Gulan: The roots of Islamic terrorism

http://www.gulan-media.com/h629/krestina629.pdf

President George W. Bush is running a crusade against Islamic terrorism. Who created this monster? Believe me or not: his father George Bush in cooperation with his predecessor Ronald Reagan.

Who gave weapons to Islamic militants? CIA, the American intelligence service. CIA also trained them to kill. It was the period when many African and Asian countries had got their independence after colonialism. It was the cold war era.

Open involvement in other countries policies had not given CIA the results it wanted. CIA replaced the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran 1953 by Shah Reza Pahlavi. But it was only a short term solution to get American minded administration in Iran. And of course the Vietnam war was the real catastrophe.

So CIA learned its lesson. When the government of a third world country made cooperation with Soviet Union CIA’s strategy was to arm their opponents like The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-i-Islam in Pakistan.

The peak of these activities was the war in Afghanistan. Soviet Union soldiers entered there 1979 and CIA started to arm Mujahedins to fight against them. Mahmood Mamdani calls this war an American jihad: CIA armed militant Muslims from all around the world to a holy war against Soviet Union. Mamdani is professor of anthropology in the American Columbia University. He is born and grown up in Uganda. He lived in South-Africa during the change period from apartheid to democracy. Now Mamdani lives in New York. He observed there the 11.9. attack and has written a sharp analysis about it.

The name of Mamdani’s book is ”Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror”. He criticizes CIA for running secret military operations against the will of the American congress.

The Vietnam war caused an anti-war movement in USA. Many senators who wanted peaceful foreign policy were elected to the congress. Most famous of them were John Tunney and Dick Clark. The congress accepted the so called Clark Law 1976. It gave the congress good possibilities to get information and control American military operations abroad. Due to ”the Clark Law” CIA could not involve openly in wars abroad. So it started to finance secretly Islamic groups abroad. This law was annulled 1985 during the second era of president Ronald Reagan. Mahmood Mamdani pays attention that CIA’s secret operations abroad are an attack also against the American democracy.

CIA tried to turn the Afghan war into Soviet Union’s Vietnam. But then happened something CIA had not expected: the cold war ended to the collapse of Soviet Union. There were thousands Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. It became the training centre of Islamic militants. When the war ended they returned to their home countries. They were well trained and had built an close network. Islamic terrorist groups were formed from these troops.

In South Kurdistan the situation is totally different than in the wars during last decades in Laos, Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. US army is making openly co-operation with a well functioning administration, not with marginal groups fighting against the legal administration. CIA’s target in Afghanistan was to win the Soviet troops, not to form a new government. They knew it was impossible. By using Mamdani’s terms the cooperation between the Afghan clans was ”like putting five different animals into one cage”. Taliban movement is a consequence of this war.

Islamic militants have not arrived to South Kurdistan. But in America there are now some similarities to the post-Vietnam war period. Anti-war movement is growing. And so are the demands to remove American troops from dangerous Iraq.

I am sure that every politician in both South Kurdistan and the Arab parts of Iraq think all the time what to do when American troops go home from there. I hope they will do anything else but not secret deals with CIA.

Mamdani, Mahmood: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Pantheon Books, New York 2004.