Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (20 page)

Two political objectives, one regional, the other global, shaped U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The regional objective was to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution. This was accomplished with two regional alliances against Iran, one with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the other with Iraq. Whereas the United States saw Islamist social movements as a threat, it was eager to reinforce Islamist—Sunni, not Shi’a—state projects. This American strategy provided a political opening for the intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to promote exaggeratedly anti-Shi’a Sunni doctrines, chief among them the Wahhabi doctrine from Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi doctrine from Pakistan.

The strategic shift in the U.S. perspective as the Cold War progressed from “containment” to “rollback” coincided with the transition from the Carter to the Reagan presidency. Determined to increase the tally of dead Russians in Afghanistan, the Reagan administration showed no interest in a negotiated or compromise settlement. It wanted to ally itself with internationalist, militantly anti-Communist Islamist ideologues rather than moderately pragmatic Muslims, a view shared by the ISI. Both were uninterested in
Afghan nationalism, the United States because it feared nationalists might compromise the anti-Soviet war and Pakistan because it feared that Pashtun nationalism would erode its territorial integrity. This shared view of the patron and the proxy, CIA and ISI, effectively marginalized mainstream traditionalist/nationalist Muslim organizations and elevated highly ideological but exiled Islamist factions, even if they were on the fringes of Afghan society. The simple fact was that whereas traditionalists understood their struggle in a national frame of reference, ideologues found meaning in the struggle as the beginning of an international jihad.

Close observers of the Afghan jihad have tended to conclude that the ISI was able to take advantage of its position as sole agent to translate its own preference for state-centered political Islam into policy, while the American course of action was one of benign neglect. Thus, Ahmed Rashid wrote:

When the CIA funneled arms to the Afghan Mujahideen via Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the ISI gave preference to the radical Afghan Islamic parties—which could more easily be turned into an engine of anti-Soviet jihad—and pushed aside moderate Afghan nationalist and Islamic parties. At that time the CIA made no objections to this policy.

But the absence of a stated CIA objective did not mean a lack of a clear CIA preference. Ironically, this objective was so central to U.S. policy that it led to a high level of tolerance for groups not particularly well disposed to the United States. As early as 1985, during a visit to address the UN, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar refused to meet President Reagan, arguing that “to be seen meeting Reagan would serve the KGB and Soviet propaganda,” which “insisted
that the war was not a jihad, but a mere extension of US Cold War strategy.”

The seven resistance groups that made up the Afghan jihad were divided into two opposing political constellations, one traditional-nationalist, the other Islamist. Barnett Rubin has sketched their historical formation and political perspective in some detail. The leadership of the traditionalist bloc came from the historic elite of Afghanistan, who were either heads of the Sufi orders (the Qadariyya or the Naqshbandi tariqa) or traditional
alims
(legal scholars) versed in Islamic jurisprudence. None of these three mainstream groups received external assistance of any significance. The National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, led by the head of the Qadariyya Sufi order, was considered too “nationalist” and “insufficiently Islamic” to receive funds. The Afghan National Liberation Front was led by the family that headed the Naqshbandi tariqa. It was more of a centrist group that pledged both to defend “national traditions” and to establish “an Islamic society”; it, too, “hardly existed as a military force.” The only traditional-nationalist group with a military presence on the ground was called the Movement of the Islamic Revolution. Led by a respected alim who both ran a large traditional madrassah and controlled huge landholdings, its commanders (in particular, Mullah Nasim Akhundzada of the Helmand Valley) were also among the largest drug lords inside Afghanistan.

In contrast to these three traditional-nationalist groups whose leadership came from the historical tribal and religious elite of Afghanistan, leaders of the four Islamist groups came from students and faculty active in the Jamiat-i-Islami, the parent Islamist organization at Kabul University in the 1970s. The first split from the Jamiat came in 1975 and led to the formation of Hikmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami (Hizb). A later split from the Hizb led to the creation
of the Khalis faction. The fourth Islamist organization was led by Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, who had studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo and then joined the sharia (law) faculty at Kabul University. He had been Burhaneddin Rabbani’s deputy in the Jamiat in the 1970s.

The key parties in the Islamist constellation were the Jamiat and the Hizb. After the split with Hizb, Jamiat had turned into the “main voice for non-Pashtuns, especially Persian speakers.” Jamiat field commanders were autonomous and retained control over their men’s weapons. Led by the most successful of the commanders, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Jamiat developed into “the most powerful party of the resistance” over the course of the war. In spite of that, the Jamiat was not the preferred recipient for CIA support. There was one important reason for this: Jamiat represented the moderate center in Islamist politics, and the CIA backed not just Islamist ideologues but extremists over moderates.

The key extremist party was the Hizb, which “represented the most radical part of the student movement” and was “the most revolutionary and the most disciplined of the Islamic parties.” Unlike other leaders in the Jamiat, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar had a political background that included participation in both the Communist and the Islamist movements: he had begun political life in high school as a member of the Percham faction of the Communist party and then gone on to the Muslim Youth Movement. One wonders whether Hikmatyar brought the discipline of Communist youth organizations to Hizb, for Hizb was distinguished from other Islamist parties by its modern organization. It stressed party supremacy over loyalty to individual commanders, so that weapons were the property of the party and not of individual commanders, as in other organizations. Recruitment and promotion were based more on individual ideology and skills than on social
background. Hizb was also the only party to have internal election of leaders, although the right to vote was restricted to members who had joined before the 1978 Communist coup. In Rubin’s judgment: “Hikmatyar’s radical Islamism (and hence anticommunism) and the superior organization of his party made the Hizb the favorite of not only the Pakistani and the Arab Islamists—including the ISI officers—but also moderate Pakistani generals and the operations wing of the CIA.” This preference gave the Hizb privileged access to Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, to American refugee aid, and to refugee schools. We have also seen that Hikmatyar was the drug lord who owned seven heroin-processing plants on the Pakistani side of the border. Yet even though it was the recipient of more than half of CIA funds, estimated at $2 billion over the ten-year war, the Hizb was not the most active in the guerrilla war, a fact that led to the formation of a splinter group, the Khalis faction, calling for greater involvement in guerrilla action.

As to unity, most initiatives came from individuals outside the CIA/ISI and the radical Islamists they patronized. Serious overtures usually came from moderates within and from Saudi Arabia, except that Saudi interest was limited to an alliance behind their favored leader, Sayyaf. The first Saudi effort at unity was in 1981. It led to a brief alliance, which ended when the three traditionalist-nationalist parties left, “complaining of rampant corruption and discrimination by Sayyaf.” Only remnants of these parties, lured by the scent of Saudi money, stayed behind. This is why, in spite of the fact that only four organizations stayed in the alliance, the record speaks of the ISI-favored alliance as the Peshawar Seven. Later, when traditionalist-nationalist leaders proposed coming together under a unifying leader such as King Zahir, Pakistan, reluctant to flirt with Afghan nationalism and determined to put an
Islamist in power in Kabul, refused him a visa. Unity among the Islamists continued to be elusive. Rebel leaders had admitted to U.S. officials as early as 1979 that trying to create a unified Afghan resistance was like “putting five different animals in the same cage.”

In this setting, in which America was backing groups with no internal support or the possibility of organizing it, the United States and its allies had to support a myriad of groups if only to ensure that the jihad continued to have an even chance. The support of different groups turned out to be support for several wars fought by rival groups. This is why as soon as the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan and victory seemed at hand, the CIA-supported jihad mutated into a civil war. With the traditionalist-nationalists marginalized, the Soviet withdrawal of 1989 led to a turf battle between different Islamist groups, pitting the extremists led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and the Hizb against the moderates in the Jamiat led by Burhaneddin Rabbani and his spectacularly successful field commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud. When the international press reported that Hikmatyar had slaughtered thirty members of a rival mujahideen group, the president of the interim government was so outraged that he denounced Hikmatyar, by then his own foreign minister, as a “criminal” and a “terrorist.”

As the turf war culminated in a seesaw battle for Kabul, the civil war turned vicious. When it became obvious that Hikmatyar’s forces were losing ground, the Pakistani army shifted its backing to the Taliban, a group mainly comprising students it had trained since 1980 in madrassahs in the North-West Frontier Province. The ISI saw the Taliban as amenable to tight control and thus a preferable substitute for the now discredited Islamist coalition led by Hikmatyar. With the Cold War over, the focus of official America also narrowed to a pecuniary dimension: oil. And for
American oil interests—particularly Unocal, the giant oil company that hoped to build a trans-Afghan pipeline from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean as an alternative to going through Iran—any group that could offer security in Afghanistan would do. On October 4, 1996, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that a new rumor was making rounds of Kabul—“many are sure that the Clinton administration is supporting the Taliban, the victorious Islamic militia”—and added that the conspiracy theory was “plausible, given the great mystery that shrouds the Taliban’s rise and rapid advance: How did a ragtag force that emerged in late 1994 among Muslim religious students in the southern region of Kandahar and adjacent areas of Pakistan grow so quickly that, two years later, it has become master of three-quarters of Afghanistan? Who paid for its weaponry, ammunition and vehicles? Who organized its training and logistics? Is intelligence or military assistance received from outside one of the reasons the Taliban has enjoyed astonishing, and relatively bloodless, successes over experienced moujahedeen who, for nearly a decade, fought occupying Soviet troops?” It cited “generous support” from Pakistan but still wondered whether the United States was involved. A ranking UN official said: “The U.S. wants law and order in Afghanistan, and the Taliban now seem like the best bet.” A local director of a foreign charity was equally cynical: “There are two different things—American state interests and human rights. For the politicians running America, human rights take second place.” And a Kabul university graduate who worked as a translator asked the reporter, “How can your country want to deal with people who whip women for not conforming to their dress code?” After a State Department meeting with a visiting Taliban delegation on February 3, 1997, a senior U.S. diplomat explained his government’s point of view: “The Taliban will probably develop like
Saudi Arabia. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”

If the assortment of mujahideen groups were the ideological products of the Cold War—trained, equipped, and financed by the CIA and its regional allies—the Taliban arose from the agony and the ashes of the war against the Soviet Union. The Taliban was a movement born across the border in Pakistan at a time when the entire population of Afghanistan had been displaced, not once but many times over, and when no educated class to speak of was left in the country. A
talib
was a student in a religious school, and the movement of students, Taliban, was born of warfare stretching across decades, of children born in cross-border refugee camps, of male orphans with no camaraderie but those of other boys in madrassahs, which initially provided student recruits to defend the population at large—ironically, women and young boys in particular—from the lust and the looting of mujahideen guerrillas. Without understanding that the Taliban provided the population effective protection against the likes of Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, warlords turned drug lords, it is difficult to understand why the population turned to the Taliban. The promise that made the Taliban popular and brought it to power was that it would establish law and order. Tragically, though, the Taliban, born of a brutalized society, was to brutalize it further. An old man in a mosque in Kandahar, an architectural ruin of an ancient city of gardens and fountains and palaces, confided about the Taliban to Eqbal Ahmad, “They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life.”

Ahmed Rashid noted that “the Taliban reflect none of the major Islamicist trends that were earlier prevalent in Afghanistan or that emerged during the jihad of the 1980s.” Not one of the
three major impulses that define Islam in central Asia and its environs could be found in the Taliban. They did not follow either of the traditional Central Asian paths—the mystical Islam of the Sufis or the scholarly Islam of the ulama. And they were not inspired by the social and political radicalism of the political Islamist group born at the start of the twentieth century, the Society of Muslim Brothers, the one that was closest to the moderate Islamists led by the Jamiat. Their ideology of Deobandi Islam was a Pakistani import. The Taliban’s international agenda was an adoption as well as an adaptation, a hand-me-down from the alliance with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. In Ahmed Rashid’s words, “the tens of thousands of Pakistani militants, and the thousands of Central Asians, Arabs, Africans, and East Asians who have fought for the Taliban since that time, have brought with them a global perspective of Islamic radicalism that the Taliban have adopted as their own.”