Pubdate: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC) Copyright: 2001 Vancouver Courier Contact: http://www.vancourier.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474 Author: Geoff Olson U.S. NURTURED RADICAL ISLAM, IGNORED DRUG DEALING Most of us have heard the mainstream media's drill on Osama bin Laden, chief suspect as ringleader in the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York. The scion of a wealthy Saudi family, finding purpose in fundamentalist Islam, becomes a "freedom fighter" in the Afghan-Soviet war, and ends up exporting terrorism a decade later. This tale of faith, double-dealing, and vengeance is as old as Jericho, but with a modern twist: boy meets religion, boy gets religion, boy goes nuts and blows up assets belonging to the Great Satan. While the outlines of bin Laden's past have received mention by Ted Koppel and co.-sometimes even with passing mention of the CIA's covert support for the mujahideen's 1979-1992 war against the Soviets-it might be instructive to look a closer at the historical roots of the Islamic fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan, and the source of the militant's fanatical hatred of the United States. In 1979 the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Working with Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence-an entity midwived by American interests-the idea was to turn the Afghan war into a total holy war against the Soviet Union by all Muslim States. According to the foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs, "some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad." Financial support for the resistance was supplied by Saudi Arabia. Among the supporters was the rich young financier Osama bin Laden, who travelled to Afghanistan to join the anti-Soviet resistance. Arms supplies rose to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, accompanied by a "ceaseless stream' of CIA and Pentagon specialists who travelled to the secret headquarters of Pakistani's ISI. The mujahideen' did not deal directly with American intelligence, but through the ISI instead. Afghanistan's CIA-funded guerrilla camps-ironically, now prime targets for an American counterattack-were responsible for the training of the freedom fighters, integrating military instruction with the teachings of Islam. Using U.S. marine manuals translated into Arabic, and the time-tested principles of CIA psychological operations, the ISI worked with peoples' beliefs rather than against them. Guerrillas in training were taught that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow. A lesser known aspect of American involvement in the Afghan-Soviet war were the consequences for the global drug trade. On June 18, 1986, The New York Times reported that the mujahideen "have been involved in narcotics activities as a matter of policy to finance their operations.The opium warlords worked under cover of the U.S./Saudi/Pakistani axis that funded their arms sales and aided the conveyance of the drugs into the European and North American markets where they account for 50 per cent of heroin sales." According to University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade in the region, as they did in Vietnam and Laos a decade earlier. "As the Mujahideen 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 a full decade of wide open drug dealing, McCoy discovered, the American Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to make one major seizure or arrest. American intelligence looked the other way, preferring the war on drugs-which would have run counter to subsidies for the fighters, after all-to be subordinated to the war on the Soviet Union. The fallout: a worldwide heroin epidemic beginning in the mid-seventies, traceable in retrospect to the Afghan-Soviet war. More on the "blowback" from American support for the Islamic militants in Afghanistan next week. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth