Posted on 05/06/2002 1:37:38 PM PDT by dead
[The following article is from a Nigerian newspaper, but the author continuously refers to the US as “us” and “we”. They don’t credit the author, but he’s put together a very succinct and interesting summary of where the US stands regarding Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.]
MODERN Islam is under siege. The vast territories of Islam are now filled with radicalism, and the faith has been hijacked by those who preach that political power must be anchored in religious zeal. This is the siren song of Osama bin Laden and those who carry his banner. Their core followers are the impoverished youth of Islam-urban, half-educated, on the run from the security services in their homelands. They are the drifters who stare at us in the daily newspapers, rounded up in the global hunt for terrorists. And their numbers are legion, and still growing.
These militants have targeted governments in their own Muslim world, confident that a tide of Islamic fundamentalism will sweep more moderate or secular rulers away. The fate of three nations in particular matter enormously to us: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Here's why their struggles won't end soon, and what their turmoil could mean to America and the world.
Egypt
There is a truth about Egypt that is hard for Americans to hear. Many in this ancient land hate us. Deeply. On its face, this defies reason. Here, modern Islam has fashioned the most accomplished society within the Arab world. Cairo, Egypt's capital, is a genuinely cosmopolitan city. For two centuries, this state has been on a Sisyphean quest for modernity, and along the way it has become the pillar of Western influence in Araby.
But Egypt also has been home to the oldest and most tenacious movement within radical Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a nation that gave birth to some of the most zealous of Al Qaeda's leaders. Of the 22 men on the FBI's most wanted list following September 11, seven were Egyptians. It was Egypt that dispatched Sheik Omar Abdulrahman, the preacher whose sermons inspired the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. And it was a son of Egypt's middle class, Mohammed Atta, who piloted the jet that crashed into the North Tower.
All this surprises us because we think of Egypt as a partner and friend. From Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, we have given this Arab country the support and indulgence it needed - including $50 billion in foreign aid over the last quarter-century. The reason is simple: Egypt, with its vast reserves of peasant soldiers, offers the most serious challenge to Israel. Without Egypt, there can be no full-scale Arab-Israeli war. So we've worked hard to pull this nation within our sphere of influence.
Deep down, however, American statesmen knew the limits of this game. Egypt could never be turned into a reliable partner. The anti-Westernism first stoked there by British colonialism has simply shifted onto the United States. There is something more to the anti-Americanism. To hear Egypt's rulers, the visible hatred of Americans is caused by U.S support for Israel. Don't believe it. It is motivated by envy. Anti-Americanism is a convenient excuse for the economic and political failures of this bitter land.
But America could only play the hand dealt it. We befriended the rulers, knowing the people of Egypt would remain deeply hostile to us. We fared even worse in the bargain: The United States got only tepid support from a regime that winks at - and even feeds - anti-Americanism as a way of deflecting the people's anger away from itself.
That anger is no small matter. The Egyptian government has been waging war against radical Islamists since the mid-1970s. Its most dramatic moment came on October 6, 1981, when Egypt, for the first time in its history, killed its "pharaoh," President Anwar al-Sadat. The flamboyant Sadat had let powerful winds from America and the West sweep his country - an "open door" economy, a more hip Western culture - and was struck down by Islamists who claimed he was betraying the faith.
So far, the radicals have failed to overthrow the military-backed autocracy of Hosni Mubarak. The struggle for Egypt's soul is not a pretty spectacle. The militants have been merciless, the regime equally so. No fewer than 12,000 Islamists are in Egypt's prisons. America, meanwhile, has become a player in this drama, with a regrettable role. For the radicals have decided that if they can't subdue the enemy within, they will strike out at the distant enemy. That would be the United States which, in their eyes, is a patron of the dreaded regime at home. Mohammed Atta and his cohorts showed that we are targets of Egypt's terrorists.
Their campaign against America will only escalate if Mubarak's regime falls. The radicalism of this country would then infect the wider Arab world, spilling to the oil lands of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. It's difficult to imagine how America could fight this cancer. U.S. troops will not likely go into Egypt to join the internal brawl. And if Egypt is seized by radicals, our diplomacy will fall on deaf ears. All we can do for now is watch uneasily from the sidelines, trusting that Egypt's rulers will hang on to power. Better their lukewarm friendship than the dreadful alternative.
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is a realm of mystery and shadows. Here, the mixed of Islam and political power is utterly unique, a stabilising force over the years, an incendiary one more recently. This is the home of Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina. It is also a place that Franlin Delano Roosevelt staked out for American power shortly before his death in 1945. With a quarter of the world's oil reserves, Saudi Arabia has been vital to America's primacy in the world. It was for the Saudi realm, and for our access to it, that the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91 was launched.
Today the United States gets one-fifth of its oil imports from Saudi Arabia. So forget all talk of "energy independence," of big oil finds in Alaska and the North Sea. America is in the Saudi state to stay. But the price is becoming steep. Saudi Arabia is a land that abhors open dissent. It spoke volumes when, last October, Crown prince Abdullah called on the ulama, the religious class, to rein in Islamic militancy "lest we get to a hazardous situation". It was a stunning public admission that religious extremism had overflown the banks.
He could hardly deny the evidence. Of the 19 hijackers who struck at America on September 11, 15 are thought to have been Saudis. It is a cruel irony that religion has become such a deadly force in Saudi Arabia. For it has been a handmiaden of the state ever since the Saudi realm emerged in 18th-century Arabia out of an alliance between a desert chieftain, Muhammed ibn Saud, and a religious reformer named Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. This partnership anchored the kingdom. The House of Saud defended the country and struck bargains with world powers, while the descendants of the Wahhab family dominated the judiciary and an educational system suffused with religion.
The Islamic scholars were men who counseled obedience to the country's rulers. "Better sixty years of tryranny than one day of anarchy" goes one conservative Islamic maxim. It was in the spirit of that creed that the highest religious jurists sanctioned the arrival on Saudi soil of American forces during the Gulf War. But Wahhabism also has in it deep reservoirs of xenophobia and an abhorence of the moral "pollution" of the West. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, preachers exploited this prejudice, bending the faith to their will. They hacked away at the political monopoly of the House of Saud. In time, they brazenly dismissed the official religious class as pawns of the rulers.
This malignant strand of political and religious extremism found disciples among the young Saudis who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet infidels. These holy warriors, Osama bin Laden among them, returned home with an unyielding faith-and found the American "crusaders" in Arabia.
Can these extremists overthrow the Saudi regime? It's not likely. The rulers have much on their side: the wealth of the realm, its establishment religious class, the armed power of the state.
These radical preachers and zealots who have stepped forth in the last decade can't run a modern, complex economy. They are hyporitical to boot. They rail against America, against modernity, but do it on the satellite channels perfected by the "infidels." They agitate and circulate their grievances, but on modern far machines. Were their utopia to come to pass, all the gains made in the once harsh peninsula would be undone.
The American presence on Arabia, reaching back to the 1930s and the arrival of the American oil prospectors, has been benevolent in the extreme. The American military presence and a vast civilian community of American "expats" are two sides of this benevolence: the soldiers keeping the threats to the realm at bay; the technicians making sure that the modern industrial sector endures. Arabia's troubles are our own: We stand sentry in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and our economic prosperity and the lives of young Americans are at stake.
Pakistan
Pakistan could become our ultimate nightmare. In this land of stark poverty and political instability, it's easy to foresee catastrophe: nuclear weapons and know-how falling into the hands of terrorists. Yet America ignored Pakistan for years, other than imposing economic sanctions for the detonation of six nuclear devices in 1998. The neglect backfired badly. The Taliban regime and some Al Qaeda leaders first nested in Pakistan, and the country is still riddled with "badlands" where anti-American terrorists and outlaws operate at will. For victory to come in our global war against terror, Pakistan must be returned to the society of law-abiding nations.
We appear to have an ally in Pakistan's authoritarian ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a coup d'etat in 1999. He is a soldier in a land where the army has ruled for 27 of the state's 54 years of independence, but he is also a secularist. And Musharraf is brave. In a remarkable display of nerves, he stared down radical demonstrators last fall and placed his country on the side of the American campaign against terrorism. On his orders, Pakistan leased airfields to American special forces and provided intelligence on the Taliban and al Qaeda.
This only assures that Musharraf's tug of war with radical Islamists will grow more heated. The militants draw strength from Pakistan's crippling poverty and public chaos. Only 40 per cent of the population is literate; only 62 per cent of its girls are enrolled in school. About two-fifths of the people are without access to safe drinking water. But one thing above all is feeding the fundamentalist monster: the religious schools in Pakistan that are known as "madrassas."
No one knows for sure how many madrasses operate in Pakistan today-the estimates are as high as 40,000 to 50,000. Their classrooms are dominated by a curriculum that stokes religious fanaticism and a hatred of infidels. Wealthy Pakistanis and Arabs from the Persian Gulf give the madrassas the means to press on with their ruinous agenda. It's an open question whether Musharraf will be able to hold the line against these radical Islamists. But rest assured, America is already acting covertly to secure Pakistan's nuclear sites. In all likelihood, they are under U.S supervision even now. And we have plans to defend the nuclear arsenal if Pakistan is overwhelmed by political chaos. That could pull us into a messy conflict, to be sure, but it's a risk we would be willing to take.
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