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Why? An attempt to explain the unexplainable
By Rahul Bedi, Jane’s correspondent in New Delhi 14 September 2001
The origins of last Tuesday’s attack on the United
States arguably have their roots in the 1970s. At this
time, during the height of the Cold War, a Washington
shamed by defeat in Vietnam embarked on a deep,
collaborative enterprise to contain the Soviet Union.
The genesis of the policy came to a head following the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when President
Jimmy Carter set up a team headed by National
Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to employ its
‘death by a thousands cuts’ policy on the tottering
Soviet empire, especially the oil- and mineral-rich
Central Asian Republics then ruled by Moscow.
A marriage of convenience
Thus began the US-love affair with Islamists in which
short-term profit motivated all parties concerned, but
the deadly ramifications of which are haunting the world
today and the effects of which were brought home
starkly to America earlier this week.
This ‘marriage of convenience’, consummated in an
alliance with Islamic fundamentalists, particularly
suited the Pakistani military junta of General
Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, which was looking for greater
strategic depth and economic influence in Afghanistan
and Central Asia.
The flip side of the wily general’s agenda was that this
alliance with the US would also strengthen Pakistan's
military capabilities with respect to rival India with the
induction of sophisticated US weaponry at throwaway
prices. This was also the time when Pakistan made
great strides in developing its covert nuclear capability
through a combination of clandestine transactions,
outright theft and forging closer military and nuclear
relations with China, all connived at by Washington.
The US-led ‘proxy war’ model was based on the
premise that Islamists made good anti-Communist
allies. The plan was diabolically simple: to hire, train
and control motivated Islamic mercenaries. The trainers
were mainly from Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence
(ISI) agency, who learnt their craft from American
Green Beret commandos and Navy SEALS in various
US training establishments. Mass training of Afghan
mujahideen was subsequently conducted by the
Pakistan Army under the supervision of the elite
Special Services Group (SSG), specialists in covert
action behind enemy lines and the ISI.
Pakistan’s current military ruler, General Pervez
Musharraf, spent seven years with the SSG and was
also involved in training Afghan mujahideen. Provided
he co-operates, he will prove a useful guide to the US
in hunting down terrorists inside Afghanistan.
The entire anti-Soviet operation, headed by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and held together on the
ground by the ISI, was supported by generous
donations from the US State Department, Western
governments, Saudi Arabia and a handful of commando
experts from the UK Special Air Service (SAS), while
surveillance training, communication and first aid help
came from France.
Israel provided weapons like rifles, tanks and even
artillery pieces, captured during its many wars with the
Arab states, while Sudan and Algeria contributed
committed mujahideen and religious motivation. The
entire operation was, inexplicably but amusingly,
christened the Safari Club.
Fallout from the fighting
The fallout of this ‘holy war’, which ended with the
Soviet withdrawal in 1989, brought in its wake a series
of distinctly ‘unholy wars’ and ‘epidemics of violence’ in
places like Kashmir in northern India. It also brought
grave unrest to the Central Asian and other former
Soviet Republics like Chechnya as well as to North
Africa. Now, it has been brought to the US, and to the
rest of the world.
Over the past decade Afghanistan has been steadily
devastated by internecine battles in which the
Pakistan-backed Taliban militia has emerged partially
victorious. Nearly two million Afghans of the country's
population of some four million became refugees in
Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia. The majority of those
who were part of the jihad became unemployed,
lacking food and shelter and, most importantly,
patrons.
This, in turn, made them ideal recruits for exploitation
by the ISI and Pakistan’s increasingly fundamentalist
army. According to intelligence estimates over 10,000
Islamic mercenaries, trained in guerrilla warfare and
armed with sophisticated weapons, are unemployed in
Pakistan today, waiting to be transported to the next
jihad.
Osama bin Laden was one of many US beneficiaries in
its war against Moscow. He spent years in the
mid-1980s travelling widely to raise funds and recruit
thousands of Muslim youths to fight the Soviets.
The rise of Al-Qaeda
In 1988, with US knowledge, Bin Laden created Al
Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of
quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells in countries
spread across at least 26 countries, including Algeria,
Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Burma, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Azerbaijan, Dagestan,
Uganda, Ethiopia, Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen,
Bosnia as well as the West Bank and Gaza. Western
intelligence sources claim Al Quaeda even has a cell in
Xinjiang in China, a country that ironically was another
willing partner in the jihad against the Soviets. China
wanted the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan for its own
strategic ends and even trained and despatched
Muslim Uighurs of the western Xinjiang region to fight
alongside the Afghan mujahideen. China feared that the
old Silk Route along the Karakoram Highway could, in
time, come under Moscow's domination if the Soviets
were not swiftly dislodged from Kabul.
Chinese strategy on this front, however, had a negative
fallout for Beijing as the returning Uighur jihadis fuelled
the already-simmering insurgency for an independent
Muslim Eastern Turkestan in Xinjiang. This insurgency
continues, though the Chinese have managed to
significantly counter it through economic sops, effective
sealing of borders and drowning dissidence using
strong-arm methods, actions unquestioned by the
outside world.
Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda, confident
that it would not directly impinge on the US. By the
time the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were
bombed in 1998, killing 224 people including 12
Americans, and the ill-fated World Trade Center was
similarly attacked around the same time, it was too
late for remedial measures. It was this reality that was
brought home with such an unimaginable atrocity this
week.
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