There is no “state-sponsored terrorism” in Afghanistan because Afghanistan has no state. While it is true that Osama bin Laden, the “prime suspect” in the Sept. 11 attacks, likely resides there and that his protectors, the ruling Taliban, have controlled most of the country since 1996, its leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, keeps his “treasury” in a tin box. Drug trafficking supplies revenue.
“Social policy” rests with a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice that is charged with driving women out of the workplace and banning kite flying, raising pigeons, squeaky shoes on women, men without beards, dancing at weddings and drumming, along with enforcing many other prohibitions that scandalize much of the Muslim and non-Muslim world.
Groups such as the Taliban that support terrorism are a direct consequence of a devastating war waged since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By the 1990s, few places offered a better opportunity for drug traffickers and arms traders, or a better chance for asylum for violent dissidents, than did Afghanistan. Lacking an effective government, the country became an ideal base for any renegade with a cell phone and cash to buy off the local military commander and lubricate the traditional hospitality of his host.
These outcasts have tainted governments in other countries and become instruments of foreign intrigue, dangerous to those who try to manipulate them. This is especially true of neighboring Pakistan, a country central to U.S. strategies for dealing with terrorism.
The Taliban’s rise is a study in the collapse of states.
The Taliban’s first followers came from madrassas, religious schools in parts of Pakistan where Afghan refugees started settling in the 1980s. Run by barely literate mullahs removed from the mainstream teachings of Islam, the schools relied on funds from the CIA and Middle Eastern countries. Bolstered by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, they turned out young militants in the crusade against communism.
Most of these students (or talibs, hence the name Taliban) were orphans of war, rootless, restless, untrained in any occupation and unfamiliar with the old ways of life back in prewar Afghanistan. This left them receptive to a messianic Puritanism of the fight, or jihad, against enemies of Islam. Saudi Arabia then encouraged 15,000 to 25,000 Arab volunteers, including Osama bin Laden, to join this struggle.
But as soon as the counterattack against the Soviet invasion began, jihad started to spread and corrode all of the governments that had helped sponsor it. Pakistan’s Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI), a militant religious party, recruited radicalized Afghans and Pakistanis near the war zone. Because Pakistan’s government could not provide an education to most of its own citizens, the JUI ran madrassas for Pakistani youngsters, too, training them to fight enemies of Islam not only in Afghanistan, but also in Kashmir, the disputed province between Pakistan and India, and in Pakistan itself.
Once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, talibs and the Arab “Afghans” found other things to do.
Facing the end of the annual $600 million in U.S. aid, refusal to deliver military aircraft already paid for, and criticism for its nuclear ambitions, Pakistan’s military and security services turned to militants. They recognized that talibs made good fighters for a jihad against not only Indian-controlled areas in Kashmir, but also Kashmiri separatists who were not keen to join Pakistan.
Pakistan’s military continued to use them in Kashmir as proxies to avoid embroiling its own troops in a war against a nuclear neighbor. Other “Afghans” and Pakistani officers joined the Taliban’s annual offensives against the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which now controls only about 5 percent of the country.
Economic opportunities
Pakistan’s military and security services found copious economic opportunities in smuggling rackets and the drug trade in Afghanistan. By the end of the 1980s, heroin processing and trade had created a shadow economy worth an estimated $8 billion, about half the size of Pakistan’s legal commerce. Pakistan’s elected (and usually ejected) civilian prime ministers were hardly in a position to dictate policies to this mafia within its government.
One wonders about the value of Pakistan’s latest commitment to fight terrorism, given the degree to which this requires the country to fight against a significant chunk of its own government.
Nor could Arab “Afghans” simply be demobilized, even after the U.S. pressured Pakistan to expel the Arab volunteers in 1993. More migrated to Afghanistan to support the Taliban, while others graduated to mercenary pursuits, a “rent-a-jihad” available for work back home and further afield in Chechnya, and now the United States.
Tough fight
Fighting this kind of terrorism presents huge difficulties.
U.S. pressure on Pakistan forces its tattered government to confront its own military, one that incites Islamist expectations and fights with the Taliban, and denounce its unemployed young, who flock to the sectarian message of the madrassas in hopes of extending Taliban-like rule to Pakistan. If Pakistan’s government collapses, there is a real danger of completing the Talibanization of that nuclear-armed country, where networks trading in guns, drugs and jihad rule all of the roost.
Should the U.S. use the Northern Alliance as a proxy to fight the Taliban and its Arab “Afghans,” as some analysts suggest? Conveniently, three days before the World Trade Center attacks, a suicide bomber found the sole remaining leader with any wide legitimacy.
The remaining “leaders” on offer include a former Hells Angel with an affinity for hashish and Pekingese dogs. The other is a major drug runner.
Meanwhile, President Bush’s single-minded focus on Osama bin Laden risks turning him into a lodestar for those who face corrupt governments and economic meltdown in other Muslim countries. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian population, whatever the justification, is an incubator of extremism.
Young Palestinians see in Israel’s onslaught the failure of their secular nationalist politicians, who promised an independent Palestine and economic prosperity. They turn to Islamist groups such as Hamas–which Israel helped foster in the 1980s as a counterbalance to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah–and envision a Middle East without Israel.
The real cause of terrorism is the inability of governments to provide security and economic improvement to their people. To the extent that people in these places see the U.S. as the power behind the forces unleashed in Cold War proxy battles and the center of a global economy that offers nothing to them, the U.S. will be a target of their frustrations and people such as bin Laden and Arab “Afghans” and their jihads will find wide audiences. Governments that collapse provide a haven for a rogue’s gallery of characters who exploit misery for political goals and personal wealth.
An important juncture
The U.S. response to terrorism in the short run will require intervention in these violent and treacherous politics.
The U.S. also stands at an important juncture for stanching the long-term danger of terrorism. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration walked out on six major international treaty negotiations, including those concerning money laundering and control of chemical weapons.
This policy is already at an end.
More challenging is lessening the desperation that leads to the Talibanization of societies. This will require that poor countries in the Middle East and elsewhere actually benefit from the global economy, that average people have a stake in democratic governments, and that further outside meddling not sustain corrupt, tyrannical governments that fan the flames of religious extremism.
