The United States of America in the AfPak Region and Beyond
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- Published on Sunday, 18 January 2015 23:44
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1069 .... January 19, 2015
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The United States of America in the AfPak Region and Beyond:
War on Terror or Alliance with Islamic Terrorism?
Hassan N. Gardezi
It may sound rather odd in the face of the open war on terror that has been raging in Afghanistan and the Middle East to speak of United States' alliance with Islamic terrorists, but that is the messy reality of our times. The United States, it seems, has decided to live with the contradiction of courting Islamic terrorists at the same time as it is waging a war on Terror.
The seeds of the present day Islamic terrorism were in fact planted by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), by launching the code named "Operation Cyclone" in Afghanistan. The immediate aim... of this Operation was to overthrow the USSR supported communist government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) which had taken over in April, 1978. However, this aim was overshadowed by the much wider American Cold War objective which, in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, was "to provide the USSR with its Vietnam War."
The American CIA went around the world to recruit men to be mobilized and trained into a force of Islamic holy warriors, called Mujahideen to wage a holy war or jihad to expel the units of the Soviet Red Army that had entered the country to shore up the PDPA government which had run into internal problems soon after coming into power. According to one source between 1982 and 1990 as many as 35,000 Islamist militants were brought from outside into Afghanistan to wage this holy war. Osama bin Laden of the al-Qaeda notoriety was one of them recruited for the CIA personally by the head of the Saudi Intelligence Service, Prince Turki bin Faisal.
Selig Harrison, a prominent area studies expert specializing in the AfPak region (Afghanistan and Pakistan theatre of war as president Obama calls it) is reported to have said at a conference that "CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all around the world to come to Afghanistan..." Harrison may have seen the mistake in term of the eventual transformation of the Mujahideen into Islamist terrorists. But even from a humanist point of view the decade long war in which these outside fighters became a major force was no less a blunder as will be noted bellow. But before we get into that, let us look at the neighbouring state of Pakistan's key role in this tragedy that hit Afghanistan.