The Lost Hegemon:
Whom the gods would destroy
Chapter Seven:
The CIA’s Afghan Crusade:
Opium Wars, bin Laden, and Mujahideen
“When the operation started in 1979, this region grew
opium only for regional markets and produced no heroin. Within two years,
however, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin
producer. . . . CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade.
As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered
peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax.”
—Alfred McCoy, author, The Politics of Heroin
in Southeast Asia
A Soviet “Vietnam”
By far the most influential voice in the US
Administration of President Jimmy Carter was his National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski’s influence drew largely from the fact
that he had one of the most influential patrons in the United States at the
time. David Rockefeller, then chairman of the family’s Chase Manhattan Bank,
one of the most influential banks internationally, had taken Brzezinski under
his wing.
In 1973, Rockefeller had founded an elite, secretive
policy group called the Trilateral Commission. It was created to “coordinate”
political and economic policy between Washington, Western Europe, and, for the
first time, Japan, hence the “tri” in the name. Rockefeller selected his
trusted friend Brzezinski to be the first Executive Director of the Trilateral
Commission, charged with selecting the group’s three hundred powerful
international members. The “coordination” envisioned by Rockefeller and
Brzezinski involved not an exchange of ideas among equals but rather bringing
the major areas of the industrial world under the control of a Rockefeller
agenda.
Rockefeller’s group of handpicked Trilateral members
was so influential that it was decisive in making a previously unknown Georgia
peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, President of the world’s most powerful nation in
1976. Carter had been chosen by Brzezinski to join Rockefeller’s exclusive
Trilateral Commission in 1973. It was Brzezinski, in fact, who first identified
Carter as presidential potential and tutored him in economics, foreign policy,
and world politics.[1]
When Carter got elected President in 1976, with more
than a little help from Rockefeller’s significant influence, he chose
Brzezinski as his National Security Adviser and, de facto, his main foreign
policy adviser.[2] Brzezinski, an
ardent anti-Soviet cold warrior from a Russo-phobic Polish nobility background,
was a disciple of the British founder of Geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder,
like Henry Kissinger was before him. Brzezinski had been trained to look at how
to most effectively manipulate the global power nexus to Washington’s
advantage.
By 1979, Washington’s geopolitical world was in a
terrible flux. The Dollar, a pillar of US hegemony in global finance, was in
steep decline against the strong currencies of Japan, Germany, and France.
Severely high oil prices in the wake of the Iranian Khomeini revolution were
driving the US economy deep into recession. Western Europe, notably Germany and
France were increasingly opposed to what they felt was a unilateral de facto
imperial arrogance on the part of Washington in world affairs.
In the oil-rich Middle East, Iran had undergone a
theocratic revolution that ousted America’s puppet dictator and Rockefeller
crony, Shah Reza Pahlevi. The Ayatollah Khomeini was consolidating power and
establishing a rigid Shi’ite Muslim theocratic state. Initially open to
maintaining friendly relations with Washington, Iran under the Shi’ite rule
soon distanced herself from her earlier US alliance. By 1980, Turkey, which had
been torn between right and leftist parties for several years, underwent a
CIA-backed General’s Coup, but the growing distrust of the US among Turkish
leading circles was always simmering in the background.
Against this background of global instability,
Brzezinski initiated a far-reaching policy decision. He authorized and
organized the recruitment of Islamic Jihadists from all over the world and
smuggled them into Soviet-controlled Afghanistan through US-friendly Pakistan.
The aim of his little Jihad, as Brzezinski wrote in a classified internal memo
to President Carter, would be to create “the Soviet Vietnam.” In other words,
Washington and the CIA manipulated events inside Afghanistan to force a Soviet
response—a military occupation. Afghanistan was far too strategic to Soviet
security, Brzezinski reckoned, and his actions were a trap to bog them down in
an endless war against US-trained and armed Jihadist guerillas.
The global consequences of Washington’s attempt to
instrumentalize Muslim Jihadists, contemptuously referred to later by
Brzezinski as “some stirred-up Muslims,” would come back to haunt and terrorize
the world and the US in the decades after.[3] Brzezinski was
obsessed with giving the Soviets their Vietnam, and anti-communist Muslim
Brotherhood “freedom fighters,” as Washington propaganda named them, seemed the
perfect way.
Afghanistan: the New Great Game in an “Arc of Crisis”
In the 19th century, there was an ongoing
struggle between Czarist Russia and the British Empire over who would control
Afghanistan, a geo-strategically central land straddling Central, Southern, and
Southwestern Asia. The stakes were huge. With control of Afghanistan, a major
power could control or destabilize all Central Asia through Afghanistan. It was
the Soviet Union’s “soft underbelly.” Rudyard Kipling popularized the struggle
between Russia and the West over Afghanistan as “the Great Game,” a
geopolitical rivalry for control of the Eurasian landmass by controlling the
Afghan space.
During the Cold War, that Great Game for control of
Afghanistan underwent a changing cast of players. Initially the Soviet Union
acted as protector of the non-aligned regime of socialist President Nor Mohammed
Taraki. Taraki became President in 1978 by ousting Mohammed Daoud, the cousin
of deposed King Mohammed Zahir Shah. Moscow was determined to prevent any
possible Western attacks from her vulnerable Afghan underbelly.
This time around, however, the United States played
the lead role that the British Empire had played a century before, using
Afghanistan to drive a dagger into the heart of Soviet Central Asia in order to
force Moscow into its own “Vietnam” quagmire and more.
In 1978, Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, was already speaking of an “arc of crisis.” The arc, he declared,
went “along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile and social and
political structures in a region of vital importance to us, threatened with
fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements
hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.”[4] His clear
message was that the United States’ “national security interests” dictated US
intervention to stem that “chaos” from “adversaries,” shorthand for the
Soviets.
What Brzezinski deliberately did not say
was that he and US intelligence networks were actively stirring up that chaotic
Arc of Crisis in order to destabilize the Islamic perimeter of the Soviet
Union.
Brzezinski’s remarks were aimed at preparing the
American public for a coming confrontation with the Soviet Union across its
Islamic underbelly. Washington intelligence networks were quietly preparing the
crisis that was to give the excuse to finance the most costly covert operation
in US history, the Afghan Mujahideen war against Soviet-occupied Afghanistan,
with the CIA discreetly directing all from behind the stage.
Brzezinski’s “Arc of Crisis” was adapted from a
proposal of British intelligence operative and Islam expert, Sir Bernard Lewis.
Lewis, who was then at Princeton University in the US, proposed new borders for
the Middle East: the Bernard Lewis Plan. Brzezinski’s Arc of Crisis was
composed of the nations across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the
Indian subcontinent to Turkey, south through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn
of Africa, with Iran as its center of gravity.[5]
At a confidential April 1979 meeting of the
US-European Bilderberg Group in Baden, Austria, Lewis elaborated his notion of
using this Arc of Crisis to destabilize the Soviet Union. He called on NATO
countries to “endorse the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini,
in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal
and religious lines.”[6] At that point,
many in US intelligence circles, including even Brzezinski, believed they could
control Khomeini’s revolution as a weapon against the Soviets.[7]
Anglo-American strategy in the region made a radical
shift based on the plans of Lewis and Brzezinski. State Department Middle East
official Henry Precht later recalled, “There was this idea that the Islamic
forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc
of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets. It
was a Brzezinski concept.”[8]
Bernard Lewis argued that the West should encourage
autonomous groups, such as Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian
Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The ensuing chaos would spread in what
he termed “an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would inevitably spill over into the
Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.”[9]
Aside from a tiny handful of US Middle East experts,
however, almost no one inside the Washington Administration really understood
the internal dynamics of political Islam. They were like small children playing
with an undetonated bomb they had unearthed from the war. The bomb was soon to
explode.
Ramadan in Afghanistan
Said Ramadan was perhaps the most influential man in
the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the years just after the death of his
father-in-law, Hassan al-Banna. Ramadan spent the 1960s and 1970s in exile in
Geneva. From there, with overt and mostly covert political support from the
CIA, he traveled regularly between Munich, where the Munich Mosque had become
one of the main bases of spreading the Muslim Brotherhood internationally, and
Asia. He was very often in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the CIA had a
special Cold War interest in pressuring the Soviet Union as noted.[10]
Ramadan and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—the old
anti-Semitic friend of Hassan al-Banna and of SS-leader Heinrich Himmler—had
revitalized the moribund Muslim World Conference in Jerusalem. Mohammad Amin
al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was President of the Congress. It was
tightly controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan turned the focus of the
Muslim World Conference into a forum for condemning the plight of Muslims
forced to live under communist rule, an agenda that fit nicely with the CIA’s
Cold War strategies.[11]
In 1962, Said Ramadan had gone to Mecca to launch what
was to become the most important international organization of political Islam
and of the Muslim Brotherhood—the Muslim World League (MWL). Ramadan drafted
the League’s bylaws.
The Muslim World League became the de facto world
center for spreading the Salafist Jihad ideology of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood of Hassan al-Banna through his son-in-law, Ramadan. Its founding
members included the elite of global Jihadist Islam. It included Al-Banna’s old
friend from World War II, pro-Nazi Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of
Jerusalem, who, by then, was enjoying Saudi financial largesse instead of
Hitler’s. It included Abul-Ala Mawdudi, the founder of Jamaat
e-Islamiya, Pakistan’s de facto Muslim Brotherhood organization. Mawdudi
orchestrated the Salafist dictatorship of Pakistan’s President, Zia-ul-Haq.[12]
Ramadan’s Muslim World League also included Muhammad
Sadiq al-Mujaddidi of Afghanistan, who worked closely with the CIA and whose
protégés would form the core of the CIA’s Mujahideen. The Muslim World League
founding board also included the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ibn
Ibrahim al-Shaikh, the senior religious spokesman for the ultra-fundamentalist
Saudi Wahhabism, and a person who enjoyed enormous influence within the Saudi
Royal House.[13]
In effect, the Muslim World League represented a
marriage of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s political Salafism with the
ultra-traditional Saudi Wahhabite ideology. A more deadly political cocktail
would have been hard to imagine. By all indications, virtually no one at the
senior levels of US intelligence bothered to look closely at the new
organization of Said Ramadan and what its ultimate goals might be beyond the
simple fact that Ramadan’s Muslim World League was devoutly anti-communist.[14]
The League, by tradition always headed by a Saudi
national—usually from the Royal family—was financed by Saudi oil dollars. It
combined the feudal Islamic obedience of Saudi Wahhabite Sunni Islam with the
Brotherhood’s agile, politically opportunist Islamic Jihadism. The League
basically took whatever public profile was useful in order to advance their
global Caliphate agenda, much like the Catholic Church’s Society of Jesus since
their founding by Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier.[15]
The Muslim Brotherhood’s development and expansion of
the Muslim World Conference in Jerusalem and the Muslim World League in Mecca
created the low-profile organizational infrastructure of what was soon to be
called a “Global Jihad.”
In the 1960s and up well into the 1970s, the CIA
seemed content to give Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood a large degree of
freedom so long as their focus was anti-communism and against troublesome Arab
nationalism of the Nasserite brand. As a consequence Said Ramadan helped build
up the Pakistani Muslim Brotherhood local organization, Jamaat
e-Islamiya, and founded madrassas and other religious schools across
Afghanistan.[16] Those organizations
of the Muslim Brotherhood in both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan were
soon to gain greater attention from the CIA and Western intelligence.
Afghanistan and the Soviets
In 1973, Afghan Prince Muhammad Daoud ousted his
cousin, the Afghan king, with help from the Soviet Union. He then established
an Afghan republic of sorts.
As President, Daoud embarked on a cautious land reform
program to try to win poor Afghan sharecroppers. Washington was alarmed that
they had not anticipated the Daoud coup and began to actively encourage the
Muslim Brotherhood networks they knew from Ramadan and other assets to make
resistance to the Daoud presidency. Earlier, as Prime Minister to the King,
Daoud had strongly opposed the Brotherhood, making the two bitter enemies from
the start.[17]
However, soon after seizing power in 1974, Daoud began
to distance himself from over-reliance on the Soviet Union for military and
economic support. He opened stronger ties with non-aligned India and the pro-US
Shah in Iran. Daoud also turned to other oil-rich Muslim nations, such as
America’s strongest Middle East Muslim allies, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait,
for financial assistance, bringing him still closer to the US influence.
During a March 1978 visit to Islamabad, Pakistan,
Daoud reached an agreement with Pakistan’s US-backed Sunni military dictator,
President Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq.
As Daoud turned closer to the West and Washington’s
Persian Gulf allies, he distanced his regime from the Soviets. He began to
purge his government of communists, removed Soviet military advisers, and
shifted military training from the Soviets to the pro-US Egypt of Anwar Sadat.
His new cabinet contained several staunch anti-communists. By spring of 1978,
he announced plans to fly to Washington for high level talks with the Carter
Administration.[18]
Daoud had failed to improve Afghanistan’s economy, and
his increasingly dictatorial one-man rule alienated most of his earlier allies.
When he arrested leaders of the communist PDPA (the People’s Democratic Party
of Afghanistan), communist leaders Nor Mohammed Taraki and Tabizullah Amin,
along with a group of anti-Daoud military officers, staged a coup that ended in
the killing of Daoud and the installing of Mohammed Taraki as new President.
The PDPA military putsch brought major land reform
intended to weaken powerful landlords who were closely tied to fundamentalist
Sunni Islam. Taraki’s goal was to win the peasants to the new Taraki regime by
aiding poor Afghan sharecroppers traditionally forced to work land owned by the
King and his cronies. Taraki also built schools for women who had been banned
from education under the religiously strict Sunni monarchy. He opened Afghan
universities to the poor and introduced free health care.[19]
The land reforms and the education of women
represented a red flag for the Muslim Brotherhood and other reactionary
fundamentalist Muslim organizations in Afghanistan, who had flourished among
wealthy landowners and in the universities since the time of Ramadan. These
fundamentalist Islamic networks began inciting riots and protests against the
Taraki regime, charging them with violating fundamental precepts of Islam.
It was widely said within Afghanistan and in Moscow
that well before the December 25, 1979, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,
Washington had covertly encouraged the protests against Taraki’s socialist government.
It was a cruder, earlier version of the tactics later perfected in the 2011
“Arab Spring” revolts.
In March 1979, a CIA memorandum to Brzezinski stated
that the fundamentalist attacks on the Kabul regime, burning of girls’ schools,
and other acts of violence had “achieved surprising successes.”[20] In February
1979, against the wishes of Moscow and of the Taraki government, pro-Taraki
militants kidnapped and assassinated CIA Kabul Station Chief and then US
Ambassador Adolf “Spike” Dubs, conveniently enough, further justifying strong
action from Washington.
The man named by Taraki to carry out his land reform,
Tabizullah Amin, Cabinet Minister, was suspected by Soviet KGB Chief Yuri
Andropov to be a CIA deep cover agent. Amin had launched a brutal campaign of
terror against political opponents that turned world opinion against the Taraki
government. Andropov believed the CIA had Amin infiltrate the Kabul government
with the intent of discrediting the Taraki revolution.[21]
If that was so, he did a brilliant job for his
Washington sponsors.
Taraki flew to Moscow to consult with Brezhnev on a
strategy to get rid of Amin. The day he returned to Kabul, Amin had Taraki
executed and immediately seized power himself. Weeks later, CIA-backed warlords
massacred dozens of Afghan government officials in the western city of Herat.
The combination of these two events finally convinced a reluctant Brezhnev to
send troops into Afghanistan on December 25, 1979.
Falling into Brzezinski’s Trap
With Moscow’s friend Nor Mohammed Taraki murdered and
Tabizullah Amin a suspected CIA agent in control in Kabul, Moscow realized they
were in danger of losing the strategic Great Game for control of Afghanistan to
the West, a devastating strategic catastrophe were it to come to pass. On
December 25, 1979, after initially rejecting direct military intervention as
too dangerous, Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev ordered Soviet tanks to roll into
Afghanistan across the Panjshir Valley while KGB operatives and Soviet Special
Forces troops stormed the Royal Palace in Kabul.
The Soviet forces assassinated Tabizullah Amin and
installed Babrak Karmal as the new leader of Afghanistan. The original intent
of Moscow was to stabilize the situation and leave within a few months.
Instead, they would be caught in Afghani political and tribal quicksand, as
would the US military itself in Afghanistan after 2001.[22]
A Soviet-organized government led by Babrak Karmal was
hastily organized in an effort to try to fill the power vacuum. Soviet troops
were deployed in substantial numbers to stabilize Afghanistan under Karmal,
although the Soviet government, naively, did not expect to do most of the
fighting in Afghanistan. As a result of their intervention, however, the
Soviets were directly involved for the first time in what had been a domestic
war in Afghanistan.
Brzezinski now had the excuse he’d been looking for to
begin overtly arming a USA-backed counter-revolution in Afghanistan. Moscow had
taken the bait.[23]
Birthing Mujahideen
In April 1979, eight months before the Soviet
intervention, US officials had secretly begun meeting with Mujahideen guerrillas
and as a result of the talks, asked a Pakistani military official to recommend
that Mujahideen organizations receive US support. Brzezinski was laying his
trap, and the Islamic fundamentalists were his bait.
Unbeknownst to the American public, on July 3, 1979,
well before Soviet tanks and paratroopers rolled into Afghanistan, President
Carter—at Brzezinski’s recommendation—had signed the first national security
directive authorizing secret US aid to Afghan warlords to fight the Afghan
regime. Brzezinski said years later he had convinced Carter that, in his
“opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”[24]
Brzezinski was right, and everything Washington
covertly did was to make sure it happened that way.
Initially, the principle Islamic Jihad organization
which the CIA used against Soviet Afghanistan was Hezbi Islami. It
was a neo-feudal Islamic Jihad organization modelled on Ramadan’s Muslim
Brotherhood. Like the Brotherhood in Egypt, it set out to create a pure Islamic
State, deploying a highly disciplined organization built around a small cadre
of educated elites.[25]
CIA’s Mujahideen Islamic Jihadists defeated the Soviet
Army in Afghanistan in 1980s.
Hezbi Islami had
been founded in 1977 by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was a psychopathic Sunni
fundamentalist whose unrestrained acts of murder and terror won him the
attention of the CIA and of Pakistan’s US-trained military dictator, General
Zia-ul-Haq.
Hekmatyar’s Hezbi Islami had murdered
hundreds of left-wing students in Afghanistan universities. Hekmatyar ordered
his followers to throw acid into the faces of Afghan women who refused to wear
their burkas. He was brutally serious about his Sharia
fundamentalism.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had come out of Kabul University
in 1973 as leader of the CIA-financed Organization of Muslim Youth, the student
organization of Said Ramadan’sJamiat-e-Islami, a Muslim Brotherhood
affiliate.[26] Hekmatyar
later became President Reagan’s favorite Mujahideen “freedom fighter” in the
CIA’s secret war against the Soviets.
Even as a student at Kabul University, Hekmatyar was
no mere academic intellectual or theoretical Jihadist. He joined the
Brotherhood there and put his beliefs into practice. While a student in charge
of the secret military wing of the Brotherhood’s Kabul student organization, he
was sentenced to prison for murdering his university rival, a Maoist student.[27] He and
his Hezbi Islami followers then fled to Peshawar across the
border in Pakistan, where he soon caught the attention of Pakistan’s equally
brutal Jihadist President, Zia-ul-Haq.[28]
The so-called Mujahideen were a ragtag assortment of
various tribal gangs from inside Pakistan, together with Islamist foreign Jihad
volunteers. Hekmatyar’s Hezbi Islami was the most powerful of
seven such gangs which constituted the Peshawar Seven alliance of Sunni
Mujahideen forces.
One such foreign Jihad volunteer to the Mujahideen
Jihad was Osama bin Laden, the 22-year-old son of a Saudi construction
billionaire whose family had made their fortune as the Saudi Royal constructor.
Young Bin Laden arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia in 1979 with
money and many Arab Jihad volunteers. Osama bin Laden had been sent to
Afghanistan, with US approval, by then Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki
bin Faisal.[29]
Osama Bin Laden became part of the CIA’s Operation
Cyclone, the code name for Brzezinski’s project to use Islamist fighters
against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan to give the Soviet Union their own
“Vietnam.” He proceeded to set up something innocuously called the Services
Office, together with his teacher and mentor from the university in Jeddah,
Muslim Brotherhood member Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Sunni Muslim
known as the “Father of Global Jihad.”[30]
Part of the Afghan Mujahideen financing was organized
through Osama bin Laden. In 1984, bin Laden and Azzam established Maktab
al-Khidamat (MAK), which funneled money, arms, and fighters from around the
Arab world into Afghanistan. The Saudi monarchy had agreed to match
dollar-for-dollar every sum Washington put into the Afghan proxy war against
the Soviet Union.[31] Bin Laden,
the MAK, and the Afghan Mujahideen received in total about half a billion
dollars a year from the CIA and roughly the same from the Saudis, funneled
through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).[32]
Through Maktab al-Khidamat or MAK, bin Laden became
one of the financiers of the Afghan Mujahideen Holy War against Moscow. His MAK
paid for air tickets to bring thousands of Arab fighters for the Afghan Holy
war against Communism.
Bin Laden also collaborated closely with
Hekmatyar’s Hezbi Islami. Bin Laden established camps across the
Afghan border inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan near Peshawar. There, the
ISI and allied intelligence services trained Jihadi volunteers from across the
Muslim world, so-called “Afghan Arabs,” to fight against the Soviet puppet
regime: the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.[33] After the
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the key figures in Maktab
al-Khidamat, including Osama bin Laden, went on to form what became known as Al
Qaeda.[34]
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, bin
Laden’s Palestinian partner, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Abdullah Yusuf Azzam,
issued a fatwa titled, Defence of the Muslim Lands, the First
Obligation after Faith. In it he declared that both the Afghan and
Palestinian struggles were Jihads in which killing occupiers of their land, no
matter what their faith, was a personal obligation for all Muslims. The edict
was supported by Abdul al-Aziz bin Baz, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, or highest
religious scholar.[35]
CIA Operation Cyclone Launched
Brzezinski’s new Mujahideen Jihad project, Operation
Cyclone, was taking formidable shape.
With US and Saudi money and training done by
Zia-ul-Haq’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and Pakistani military
officers, the Afghan Mujahideen began to take on Soviet occupation troops
inside Afghanistan in a terror campaign that lasted from 1979 until the Soviet
withdrawal in 1989. Pakistan’s Zia was the main intermediary for doling out the
money from US intelligence and Saudi sources—including Osama bin Laden—handing
out weapons, and giving military training and financial support to Afghan Mujahideen
groups.
General Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistani President,
introduced brutal Sharia law in Pakistan and trained the Mujahideen along with
CIA and Saudi money.
Zia-ul-Haq was a suitable ideological patron for
Hekmatyar and the Afghan Mujahideen. He was a fanatical devotee of the most
severe Islamic Sharia. As President, Zia-ul-Haq put more than 15,000 female
rape victims in jail because they could not comply with the Islamic condition
requiring them to have numerous male witnesses of their victimization. They
were charged with fornication, and their rapists were let go free. A Pakistani
woman who made an allegation of rape was convicted for adultery, while the
rapist was acquitted. Previous Pakistani legal provisions relating to adultery
under Zia’s Sharia were replaced so the guilty woman and man would be flogged,
each with a hundred stripes if unmarried. And if they were married, they would
be stoned to death.
Blaspheming Muhammad was punishable with “death, or
imprisonment for life,” while disrespecting the Quran was punishable by life
imprisonment, and disrespecting the family of the Prophet or the Companions of
the Prophet was punishable by up to three years in prison. This was the
ideology of Washington’s man in charge of training and recruiting Afghan
Mujahideen “freedom fighters.”[36]
Washington’s CIA, along with funding from Britain’s
MI-6 and SAS and significant money from Saudi Arabian intelligence, made it
possible for the Pakistani ISI to arm and train over 100,000 insurgents between
1978 and 1992.[37] Washington
alone spent as much as $20 billion, by some estimates.
Heroin trafficking run by Mujahideen, as in Vietnam in
the 1970s, played a major added financial role with more than a little help
from their friends in the CIA.[38]
CIA and “Poppy” Bush Take Over
One of the greatest political problems facing
President Carter in his reelection bid was the Iranian government’s seizure of
US embassy personnel as hostages. US news media broadcast the plight daily,
making it an albatross around Carter’s neck for not finding a solution.
With the assist of a secret deal between the
Republicans and Khomeini’s Iran, US embassy hostages held since November 1979
in the Teheran Embassy were not released until after the November 1980 US
presidential elections. Carter’s people had secretly been negotiating such a
release before US elections to boost Carter against the Republican team of
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. But Bush, Reagan Campaign Manager and
future CIA Director, Bill Casey, and a small circle around G.H.W. Bush secretly
offered Iran a sweeter deal if the release took place after the
US elections. It became known as the “October Surprise.”[39]
On January 20, 1981, the same day Reagan and Bush were
sworn into office, Iran released the 52 US Embassy hostages. At the same time,
in violation of the US Arms Export Control Act—a law prohibiting a recipient
country of US arms from transferring “United States-origin” munitions to a
third country without written permission from the United States—Israeli Defense
Minister Ariel Sharon began to channel what became billions of dollars of
US-made weapons to Iran to tilt the war between a US-backed Saddam Hussein
regime in Iraq and Khomeini’s Iran.[40]
With the Reagan-Bush Administration now in charge of
US foreign policy, a dramatic shift took place in what was permitted in terms
of covert operations in Afghanistan, as well as in the Iran-Iraq war then
underway. The latter had begun as a US-covert encouragement to Iraq’s Saddam
Hussein to neutralize the growing power of Iran under Khomeini’s strict Sharia
Islamic rule.
One faction in the Reagan Administration, led by US
Secretary of State George Shultz and defense Secretary Casper Weinberger,
backed Iraq against Iran for reasons of Western oil supply security. Another
faction, led by National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane and two members
of his national Security Council staff, Howard Teicher and Colonel Oliver
North, argued in favor of arming Iran for two reasons: to enhance Israel’s
security and to facilitate better relations with a post-Khomeini Iran. At the
time, Israel depended on Iranian oil and made a nice business selling Israeli
arms to Iran.
Vice President and former CIA Director George H.W.
Bush shrewdly straddled both camps with the effect of US policy zigzagging
between backing for Iraq and then backing for Iran to ensure that the Iran-Iraq
war raged for eight years until 1988, costing hundreds of thousands of dead and
disabled in both countries. The Iran-Iraq US duplicity and arming of both sides
to drag out the conflict was a huge boon to Bush’s friends in the
military–industrial complex, as well as giving billions in windfall profits for
Bush’s cronies in the US and British oil industries, who used the war to charge
high oil prices.[41]
A key figure who was instrumental in a Reagan
Administration shift from arming Iraq to covertly arming Khomeini’s Iran in
1985 was Graham E. Fuller, the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for the
Middle East. For the previous two years, the Reagan Administration had
conducted a program known as Operation Staunch to stem the
flow of weapons to Iran while it continued to supply Iraq with covert aid,
including top-secret satellite photographs.
Fuller argued that it was now time to change course.
“Our tilt to Iraq was timely when Iraq was against the ropes and the Islamic
revolution was on a roll,” Fuller wrote in a May 1985 memo to CIA director
Casey. “The time may now have to come to tilt back.” Fuller contended that the
United States should once again authorize Israel to ship United States arms to
Iran. [42]
The Fuller memo initiated the first of what would
become repeated US “tilt fro, tilt back” shifts between backing Sunni against
Shi’ite or backing Shi’ite against Sunni interests in the Islamic geopolitical
space. Fuller’s memo laid the seeds for the illegal enterprise later known as
the Reagan-Bush Iran-Contra Affair.
Graham E. Fuller was later to play an instrumental
role in the CIA’s cultivation of another Islamic asset, Fethullah Gülen in
Turkey. Step by step, US intelligence was becoming immersed in trying to steer
Islamic Jihadists on behalf of the Washington global strategic agenda. The
Muslim Brotherhood and its later offshoots, however, had their own global
strategic agenda, and it was hardly one supportive of US national interest.
Bush, BCCI, Mujahideen, and Heroin “Fallout”
By the mid-1980s, under Vice president and ex-CIA
Director George H.W. Bush and CIA Director Bill Casey, Washington’s
geopolitical games with fundamentalist Jihad Islam went into high gear in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. The operations were very dirty, involving heroin and
opium trafficking and money laundering through a very dirty bank, BCCI. It
involved the CIA, Saudi intelligence, and the Mujahideen.
It was perhaps more than ironic that, within the
family, George Herbert Walker Bush, father of later president George W. Bush,
was known as “Poppy” Bush, a moniker that could refer to opium poppies of
Afghanistan just as well as to his being family father. The Bush family was
deeply entangled in both Colombian cocaine and Afghan opium and heroin
operations. As Reagan’s Vice President during the time of the Afghan Mujahideen
war, Bush headed a Presidential Task Force on International Drug Smuggling.
According to European anti-narcotics officials, Bush used his post to
facilitate the inflow of Colombian cocaine via Florida, where his old CIA Cuban
buddies controlled organized crime.[43]
With the Republicans now in a second term, Vice
President George Bush became bolder. As veteran Washington journalist Robert
Parry described the mood then,
A real-politick Zeitgeist took
hold in Washington. It tolerated drug smuggling by CIA-connected groups,
including the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan Mujahideen. It watched
passively as CIA associates plundered the world’s banking system, most notably
through the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which
also had paid off a key Iranian in the October Surprise mystery.[44]
The CIA and Saudis, through BCCI bank,
financed Osama bin Laden’s Mujahideen in Afghanistan and laundered their heroin
profits.
The financial heart of the CIA’s 1980s Mujahideen
operation was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), founded in
1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier close to Zia-ul-Haq. The Bank
was registered in Luxembourg, with head offices in Karachi and London. It
became the bank of choice for laundering profits of Mujahideen heroin sales,
financing CIA black operations, and countless other illegal transactions.[45]
In fact, as a later US Senate investigation uncovered,
BCCI was intimately tied to the CIA. BCCI head Abedi was on personal terms with
former Director of the CIA Richard Helms, Colonel Oliver North, and the CIA
operatives loyal to Vice President Bush in the Iran/Contra affair. And
Reagan-Bush CIA Director Bill Casey met numerous times with Abedi.[46]
BCCI, in short, was the financial glue linking Afghan
Mujahideen, Saudi Arabian intelligence, the CIA, and Pakistani ISI. Its owners
included Bank of America, then the largest US bank; Khalid bin Mahfouz, who
headed the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, NCB, which handled funds of the Saudi
Royal family; and Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. Kamal Adham
and Abdul Raouf Khalil, the past and the then Saudi intelligence liaisons to
the United States, respectively, were shareholders as well.[47]According to Craig
Unger’s book House of Bush, House of Saud, bin Mahfouz donated over
$270,000 to Osama bin Laden’s Islamist organization to assist the US-sponsored
resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
In addition to the CIA, the BCCI client list included
Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, the Medellin Cocaine Cartel, and mercenary
terrorist-for-hire, Abu Nidal, along with Osama bin Laden. In 1987, BCCI’s US
bank subsidiary even helped a young Texas oilman, George W. Bush, with
financing for his Harken Energy Co.[48]
As the Mujahideen expanded operations in Pakistan
across the border and into Afghanistan, opium cultivation and refined heroin
traffic grew along with it, as did the global operations of BCCI. Veteran drug
researcher Alfred McCoy described how it functioned during the CIA’s covert
Afghan Mujahideen war:
When the operation started in 1979, this region grew opium
only for regional markets and produced no heroin. Within two years, however,
the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer,
supplying 60 percent of US demand. . . . CIA assets again
controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujaheddin guerrillas seized territory
inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary
tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under
the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin
laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the US Drug
Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.[49]
McCoy further described the situation at the end of
the Afghan Mujahideen war and the time of Soviet withdrawal:
In May 1990, as the CIA operation was winding down,
The Washington Postpublished a front-page expose charging that
Gulbudin Hekmatyar, the ClA’s favored Afghan leader, was a major heroin
manufacturer. The Post argued . . . that U.S.
officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan
allies. . . . In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan
operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war
to fight the Cold War. “Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible
to the Soviets. . . . I don’t think that we need to apologize
for this. Every situation has its fallout. . . . There was fallout
in terms of drugs, yes.” [50]
McCoy continued his description of the CIA narcotics
operations:
Once the heroin left Pakistan’s laboratories, the
Sicilian mafia managed its export to the United States, and a chain of
syndicate-controlled pizza parlors distributed the drugs to street gangs in
American cities, according to reports by the Drug Enforcement Agency. Most
ordinary Americans did not see the links between the ClA’s alliance with Afghan
drug lords, the pizza parlors, and the heroin on US streets.[51]
Mujahideen “Freedom Fighters” into “Terrorists”
US support for the Mujahideen became the centerpiece
of US foreign policy by 1985 and came to be called the Reagan Doctrine.[52] Under the
aggressive new proactive stance toward the Soviet Union, the US provided
military and other support to anti-communist resistance movements in
Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, and Poland’s Solidarność trade union.
From 1979, Afghanistan became home to violence and heroin production that was
to become the norm over the following thirty-five years. The CIA and US State
Department’s USAID played a major role in fomenting Islamic hate toward
communism that did not vanish when the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989.
American universities produced books for Afghan children praising the virtues
of Jihad and of killing communists. The books were financed by a USAID $50
million grant to the University of Nebraska in the 1980s. USAID was often used
as a covert conduit for CIA operations. The textbooks sought to create
enthusiasm in Islamic militancy. They called on Afghan children to “pluck out
the eyes of the Soviet enemy and cut off his legs.” Years later, the same
US-produced books were approved by the Taliban for use in madrassas and were
widely available in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.[53]
Money from a bizarre coalition of forces poured into the Mujahideen being
trained and based across the Afghan border in Pakistan. The USA, Saudi
intelligence service or al-Istakhbarat al-’Ama, the Kuwaitis,
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Qaddafi’s Libya, and Khomeini’s Iranians all paid the
Salafist Islamic “freedom fighters” of Mujahideen over $1 billion per year
during the 1980s.[54]
The Afghanistan conflict from 1979 through the final Soviet troop pullout in
February 1989 was the bloodiest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. More
than 13,000 Soviet soldiers paid with their lives, and some 40,000 were
wounded. Roughly two million Afghans lost their lives during the war, and an
additional 500,000 to two million were wounded and maimed.[55]
The ISI of Pakistan’s Zia-ul-Haq, working with Osama
bin Laden and other groups, had trained more than 100,000 Islamic radical
jihadists in every art of modern warfare and terrorist techniques. They worked
side by side together with the CIA, Britain’s MI6, the Israeli intelligence
services, and Saudi intelligence. Over the ensuing near quarter century, each
of those “sponsors” would finance and deploy those Mujahideen veterans under
the guise of one or another Islamic Jihad organization. One of the more
infamous came to be named “Al Qaeda,” or the Base, and its nominal head was the
Saudi Osama bin Laden. Citing Western intelligence sources, Jane’s
Defence Weekly reported in 2001:
In 1988, with US knowledge, Bin Laden created Al Qaeda
(The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells in countries
spread across at least 26 countries, including Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Egypt,
Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Burma, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait,
Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Syria,
Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Bosnia as well as the West Bank and Gaza. Western
intelligence sources claim Al Qaeda even has a cell in Xinjiang in China.[56]
For the Wahhabite Sunni Muslim world, the defeat of
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was greeted as a “victory” for Islam and the
Global Caliphate. For Washington, it was seen as a major defeat of America’s
Cold War communist adversary. Each player in the Mujahideen Great Game—Washington
and Jihadist Islamists—looked at the events through completely different
lenses.
From their triumph in Afghanistan, the CIA helped
bring key cadre of the Mujahideen into Chechnya, Bosnia, and other battles in
the post-Soviet Central Asia theatre. For the Jihadists, that was yet another
assist on the road to the Global Caliphate that they were quite happy to
accept.
Endnotes
[1] Patrick
Wood, The Trilateral Commission: Usurping Sovereignty, August 3,
2007, accessed in http://www.theendrun.com/the-trilateral-commission-usurping-sovereignty.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Zbigniew
Brzezinski, US history: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen,
January 1998, accessed in http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a13_1240427874.
[4] Iskander
Rehman, Arc of Crisis 2.0?, March 7, 2013, National Interest,
accessed in
[5] Andrew
Gavin Marshall, Creating an “Arc of Crisis”: The Destabilization of the
Middle East and Central Asia
The Mumbai Attacks and the “Strategy of Tension,” Global Research, December 7, 2008, accessed in
[6] F.
William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the
New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: p. 171.
[7] Richard
Cottam, Goodbye to America’s Shah, Foreign Policy Magazine, March 16, 1979,
accessed in
[8] Peter
Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America,
University of California Press: 2007: p. 67.
[9] F.
William Engdahl, op. cit., p. 171.
[10] Ian Johnson, A Mosque in Munich: Nazis,
the CIA and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, Houghton,
Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, p. 162.
[11] Ibid., p. 133.
[12] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game, 2005,
Metropolitan Books, New York, p. 132.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., p. 134.
[15] Ibid., p. 162. See also Muslim World
League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Pew Research, September 15,
2010, accessed in http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/15/muslim-networks-and-movements-in-western-europe-muslim-world-league-and-world-assembly-of-muslim-youth/.
[16] Ian Johnson, op. cit., p. 197.
[17] Dean Henderson, Afghan History
Suppressed: Part I-- Islamists Heroin and the CIA, February 11, 2013,
Veterans Today, accessed in http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/02/11/afghan-history-suppressed-part-i-islamists-heroin-and-the-cia/.
[18] Peter R. Blood, ed., Afghanistan: A
Country Study: DAOUD'S REPUBLIC, JULY 1973- APRIL 1978, Library of
Congress, Washington DC, 2001, accessed inhttp://countrystudies.us/afghanistan/28.htm.
[19] Dean Henderson, op. cit.
[20] Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The
Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War,
New York, Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 144.
[21] Dean Henderson, op. cit.
[22] Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye:
The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, 2011, Harvard University Press, pp.
24.
[23] Ibid., pp. 25–28.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Institute for the Study of War, Hizb i
Islami Gulbuddin (HIG)—Overview, accessed inhttp://www.understandingwar.org/hizb-i-islami-gulbuddin-hig.
[26] Dean Henderson, op. cit.
[27] Institute for the Study of War, Hizb-i-Islami
Gulbuddin (HIG), accessed inhttp://www.understandingwar.org/hizb-i-islami-gulbuddin-hig.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of
Saud – The Secret Relationship between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties,
London, Scribner, 2004, p. 100.
[30] Andrew Marshall, Terror blowback burns
CIA--America's spies paid and trained their nation's worst enemies, The
Independent, 1 November 1998, accessed inhttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/terror-blowback-burns-cia-1182087.html.
[31] John Lumkin, Maktab al-Khidamat,
GlobalSecurity.org, accessed inhttp://www.globalsecurity.org/security/profiles/maktab_al-khidamat.htm.
[32] Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam,
Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000,
p. 91.
[33] Vijay Prashad, War Against the Planet,
Counterpunch, November 15, 2001, accessed in http://www.counterpunch.org/2001/11/15/war-against-the-planet/.
[34] John Lumkin, op. cit.
[35] Abdullah Azzam (Shaheed), Defence of the
Muslim Lands; The First Obligation After Iman, English translation work
done by Muslim Brothers in Ribatt, accessed inhttp://archive.org/stream/Defense_of_the_Muslim_Lands/Defense_of_the_Muslim_Lands_djvu.txt.
[36] Wikipedia, Zia-ul- Haq’s Islamization,
accessed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zia-ul-Haq%27s_Islamization.
[37] Hasan-Askari Rizvi, Pakistan's Foreign
Policy: an Overview 1974-2004. PILDAT briefing paper for Pakistani
parliamentarians, 2004, pp. 19-20.
[38] Dean Henderson, CIA Created Afghan
Heroin Trade, November 10, 2012, accessed in http://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2012/11/cia-created-afghan-heroin-trade-2445926.html.
[39] Robert Parry, Second Thoughts on October
Surprise, June 8, 2013, accessed inhttp://consortiumnews.com/2013/06/08/second-thoughts-on-october-surprise/.
[40] Murray Waas and Craig Unger, Annals of
Government: How the US Armed Iraq—In the Loop: Bush’s Secret Mission, The
New Yorker Magazine, November 2, 1992, accessed in http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/111402.htm.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Private conversation with the author in January
1985 in Stockholm Sweden with an officer of an anti-narcotics unit of Swedish
Customs.
[44] Robert Parry, The Consortium: Bush and a
CIA Power Play, 1996, accessed inhttp://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile7.html.
[45] John Kerry, Senator, The BCCI Affair: A
Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate,
December 1992, 102d Congress 2d Session Senate, accessed in http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Ibid.
[48]David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, Follow the
Money, Washington Monthly, September 2004, accessed in http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html.
[49] Alfred McCoy, Drug Fallout,
Progressive magazine, August 1997, accessed inhttp://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIAdrug_fallout.html.
[50] Ibid.
[51] Ibid.
[52] Charles Krauthammer, The Reagan Doctrine,
April 01, 1985, TIME, accessed inhttp://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,964873,00.html#ixzz2mEiNO7lX.
[53] Washington Blog, Sleeping With the
Devil: How US and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 911, September 5, 2012,
accessed in http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09/sleeping-with-the-devil-how-u-s-and-saudi-backing-of-al-qaeda-led-to-911.html.
[54] Vijay Prashad, op. cit.
[55] Henry S. Bradsher, Afghan Communism and
Soviet Intervention, (Oxford University Press, 1999), 177–178.
[56] Rahul Bedi, Why? An attempt to explain
the unexplainable, Jane’s Defense Weekly, 14 September 2001, accessed
in http://www.takeoverworld.info/janes_marriage.htm.
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