Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (17 page)

The blueprint for the Afghan jihad was worked out by the CIA, in collaboration with the ISI of Pakistan. For the actual conduct of the war, the CIA acquired weapons and specialists in guerrilla warfare from different countries and delivered them, along with intelligence and surveillance information on Afghanistan, to the ISI. The ISI was responsible for transport of weapons to the border, supervised the training of Afghan fighters inside Pakistan, and coordinated their operations inside Afghanistan. While ISI was the main regional proxy in the operation, the second line included the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with the intelligence services of Britain, China, the Philippines, and even Israel also involved. The basic lesson of Indochina, southern Africa, and Central America was applied with great care: this was to be an operation in which the CIA would be at more than
arm’s length. It would be a proxy war run through third and fourth parties.

As different tasks were subcontracted to different agencies, the blueprint of the war unfolded in a compartmentalized fashion. The point was to ensure the direct involvement of as few Americans as possible; fewer still were in direct contact with the mujahideen or their field commanders. While subcontracting removed American presence from the ground, and thus the possibility of any direct damage to American personnel, its unintended consequence was to give substantial freedom to the subcontractors to bypass central command and deal directly with agencies such as the CIA or DEA. The result was a lack of coherence in overall American policy.

Beyond the front-line proxy states and their intelligence agencies, increasingly the intermediaries were private institutions, both religious and secular. The overall effect was progressively to privatize the war on an international basis. From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11.

Had the anti-Soviet crusade been organized in a national framework, the CIA would have looked for mainly Afghani recruits to wage it. But with the war recast as an international jihad, the CIA looked for volunteers from Muslim populations all over the globe.

Outside of Pakistan, the Arab countries were the main source of volunteers, who became known as Afghan-Arabs. The non-Afghani recruits were known by hyphenated identities, as Afghan-Algerians, Afghan-Indonesians, and so on. A network of recruitment centers was set up, linking key points in the Arab world—Egypt and Saudi Arabia—with Pakistan. Eventually, they spread as far as Sudan to the south, Indonesia to the east, Chechnya to the north, and
Kosovo to the west. Sensitive to the critique from within the religious right that they had failed to support the Palestinian struggle meaningfully, members of the Saudi establishment encouraged local dissidents to join the Afghan jihad, and the Egyptian government looked the other way as local Islamists made their way to Afghanistan. A third major Arab source of recruitment was Algeria. Martin Stone writes that “the Pakistani embassy in Algeria alone issued 2,800 visas to Algerian volunteers during the 1980s.” The numbers recruited and trained were impressive by any reckoning: the estimate of foreign radicals “directly influenced by the Afghan jihad” is upwards of one hundred thousand. The Afghan-Arabs constituted an elite force and received the most sophisticated training. Fighters in the Peshawar-based Muslim “international brigade” received the relatively high salary of around $1,500 per month.

The CIA looked for a Saudi prince to lead this crusade but was unable to find one. It settled for the next best, the son of an illustrious family closely connected to the Saudi royal house. We need to remember that Osama bin Laden did not come from a backwater family steeped in premodernity but from a cosmopolitan family. The bin Laden family endows programs at universities such as Harvard and Yale. Bin Laden was recruited, with U.S. approval at the highest level, by Prince Turki al-Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence. According to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, Osama bin Laden first traveled to Peshawar in 1980 and met mujahideen leaders there, and for the next two years he returned frequently with Saudi donations for the cause. In 1982, he decided to settle in Peshawar. In 1986, bin Laden worked as the major contractor to build a large CIA-funded project: the Khost tunnel complex deep under the mountains close to the Pakistani border. The Khost complex housed a major arms depot, a training
facility, and a medical center for the mujahideen. It is the Khost complex that President Clinton decided in 1998 to bomb with Tomahawk cruise missiles. It is also in the Khost complex—the famed mountain caves—that the United States later fought al-Qaeda remnants in its own Afghan War.

Though Osama bin Laden had been a student of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the first Afghan-Arab gatekeeper of the jihad in the mid-eighties, a break between Azzam and bin Laden came toward the end of the Afghan jihad. The parting of the ways was the result of a disagreement in 1989 over the future of the jihad: bin Laden “envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,” whereas Azzam “strongly opposed making war against fellow-Muslims.” Soon after, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. A meeting was held toward the end of 1989 in the town of Khost to decide on the future of the jihad. One of the ten at the meeting was a Sudanese fighter named Jamal al-Fadl. He testified in a New York courtroom in one of the trials connected with the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in East Africa that a new organization was created in that meeting to wage jihad beyond the borders of Afghanistan. That organization was al-Qaeda, “the Base.” Bin Laden thus emerged as the organizer and patron of the most prominent privatized arm of the American jihad.

There is little published information on the pattern, scope, and method of the CIA’s international recruitment to its jihad. If the volunteers were recruited by “CIA agents,” these agents were more often than not neither directly employed nor directly paid by the CIA, nor even always acting in the knowledge that they were CIA
proxies. The little available information suggests that the recruitment of foreign volunteers—perhaps not on the level of Osama bin Laden but certainly many others—was privatized through Islamic religious and charitable bodies. Would it be surprising if recruiters received no special payment, and commitment turned out to be the chief mode of harnessing volunteer energies?

To get an idea of the type of Islamic religious and charitable bodies that were knowingly or unknowingly turned into recruiting agencies for the Afghan jihad, we can turn to John Cooley’s study of one international Islamic missionary organization, the Tablighi Jamaat, with headquarters in Pakistan and branches all over the world, including in North America. Founded in 1926 by a Muslim scholar, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas, to “purify” borderline Muslims “who had retained many of the customs and religious practices from their Hindu past,” the Tablighi Jamaat had grown large enough to attract more than a million Muslims from ninety countries to their annual conference near Lahore, Pakistan, in 1988, the last year of the Afghan War. That same year, their convention in Chicago attracted more than six thousand Muslims from around the world.

The Tablighi Jamaat was neither set up nor functioned as a terrorist organization. This mainstream religious group was, however, among those used by the CIA as a conduit in its recruitment. It is difficult to tell how many of these recruits were mercenaries looking for advantage, how many were adventurers looking for a thrill, and how many enlisted out of conviction, in response to a call to fight for the independence of an Islamic people from a “godless evil empire” determined to impose a secular code of conduct on them. Of those recruited by the Tablighi Jamaat from Tunisia, “a few more than 160” were recruited for religious courses in Lahore; of these, “about 70” completed military training, “some
15 to 20” actually fought in the jihad, and “a handful of these died fighting,” according to Cooley. Only when Sheikh Muhammed al-Hamidi, a religious teacher who had immigrated to France, “was charged with trying to recruit mercenaries for the Afghan Mujahidin and was later imprisoned for three years,” did it become clear that “the Tablighi recruiting network was spreading from North Africa to France.”

In the United States, too, the CIA took cover behind legitimate charitable and religious Muslim organizations. To what extent these were subverted in the process, we shall probably never know. One instance will suffice to highlight this development. According to Cooley, the al-Kifah Afghan Refugee Center on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, was turned into a key center for “recruiting and fund raising for the Afghanistan jihad” and came to be called the “Al-Jihad” center by those who worked there. Among the leading recruiters at the center were Sheikh Abdullah Azzam and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Both were prominent Islamists, and both had sustained records of collaboration with the CIA. Sheikh Azzam, as we have seen, was a founder of Hamas and the leading recruiter of Afghan-Arabs for the CIA. Sheikh Rahman, a blind Egyptian prayer leader, was a founder of the Egyptian Islamic Group. He had “sent his sons to fight in Afghanistan” and was at the same time known to have “recruited for the CIA.” Sheikh Rahman, who had relocated to the United States in the eighties, was “convicted in the successful World Trade Center bombing of February 1993 and the subsequent aborted conspiracy in June 1993 to bomb UN headquarters, traffic tunnels, bridges, FBI headquarters and government offices, as well as to assassinate pro-Israel officers and legislators.”

Training for the Afghan jihad was divided into the training of trainers and the training of fighters. Whereas the main training for the Afghan jihad took place in the string of traditional Koranic schools or madrassahs opened up under General Zia in Pakistan, the training of trainers—and of some high-level mujahideen recruits—also took place at a number of camps in the United States. Cooley’s list includes the High Rock Gun Club in Naugatuck, Connecticut; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; CIA’s Camp Perry in Williamsburg, Virginia; a CIA-used Army Special Forces site, Harvey Point, North Carolina; Fort A. P. Hill, Virginia; and Camp Pickett, Virginia.

Probably the most subversive effect of the privatized jihad was on the madrassahs, many of which were turned into politico-military training schools. The point was to integrate guerrilla training with the teachings of Islam and thus create “Islamic guerrillas.” The London-based Indian journalist Dilip Hiro commented on the curriculum of the madrassahs: “Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete sociopolitical ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow.” The madrassahs not only opened their doors to Islamic radicals from around the world but also taught that the Islamic revolution in Afghanistan would be but a precursor to revolution in other Muslim-majority countries, particularly those in Soviet Central Asia. By the late 1980s, leading Deobandi madrassahs in Pakistan “began to reserve places specifically for Central Asian radicals, who received a free education and a living allowance.” These were among the first of the students to be prepared for a wider war, and from them would come the Taliban.

The mujahideen operated an Educational Center for Afghanistan
during the 1980s. Pervez Hoodbhoy gives the following examples from children’s textbooks designed for it by the University of Nebraska under a $50 million USAID grant that ran from September 1986 through June 1994. A third-grade mathematics textbook asks: “One group of maujahidin attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed. How many Russians fled?” A fourth-grade textbook ups the ante: “The speed of a Kalashnikov [the ubiquitous Soviet-made semiautomatic machine gun] bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.” The program ended in 1994, but the books continued to circulate: “US-sponsored textbooks, which exhort Afghan children to pluck out the eyes of their enemies and cut off their legs, are still widely available in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some in their original form.”

The madrassahs were both private and government-funded, and ranged from those who thought of Islamic piety in religious terms to those for whom Islam was also a political calling. In spite of their proliferation, military training was mainly carried out in army camps. The trainees were divided into two groups: Afghan mujahideen and non-Afghan jihadi volunteers. Brigadier Muhammad Yusuf, a chief of the Afghan cell of ISI for four years, confirmed: “During my four years, some 80,000 mujahiddin were trained.” Ahmed Rashid estimates that thirty-five thousand Muslim radicals from forty-three Islamic countries fought for the mujahideen between 1982 and 1992. United States authorities estimated that “at least 10,000” received “some degree of military training.” A
Los Angeles Times
team of reporters that did a four-continent survey of the fallout of the Afghan jihad estimated that “no more than 5,000 had actually fought.” Between the withdrawal
of Soviet troops in February 1989 and the collapse of Kabul’s Communist government in April 1992, another round of “at least 2,500 foreigners” received “military instruction of some sort.” That made for a total of 7,500, no mean figure: “Largely out of sight of the world, in training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, something akin to a radical Islamic foreign legion was taking shape.” Around this core was a larger group: tens of thousands more studied in the thousands of new madrassahs in Pakistan. Eventually, Rashid concludes, “more than a hundred thousand Muslim radicals around the world had direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan.” However most madrassah graduates were not destined for Afghanistan but for the internal political contest in Pakistan. Tariq Ali gives an estimate of 2,500 madrassahs with an annual crop of 225,000 students, many of whom had been taught literacy in primers that stated that the Urdu letter
tay
stood for
tope
(cannon),
kaaf
for
Kalashnikov, khay
for
khoon
(blood), and
jeem
for
jihad.