Recalling a Little History on the Origins of Contemporary “Terrorism”

Our leaders have described our “war on terrorism,” as a “clash of civilizations,” a backward, primitive, and authoritarian frame of mind versus our modern, progressive, and democratic values, evil versus good. But the history of this contemporary threat to the United States suggests something quite different, with our government serving as midwife to this terrorism’s birth.

The worldwide al-Qaeda network and the Taliban of Afghanistan were the products of American efforts to dislodge the Communist government and Soviet troops in Afghanistan. In the last decade of the Cold War, America’s leaders saw in Afghanistan the opportunity to create a “Soviet Vietnam,” in which “the evil empire” would suffer the same loss of life, the same humiliating decline in international stature, and the same squandering of national resources that we experienced in Vietnam.

But to arrange that, we needed an anti-Soviet guerilla army as emotionally committed as the Vietnamese nationalists had been. Afghanistan, divided into private fiefdoms ruled by autonomous tribal warlords, did not provide that. So we recruited an army of fundamentalist Muslims from around the world: Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Egypt, Kosovo, the Sudan, Chechnya, etc. We paid the Pakistani intelligence agency to train this politically and religiously motivated army to single-mindedly attack the godless communists. The attacks were not just aimed at military targets, but also at basic public infrastructure so as to undermine the communist government. It was, in short, a terror campaign similar to what we now face in Iraq. We mobilized an international army of fundamentalist Muslims, trained them in sabotage, the use of weapons, and violent covert operations. We also encouraged the establishment of a worldwide network of Islamic banks, charities, schools, and mosques to help fund this anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. We created, in effect, an American supported jihad.

The strategy was war by proxy, with the US finding a temporary ally to do the fighting for us.

But in the early 1980s the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was not the only enemy threat we perceived. Just to the West, the Shah of Iran had been overthrown and a different group of radical Muslims had taken power. Concerned about the implications of a hostile government in the Mid East, we looked for a proxy army to attack that regime too. We found it in Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim worried about Shi’a Iran supporting the Shi’a majority in Iraq and undermining his dictatorship.

We helped arm and support Saddam and supplied his invasion of Iran, including his early acquisition of biological and chemical weapons. Saddam, serving partly as our proxy, inflicted horrible damage on Iran’s forces while also turning those weapons on restive ethnic opposition groups in Iraq itself.

We were successful. The Soviets withdrew in defeat from Afghanistan and within a few years the Soviet Union was no more. Iraq fought Iran to an exhausted standstill.

But proxy armies do not evaporate after the job their client gave them is done. By the beginning of the 1990’s Saddam was invading Kuwait, gambling, disastrously, that his American supporters would not take action against him. Meanwhile, with the Soviets out of Afghanistan, the organized and trained international insurgents dispersed to their home countries, but the network that recruited them remained in place. Very quickly they began to deploy their American provided skills against other godless targets including the United States and its allies. Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden began to flex their muscles, operating out of sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan and the stage was set for the 9-11 attacks and the American occupation of Iraq.

Clearly we, Americans, were not simply innocent victims in all of this. Our current problems are actually blowback from past policies in which our government consciously made use of terrorism and terrorists in the pursuit of what our leaders perceived to be our national interest. Most of that policy was hidden from the American people because after Vietnam we opted to operate militarily around the world not with our own armies but with a variety of proxy forces that we used in Laos, South Africa and Latin America besides in Afghanistan and Iran.

Clearly that policy has not brought us security and peace. In fact, it is one of the primary sources of our current insecurity. The architects of these past policies currently again control our foreign policy. We can expect nothing but more of the same aggressive violence from them.

The time is long overdue to review this disastrous history and seek to design a multilateral approach to regional conflicts that does not condemn us to the endless cycles of violence in which we have trapped ourselves and millions of innocent people around the world.