Afghanistan.

    To take the approach that this is a war rather than a police action to arrest suspects who have committed crimes against humanity (in the legal definition under international law) is to accord the terrorist network the status of a state, which Osama bin Laden has implicitly claimed for years. This approach legitimizes the use of weapons of mass destruction, since states, including the United States and Britain, have long claimed the prerogatives of such use for themselves. The very doctrine of air warfare has its historical roots in the idea of terrorizing populations.(1) The United States, Britain, France, NATO, and Russia all maintain the option of using nuclear weapons first in any conflict. Osama bin Laden has more than once referred to the U.S. use of nuclear weapons over Japan, an act carried out in wartime, as justification for the attacks he is calling on terrorists to carry out against the United States. He repeated that justification after the October 7, 2001 U.S.-British strikes on Afghanistan.

    Military action threatens to de-stabilize the situation in Saudi Arabia, where feelings against the stationing of U.S. troops since 1991 have run very high and are the main source of popular support for Osama bin Laden. The flow of oil as well as the position of the U.S. dollar as a global currency are dependent on Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). OPEC’s decision of the, anchored by Saudi oil reserves, the largest in the world, to denominate the price of oil in U.S. dollars, is one of the anchors of the U.S dollar. In the present crisis, the states of the Persian Gulf may be pushed by their people to follow the 1999 example of Saddam Hussein, who asked to be paid for Iraqi oil in euros, the new European currency. If OPEC decides to denominate the price of oil in euros, the effect on the U.S. and world economies could be profoundly de-stabilizing, with unpredictable economic, political, and military consequences.(2) Other oil exporting countries also face de-stabilization, notably Indonesia, where anti-U.S. government tensions have been high since the International Monetary Fund’s intervention in its financial crisis in 1997.

    The United States, British, and Russian governments, as distinct from the people who were killed on September 11, are widely seen in the region and the world as having had major roles in the crisis in the Central Asian, South Asian, and Middle East regions that has spawned terrorist cells. The proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States carried out via Pakistan’s government, with financing both from the Saudi government and by all accounts, from drug trade profits, has been at the center of the chaos and mass deprivation in Afghanistan. Many of the present opponents of the United States were its allies and instruments then. (For instance, in a proclamation published in the Federal Register, President Reagan said of the Islamic opposition to the Soviets on March 20, 1984 that “[w]e stand in admiration of the indomitable will and courage of the Afghan people who continue their resistance to tyranny. All freedom-loving people around the globe should be inspired by the Afghan people’s struggle to be free and the heavy sacrifices they bear for liberty.”)

    The United States and Britain are also seen as promoting and being allied with undemocratic regimes for the sake of oil supplies and profits, both historically and at the present time.

    The British military role is also likely to inflame unpleasant memories. The present Pakistani-Afghan border dates back to its British demarcation by Colonel Algermon Durand in 1893, and was part of the British-Russian imperialist rivalry in the region. It divided the Pushtu people, who found themselves on both sides of the line. After the partition of South Asia in 1947, Pakistan, allied with the United States, tried to use Islam as an ideological counterweight to Pushtu nationalism on its side of the border. The various coups between 1973 and 1979 in Afghanistan cemented the drift of Afghanistan and Pakistan into opposite camps of the Cold War. The arrival of Soviet troops at the end of 1979 sealed the division and a devastating proxy war followed. When wars and partitions result in such immense misery, memories are long and bitter, as the continuing problems in South Asia, Israel/Palestine, and Ireland/Northern Ireland demonstrate. Military attacks and wars have not contributed to solutions in any of these conflicts, only aggravated them and inflamed and hardened hatreds.

    The announced U.S.-British goal of protecting the civilian population of Afghanistan is at odds with aerial bombing. An operation more complex and vast than the Berlin airlift of 1948-1949 (“Operation Vittles”) would have to be launched in order to meet emergency demands. Operation Vittles involved airlift to an airport of thousands of tons of food, fuel, and other supplies every day, over distances of a few hundred miles. Given the magnitude of the historical refugees crisis and the one that is being created by the threat and reality of bombings, an operation of similar or larger scale will be needed over much vaster distances and more inhospitable terrain. It will need to be over areas that are controlled by the Taliban as well as forces opposed to the Taliban, meaning that inefficient airdrops are involved. The starving people in theTaliban controlled areas are hardly in a position to topple that government. They face a humanitarian crisis of stunning proportions. Both Pakistan and Iran, already hosting millions of refugees between them, are trying to keep their borders closed. In sum, the relief operation will have to be roughly a hundred times larger than the one carried out on October 8, if it is to have substantial actual effect in relieving the suffering of the people of the region. By all accounts, the best way to deliver food aid is by road. This mode of aid is made difficult or impossible by air attacks, which have, moreover, already resulted in the deaths of four civilian U.N. workers.

    For profound historical, legal, practical, and moral reasons, the use of military force, especially air strikes, to resolve the crisis, is a recipe for continued violence, terrorism, insecurity, and injustice, not to mention the immense increase in suffering for millions of Afghani people. These problems will not be resolved until the U.S., British, and Russian governments show far more understanding of their own role in the problems of the people of the region. And until that time, military action by these countries, directly or by proxy, is likely to increase problems rather than contribute to their solution.

    A different approach to resolving the crisis is urgently needed. The most important ingredient is that American people must work with the international community to put together a force for a police action to carry out the arrests in Afghanistan that does not involve U.S., British, Russian, or non-state proxy militaries. The September 11, 2001 tragedy has brought the people of the world closer to the people of the United States in their suffering. The heartfelt worldwide demand for justice and for greater security against terrorism can be the basis for a framework to address the issues of justice relating to the crimes against humanity committed on September 11, 2001 and other aspects of the crisis that have enveloped the world since that date.

    Basis of a solution

    1. It is essential to de-legitimize the use of or threat of use of weapons of mass destruction and other tactics that have the same effect, whether by states or non-state groups. The people who were killed did not create the chaos in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region or contribute to the hatreds that led to the September 11 attacks. Therefore the search for justice for those attacks should not be linked to any other injustices and problems, which should also be addressed in their own right.

    2. The use of military force by the United States and Britain, as well as the arming of proxy military forces, should stop immediately.

    3. The process of apprehending the suspects should be carried out under the mandate of the U.N. Security Council using existing international law to pursue crimes against humanity. The people of the United States should rely at this time on a police action in which neutral countries from all over the world are mainly involved. It is crucial that this be defined explicitly as a police action to make arrests.

    4. The U.N. force must have firm rules of operation. Violence against civilians, including bombing of cities, villages, and refugee camps, should be prohibited. The parties to the coalition should commit to respecting human rights. Participating states and personnel should act within the confines of humanitarian and international law, including the Nuremberg principles. They should expect to be held to the same level of accountability in an international judicial process that they seek to impose.

    5. Even though its military forces would not be involved, the United States will, as a practical matter, have a powerful voice in how the U.N. force operates for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the September 11 attacks were on U.S. soil. In order that the United States have moral authority in regard to threats and acts of mass destruction, the United States should take the leadership against the very idea of mass destruction by explicitly renouncing first use of nuclear weapons. To show its good faith, it should begin the process of de-alerting them. It should invite Russia and all other nuclear weapons states into an urgent process of verifiable de-alerting of all nuclear weapons and of putting all nuclear warheads and weapons-usable nuclear materials under international safeguards. This will strengthen the international coalition against terrorism and fulfill longstanding demands of the international community. It will also help stabilize nuclear situation in South Asia, with attendant positive security implication for that region, and the rest of the world, including the United States.

    6. There should be no proxy wars, as for instance, was the practice during the Cold War, or arming of groups that could result in proxy wars.

    7. There should be explicit recognition that the suffering of the Afghani people has its roots, in large measure, in Cold War politics and proxy wars. That recognition, both from Russia and the United States, is long overdue. When translated into practical humanitarian policies, this means that the alleviation of their suffering must be a central, co-equal goal to that of apprehending the suspects. Most of all, any process must take into account that a re-ignition of the civil war would be disastrous for the people of Afghanistan and probably Pakistan, and could have other far-reaching serious de-stabilizing consequences.

    8. It is essential that the United States protect human rights, civil rights (including freedom of speech, assembly, and religion and freedom from discrimination) at home. The rights of immigrants should be respected along with all other people living in the United States. While the evidence clearly indicates that the crimes of September 11 were likely committed by non-citizens, there are many examples where U.S. citizens have committed acts of terror, including the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City and the many crimes over a long period by the “Unabomber.” Immigrants should be accorded due process and liberties guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.

    9. The formation of a coalition against terrorism and the rules of its operation should be taken up as a matter under the many treaties against terrorism that already exist. The crisis of September 11 should be used as the time to create a direction for the world community that will be based on morality, equity, the rule of law and justice for all. It is crucial to create a direction in which the rules and norms of behavior against mass violence imposed on individuals and non-state groups be extended to states, rather than the opposite, which is the direction that the bombing of Afghanistan is taking the world.

    Notes 1: The doctrine was first elaborated by an Italian, Brigadier Douhet, who wrote: “The conception of belligerents and nonbelligerents is outmoded. Today it is not the armies but whole nations which make war; and all civilians are belligerents and all are exposed to the hazards of war. The only salvation will be in caves, but those caves cannot hold entire cities, fleets, railways, bridges, industries, etc.” That doctrine of air warfare was first employed on a large scale by Germany during the mid-1930s against Spain and again in 1940 and thereafter against Britain, and also by Britain and the United States, in conventional bombing, fire bombing, and nuclear bombing during World War II. For a history of aerial warfare see Jack Colhoun, “Strategic Bombing,” at http://www.ieer.org/comments/bombing.html 2. For an analysis of the oil-dollar problem see Arjun Makhijani, “Saddam’s Last Laugh” at http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/03/09/

  • Neglecting Moral Approach to US and World Security

    From Mr David Krieger,

    Sir, Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, in his speech to the Labour party conference of October 2, invoked “the moral power of a world acting as a community” to combat terrorism. But to take a truly moral approach to US and global security, the US must heed seven urgent moral imperatives that we are still neglecting:

    First, to take far stronger measures to prevent future attacks rather than simply to avenge the acts of September 11, beginning with redressing US intelligence’s massive failure to detect the threat, despite ample warnings.

    Second, to assign top priority to preventing terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction, focusing resources on plausible threats of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons attacks, before funding costly missile defences against the implausible ones.

    Third, to deploy military protection now for all nuclear power plants and rapidly phase them out. Nuclear reactors are dormant radiological weapons in proximity to highly populated areas. Until shutdown, protect plants and spent fuel with troops and anti-aircraft weapons.

    Fourth, to bring the world’s nuclear weapons and fissile materials under control and move quickly towards eliminating these weapons. In the short term, reduce nuclear arsenals now to reliably controllable numbers to keep them out of terrorist hands.

    Fifth, to commit to multilateral action to bring terrorists to justice, expressly under UN auspices and existing international treaties on terrorism and sabotage. Try perpetrators for transnational crimes against humanity before an international tribunal established for this purpose.

    Sixth, to use US pre-eminence to uphold security and justice, not just for ourselves and industrialised allies but for the world, recognising that true security is co-operative and that life in the US is ultimately only as secure and decent as life on the planet.

    Last, to have the moral courage to reconsider US policy in light of the question: Why are Islamic extremists willing to die to murder us? Is it, as President George W. Bush said, hatred of freedom and democracy, or our Middle East policy?

    Until the 1960s, the Islamic world generally admired the US as a non-colonialist beacon of freedom and democracy. Subsequent US policies changed that. While terrorists cannot dictate US actions, neither can we fail to amend policies detrimental to our security simply for fear of appearing soft on terrorism.

    *David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Search for a Political Solution in Afghanistan

    Statement by Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General, October, 8 2001

    Following is the text of a statement made today by Secretary-General Kofi Annan on military strikes in Afghanistan:

    Immediately after the 11 September attacks on the United States, the Security Council expressed its determination to combat, by all means, threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts. The Council also reaffirmed the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. The States concerned have set their current military action in Afghanistan in that context.

    To defeat terrorism, we need a sustained effort and a broad strategy to unite all nations, and address all aspects of the scourge we face. The cause must be pursued by all the States of the world, working together and using many different means — including political, legal, diplomatic and financial means.

    The people of Afghanistan, who cannot be held responsible for the acts of the Taliban regime, are now in desperate need of aid. The United Nations has long played a vital role in providing humanitarian assistance to them, and it is my hope that we will be able to step up our humanitarian work as soon as possible.

    It is also vital that the international community now work harder than ever to encourage a political settlement to the conflict in Afghanistan. The United Nations is actively engaged in promoting the creation of a fully representative, multi-ethnic and broad-based Afghan Government.

  • How Can the US Bomb This Tragic People

    We are witnessing this weekend one of the most epic events since the Second World War, certainly since Vietnam. I am not talking about the ruins of the World Trade Centre in New York and the grotesque physical scenes which we watched on 11 September, an atrocity which I described last week as a crime against humanity (of which more later). No, I am referring to the extraordinary, almost unbelievable preparations now under way for the most powerful nation ever to have existed on God’s Earth to bomb the most devastated, ravaged, starvation-haunted and tragic country in the world. Afghanistan, raped and eviscerated by the Russian army for 10 years, abandoned by its friends – us, of course – once the Russians had fled, is about to be attacked by the surviving superpower.

    I watch these events with incredulity, not least because I was a witness to the Russian invasion and occupation. How they fought for us, those Afghans, how they believed our word. How they trusted President Carter when he promised the West’s support. I even met the CIA spook in Peshawar, brandishing the identity papers of a Soviet pilot, shot down with one of our missiles – which had been scooped from the wreckage of his Mig. “Poor guy,” the CIA man said, before showing us a movie about GIs zapping the Vietcong in his private cinema. And yes, I remember what the Soviet officers told me after arresting me at Salang. They were performing their international duty in Afghanistan, they told me. They were “punishing the terrorists” who wished to overthrow the (communist) Afghan government and destroy its people. Sound familiar?

    I was working for The Times in 1980, and just south of Kabul I picked up a very disturbing story. A group of religious mujahedin fighters had attacked a school because the communist regime had forced girls to be educated alongside boys. So they had bombed the school, murdered the head teacher’s wife and cut off her husband’s head. It was all true. But when The Times ran the story, the Foreign Office complained to the foreign desk that my report gave support to the Russians. Of course. Because the Afghan fighters were the good guys. Because Osama bin Laden was a good guy. Charles Douglas-Home, then editor of The Times would always insist that Afghan guerrillas were called “freedom fighters” in the headline. There was nothing you couldn’t do with words.

    And so it is today. President Bush now threatens the obscurantist, ignorant, super-conservative Taliban with the same punishment as he intends to mete out to bin Laden. Bush originally talked about “justice and punishment” and about “bringing to justice” the perpetrators of the atrocities. But he’s not sending policemen to the Middle East; he’s sending B-52s. And F-16s and AWACS planes and Apache helicopters. We are not going to arrest bin Laden. We are going to destroy him. And that’s fine if he’s the guilty man. But B-52s don’t discriminate between men wearing turbans, or between men and women or women and children.

    I wrote last week about the culture of censorship which is now to smother us, and of the personal attacks which any journalist questioning the roots of this crisis endures. Last week, in a national European newspaper, I got a new and revealing example of what this means. I was accused of being anti-American and then informed that anti-Americanism was akin to anti-Semitism. You get the point, of course. I’m not really sure what anti-Americanism is. But criticising the United States is now to be the moral equivalent of Jew-hating. It’s OK to write headlines about “Islamic terror” or my favourite French example “God’s madmen”, but it’s definitely out of bounds to ask why the United States is loathed by so many Arab Muslims in the Middle East. We can give the murderers a Muslim identity: we can finger the Middle East for the crime – but we may not suggest any reasons for the crime.

    But let’s go back to that word justice. Re-watching that pornography of mass-murder in New York, there must be many people who share my view that this was a crime against humanity. More than 6,000 dead; that’s a Srebrenica of a slaughter. Even the Serbs spared most of the women and children when they killed their menfolk. The dead of Srebrenica deserve – and are getting – international justice at the Hague. So surely what we need is an International Criminal Court to deal with the sorts of killer who devastated New York on 11 September. Yet “crime against humanity” is not a phrase we are hearing from the Americans. They prefer “terrorist atrocity”, which is slightly less powerful. Why, I wonder? Because to speak of a terrorist crime against humanity would be a tautology. Or because the US is against international justice. Or because it specifically opposed the creation of an international court on the grounds that its own citizens may one day be arraigned in front of it.

    The problem is that America wants its own version of justice, a concept rooted, it seems, in the Wild West and Hollywood’s version of the Second World War. President Bush speaks of smoking them out, of the old posters that once graced Dodge City: “Wanted, Dead or Alive”. Tony Blair now tells us that we must stand by America as America stood by us in the Second World War. Yes, it’s true that America helped us liberate Western Europe. But in both world wars, the US chose to intervene after only a long and – in the case of the Second World War – very profitable period of neutrality.

    Don’t the dead of Manhattan deserve better than this? It’s less than three years since we launched a 200-Cruise missile attack on Iraq for throwing out the UN arms inspectors. Needless to say, nothing was achieved. More Iraqis were killed, and the UN inspectors never got back, and sanctions continued, and Iraqi children continued to die. No policy, no perspective. Action, not words.

    And that’s where we are today. Instead of helping Afghanistan, instead of pouring our aid into that country 10 years ago, rebuilding its cities and culture and creating a new political centre that would go beyond tribalism, we left it to rot. Sarajevo would be rebuilt. Not Kabul. Democracy, of a kind, could be set up in Bosnia. Not in Afghanistan. Schools could be reopened in Tuzla and Travnik. Not in Jaladabad. When the Taliban arrived, stringing up every opponent, chopping off the arms of thieves, stoning women for adultery, the United States regarded this dreadful outfit as a force for stability after the years of anarchy.

    Bush’s threats have effectively forced the evacuation of every Western aid worker. Already, Afghans are dying because of their absence. Drought and starvation go on killing millions – I mean millions – and between 20 and 25 Afghans are blown up every day by the 10 million mines the Russians left behind. Of course, the Russians never went back to clear the mines. I suppose those B-52 bombs will explode a few of them. But that’ll be the only humanitarian work we’re likely to see in the near future.

    Look at the most startling image of all this past week. Pakistan has closed its border with Afghanistan. So has Iran. The Afghans are to stay in their prison. Unless they make it through Pakistan and wash up on the beaches of France or the waters of Australia or climb through the Channel Tunnel or hijack a plane to Britain to face the wrath of our Home Secretary. In which case, they must be sent back, returned, refused entry. It’s a truly terrible irony that the only man we would be interested in receiving from Afghanistan is the man we are told is the evil genius behind the greatest mass-murder in American history: bin Laden. The others can stay at home and die.

  • Rep. Barbara Lee’s Speech Opposing the Post 9-11 Use of Force Act

    Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart, one that is filled with sorrow for the families and loved ones who were killed and injured in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Only the most foolish or the most callous would not understand the grief that has gripped the American people and millions around the world.

    This unspeakable attack on the United States has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction.

    September 11 changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.

    I know that this use-of -force resolution will pass although we all know that the President can wage war even without this resolution. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today-let us more fully understand their consequences.

    We are not dealing with a conventional war. We cannot respond in a conventional manner. I do not want to see this spiral out of control. This crisis involves issues of national security, foreign policy, public safety, intelligence gathering, economics, and murder. Our response must be equally multifaceted.

    We must not rush to judgment. For too many innocent people have already died. Our country is in mourning. If we rush to launch a counterattack, we run too great a risk that woman, children, and other non-combatants will be caught in the crossfire.

    Nor can we let our justified anger over these outrageous acts by vicious murderers inflame prejudice against all Arab Americans, Muslim, Southeast Asians, and any other people because of their race, religion, or ethnicity.

    Finally, we must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target. We cannot repeat past mistakes.

    In 1964, Congress gave President Lyndon Johnson the power to “take all necessary measures” to repel attacks and prevent further aggression. In so doing, this House abandoned its own constitutional responsibilities and launched our country into years of undeclared war in Vietnam.

    At this time, Senator Wayne Morse, on e of the two lonely votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, declared, “I believe that history will record that we have made a grave mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United StatesŠI believe that with the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.”

    Senator Morse was correct, and I fear we make the same mistake today. And I fear the consequences. I have agonized over this vote. But I came to grips with it in the very painful yet beautiful memorial service today at the National Cathedral. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, ” As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”

  • The Cost of an Afghan ‘Victory’

    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 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 communiqué 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.