The terrorism trap : September 11 and beyond by Michael Parenti

Author:Michael Parenti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Intervention (International law), September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, War on Terrorism, 2001-2009, Militarism, Corporations, Globalization, 11 September 2001, Terrorisme, Elfter September, Terrorismus, Bekämpfung
Publisher: San Francisco : City Lights Books
Published: 2002-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style

The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to escalate the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad against godless communism. The goal was not only to expel the infidels from Afghanistan but eventually to liberate the Muslim-majority areas of the Soviet Union. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself.54 Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire rightwinger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.

After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year. The USSR was overthrown in 1991, while the PDP government in Kabul, despite the unending onslaught of superior US weaponry, prevailed into 1992.

Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as "a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers."55

Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. "Within two years of the CIAs arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. "56

In Afghanistan the United States was "unaware that it was financing a future war against itself," Arundhati Roy reminds us.57 Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah's name against the purveyors of secular "corruption."

In 1993 came the first attack upon the World Trade Center. A van filled with explosives was detonated in the WTC's underground garage, killing six people and injuring over a thousand others. Most of the terrorists involved were mujahideen veterans of the Afghan war. In 1995, a ten-member group convicted of a plot to bomb the United Nations building and several other targets in New York was led by Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, who had worked with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Earlier Rahman had obtained a US visa from a CIA undercover agent, leading to speculation that he still had CIA links at the time of the plot.58 Such undertakings demonstrated the multi-centered, quasi-autonomous nature of these terrorist cells, and their ability to inject themselves into Western society.

In Afghanistan, the triumphant chieftains continued their turf fights and their wanton rule.

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