America's Gift to the World—the Afghan Terrorist
Alumni
Osama bin Laden—alleged to have been the mastermind behind the bombing of two US embassies in Africa in 1998—was not always on Washington's hate list. He and many other Islamic fundamentalists were supremely useful during the 1980s in Washington's war which quashed the last chance the Afghan people had for desperately needed social and economic reform and a secular society. Because of their uninhibited, sadistic cruelty directed against government and Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, the fundamentalists—the moujahedeen (Muslim holy warriors)—were good terrorists. They were our terrorists.
After the success of their jihad, these forces roamed afar, carrying out grisly actions in numerous corners of the world, metamorphosing into really bad terrorists.
Forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw its military forces from Afghanistan truly went to the heads of the moujahedeen. They thought they were invincible and had a god-given mission. Allah Akbar! They seemed to place little weight upon the fact that it had been the United States, bringing its military, political and financial weight to bear, that had been the sine qua non of the victory.
In 1992, after 12 years of battle, the various factions of the moujahedeen could claim Afghanistan as all their own, albeit now fighting each other. The war had been a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world—an Islamic Abraham Lincoln Brigade—and laid the groundwork for their future collaboration and support. Tens of thousands of veterans of the war—young men from every Muslim nation, battle-hardened and armed—dispersed to many lands to carry out other jihads against the infidels and to inflame and train a new generation of militant Islamists and terrorists, ready to drink the cup of martyrdom: a virtual Islamic Foreign Legion.
In the midst of a wave of assault weapons and violence (dubbed a "Kalashnikov culture"), Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto complained in 1996 that her country got stuck with this air of frenzy as a direct result of cooperation with the United States in forcing Soviet troops from Afghanistan. "We are left on our own to cope with the remnants of the Afghan war, which include arms smuggling...drugs and...[religious] zealots who were leaders at the time of the Afghan war."1
"Your government participated in creating a monster," complained an Algerian sociologist to a Los Angeles Times correspondent in Algiers. "Now it has turned against you and the world—16,000 Arabs were trained in Afghanistan, made into a veritable killing machine."2 His figure may be rather low inasmuch as there are an estimated 15,000 veterans of the Afghanistan war—or "Afghans" as they've come to be known all over, whether from Afghanistan or not—in Saudi Arabia alone.3
Professor of Middle East Studies Eqbal Ahmad has observed:
The propaganda in the West suggests that violence and holy war are inherent in Islam. The reality is that as a world-wide movement, Jihad International, Inc. is a recent phenomenon...Without significant exception during the 20th century, jihad was used in a
national, secular and political context until, that is, the advent of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.4
...
In a 1999 interview, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi told a London-based Arabic newspaper that his government had crushed an Islamic militant movement of "Afghans". "They returned desperate and destructive," he said, "and adopted killing and explosives as their profession, according to the training they received from the American intelligence."23
And there has been more of the same in other places, from the men Ronald Reagan fancied as "freedom fighters". "This is an insane instance of the chickens coming home to roost," said a US diplomat in Pakistan in 1996. "You can't plug billions of dollars into an anti-Communist jihad, accept participation from all over the world and ignore the consequences.
But we did. Our objectives weren't peace and grooviness in Afghanistan. Our objective was killing Commies and getting the Russians out."24
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