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A
few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence,
that "Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime
suspects." CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the
capacity to plan "multiple attacks with little or no warning.''
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks "an act of
war" and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address
to the nation that he would "make no distinction between the
terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."
Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at "state
sponsorship," implying the complicity of one or more foreign
governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence
Eagleburger, "I think we will show when we get attacked like this,
we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution."
Meanwhile,
parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the
launching of "punitive actions" directed against civilian
targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in
the New York Times: "When we reasonably determine our
attackers' bases and camps, we must pulverize them – minimizing but
accepting the risk of collateral damage – and act overtly or covertly
to destabilize terror's national hosts."
The
following text outlines the history of Osama Bin Laden and the links of
the Islamic "jihad" to the formulation of US foreign policy
during the Cold War and its aftermath.
Prime
suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by
the FBI as an "international terrorist" for his role in the
African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited
during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the
CIA, to fight Soviet invaders."1
In
1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA"
was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in
support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.2:
"With
the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter
Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a
global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some
35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined
Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more
came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000
foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan
jihad."3
The
Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi
Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden
Crescent drug trade:
"In
March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision
Directive 166, ...[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military
aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war
had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through
covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S.
assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies – a
steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, ... as well as a
"ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who
traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main
road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with
Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the
Afghan rebels."4
The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using Pakistan's military
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) played a key role in training the
Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA sponsored guerrilla training was integrated
with the teachings of Islam:
"Predominant
themes were that Islam was a complete sociopolitical ideology, that
holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and
that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their
independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by
Moscow."5
Pakistan's
Intelligence Apparatus
Pakistan's
ISI was used as a "go-between." The CIA's covert support to
the "jihad" operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI –
i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the mujahideen. In
other words, for these covert operations to be "successful,"
Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the
"jihad," which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union.
In
the words of CIA's Milton Beardman: "We didn't train Arabs."
Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for
Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the "Afghan Arabs"
had been imparted "with very sophisticated types of training that
was allowed to them by the CIA."6
CIA's
Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama bin Laden was not aware
of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of bin
Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw
evidence of American help."7
Motivated
by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware
that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While
there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy,
Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the
CIA.
With
CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of US military aid, the
Pakistani ISI had developed into a "parallel structure wielding
enormous power over all aspects of government."8
The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers,
bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000.9
Meanwhile,
CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by
General Zia Ul Haq:
"'Relations
between the CIA and the ISI [Pakistan's military intelligence] had
grown increasingly warm following [General] Zia's ouster of Bhutto
and the advent of the military regime,'... During most of the Afghan
war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United
States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980,
Zia [UL Haq] sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central
Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984....
'the CIA was more cautious than the Pakistanis.' Both Pakistan and
the United States took the line of deception on Afghanistan with a
public posture of negotiating a settlement while privately agreeing
that military escalation was the best course."10
The
Golden Crescent Drug Triangle
The
history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the
CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium
production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional
markets. There was no local production of heroin.11
In this regard, Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of
the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, "the
Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer,
supplying 60 percent of US demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict
population went from near zero in 1979... to 1.2 million by 1985 – a
much steeper rise than in any other nation":12
"CIA
assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen
guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered
peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in
Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection
of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.
During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the US Drug
Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures
or arrests ... US officials had refused to investigate charges of
heroin dealing by its Afghan allies 'because US narcotics policy in
Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet
influence there.' 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. '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.'"13
In
the Wake of the Cold War
In
the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic
for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the
World's opium representing multi-billion dollar revenues to business
syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized
crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between
100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the
worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations
to be of the order of $500 billion.14
With
the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production
has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in
Afghanistan in 1998-99 – coinciding with the buildup of armed
insurgencies in the former Soviet republics – reached a record high of
4600 metric tons.15 Powerful business
syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are
competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.
The
ISI's extensive intelligence-military network was not dismantled in the
wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic
"jihad" out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set
in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan's
military and intelligence apparatus essentially "served as a
catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of
six new Muslim republics in Central Asia."16
Meanwhile,
Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had
established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the
Russian federation, encroaching upon the institutions of the secular
state. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was
largely serving Washington's strategic interests in the former Soviet
Union.
Following
the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan
continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani
Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI).
In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir
Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995,
with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul,
the Taliban not only instated a hard-line Islamic government, they also
"handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI
factions..."17
And
the JUI, with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements, played a key
role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former
Soviet Union.
Jane
Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that "half of Taliban
manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI."18
In
fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in
the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through
Pakistan's ISI.19
In
other words, backed by Pakistan's military intelligence (ISI) which in
turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic state was largely
serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade
was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army
(starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
There is also evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the
ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia.
No
doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes to the reign of
terror imposed by the Taliban, including the blatant derogation of
women's rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of
women employees from government offices and the enforcement of "the
Sharia laws of punishment."20
The
War in Chechnya
With
regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab
were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congress's
Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya
had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held
in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia.21 The
summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and
Pakistani intelligence officers. In this regard, the involvement of
Pakistan's ISI in Chechnya "goes far beyond supplying the Chechens
with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are
actually calling the shots in this war."22
Russia's
main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite
Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect
beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil
conglomerates that are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline
corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin.
The
two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil
Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by
Pakistan's ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training
the Chechen rebel army:
"[In
1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev
and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic
indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost
province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early
1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev
was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo
training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the
highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers:
Minister of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of
Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in
charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now
retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev."23
Following
his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the
assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995.
His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal
syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, according to Russia's Federal
Security Service (FSB), "Chechen warlords started buying up real
estate in Kosovo... through several real estate firms registered as a
cover in Yugoslavia."24
Basayev's
organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including
narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia's oil pipelines,
kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling
of nuclear materials. (See "Mafia linked to Albania's collapsed
pyramids."25) Alongside the extensive
laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities
have been funneled towards the recruitment of mercenaries and the
purchase of weapons.
During
his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born
veteran Mujahideen Commander "Al Khattab," who had fought as a
volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev's return to
Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in
Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC,
Khattab's posting to Chechnya had been "arranged through the
Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a
militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals
which channeled funds into Chechnya."26
Concluding
Remarks
Since
the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden,
while at same time placing him on the FBI's "most wanted list"
as the World's foremost terrorist.
While
the mujahideen are busy fighting America's war in the Balkans and the
former Soviet Union, the FBI – operating as a US based Police Force
– is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some
respects independently of the CIA, which has – since the Soviet-Afghan
war – supported international terrorism through its covert operations.
In
a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad – featured by the Bush
administration as "a threat to America" – is blamed for the
terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these
same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US
military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet
Union.
In
the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth
must prevail to prevent the Bush administration together with its NATO
partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the
future of humanity.
Endnotes
- Hugh
Davies, International: "'Informers' point the finger at bin
Laden"; Washington on alert for suicide bombers, The Daily
Telegraph, London, 24 August 1998.
- See
Fred Halliday, "The Un-great game: the Country that lost the
Cold War, Afghanistan," New Republic, 25 March 1996):
- Ahmed
Rashid, "The Taliban: Exporting Extremism," Foreign
Affairs, November-December 1999.
- Steve
Coll, Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
- Dilip
Hiro, "Fallout from the Afghan Jihad," Inter Press
Services, 21 November 1995.
- Weekend
Sunday (NPR); Eric Weiner, Ted Clark; 16 August 1998.
- Ibid.
- Dipankar
Banerjee; "Possible Connection of ISI With Drug
Industry," India Abroad, 2 December 1994.
- Ibid
- See
Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The
Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1995. See also the review of Cordovez and
Harrison in International Press Services, 22 August 1995.
- Alfred
McCoy, "Drug fallout: the CIA's Forty Year Complicity in the
Narcotics Trade," The Progressive; 1 August 1997.
- Ibid
- Ibid.
- Douglas
Keh, "Drug Money in a Changing World," Technical
document no 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also Report of the
International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1
United Nations Publication, Vienna 1999, p 49-51, and Richard
Lapper, "UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade," Financial
Times, 24 February 2000.
- Report
of the International Narcotics Control Board, op cit, p 49-51, see
also Richard Lapper, op. cit.
- International
Press Services, 22 August 1995.
- Ahmed
Rashid, "The Taliban: Exporting Extremism," Foreign
Affairs, November- December, 1999, p. 22.
- Quoted
in the Christian Science Monitor, 3 September 1998)
- Tim
McGirk, "Kabul learns to live with its bearded
conquerors," The Independent, London, 6 November1996.
- See
K. Subrahmanyam, "Pakistan is Pursuing Asian Goals," India
Abroad, 3 November 1995.
- Levon
Sevunts, "Who's calling the shots?: Chechen conflict finds
Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan," The Gazette,
Montreal, 26 October 1999.
- Ibid
- Ibid.
- See
Vitaly Romanov and Viktor Yadukha, "Chechen Front Moves To
Kosovo," Segodnia, Moscow, 23 Feb 2000.
- The
European, 13 February 1997, See also Itar-Tass, 4-5 January
2000.
- BBC,
29 September 1999).
Copyright
by Michel Chossudovsky, Ottawa, June 2001. All rights reserved.
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