Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (18 page)

The real damage the CIA did was not the providing of arms and money but the
privatization
of information about how to produce and spread violence—the formation of private militias—capable of creating terror. Cooley notes that CIA training in its U.S. camps ranged from infiltration techniques to ways of extracting prisoners or weapons from behind enemy lines to more than sixty assorted “deadly skills.” The skills passed on by trainers to fighters included “the use of sophisticated fuses, timers and explosives; automatic weapons with armor-piercing ammunition, remote-control devices for triggering mines and bombs (used later in the volunteers’ home countries, and against the Israelis in occupied Arab territory such as southern Lebanon).” There were also local Afghan skills—such as throat cutting and disemboweling—that the CIA incorporated in its training.

The team of
Los Angeles Times
reporters who carried out an investigation into the aftermath of the Afghan War “over four continents” found that the key leaders of every major terrorist attack, from New York to France to Saudi Arabia, inevitably turned out to have been veterans of the Afghan War.

One of those charged in 1995 for the conspiracy to bomb the UN building, FBI headquarters in lower Manhattan, and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels linking Manhattan with New Jersey was Claments Rodney Hampton-el, a hospital technician from Brooklyn, New York, who had come home after being wounded in the arm and leg in Afghanistan. Both the “hands-on ringleader” of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a Brooklyn taxi driver named Mahmud Abouhalima, and the alleged mastermind of the bombing, Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, had fought in the Afghan War against the Soviets. In 1995, Pakistani authorities arrested and extradited to the United States the twenty-eight-year-old youth named Yousef, according to the
Los Angeles Times
, “the most notorious example yet of this lethal, unanticipated byproduct of the Afghan War.” Charges leveled against him include FBI charges of “an alleged plot to simultaneously bomb about a dozen Delta, Northwest and United Airlines jumbo jets over the Pacific,” Philippine government accusations of “plotting to assassinate Pope John Paul II during a January 1995 visit,” and Pakistani charges of an aborted plan in 1993 to kill the prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

When France, with a population of three million Muslims, endured a series of eight bomb attacks in the summer of 1995, a law enforcement officer in Paris commented, “Almost all of the leaders of the people we have arrested for terrorism have passed by Afghanistan or Pakistan. The know-how was learned there. How to operate clandestinely as well.” When a pickup truck stuffed with
explosives was detonated outside a three-story building in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on November 13, 1996, killing five Americans, “three of the four Saudi militants arrested for that attack admitted to having received firearms and explosives training in Afghanistan and to having participated in combat” there. When a mammoth truck bomb demolished an eight-story barracks at the King Abdulaziz Air Base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996, killing nineteen U.S. airmen and wounding 250 others, General J. H. Binford Peay, head of the U.S. Central Command, told hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee looking into the Dhahran bombing, “Recently we have seen growth in ‘transnational’ groups, comprised of fanatical Islamic extremists, many of whom fought in Afghanistan and now drift to other countries with the aim of establishing anti-Western fundamentalist regimes by destabilizing traditional governments and attacking U.S. and Western targets.”

Others were more candid. “Your government participated in creating a monster,” Mahfoud Bennoune, an Algerian sociologist, told a
Los Angeles Times
correspondent in Algiers, “Now it has turned against you and the world: 16,000 Arabs were trained in Afghanistan, made into a veritable killing machine.”

Financing the Jihad Through the Drug Trade

When the Carter administration began to ferry arms to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, there was immediate opposition from Dr. David Musto, a Yale University psychiatrist who was also a White House adviser on drug policy. Musto and another medical member of the White House Drug Council asked in a the
New York Times
op-ed piece, “Are we erring in befriending these tribes as we did in Laos when Air America (chartered by the Central Intelligence
Agency) helped transport crude opium from certain tribal areas?” Years later, Musto recalled in an interview with Alfred McCoy, “I told the [White House Drug] Council that we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their rebellion against the Soviets. Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos?”

There were two reasons why Musto’s concerns went unheeded. First, precisely because Afghanistan’s drug lords were in open rebellion against the new Soviet-supported regime, the CIA counted on them as readily available and dependable allies. Second, as the CIA knew too well from experience, nothing could rival the drug trade as a reliable source of big money for covert warfare. The Afghan War was funded from multiple sources, external and internal, state and private. When it began, it was fueled by state contributions. As early as February 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski secured pledges of financial support from Saudi Arabia, “which eventually would match the US government financial input ‘dollar for dollar.’ “After President Reagan issued National Security Directive 166 in March 1985, the Afghan jihad turned into the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In the fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine American military aid to the mujahideen amounted to $660 million—“more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua.” Noting that this sum was “more than what Pakistan itself was receiving from Washington,” Steve Galster at the National Security Archive calculated that Congress ultimately provided “nearly 3 billion dollars in covert aid for the mujahideen, more than all other CIA covert operations in the 1980s combined.”

Besides these external funds, there were funds generated by the mujahideen through the drug trade. Organized and centralized
under CIA control, the drug trade combined the peasant’s market wisdom with the mujahideens’ capacities for extortion and entrepreneurship. Alfred McCoy traced the different steps in the drug economy, beginning with peasant production: “As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax.” It no doubt helped that for the grower the price of opium was five times that for wheat. Also, there was no dearth of processing facilities: “Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.” Writing in
The Nation
in 1988, Lawrence Lifschultz pointed out that the heroin laboratories, located in North-West Frontier Province, were operated under the protection of General Fazle Haq, an intimate of General Zia. The next link in the chain was transport, which was provided by trucks from the Pakistani army’s National Logistics Cell (NLC), which “arrived with CIA arms from Karachi” and “often returned loaded with heroin—protected by ISI papers from police search.”
The Herald
of Pakistan had reported as early as September 1985 that “the drug is carried in NLC trucks which come sealed” and “are never checked by the police” and that “this has been going on now for about three and a half years.” Finally, the CIA provided the legal cover without which this illicit trade could not have grown to monumental proportions:

During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests…. U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies “because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.”

Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The production there was of opium, a very different drug, which was directed to small, rural, regional markets. By the end of the Afghan jihad, the picture had changed drastically: the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s leading producers of both opium and processed heroin, the source of “75 percent of the world’s opium, worth multi-billion dollars in revenue.” In a report released in early 2001, the United Nations International Drug Control Program traced the rapid expansion of Afghan opium production to exactly 1979, the year the U.S.-sponsored jihad began: “It is no coincidence that Afghanistan began to emerge as a significant producer of illicit opium in precisely the period of protracted war that began in 1979, and still persists.” The big push came after 1985. Accounting for less than 5 percent of global opium production in 1980, the region accounted for 71 percent of it by 1990, according to this same report. The fate of Afghanistan resembled that of Burma, another Asian mountainous region that had been the site of CIA intervention at the beginning of the Cold War. “Just as CIA support for Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops in the Shan states had increased Burma’s opium crop in the 1950s,” concluded Alfred McCoy, “so the agency’s aid to the mujahideen guerrillas in the 1980s expanded opium production in Afghanistan and linked Pakistan’s nearby heroin laboratories to the world market.”

The heroin economy literally poisoned Afghani and Pakistani life. The figures who thrived in this cesspool had been hailed by Ronald Reagan as “moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” The worst example was Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, who received more than half of CIA covert resources, estimated to be worth $2 billion over the ten-year war, and quickly came to dominate the Afghan mujahideen. Long known as a militant “fundamentalist,”
Hikmatyar was not a clergyman but a student in the highly competitive American-sponsored Faculty of Engineering at Kabul University, “who had led student demonstrations in Kabul during the late 1960s to oppose the king’s secular reforms.” The
New York Times
reported—though only after the Afghan jihad had ended—an incident in the early 1970s when “he had dispatched followers to throw vials of acid into the faces of women students who refused to wear veils.” Accused of murdering a leftist student, Hikmatyar served a prison sentence and fled to Pakistan. His opportunity came with the republican coup of 1973 in Afghanistan. Fearing that the new government might encourage Pashtun separatism in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, the Pakistani government ordered the army to train a clandestine Afghan rebel group. From then on, Hikmatyar became the Pakistani army’s favorite “contract revolutionary.” When introduced to the CIA by the ISI, Hikmatyar was leading an armed guerrilla force called Hizb-i-Islami, a creation of the ISI that had little support inside Afghanistan. Over the next decade, his group received “more than half of all arms” supplied by the CIA. With a guaranteed long-term subsidy, the Hizb-i-Islami grew into the mujahideen’s “largest guerrilla army,” one that Hikmatyar used “to become Afghanistan’s leading drug lord.”

Hikmatyar’s chief rival was Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, known as the “King of Heroin.” Mullah Nasim controlled “the best-irrigated lands in the Northern Helmand valley,” once Afghanistan’s breadbasket, “and decreed that half of all peasant holdings … be planted to opium.” He “issued opium quotas to every landowner” and responded “by killing or castrating those who defied his directives.” When the
New York Times
correspondent Arthur Bonner spent a month in early 1986 traveling in Helmand, he found extensive poppy fields in every village and town.
Mullah Nasim’s elder brother, Mohammed Rasul, explained, “We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers.” While Mullah Nasim had the opium-poppy fields of Helmand, Hikmatyar had six heroin refineries. Situated at Koh-i-Sultan at the southern end of Helmand, just inside Pakistan, these refineries processed the opium into heroin. At the height of the Afghan jihad, in 1988-1989, Hikmatyar’s forces “challenged Mulla Nasim’s rule over the Helmand opium harvest.” The savage turf war lasted into the spring of 1989, after the snows melted. Both sides absorbed huge casualties. This, and not any encounter with Soviet or Afghan government forces, turned out to be the largest single battle in the Afghan jihad. In the end, Mullah Nasim won and kept control of the valley.

The ISI gave Hikmatyar “a free hand to rule the Afghan refugee camps that sprawled around Peshawar.” Speaking before a congressional committee, Barnett Rubin, a highly respected specialist on Afghan affairs at the Center for International Cooperation at New York University, cited a UN refugee worker who had described Hikmatyar’s rule as “a reign of terror.” Hikmatyar ran the camps like a drug lord. He used violence as the measure of all relationships. Stating that this was a jihad, he took no prisoners: instead of welcoming defectors from the government side as would a guerrilla army interested in winning support, his forces simply killed them. From the start of the covert war in 1979, “other mujaheddin leaders charged that Hekmatyar’s followers were using violence to take control of rival resistance groups.”

It is true that Hikmatyar was not an original CIA product, but he was introduced to the CIA’s Islamabad station chief, John Joseph Reagan, by the ISI at the very start of the covert war in May 1979, before Soviet troops had entered Afghanistan. Most writers on Afghanistan have concluded that the CIA’s margin of
maneuver was limited by the ISI. Yet we must take into account that Hikmatyar remained the primary recipient of CIA arms largesse for a decade, from 1979 through 1981, when the supply increased under the first Reagan administration, to 1985, when it ballooned massively under the second Reagan administration, and until the war ended. Islamabad, the nerve center of the Afghan jihad, grew into one of the largest CIA stations. Why did the CIA’s affair with Hikmatyar flourish for a decade? I have suggested that the sustained preference that both the CIA and the ISI exhibited for Hikmatyar was a result of a shared objective: neither agency was interested in a compromise settlement; both preferred anti-Communist radical Islamists who shared their desire for “killing Russians” and bleeding the Soviet Union white.