Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (21 page)

Both those who see the Taliban as an Islamic movement and those who see it as a tribal (Pashtun) movement view it as a pre-modern residual in a modern world. But they miss the crucial point about the Taliban: even if it evokes premodernity in its particular language and specific practices, the Taliban is the result of an encounter of a premodern people with modern imperial power. When I asked two colleagues, one an Afghani and the other an American student of Afghanistan, how a movement that began in defense of women and youth could turn against both, they suggested I put this outcome in a triple context. First, the experience of the enforced gender equity of the Communists; second, the combination of traditional male seclusion of the madrassahs with the militarism of the jihadi training; and finally, the fear of Taliban leaders that their members would turn into rapists, following the notorious example of the mujahideen. Eqbal Ahmad
recognized the tragedy of the Afghani people, historically adapted to a highly decentralized and localized mode of life but subjugated to two highly centralized state projects during the Cold War: first, Soviet-supported Marxism; then, CIA-supported Islamization. “The Ideologies of war—marxism and fundamentalism—are alien to Afghan culture,” he wrote in 1991. “Afghanistan is a diverse and pluralistic society; centralizing, unitary agendas cannot appeal to it.”

Cost to the Muslim World

The CIA was key to the forging of the link between Islam and terror in central Asia and to giving radical Islamists international reach and ambition. The groups it trained and sponsored shared a triple embrace: of terror tactics, of holy war as a political ideology, and of a transnational recruitment of fighters, who acquired hyphenated identities.

Tens of thousands of jihadi fighters, trained in the Afghan War, scattered with the end of the war. Subsequent developments in disparate locations testify to the overall impact of the Afghan jihad as well as to the importance of local histories and local grievances. The Afghan War realized the dream of Abdul A’la Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb: it trained and linked together an international jihadi vanguard of Algerian-Afghans, Egyptian-Afghans, Indonesian-Afghans, Filipino-Afghans, British-Afghans, and so on. The importance of the vanguard was that its members shared an experience that shaped their ideological and political perspective. But the shared perspective could not ensure a local following. To cultivate that required the vanguard to address local issues. This single fact explains the difference between crime and political terrorism: unlike crime, political terror must bid for popular support.
To deny that support for terrorist groups requires addressing grievances—and thus issues—that give terrorists so many opportunities to recruit followers. Terror, unlike crime, has to be fought politically, not just militarily. The political dimension of terror, and the fight against it, is best highlighted by recent events in Algeria and Egypt.

Algeria

When Algeria held its first national ballot after independence in 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won 180 out of 231 seats in the first round. A second round to decide more than two hundred other seats was to be held on January 16, 1992. The secular establishment, including the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) and the army, was alarmed: not only were the Islamists only twenty-eight seats short of a majority already, there was a real possibility they would win the two-thirds majority that would have allowed them to rewrite Algeria’s constitution. The army stepped in, nullified the electoral process, and took power. Algeria’s ruling party and army were not the only ones to be alarmed; their anxiety was shared by Algeria’s former colonial power, France. Significant sectors of political society in France, including many on the left, supported the demand that the electoral process in Algeria be nullified to prevent the FIS—which they described as “Islamo-fascist”—from coming to power.

The FIS were not democrats, but neither were the FLN and the military. The FIS, however, had the demonstrated support of the majority of Algerian people. The rise of FIS signaled the entry of an Islamist element into politics, but that element could not be equated with political terrorism. The difference between political Islam and political terrorism became clear as the nullification of
the electoral process set the stage for the onset of a vicious civil war between Islamists and secularists and, in that context, a contest between different Islamist political tendencies. Once the parliamentary road was blocked, a debate and a struggle for power ensued between those in the FIS leadership who had pioneered that road and those in the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and other organizations calling for an armed jihad as the only way to establish an Islamic state in Algeria.

Chadli Bendjedid, a prominent figure in the Algerian independence movement, served three terms as president, from 1979 until his resignation in January 1992. Two different generations, each the product of an armed struggle, proved key to the formation of extremist Islamist groups in the post-Chadli crisis. The older generation tended to be shaped by Algeria’s particularly brutal armed struggle for national independence against French colonialism after the Second World War. Reports from Algeria confirm not only the totally ruthless attempt by the government to repress the Islamist insurgency but also raise questions about how many of the massacres attributed to Islamists are actually the work of
agent provocateurs.
As always, we cannot ignore the link between state terror and societal terror. When it comes to the proliferation of terror in society, the influence of the Afghan-Algerian veterans seems to be more important. The Algerian sociologist Mahfoud Bennoune insists that “the nucleus of the terrorist movement in Algeria had combat experience in Afghanistan.” Cooley estimates that “between 600 and 1000 Algerians with combat experience returned home.” In the 1990s, John-Thor Dahlburg, who reported for the
Los Angeles Times
from Algeria, put together biographies of some of the more important ones, of which here are three.

Probably the most important leader to come out of the
Afghan-Algerian ranks was Kamerredin Kherbane. Kherbane left the Algerian military in 1983 to join the Afghan jihad. There, he met Osama bin Laden and representatives of Islamic Rescue Organization, a support group, and discussed with them the possibility of raising an “Afghan Legion” to lead the struggle for an Islamic state in Algeria. Kherbane went on to serve on the FIS’s executive council in exile. Another is the notorious Aisa Messaoudi, known as “Tayeb al-Afghani” (Tayeb the Afghan). Messaoudi returned from Afghanistan after 1989 and became an active member of FIS. After the 1991 election was nullified, he organized the armed slaughter of border guards in a barrack in Guemar, a palm-bordered oasis on the Tunisian border. This gruesome event has come to mark the start of the armed uprising and the civil war in Algeria, as well as the birth of the notorious GIA. Dahlburg reported that the group used “the same tactics employed against Russians in Afghanistan”: they hacked their victims to death with knives and swords and burned others with blowtorches.

Another GIA leader key to defining the use of terror in the civil war was Si Ahmad Mourad, also called Jaffer al-Afghani. Mourad became known for expanding the ranks of those targeted from government agents to civilians—foreigners, intellectuals, journalists, women, even children—and for the savagery of those attacks. The justification was simple: violence must be used to intimidate indifferent rural masses. The emphasis on the use of terror reportedly caused one of the first serious splits in the GIA, one between national and international fragments. As the nationalists pursued the gruesome civil war at home, the internationalists, wary of slaughter and bloodshed in their own country, turned to terrorism abroad.

Egypt

Islamist politics in Egypt was defined by the historical legacy of the Society of Muslim Brothers and the ideological legacy of Sayyid Qutb. We have seen that the society was historically more of a reformist than an extremist organization. Their ideological shift came with the radicalization of Sayyid Qutb in prison. Qutb’s prison writings constituted a break with the reformist thought of Hassan al-Banna and a link with the Indian Islamist Abdul A’la Mawdudi. To understand the growth of a terrorist group in practice, we need to trace the links between radical Islamism in Egypt and the American jihad of the 1980s. Egyptian involvement in the American jihad flowed from Anwar al-Sadat’s determination to move Egypt from being pro-Soviet to being pro-American. He became an enthusiastic supporter of the American jihad, second only to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. But for the Islamist recruits that his intelligence services sent to join the American jihad, Sadat’s commitment was belied by his willingness to sign a peace treaty with Israel, thus betraying the Palestinian cause by contributing to its isolation. Ironically, Sadat was killed by jihadists in October 1981, at a time when Egyptian state support for the Afghan jihad was reaching its high point.

One of the leaders of the jihadist group was Ayman al-Zawahri, a surgeon trained at one of the country’s leading universities. Soon after Sadat’s assassination, al-Zawahri escaped Egypt and arrived in Peshawar to join Osama bin Laden. With the Gulf War and the entry of American troops into Saudi Arabia, al-Zawahri’s view that Sadat had betrayed the Islamist cause came to be shared by bin Laden, who now thought similarly of the House of Saud. The unipolar world that emerged from the fall of the Soviet Union no doubt influenced the radical shift in how the
al-Qaeda leadership came to see its erstwhile benefector, America. Al-Zawahri wrote in his memoir that he considered the Afghan jihad as “a training course of the utmost importance to prepare the Muslim mujahideen to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the United States.”

Afghan-Egyptians came to public attention on November 17, 1997, when an Egyptian gunman—who security officials said was trained in the Afghan guerrilla camps—led five others in the mass murder of fifty-eight foreign tourists and at least four Egyptians on the banks of the Nile at Luxor in Upper Egypt. As in Algeria, the methods used by terrorists were gruesome—such as throat cutting and disemboweling—and suggested training in the Afghan jihad. The Luxor attack was not an isolated incident; it came on the heels of at least 150 murders of unarmed civilians in 1996 and 1997—killings that in several cases were led, according to Egyptian police, by “Afghan war veterans.”

Perhaps more important than the skills the jihad fighters were taught was the training that obliterated the distinction between soldier and civilian and justified any target so long as attacking it increased chances of victory. Foreigner or local, intellectual or soldier, judge or police officer, woman or man, child or adult, all were considered fair game. Those recruited as volunteers for the American jihad included all types of characters: from honest believers acting out of commitment to unemployed youths looking for adventure to hardened criminals in search of victims. Not all were enthusiastic converts to the tactics of terror taught by their new mentors. Depending on past experience, some—such as criminals and outcasts—were likely to embrace these skills more readily than others. This may also explain why the fallout of the American jihad tended to lead to greater brutality than had been characteristic of the original Afghan edition.

The legitimization of violence against civilians was a direct consequence of something the CIA manual called training in “strategic sabotage,” which was categorized as either simple or indirect. The manual explained simple sabotage as “personalized, surreptitious interdiction by individuals and small groups to damage or destroy installations, products or supplies” and indirect sabotage as different ways of reducing production in enemy territory. Part of simple sabotage was training in “demolition and arson.” More important, simple and indirect forms of strategic sabotage really distinguished between two different ways of undermining civilian support for the enemy. The time-honored forms of terror against women—kidnap and rape—were formalized and thus normalized in the annals of the Afghan jihad as “marriages of convenience.” “Time and again,” writes Cooley, “these same techniques appear among the Islamist insurgents in Upper Egypt and Algeria, since the Afghani’ Arab veterans began returning there in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”

The Islamist terror that we are witnessing today is more a mutation than an outgrowth of Islamic history, the result of a triple confluence: ideological, organizational, and political. The ideological element was the product of an encounter between Islamist intellectuals (Mawdudi, Qutb) and different Marxist-Leninist ideals that embraced armed struggle in the postwar period. The organizational element was a direct consequence of the American decision to organize the Afghan jihad as a quasi-private international crusade. The political element is a consequence of the demonization of Islam and its equation with terrorism, a tendency that emerged after the Cold War and gathered steam after 9/11. This demonizing point of view questions whether a historically grounded modernity is even possible in the postcolonial Islamic world. Best identified with Bernard Lewis, it equates modernity with secularism, secularism with Westernization, and Westernization
with subjugation. Because it sees a necessary contradiction between Islam and modernity, this point of view also sees a necessary contradiction between modernity and democracy wherever Muslim populations reside.

The Cold War and Radical Islam

The twentieth century saw three nuanced differences within political Islam. The first is a schism between reformists and radicals. Radicals are convinced that no meaningful social reform will be possible without the conquest of state power: thus the centrality of jihad in radical Islamist discourse. The second is a deepening wedge between two strands of radicalism, one society-centered, the other state-centered. Whereas society-centered Islamists claim to balance the struggle for justice (jihad) with that for democracy in the state (ijtihad), state-centered Islamists have little confidence in popular organization and action and consider the gates of ijtihad forever closed. Their perspective is defined by a single-minded dedication to the pursuit of justice. Finally, the Cold War bred, hothouse fashion, terrorist elements from within state-centered political Islam. Islamist terror combined two hitherto hostile points of view: a deep hostility to contemporary Islamic states from those like Qutb who had been savagely repressed in jails, and a deep distrust of popular organization and action shared by terrorist groups.