Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (29 page)

^*
The 1990 Index was compiled from low to high, and the 2000 Index from high to low. Thus, Iraq, ranked 76th in 1990 out of 130, would be 55th if the Index had been compiled from high to low, as in 2000.

Conclusion
B
EYOND
I
MPUNITY AND
C
OLLECTIVE
P
UNISHMENT

S
hould terrorism be dealt with like a criminal act, as several critics of American bombing of Afghanistan have argued? It sounds appealing, but if terrorism were simply a crime, it would not be a political problem. The distinction between political terror and crime is that the former makes an open bid for public support. Unlike the criminal, the political terrorist is not easily deterred by punishment. Whatever we may think of their methods, terrorists have not only a need to be heard but, more often than not, a cause to champion. Notwithstanding Salman Rushdie’s claim in an article in the
New York Times
that terrorists are nihilists who wrap themselves in objectives but have none—and so we must remorselessly attack them—one needs to recognize that terrorism has no military solution. Even a successful military confrontation with terrorists requires their political isolation, precisely by addressing the issues they raise. That is why official America’s bombing campaign in Afghanistan is more likely to be remembered as a combination of blood revenge and medieval-type exorcism than as a search for a solution to terrorism.

Few would fail to notice the growing common ground between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the official response to it called “the war on terror.” Both sides deny the possibility of a middle ground, calling for a war to the finish. Both rally forces in the name of justice but understand justice as revenge. If the perpetrators of 9/11 refuse to distinguish between official America and the American people, target and victim, “the war on terror” has proceeded by dishing out collective punishment, with callous disregard for either “collateral damage” or legitimate grievances. Both practices are likely to nurture the spirit of revenge. I have written this book with the conviction that the response to injury does not have to be vengeance and that we need to distinguish between revenge and justice. A response other than revenge is possible and desirable. For that to happen, however, we need to turn the moment of injury into a moment of freedom, of choice. For Americans, that means turning 9/11 into an opportunity to reflect on America’s place in the world. Grief for victims should not obscure the fact that there is no choice without a debate and no democracy without choice.

The post-Afghanistan debate in the United States and globally has been preoccupied with a second question: What, if any, is the connection between the war on terror and the war on Iraq? If 9/11 shattered the sense of immunity—nowadays called security—held by ordinary Americans, it also eroded the confidence shared by successive administrations that America could continue to exercise power with impunity. To some in the establishment, this was reason to question the legacy of the Cold War, to move beyond it to forge a rule of law and a regime of international accountability. But for the Bush administration, 9/11 offered a rare historical opportunity to turn a widespread social concern for security in the face of terrorism into an opportunity to pursue a factional neo-Reaganite agenda—to settle unfinished business from the Cold War. It is this agenda that provides a clue both to the self-righteous and punitive conduct of the war on terror and to its shading into a new war, that against “the axis of evil.” It illuminates the bridge between the invasion of Afghanistan and that of Iraq. To what extent is the axis of evil but a post-Cold War edition of the evil empire? Does not the Bush administration’s promise to “democratize” the axis recall Reagan’s repudiation of détente so as to roll back the evil empire, heralding a “democratic revolution”?

Privatizing Terror During the Late Cold War

Political terror comes out of a government’s or guerrilla movement’s failure to win civilian support. The most obvious link is with the practice of counterinsurgency that the British pioneered in their Malaysian colony during the Second World War and that Samuel Huntington advised America to emulate during the Vietnam War. Huntington called for the creation of strategic hamlets, to which to relocate the population sympathetic to the Viet Cong, so as to detach guerrillas from the population on which they had come to depend for support. Counterinsurgency turned the theory of guerrilla struggle on its head. If guerrillas claimed to be waging a political struggle with arms, moving through the population with the ease of fish in water, to use Mao’s metaphor—and not a conventional war in which one could easily separate soldiers from civilians—then the point of counterinsurgency was first to drain the water so as to isolate the fish. Counterinsurgency, however, did not work as long as guerrillas actually enjoyed the political support of the civilian population. So civilians had to be targeted militarily and intimidated into submission.

The difference between counterinsurgency and a strategy of terror was that the latter deliberately hit soft targets, a lesson perversely learned from guerrilla warfare, which also blurred the line between the military and the civil. Not only did guerrillas claim to be civilians who had taken up arms in defense of civil and political rights, but the core of their strategy was to identify targets that were soft and political, that is, civilians, rather than military. As if taking a cue from left-wing guerrillas fighting right-wing dictatorships, right-wing terrorist groups confronting militant Third World nationalist governments began by eliminating civilian leaders—ranging from the political leaders of local councils to civic leaders and technical cadres in cooperatives, health centers, state farms; in short, in any government-connected production facility or social service.

Not for the first time did adversaries learn from one another. Had not Jerry Falwell, faced with the phenomenal success of black churches in the civil-rights movement in the United States, concluded that the way forward lay in breaching the line between the religious and the secular? When it came to learning from left-wing guerrillas, the political intellectuals in the apartheid military did the pioneering work. Take the example of the apartheid minister of defense, Magnus Malan, who made it compulsory for all antiguerrilla units to study Mao Zedong’s essential writings on guerrilla war. Under his leadership, the South African Defense Forces began to emulate Soviet intelligence methods, going beyond using torture to extract information from captured guerrillas to developing methods to “convert” former guerrillas into apartheid agents before reinserting them into guerrilla ranks as informers—as at Vlakplaas, apartheid’s well-known conversion camp.

The difference between left-wing “guerrillas” and right-wing “terrorists” lay in the following: as a rule, guerrillas operated in contexts where they could muster substantial civilian political support, whereas terrorists were substantially isolated from the civilian population. In practice, the distinction was blurred in several cases. The first was when guerrillas failed to win political support, as with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) leadership and cadres in Sierra Leone—antigovernment guerrillas who turned to violence to coerce support from civilians they had failed to persuade in the first place. The second was when they lost popular support, as in the case of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru who called for armed strikes, and resorted to violence against all those who would not join them, even if they were not with the government. Though they commanded significant support from the Ameri-Indian population in the region where they first organized, the Sendero Luminoso failed to win support in the rest of the country. And the third was when guerrillas ceased to make a distinction between civilian agents of unpopular dictatorship and their beneficiaries or supporters in the civilian population, turning the latter into soft targets. This last applies to movements that have resorted to terror as a tactic—rather than as a strategy—at different points in their history, from the Weathermen in the mass antiwar movement in the United States of the sixties to sections of the Palestinian and South African resistance, which resorted to violence against civilian targets when the future looked gloomy. The temptation and pitfalls of a liberation movement resorting to political terror for tactical purposes were depicted brilliantly in the film
The Battle of Algiers
(1967).

Cost to the United States

The U.S. flirtation with terror was part of the executive branch’s effort to break free of legislative constraints on foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. This constraint was formally introduced in legislation, first as the Clark Amendment of 1976, which forbade any covert assistance to parties in the Angolan civil war, and then as the Boland Amendment of 1984, at the time of the contra war in Nicaragua. The first cost America has paid for embracing terror is a growing erosion of democracy at home. The will to separate foreign from domestic policy is characteristic of imperial democracies and was one of the key legacies of the Cold War. The less accountable the executive branch was to legislative organs, the more official America came to see foreign policy in purely instrumentalist terms. Time and again, this was justified as a vulgar pragmatism: it is right because it works.

The second cost of the Afghan War arose because the United States and its allies created, trained, and sustained an infrastructure of terror, international in scope, free of any effective state control, and wrapped up in the language of religious war. Official America learned to distinguish between two types of terrorism—“theirs” and “ours”—and cultivated an increasingly benign attitude to ours. But then it turned out that their terrorism was born of ours.

The best-known CIA-trained terrorist was, of course, Osama bin Laden; in Arundhati Roy’s illuminating phrase, “bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI.” Bin Laden was not the only distinguished CIA creation—the others, as discussed, included Abdullah Azzam, a founder of Hamas, and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian prayer leader. All CIA inventions, all were on the FBI list of those most wanted. The co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing included two other veterans of the Afghan jihad: Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and Mahmud Abouhalima. The World Trade Center bomb exploded underground, leaving a crater two hundred feet wide and several stories deep. The bomb was made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—according to Cooley, a formula “taught in CIA manuals.”

The third cost of the Afghan jihad was the development of a parallel infrastructure of criminality connected with the international development of an illicit drug trade. The simple fact the government had to face was that if you decide to wage war without legislative consent, then you are likely to be short of funds. Time and again, the agencies pursuing covert wars seemed to arrive at the same solution to their financial problems: collude with drug lords. In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War but added:

Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade, … I don’t think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout…. There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.

But the fallout was not unanticipated; the consequences were known. It is a matter of debate as to whether the fallout would have been considered justifiable had executive agencies been effectively subjected to democratic accountability. This much is clear from Alfred McCoy’s study of the global drug trade since the Vietnam War. The sudden spread of high-grade number 4 heroin among GIs in Vietnam came in 1970. The U.S. Army provost marshal ruled out any possibility that the heroin was coming from the north. By mid-1971, U.S. Army medical officers estimated that 10 to 15 percent of its low-rank soldiers were using heroin on a regular basis.

During the Afghan jihad, as Afghanistan became the world’s “top heroin producer,” it supplied “60% of U.S. demand.” As heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan poured into America, notes David Musto, the Yale University psychiatrist and former White House adviser on drug policy, “the number of drug-related deaths in New York City rose by 77 percent.”

When it came to the contra war and CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, the consequences were direct. Between 1982 and 1985, the number of cocaine users in the United States rose by 38 percent to 5.8 million, more than ten times the number of heroin addicts. On August 18, 1996,
The Mercury News
of San Jose, California, published a lead story with the headline “America’s Crack Plague Has Roots in Nicaraguan War” and the main theme: “For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the CIA.” The story detailed “how a group of Nicaraguan exiles set up a cocaine ring in California, establishing ties with the black street gangs of South Central Los Angeles who manufactured crack out of shipments of powder cocaine” and “how much of the profit made by the Nicaraguan exiles had been funneled back to the contra army.” On October 4, the
Washington Post
went to town on
The Mercury News
and its reporter, Gary Webb, denying that there was evidence of a “contra-tied plot.” But the outrage that followed
The Mercury News
series could not be ignored; CIA Director John Deutsch ordered his agency’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, to launch an investigation. It took seventeen investigators eighteen months to review a quarter million pages of documents and conduct 365 interviews to produce a two-volume report.