Afghan president Hamid Karzai blames “the West” for Islamic extremism

Afghan president Hamid Karzai blames “the West” for Islamic extremism
By James Cogan
8 September 2008

The propaganda used to justify the US-led occupation in Afghanistan
typically leaves out any explanation of the origins of tendencies such
as Al Qaeda, the Taliban movement and other Islamist groups resisting
American and NATO troops. The spin merchants of the so-called “war on
terror” would have people believe that the US and its allies are
fighting religious fanatics who have no support in the country and are
motivated by an inexplicable and irrational hatred of Western
civilisation.

On rare occasions, however, someone deviates from the script and draws
attention to historical facts regarding present-day Islamic extremism
that Washington and its allies prefer to leave unmentioned. One
occasion was an interview on August 19 with Time magazine with a very
close American ally—Hamid Karzai, the man who was installed by the
Bush administration as President of Afghanistan in 2002.

Challenged by Time to answer how an enemy could be fought that “only
has annihilation as its goal”, Karzai felt compelled to note the
current situation was a by-product of US support in the 1980s for the
creation of an Islamic fundamentalist army to wage a jihad or holy war
against a pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and embroil the Soviet
military itself in a decade-long guerilla conflict.

Karzai told Time: “In order to fix terrorism at large, we need to
remedy the wrongs of the past 30 years. Remedy means to undo. The
world pushed us [Afghan jihadists] to fight the Soviets. And those who
did walked away and left all the mess spread around. September 11 is a
consequence of this ...

“In the years of fighting against the Soviets, radicalism was the main
thing. Someone like me would be called half a Muslim because we were
not radical. The more radical you were the more money you were given.
Radicalism became not only an ideological tool against the Soviets but
a way forward economically. The more radical you presented yourself,
the more money the West gave you.”

When Time protested that “it wasn’t just the West; it was Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan”, who fomented Islamic extremism in Afghanistan,
Karzai answered: “[T]hey were led by the West. The moderates were
undermined. Afghan history and nationalism were called atheism. The
more you spoke of radicalism, the better you were treated. That’s what
we are paying for now.”

Karzai is intimately familiar with the US backing for Afghan jihadists
in the 1980s. He ran the office of Sebghatullah Mojadeddi, the leader
of one of the Mujahedin groups, and undoubtedly liaised with CIA and
other US officials. His bitterness over US policy stems from the fact
that the Mojadeddi faction was regarded as “moderate” as compared to
the “radicals” who received the lion’s share of financial support.

From 1979 on, the US urged its allies such as Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan to give military and financial aid to the Islamist-based
Afghan insurgents as a means of undermining the Soviet Union. Combined
with direct American funds, as much as $2 billion poured in each year—
the CIA’s Afghan project was by far the largest covert operation of
the entire Cold War.

The largest beneficiary of US aid during the 1980s was Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, which is believed to have received as much
as $600 million in US weapons and cash. Another figure the CIA worked
with closely was Jalaluddin Haqqani, a guerilla commander who built a
large military force in the ethnic Pashtun provinces of southern
Afghanistan.

At the same time, large sums of Saudi money were used to finance the
camps to which thousands of Islamic militants came from every corner
of the world between 1985 and 1992. One of the main figures involved
in creating what came to be called “The Base”, or Al Qaeda in Arabic,
was Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi Arabian billionaire. While the
CIA denies ever working with the foreign fighters or so-called “Afghan
Arabs”, its claims are not credible. Al Qaeda was an integral part of
the overall anti-Soviet jihad in which the CIA collaborated closely
with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agencies.

Rise of the Taliban

The proxy war that the Islamists fought for the United States from
1979 on was a contributing factor in the economic and political crisis
that gripped the Soviet Union in the 1980s and led the Stalinist
regime to restore capitalist relations and ultimately, dissolve the
USSR itself.

Afghanistan, however, was virtually destroyed in the process. Before
the Soviet forces withdrew in 1988, their brutal counter-insurgency
tactics had killed over one million Afghans, wounded as many as 1.5
million and forced five million people to flee to Pakistan.

The US continued to back the Islamists in their campaign to overthrow
the weak pro-Soviet government of Mohammad Najibullah, but
increasingly relied on the Pakistani military to oversee the financing
and arming of the Mujahedin. Washington’s focus had shifted. The
crisis of the Soviet Union had led the US ruling elite to conclude
that an opportunity existed to realise their long-held ambitions to
dominate the oil-rich Middle East. The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein
was provoked into invading Kuwait, creating the pretext for the
deployment of more than half-a-million American troops into Saudi
Arabia and, in March 1991, the first Gulf war against Iraq.

In Afghanistan, the Pakistani-backed forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
conducted a murderous civil war for control of the country against
other Mujahedin factions, whose warlord commanders were receiving
support from rival regional powers such as India, Iran and Russia.
Hekmatyar troops, still well-equipped with American-supplied weapons,
carried out several wholesale bombardments of the capital Kabul, in
which much of it was destroyed and thousands of people killed. In June
1993, he was installed as the prime minister, supplanting a government
in which Karzai had briefly served as deputy foreign minister.

The brutality of the civil war, the desperate social conditions facing
the population and the plight of millions of refugees in Pakistan
created the breeding ground for the Taliban—or “religious students”.
Radical Islamic clerics led by Mullah Omar won support among
embittered youth with promises that harsh Islamic law would suppress
the criminal warlords and give a long-suffering people respite from
war. Assembling a military force in the Pakistani refugee camps in
1994, the Taliban seized control of much of Afghanistan and finally
took Kabul in 1996. When it first emerged, Karzai, like many Pashtuns,
backed the Taliban as the means for undermining the power of their
ethnic rivals.

Pakistan, which had come to view Hekmatyar as an unreliable proxy,
played a crucial role in organising the Taliban’s armed forces. Units
of the Pakistani military are believed to have actively fought
alongside them. Another factor in the Taliban successes was the
decision by Jalaluddin Haqqani in 1995 to align his large ethnic
Pashtun militia with them. Haqqani served as the Minister for Borders
and Tribal Affairs in the Taliban government from 1996 until the US
invasion in October 2001.

The Taliban never controlled the entire country and was engaged in
virtually constant warfare against the warlords who received backing
from India, Russia and, to some extent, Iran. In large areas of
southern Afghanistan, however, the population, while resenting the
Taliban’s enforcement of harsh sharia law and bans on female
education, enjoyed their first years of relative peace in over 17
years. The legacy is a degree of sympathy and even nostalgia for the
Taliban, particularly when their rule is compared with the violence of
the US occupation and the corruption of the drug barons and strongmen
who dominate Karzai’s puppet government.

The US government and major American oil conglomerates initially
welcomed the advances by the Taliban. Rich new oil and gas fields were
being developed in former Soviet Central Asian republics such as
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and the potential existed for pipelines to
be constructed through Afghanistan to refineries and ports in Pakistan
and India. None were ever constructed, however, due to the Taliban’s
inability to completely end the civil war. Relations between
Washington and the Taliban began to break down in 1998, ostensibly
over their protection of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

US policy and Al Qaeda terrorism

The terrorist acts directed by Islamic extremists against the United
States in the late 1990s were a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War.
Islamist radicals who believed they had fought to liberate Afghanistan
from non-Muslim infidels were outraged that the Saudi monarchy had
allowed American troops—as much as infidels as the Soviets—to set foot
in the country that is supposed to protect the holiest shrines of
Islam at Mecca and Medina. This sense of betrayal intensified when,
after the shattering of Iraq, the US military maintained bases not
only in Saudi Arabia, but also in Kuwait and other Gulf states.

Osama bin Laden, who had returned to Saudi Arabia, publicly denounced
the monarchy and was forced into exile in the Sudan. In 1996, he moved
back to Afghanistan, where he reforged his ties with figures such as
Haqqani, who had used many Afghan Arabs in his guerilla forces.

Al Qaeda’s outlook reflected the resentment felt by a disgruntled
section of the ruling class in the Middle East over the domination of
the region by the United States. Its reactionary perspective of
committing terrorist atrocities against American targets had only one
aim: to pressure Washington into removing its troops from Muslim
countries as the basis for establishing a new relationship with
imperialism.

In February 1998, bin Laden called for a jihad against the United
States from his new base in Afghanistan, appealing for his supporters
to kill Americans until the US government agreed to “liberate” the
Israeli-held al-Asqa mosque in Jerusalem and the al-Haram mosque in
Mecca. The character of the so-called “holy war” was revealed when Al
Qaeda attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August
1998, murdering more than 200 innocent people and wounding over 4,000.
In retaliation, the Clinton administration ordered cruise missile
strikes on alleged Al Qaeda bases near Khost in Afghanistan and a
“terrorist factory” in Sudan.

By 2000, the US military had developed its plans for an invasion of
Afghanistan. The objective was the installation of a pro-US
government. Pipeline projects could then proceed and the US would be
able to construct military bases in the very heart of Central Asia,
projecting force against Iran to the west, Russia to the north and
China to the east. All that was lacking was a justification.

September 11, 2001 provided it. In a still unexplained security stand-
down, 19 Islamists—mostly Saudis—were able to hijack aircraft and fly
them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon despite several of
them being on CIA or FBI “watch lists”. The ability of Al Qaeda to
carry out such an attack is all the more suspicious given the long
relationship between American intelligence agencies and Islamic
extremists. While bin Laden turned on his erstwhile US ally in 1991,
it is unlikely that the CIA lost all its informants and agents in his
network.

Within a month of 9/11, the US invasion of Afghanistan had begun.
Nearly seven years later, the war has no end in sight. The Taliban
have proven able to recruit guerilla forces on both sides of the
Afghan-Pakistan border, feeding off the poverty and despair of a
largely rural population and anger at the US invasion that has brought
nothing but more death and hardship.

Since the collapse of the Taliban government in 2001, Jalaluddin
Haqqani and his sons are believed to have regrouped their military
forces in the country’s south, capitalising on safe havens in the
ethnic Pashtun Federally Administrated Tribal Agencies (FATA) of
Pakistan. At the same time, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami has re-
established itself in parts of eastern Afghanistan by joining with the
Taliban in calling for resistance to the US and NATO.

While the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and what remains of his
Afghanistan-based network is not definitively known, they are most
likely operating from bases inside the FATA where Al Qaeda operated
with US, Saudi and Pakistani backing during the Soviet-Afghan war.

Inside Pakistan, Taliban-linked movements now control most of the FATA
and are spreading their influence into the North West Frontier
Province, Balochistan and even into the economic hub of the country,
Karachi. Last month, Asif Al Zardari, now president of Pakistan,
declared that the “world is losing the war” and “at the moment they
[the Taliban] definitely have the upper hand”.

Stemming the resurgence of Islamic extremism—which the US fomented in
the 1980s—is the primary pretext for an escalation of the Afghan
conflict. In the United States, the Democratic and Republican parties
are in agreement that thousands more troops must be sent. Barack
Obama, the Democratic candidate for president, has declared that any
administration he heads will have “no greater priority” than defeating
the Taliban.

Obama has stated he would order US military operations into Pakistan
without the permission of the Pakistani government, if it proves
unwilling or incapable of preventing Islamist guerillas using the FATA
as a sanctuary from which to attack US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The real objective of this shift in US policy is to advance
Washington’s strategic and economic ambitions in Central Asia.

Obama’s policy is already being adopted by the Bush administration.
This month, US ground troops carried out the first acknowledged attack
on alleged Taliban targets inside Pakistan. The action provoked an
outpouring of anger and a unanimous vote in the Pakistani parliament
that the country’s military should use force to prevent any future
American incursions.

The result of 30 years of US meddling in the affairs of Afghanistan is
a tinder box of instability and hatred of American imperialism that
threatens to ignite war throughout the region.