Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (16 page)

The revolution in Iran taught the United States to distinguish between two faces of political Islam: the revolutionary and the elitist. The revolutionary side saw the organization of Islamic social movements and mass participation as crucial to ushering in an independent Islamist state. In contrast, the elitist side distrusted popular participation; its notion of an Islamist state was one that would
contain
popular participation, not encourage it. Before the Iranian Revolution complicated the picture by sharpening the difference between these sides in Iran, the United States had operated with a simple formula, one that identified the revolutionary face of political Islam with Iran and the Shi’a sect in Islam, and the elitist face with majority-Sunni pro-American regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The Nicaraguan Revolution was the source of a different kind of lesson: how to organize and pursue a counterrevolutionary war by means both overt and covert. This first significant attempt to roll back a nationalist pro-Soviet Third World government taught the Reagan administration how to harness support from diverse quarters toward a single objective. Two lessons from the contra experience were particularly useful: the first was a benign attitude toward the drug trade as a source of cash to carry out a clandestine war; and the second was the need to involve the entire neighborhood—Christian-right ministries, the network of secular conservative political lobbies, and paramilitary mercenary outfits—in the war effort.

Secret American aid to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul had begun before the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. CIA and State Department documents seized during the embassy takeover in Tehran reveal that the United States had begun quietly meeting Afghan-rebel representatives in Pakistan in April 1979, eight months before Soviet military intervention. This much was confirmed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, in a later interview with the Paris-based
Le Nouvel Observateur
(January 15-21, 1998):

Q:
The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs
[From the Shadows]
that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahidin in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski:
Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahidin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec. 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was 3 July 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

The passage from the Carter to the Reagan presidency also exacerbated the shift in U.S. foreign policy from containment to rollback. In Afghanistan, as in Nicaragua, the Carter administration had preferred a two-track approach, combining the carrot and the stick, approving moderate levels of covert support for anti-Communist allies, whether governments or groups, alongside a search for a negotiated settlement. Containment, in this sense, was guided by the search for coexistence. In contrast, the Reagan administration had absolutely no interest in arriving at negotiated settlements. Rather than coexistence, the point of the Reagan policy was payback: everything must be done to turn the Afghan War into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. The single objective was to bleed the Soviet Union white. The CIA was determined that nothing come in the way of the “real task” in Afghanistan: “killing Russians.” Among the more influential “bleeders” in Washington was Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, Richard Perle. He would later have a second coming as a prominent hawk on the George W. Bush team after 9/11.

If the Reagan administration was predisposed to groups with hard-line ideological opposition to the Soviet Union and no interest
in a compromise settlement, successive Pakistani governments had a pathological distrust of Afghan nationalism. This became clear when the Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was deposed in a bloodless coup by his cousin and former prime minister, Mohammad Daud, in July 1973. Daud put together a republican alliance of sections of the military and a wing of the Communist Party named after its newspaper,
Percham
(banner). The new nationalist government took up the popular cause of Pashtunistan, which demanded a homeland for the Pashtun people. Not only were roughly half of Afghanistan’s population ethnic Pashtuns, millions of Pashtuns also lived in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), on the other side of an artificial border drawn by the British at the height of their colonial empire in India. Fearful of Afghan nationalism, Pakistani governments were open to supporting antinationalist forces in Afghanistan, and Zia ul-Haq’s was no exception. The ideological opposition to nationalism, including to Daud’s authoritarian version, came mainly from Communists and Islamists, mostly university students and professors who were strongly international in their outlook. Increasing popular opposition to Daud’s rule led to a second military coup known as the Saur Revolution that brought both factions of the Communist Party, Percham and Khalq (also named after its newspaper), into government. With this revolution of April 17, 1978, Communist “internationalism” became officially respectable, and Islamist “internationalism” was labeled subversive. Moderate and extremist Islamist radicals fled Kabul University for refuge in Pakistan, where they were welcomed.

The 1978 Communist coup also created a decisive shift in U.S. relations with Pakistan. The Carter administration had cut aid to Pakistan in 1977, a response to both its dismal human-rights record at home—dramatized by the army’s judicial murder of an
elected prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto—and the global implications of its accelerated nuclear program. The coup and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan changed all this: “literally days after the Soviet invasion, Carter was on the telephone with Zia offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping rebels.” Zia held out for more, and the Carter-Zia partnership remained lukewarm. The real warming came with the Reagan administration, which offered Pakistan “a huge, six-year economic and military aid package which elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid”—after Israel and Egypt.

During the Reagan presidency, there was sustained cooperation between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), and neither party had much interest in a negotiated settlement. Both intelligence agencies came to share a dual objective: militarily, to provide maximum firepower to the mujahideen and, politically, to recruit the most radically anti-Communist Islamists to counter Soviet forces. The combined result was to flood the region not only with all kinds of weapons but also with the most radical Islamist recruits. They flocked to ISI-run training camps in Pakistan, where they were “ideologically charged with the spark of holy war and trained in guerrilla tactics, sabotage and bombings.” The Islamist recruits came from all over the world, not only Muslim-majority countries such as Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia, but also such Muslim-minority countries as the United States and Britain. There is the well-known example of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, dubbed by Lawrence Wright, writing in
The New Yorker
, the “gatekeeper of the Jihad” in the mid-eighties. “A Palestinian theologian who had a doctorate in Islamic law from Al-Azhar University,” Sheikh Azzam “went on to teach at King Abdul Aziz University, in Jidda, where one of his students was
Osama bin Laden.” Azzam traveled the globe under CIA patronage. He appeared on Saudi television and at rallies in the United States. A CIA asset who appeared as the embodiment of the holy warrior and “toured the length and breadth of the United States in the early and mid-1980s recruiting for holy war, ostensibly only in Afghanistan,” Azzam was also one of the founders of Hamas. Azzam’s message was clear: participation in the jihad is not just a political obligation but a religious duty. The point of the jihad is not only to kill the enemy, the Russian, but also to invite “martyrdom.” In a 1988 recruitment video examined by Wright, Azzam says: “I reached Afghanistan and could not believe my eyes. I traveled to acquaint people with jihad for years…. We were trying to satisfy the thirst for martyrdom. We are still in love with this.” Azzam’s formula for the holy war was simple: “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues.” It neatly echoed the combined CIA-ISI objective.

The Islamic world had not seen an armed jihad for nearly a century. But now the CIA was determined to create one in service of a contemporary political objective. Of course, the tradition of jihad is contentious. Doctrinally, the tradition of jihad as “just war” can be located in the “lesser jihad,” not in the “greater jihad.” Historically, the tradition of “lesser jihad” itself comprises two different—and conflicting—notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin’s jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahhabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi’s anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth-century Sudan. The first was against occupying nonbelievers, the
second against oppressive believers, the third against occupying believers, and the fourth, against a combination of occupiers, believers and nonbelievers. The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jihad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered “heretic.” This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam. Associated with the slaughter of Shi’a civilian populations in Iran and Iraq carried out by the Ikhwan faction of the Wahhabi movement in the eighteenth century—not to be confused with the later Egyptian Ikhwan (Society of Muslim Brothers)—this tradition is more akin to the Inquisition in Christianity than to any historical practice of jihad in Islam. The notion of a standing jihad—a state institution in defense of state interests—is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia. Precisely because of its association with sectarian practices enshrined in the history of a state with such close ties to official America, an armed standing jihad was particularly appealing to CIA planners.

This is the setting in which the United States organized the Afghan jihad and that informed its central objective: to unite a billion Muslims worldwide in a holy war, a crusade, against the Soviet Union, on the soil of Afghanistan. The notion of a crusade, rather than jihad, conveys better the frame of mind in which this initiative was taken. A secondary objective was to turn a doctrinal difference between two Islamic sects—the minority Shi’a and the majority Sunni—into a political divide and thereby to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution as a Shi’a affair. The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only with Reagan’s second term in office. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, authorizing “stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet
troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.”

The redefined war was taken over by CIA chief William Casey, who undertook three significant measures in 1986. The first was to convince Congress to step up American involvement by providing the mujahideen with American advisers and American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The second was to expand the Islamic guerrilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The third was to step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the mujahideen.

The second and third decisions intensified the ideological character of the war as a religious war against infidels everywhere. Even more than Nicaragua, Afghanistan was to be an ideological battlefield. It was Islamic in a triple sense. First, the mobilization of the war targeted a worldwide Islamic public, in all aspects: financial, material, and human. Second, the mobilization was carried out, as far as possible, through Islamic institutions, ranging from banks and charities to mosques and evangelical organizations. Third, the war was (at least in theory) to be expanded to Soviet Asia, the part of the Soviet Union with historically Muslim populations.

How did right-wing Islamism, an ideological tendency with small and scattered numbers before the Afghan War, come to occupy the global center stage after 9/11? The answer lies in the Afghan jihad, which gave it not only the organization, the numbers, the skills, the reach, and the confidence but also a coherent objective. Before the Afghan jihad, the right wing of political Islam was divided into two camps: those identified with pro-American regimes, as in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and those opposed to
these same regimes, seeing them as American stooges that had betrayed the Palestinian cause. Unlike Islamists who organized political parties and sought to galvanize ordinary people into political activity, however, the right-wingers had no program outside of isolated acts of urban terror. Until the Afghan jihad, right-wing Islamists out of power had neither the aspiration of drawing strength from popular organization nor the possibility of marshaling strength from any alternative source. The Reagan administration rescued right-wing Islamism from this historical cul-de-sac. The American jihad claimed to create an Islamic infrastructure of liberation but in reality forged an “infrastructure of terror” that used Islamic symbols to tap into Islamic networks and communities. To understand the deep-seated effects of the decision to ideologize the war as Islamic, it is necessary to look at different aspects of the mobilization that was the American jihad.