Mahinda Weerasinghe

2003/02/16/

The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, through a reckless decision by Brezhnev and a tiny coterie of politburo members, unlocked a Pandora’s box.

USA’s incumbent President, the 2002 Nobel peace prize winner Jimmy Carter, naturally perceived the Soviet invasion, not merely as a threat to its interest, but also as an opportunity to destabilize the tottering Soviet empire. The resulting process in time triggered the fragmentation of the Soviet Empire and set in motion a chain of events that eventually led to the current terror campaign by the Holy Warriors of Islam against the nonbelievers of the world.

The roll call of historical personalities and individual nations, which participated in the ensuring proxy war, is for the most veiled, and misunderstood by the global society.

The decade long campaign proved that, nations act like grasping individuals when their self-interest is at stake. Indeed the most extraordinary thing about this clandestine battle is the bureaucratic decision makers’ total lack of insight on the choice of partners.

The Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq’s Inter-services Intelligence Agency (ISI) with the CIA and Saudi finances as well as Pakistani logistical support, managed to raise, equip, finance and field a rag tag army of Islamic Holy warriors to pit against the invaders of Afghanistan. The chosen were mostly fanatical Islamists, and a smattering of soldiers of fortune from across the Islamic world.

Initial financing came from US taxpayers’ pockets under Ronald Reagan’s two administrations (1981-89). Also public and private contributions from Saudi Arabia such as from Bin Laden. These matched American funds dollar for dollar. More billions were funneled by the fraudulent BCCI bank (founded by Agha Hassan Abedi, a Pakistani) and by the drug trade.

Neither the Americans, hurt and exhausted after the debacle in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, nor the Saudis, who were willing covertly to fund the Islamacisation of the world, yet hated to show their hand fighting anywhere, wanted to commit their own men overtly. That left Pakistan’s ISA to do the donkey-work. The ISI controlled directly by President Zia ul-Haq, until his still mysterious death in a plane crash in 1988, and influenced on the ground by affluent Arab organisations close to the Muslim Brothers and Pakistan’s Islamist groups, ran a successful campaign against the Russians.

Eventually in 1989 the invaders were sent packing home. The soldiers returning home faced a collapsing Soviet society and an empire destabilsed and fragmenting.

Once the Russians had departed, the American bureaucrats lost all interest in Afghanistan. In time weapons and supplies sent by the CIA for the Afghan holy warriors were turning up in large quantities in the hands of Kashmiri insurgents and in those other dissidents of India, instrumented by the Pakistan’s ISI.

We find in time the two Islamic powers, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, allied with the “world’s only remaining superpower,” the United States, had hatched a monster of Islamist extremism by 1994. Eventually we recognized it as the Taliban movement. Thus Afghanistan evolved in time as the host, for regrouping and training of the Holy warriors, thus paving the way for future terrorism.

Taliban’s super-rigorous, Sunni Muslims we find had their own views as to protocols of conduct.

These included the virtual enslavement and sequestration of women. Beatings or floggings for violations of dress codes of men and women and of prescribed beard lengths or shapes of same for men; amputations of hands and feet for theft; stoning to death for adultery; burial for sodomy – and such punishments to be executed in public.

From Peshawar, Islamabad and Kabul to Cairo, Khartoum, Algiers, Moscow, Central Asia, Manila, New York and finally, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the backlash left a trail of blood, death and pandemonium. In their sabotage and bomb strikes around the world, they were using methods which men like Saudi tycoon Usama bin Laden had been taught 18 years before. Fight fire with fire, was the CIA motto: combat militant Shi’ism of the Iranians with the even greater militancy and violence using the orthodox, mainstream Sunni Muslims. This suited the purposes of Saudi Arabia well.

Thus we note, due to manipulative policies and methods by untutored bureaucrats, who without consideration and sober analysis released forces, which they subsequently found, impossible to rein in. The Carter administration at that time enlisted the willing help of President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt, another Nobel laureate. Following Carter-brokered peace treaty of 1979 with Israel, Sadat was eager to prove his pro-American credentials and to fight Egyptian communism (so he believed). This by imitating the Americans by forging a partnership with the Islamists. The Egyptian Islamists’ brotherhood paid him back with dividends for his lack of insight. He was assassinated in October 1981, just as Egyptian support for the Afghan Jihad was reaching high gear.

Another willing ally of the CIA was China. Beijing wanted to hound the Soviets out of Afghanistan for its own strategic needs. The Chinese Communist leaders were soon recompensed by a blowback revolt of the Muslim Uighur people that they had trained, armed and sent to fight the Russians. The Uighurs returned from the jihad to fight a new terrorist battle in their old separatist war for an independent Muslim “Eastern Turkestan” in China’s vast western region of Xinjiang.

Whether or not units of Israel’s elite special forces trained the Muslim warriors, who would soon turn their guns against Israel through Muslim organizations like MAMAS, is a well-guarded Israeli secret. What is certain is that out of all the members of the anti-Soviet coalition, the Israelis have been the most successful in concealing their sordid details. Israel like all other actors is another member paying a gigantic price for covert complicity.

The Islamist “mind set” relayed back by the returning Afghan veterans spread like a bush fire across North Africa.

In Egypt, the returnees, many by now based in the neighboring Sudan under the protective wing of Sudan’s theologian-ideologue Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi, together with the logistical support of Usama bin Laden, spearheaded a fierce campaign by armed extremists. One event of this was the ferocious massacre in Luxor in November 1997 of 58 foreign tourists and Egyptians, and consequent temporary ruin of Egypt’s vital tourist industry.

In Algeria, the campaign of militant Islamists, following the military government’s cancellation of a 1992 election which would have brought Islamists legally to power, led to the death of as many as 100,000 persons during the 1990 decade.

Interestingly, we find that in time the Holy warriors have delivered to its initial financiers “several packages” of Holy terror.

The World Trade Centre bombing in New York in February of 1993, the unsuccessful attempt to kill thousands and totally disrupt New York life in June 1993, the earlier attack on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and terrorist plans to destroy no fewer than 11 American airliners on the same day in 1994. Bin Laden’s al-Qaida organization, directed from his camps in Afghanistan after his forced departure from the Sudan in 1996, next turned up in 1998 to do a massive assault on US personnel and property abroad. The two American embassies destroyed in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998 – and evident but unsuccessful attempts during the same summer and autumn season to destroy others in Kampala, Bangkok and Tirana, were signs of the spreading globalisation and privatisation of the assault on America.

11th September is of course the most infamous of such terror. Even before 9/11, John K. Cooley launched his erudite work “Unholy War”. It made crystal clear what USA should expect in time for its unethical practices and its marriage of convenience with the Holy warriors. But power-crazed bureaucrats formulating policy in USA knew better and hence had no use for such an analytical work.

The narcotic trade is another fallout of this Holy campaign. According to the experts, the South Asian marijuana, opium and semi-processed opium products and heroin, reaching the drug pushers, the adult addicts, the children and the general populations of the West, never reached such heights as in the late 1990s. America’s own drugenforcement authorities recognized the danger to Westem society, inherent in the policy of enlisting drugs in the war effort. However, the CIA, as “senior agency” waging the proxy war, apparently overruled attempts by the drug- enforcement authorities to apply the brakes on the narcotics trade.

Is their any moral to this tale? In fact we notice that most of these nation have not learned a thing from this history. The maxim is, even if one puts ones faith in politicians one should not trust crooked bureaucrats. Officials such as Henry Kissinger (another Nobel prize winner) after waging proxy wars from behind a desk, melted away to a life of luxury. The politicians such as Nixon were left holding the baby.

In spite of the above experiences, today we find there is a policy of selective terrorism in the west. The European honeymoon with the terrorists of Jaffna is a well-documented fact and need no elaboration.

But USA should have been in a different frame of mind one would have thought; yet we find those lessons have been lost on them.

President Bush is now raging about global terrorism. Yet he is studiously disregarding the most fascistic terrorist organization known to man, now being rewarded in Sri Lanka.

Following the terrorist attack on America on September 11, 2001, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1373 on September 28, 2001. The Security Council resolved that all member states should prevent and suppress the financing of terrorism and improve international cooperation to deal with the threat of global terrorism. Clauses 1 (d) and 2(a) of Resolution 1373 are of particular relevance to the events that are unfolding in Sri Lanka. Clause 1 (d) “Prohibits their nationals or any persons or entities within their territories from making any funds, financial assets or economic resources or financial or other related services available, directly or indirectly, for the benefit of persons who commit or attempt to commit or facilitate or participate in the commission of terrorist acts, of entities owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by such persons and of persons and entities acting on behalf of or at the direction of such persons”.

Norway signed it the year before and ratified it last June, but we notice they have signed an empty piece of paper as we find its bureaucrats hobnobbing with racist terrorist of Jaffna. Wonder whether we have misinterpreted the definition of terrorism!

Daily we are informed about abductions and conscription of children, weapons smuggling and other anything but peace seeking activities of the terrorist ‘’neutral” monitors notwithstanding. Some may suffer the illusion that they have cheated the Sri Lankan people, but the backlash is not far behind. They will soon find that Muslim people in the East are not so easily hoodwinked. They are gearing up for their own “Muslim homeland”, and in time we will find that peace will be in pieces.

Selective amnesia by the member states that signed the above declaration will create a dangerous precedent. If global society separates favourite terrorist from the evil ones, rewarding the former and hunting the latter, such UN declarations will not be worth the paper it’s written on. Indeed while prosecuting Milosivic, a lamb by comparison to many others, and rewarding the biggest murderer since Stalin, Bush’s war on terrorism becomes a mockery. They will discover to their dismay that “once a terrorist, always a terrorist”.

India’s “do nothing” attitude is distressing under the circumstances. India must be aware that LTTE’s racistic variety of violence will soon spillover if they standby and do nothing.

Just as in the earlier flirtation, love affair and temporary marriage between the United States and Islamist extremists ended in the present debacle, the backlash from these racist terrorists can be uglier. They will now acquire a landmass from where they can launch their variety of terrorism, – like Afghanistan in the 199Os.

The people of the USA are currently paying a huge price for their country’s marriages of convenience with Islamic terrorist. In time, those countries which promoted terror in Sri Lanka will be faced with a similar dilemma.

Norway changed its laws to execute Quisling at the end of second World War for his betrayal of their nation. Sri Lanka’s citizen have a clear precedent to follow when its time to deal with our own nest of Quislings now seeking to divide this small country.

More vital, if we do not want another ghetto Eelam in the middle of Colombo next time around some hard decisions must be made right no

Mahinda Weerasinghe
Author of “Origin of Species
According To The Buddha”.