CIA helped create 'monster'

Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the terror attacks on the United States is a "monster who is the creation of a CIA-led coalition in Afghanistan," according to John Cooley, author of "Unholy Wars."

The book, published in 1999, focuses on Afghanistan, the USA and international terrorism. He said in an interview in Athens with AFP that bin Laden's rise to power goes back to former President Jimmy Carter's decision in 1979 "to recruit, arm, train, pay, and deploy an army of mercenary volunteers" to fight Soviet forces after they invaded Afghanistan.

This army of Muslim volunteers was "trained under some CIA officers" or "by Pakistani military intelligence officers who were trained by the CIA in the United States and then went over and funded camps and training centers."

Cooley said the United States reluctantly agreed to give Pakistan a free hand in allocating weapons and funds to the many mujahedin groups involved in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, actively joined the United States in providing funds to some groups "whose ideology was the most extreme Islamist."

Bin Laden, then still in favor with the Saudi monarchy, played an active role in channeling those funds and "worked closely with the Saudis and the Pakistani military."

He later fell out with the royals over the extensive US presence in Saudi Arabia at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. The USA lost interest in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union finally pulled out in 1989: "The result of this was that people like bin Laden continued with their own projects" without the USA batting an eye. "When the Taleban appeared on the scene...the Americans initially thought that they could perhaps work with them," explained Cooley, but the USA soon "began to realize the Taleban were not the heroes of the anti-Soviet war anymore."

Washington turned its back on "what it saw as the excesses of the Taleban." Bin Laden was "thus created by the war itself in Afghanistan, the Saudi and Pakistani mentors, both of whom were allies of the Americans." "So you could say he is a monster which is the creation of a CIA-led coalition in Afghanistan, which completely turned against the United States and the West," said Cooley.

Dismantling bin Laden's global organization, as the USA have firmly said they intend to do, is no easy task, said Cooley, because "we're dealing with a vast network which has a lot of resources but very loose control in the center."

The network, Al-Qaeda, only really exists on paper and was announced a few weeks before the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 "in a communique, and the people whose names were used to sign it were a cross section of famous Islamic groups" across the Arab world. Cooley said former FBI Director Louis Freeh had explained that groups "seem to operate sometimes without visible communications links or command links with the center." "It is an organization with local autonomy and great flexibility," he said, "which is why the whole problem of retaliating against this network of bin Laden becomes so difficult." (AFP)

Stinger in the tail of US policy

By Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI - One worry for United States forces considering any aerial assault on the bases of Osama bin Laden is the arsenal of deadly Stinger missiles provided by Washington during the Afghan war in the 1980s. The shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles are part of a stockpile of infantry weaponry worth more than US$8 billion that has been a source of worry to Indian troops fighting jihadis (warriors) in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

According to security officials, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made desperate efforts following the end of the Afghan war with the pullout of the Soviet army in 1989 to buy back at least some of the 1,000 Stingers it had supplied to anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan. But they met with limited success, they say.

The Stingers and other weaponry and the Mujahideen who fought the Soviet occupation, now transformed into the Taliban that rules most of Afghanistan, are turning out to be the fateful seeds of policy that Washington sowed in the region, along with support from Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). Experts say that when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA pumped in $2.1 billion over a 10-year period to create an anti-Soviet resistance that included 200,000 fighters garnered from 20 Muslim countries. Bin Laden was one of those who joined the Afghan jihad (holy war).

India's leading defense specialist, K Subrahmanyam, says that the Saudi fugitive bin Laden, based in Afghanistan and identified by the United States as a prime suspect in the September 11 terror attack, had himself warned his American benefactors that once the Soviets were ejected, it would be the turn of the other superpower to feel the heat of jihad. But no one took bin Laden seriously, and with the Cold War over, Washington shut its eyes to the Afghan Mujahideen and the ISI and allowed them to spend their energies on Kashmir, a dispute simmering between Pakistan and India for more than 50 years, analysts say.

Pakistan itself began to suffer a backlash, with the Taliban extending and exerting influence among the influential clergy and various Kashmiri militant groups based within the country. This despite the fact that the Taliban owes to the ISI its huge military success in confining the United Nations-recognized opposition, the Northern Alliance, to about 5 percent of Afghanistan in the far north of the country.

By the mid-90s, the Americans were showing alarm that Taliban-ISI activities had found a new source of funding in growing, processing and trafficking heroin, according to the South Asia Analysis Group, an independent New Delhi-based think tank. In July this year Brigadier Imtiaz, who led the heroin operations for the ISI, was convicted and jailed for eight years for holding unaccountable bank assets worth $40 million, apart from owning vast properties.

Writing in the Pakistani daily The News, the analyst H K Burqi blames all the major ills that Islamabad now faces on the "swashbuckling years of the Afghan jihad." "The heroin, the Kalashnikovs, the Afghan refugees, the sectarian lashkars [jihadists], the all-consuming corruption, nationwide outbreaks of violent crime, they were all bequeathed by the Zia regime. The dictator [Zia ul-Haq] knew all about it. He wanted to keep the officer corps happy and loyal," Burqi writes. Evidently, Islamabad has had to pay a heavy price for acting as a frontline state for US interests during the Afghan war and at the end of it, trying to convert military gains into "strategic depth" for itself in the region by continuing the ISI-Taliban relationship.

Other people in the region have had to pay a price as well. The Kashmiris for one are now suing for peace at any cost and have been reduced to resisting attempts to "Talibanize" the valley by militants - mainly, recent news reports say, requiring women to wear the burqa (veil) on pain of having their faces disfigured or legs shot at. During the July summit with Indian leaders at Agra, Pakistan's military ruler President General Pervez Musharraf, when reminded of the heavy civilian casualties in Kashmir through a decade of armed militancy, remarked that this was normal to all freedom struggles.

But ordinary Afghans have had to flee in droves to Pakistan and other neighboring countries such as Iran and India and have even turned up recently in places as far afield as Australia, simply because they are unable to live in their own blighted homeland, where, according to UN figures, four million people are starving because of US-led sanctions.

With the US now ordering an embargo on oil and food supplies over the Pakistan border and planning to launch aerial assaults, even more of the long-suffering Afghan population is pouring over the Afghan borders. Musharraf has now been asked by Washington to help dismantle the very structure it was encouraged to set up in Kabul on the suspicion that the Taliban's Arab guest, bin Laden, was behind last week's terrorist attacks. The general has naturally balked at the prospect, but cannot play the same game of asking for "convincing evidence" to show that bin Laden was actually involved, as Pakistan did after the earlier bombing attack on the World Trade Center.

This time, Washington is clearly in no mood for protracted debates or legal niceties, such as waiting for a UN mandate for an attack on Afghanistan. Musharraf has his own problems from jihadists operating in his country. So far he has been able to ignore their activities, including sectarian murder under justification of providing support for armed militancy in Kashmir, the liberation of which territory from Indian rule is a hugely popular issue in Pakistan.

In addition to that, he has been under international pressure to restore democracy in the wake of his 1999 seizure of power through a coup. "General Musharraf has sought American indulgence of his deviation from democracy on the grounds that he plans to act against Islamic extremists," writes Husain Haqqani, a Pakistani commentator and former information minister, in an article published in the Indian Express newspaper. But last week's suicide attacks on New York and Washington have left Musharraf with little room for prevarication. The elimination of terrorism is now on top of Washington's agenda - making the Kashmir issue, restoration of democracy in Pakistan and even nuclear proliferation in South Asia secondary issues. (Inter Press Service)

Originally, the Carter administration provided the means for Afghani guerillas to obtain Soviet made equipment that could ostensibly have been thought by any casual observer to have been procured from the battlefield. It had been originally advised to Carter mere days after the Soviet invasion that with our assistance, Afghanistan could become the Soviet Vietnam. In 1986, the Reagan administration, by way of the Department of Defense, gave Stinger missiles to the guerillas to aid in their fight. Osama bin Laden came to the fight in the early 1980's and with his knowledge of building trades created roads, hospitals and training camps. This was much financed by his own money, being the case that he is the son of the personal builder of the King of Saudi Arabia. In the minds of Muslim extremists, this adds to his status as a hero. Given what he had done to contribute to the cause, there was probably not much reason for U.S. Intelligence to fear he would develop into a threat. After the Soviet pullout in 1989, the U.S. washed their hands of the guerillas, leaving the region with a highly resilient, well-trained group of political dissidents. While it can't be said that we deliberately created a monster, the U.S. certainly had a major role in aiding the Afghanis in learning modern ways of engaging in covert warfare. This brings to mind the Law of Unintended Consequences, which states that for every result you intend from an action, there are at least two which you did not imagine. Though it is arguable as to whether we taught them to how to engage in terrorist-type actions, it is certainly clear that we aided the Afghanis in obtaining the mindset that there was no power on Earth which could not be overcome through appropriate planning and action. We didn't make them terrorists, but we certainly helped to make them resolute fighters in opposition to seemingly insurmountable odds. At least, in this way we helped seal the fates of the victims in Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. and New York City. There's plenty of sadness to go around, but it's hard to lay blame on our government as it was impossible to foresee the result of their actions. In doing what they felt was right, they set in motion a terrible wrong. I am frightened to imagine where else this might lead. I just refuse to give up my Constitutional rights to subdue our enemies. If we do this, we lose. Let us pray for wisdom among our current leaders.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.