Pubdate: Sun, 21 Oct 2001 Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL) Copyright: 2001 Orlando Sentinel Contact: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/325 Author: Jeff Kunerth HISTORY REPEATS AS U.S. FINDS UNLIKELY ALLIES If politics makes strange bedfellows, foreign policy sometimes means sleeping with the devil. And that's what the United States did when it allied itself with Osama bin Laden and other Islamic militants in the 1980s. The United States helped build some of the terrorist facilities it is now destroying in Afghanistan. The Central Intelligence Agency trained Islamic militants on the use of explosives and the concept of "strategic sabotage" - -- picking targets with a symbolic significance. Altogether, the United States poured an estimated $3 billion in arms, training and financial support to mujahedeen guerrillas in efforts to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Thousands of those trained by the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI were Islamic radicals recruited from Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, China, the Philippines and the Chechnya republic in the Soviet Union. "The Islamic fundamentalists would not be in power in Afghanistan if not for U.S. intervention," said William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. "The CIA orchestrated the symphony. They brought in warriors from over a dozen Muslim countries who were trained and armed." Blum contends that the United States was so blinded by its obsession to bring down the Soviet Union that it ignored the anti-Western ideology of Islamic militants such as bin Laden. Alliance has links to drugs Today, some of the same criticism is being leveled at the United States for its support of the Northern Alliance, which has a history of human-rights abuses and drug smuggling. In its full-throttle pursuit of terrorists, the United States once again finds itself allied with mujahedeen of ill repute - -- just as it was 20 years ago in the Afghan-Soviet war. At the time, the Reagan administration saw its role in Afghanistan as an opportunity to bleed the Soviet Union's economy through a prolonged, costly war against the Afghan rebels. America's financial and military support of the mujahedeen was justified at the time as a cost-effective way to defeat the communists in the "last battlefield of the Cold War." Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah defended the strategy recently when he said, "It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union." The United States' support included supplying the mujahedeen with an estimated 1,000 Stinger missiles -- the same mobile, highly accurate missiles the Taliban forces can use to target American tanks, helicopters and low-flying air-fueling tankers. Arming militant Islamic rebels was a calculated risk the United States took in the 1980s with unforeseen consequences in the 21st century, experts said. "We clearly understood that once we teach people certain things, there might be some blowback -- not to the United States but to the nations from which these militants came," said Roger Handburg, an authority on terrorism and foreign policy at the University of Central Florida. "Blowback" is a CIA term for an agent, or operation, that backfires on its creator. Critics of America's involvement in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation contend that the Taliban and bin Laden are the personification of blowback. Others, however, argue that nothing about bin Laden in the 1980s suggested his future occupation as an international terrorist. "In no sense was the United States involved in blowback," said Harvey Kushner, author of Terrorism in America. "We did what we had to do to bring the Soviet Union to its knees." And that meant enlisting the help of warlords, drug lords and Islamic mercenaries such as bin Laden: "In the real world of international relations, this is what you have to do," Kushner said. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That's how we viewed the mujahedeen, and that's how we view the Northern Alliance now." The United States was aware of rogue agents among the Soviet opposition. Chief among them was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a known drug smuggler and good friend of bin Laden's with anti-American sentiments. In the 1970s, Hekmatyar made headlines for throwing acid in the faces of Afghan women who failed to wear veils. According to some reports, the vehicles and Tennessee mules supplied by the CIA to ship arms into Afghanistan were used by Hekmatyar and other drug lords to transport opium and heroin out of the country. "You couldn't find anybody in Washington who thought we should trust this guy, but he was Pakistan's favorite," said Teresita Schaffer, director of South Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was an agent-in-good-standing from Saudi Arabia, one of our staunchest allies in the Middle East. A member of a prominent Saudi family, bin Laden counted Prince Turki ben Faisal al-Saud of the Saudi royal family as one of his strongest supporters. Wealthy and benevolent, bin Laden gave money to Afghan widows and orphans and built roads and hospitals for those fighting the Soviets. Those were good enough credentials for the U.S. government when it went looking for allies against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan. U.S. helped build camps The CIA even helped bin Laden with the construction of facilities at Zhawar Kili al-Badr. Later identified as a "terrorist university," those facilities were bombed by the Clinton administration in 1998 in retaliation for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. Bin Laden and his partner in terrorism, Egyptian surgeon Ayman al- Zawahri, were indicted in New York for those bombings. Now, those same terrorist facilities in Afghanistan are again targets of the bombing raids ordered by President Bush. Although bin Laden's opposition to the United States dates back to the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt orchestrated by President Carter in 1979, it wasn't until the Gulf War in 1991 that bin Laden turned to terrorism against the United States for stationing American troops in Saudi Arabia and imposing what he saw as a corrupt Western lifestyle on Islam. "At the time the Afghan-Soviet war was going on, he was not saying anything that gave any indication he was going to be the person he is today," said Saiful-Islam Abdul-Ahad, an authority on Afghanistan at the University of Central Florida. If the United States didn't see the change in bin Laden, it also failed to recognize the agendas of the militant Islamics in the mujahedeen and their Pakistani sponsors. "The United States had its interests and its perspective with very little awareness of how it might be used by the radical Islamics," said Robert L. Canfield, professor of sociocultural anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. "We didn't realize we were creating a cohort of zealous young men from all over the world." Pakistan at the time was ruled by strongman Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, who envisioned his nation becoming the key player in the Middle East by helping create fundamentalist Islamic regimes in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran and Turkey. Before his death in a plane crash in 1988, Zia hoped to accomplish that goal by attracting and training Muslim extremists who would then return to their homelands as Islamic rebels. Today, Muslim terrorists who trained in Afghanistan are operating in the Philippines, China, Chechnya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries. President Bush said that cells of bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist organization now exist in 68 nations -- including the United States. Among those who learned the terrorism trade in Afghanistan are the Abu Sayyaf extremists who have kidnapped Sanford-based New Tribes missionaries in the Philippines. Three of the kidnapped missionaries are presumed dead while two others are still being held hostage. Selig Harrison, a terrorism expert at The Century Foundation in Washington, D.C., contends that the CIA made a historic mistake by supporting the Islamic extremists recruited to fight the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. "I warned them that we were creating a monster," Harrison said at a conference on terrorism in March. Alliances change quickly But in the Middle East, where alliances shift as quickly as the desert dunes, it's often hard to tell the good guys from the bad, the heroes from the villains. In the topsy-turvy world of Middle Eastern politics, friends and enemies are often one and the same. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, bin Laden was allied with Ahmed Shah Massood, a leader of the Northern Alliance that is now battling the Taliban for control of Afghanistan. On Sept. 9, two days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, suicide bombers posing as Arab journalists killed Massood. The CIA thinks bin Laden's organization was behind the assassination. In its western provinces, China is fighting Islamic rebels it helped arm and train to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Russia itself is now providing arms to the Northern Alliance -- the same mujahedeen warriors who helped drive them from Afghanistan. And the United States, in its global effort to root out terrorism, has enlisted the support of Sudan -- a former home base for bin Laden and one of seven nations on the State Department's state-sponsored terrorism list. Once again, the United States finds itself involved in Afghanistan with an unholy alliance of friends and foes. "We were happy to have anyone who was against the Soviets, just as we are happy to have anyone who helps us fight Osama bin Laden," said Louise K. Davidson-Schmich, a foreign-policy expert at the University of Miami. If the U.S. forces oust the Taliban, Davidson-Schmich said, its leaders must ask: "Who do we want in there? "We can't delude ourselves that the Northern Alliance will be a nice, pro-West democratic regime." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom