Looking Back on 9/11 with Lawrence Wright: Jihadists as Unfaithful Allies — Afghanistan (Part 7)

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Part 5 is here. Part 6 is here.

Following the 1989 Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, “cinders of the Afghan conflagration were drifting across the globe, and soon much of the Muslim world would be aflame,” wrote Lawrence Wright in 2006. His book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, and other works document how dangerous the law of unintended consequences can be with respect to supporting jihadists like Osama bin Laden, an important lesson 25 years after 9/11.

Having triumphed in the campaign to defeat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan begun in 1979, many pious Muslim warriors from around the world who had ventured to Afghanistan did not want jihad to stop there. As Rohan Gunaratna in his 2002 book Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror explained,

driven by Islamist zeal, most Arab and Asian mujahidin (warriors of God) who returned home from the internationally supported jihad (holy war) in Afghanistan wanted to precipitate radical social and political change. They joined opposition political parties, religious bodies and other groups in their own countries, campaigning against dictatorial Muslim rulers and their corrupt regimes. Their very presence served as a catalyst for religious debate, social instability and political unrest. While nonviolent campaigns turned violent, violent campaigns escalated. While many governments imprisoned these erstwhile jihadi heroes, others were denied entry, expelled, or made stateless.

Arab veterans of the Afghan jihad who sought to return home, Wright said,

were largely unwelcome in their home countries, which had perceived them as misfits and extremists even before they went to Afghanistan. These same governments had advertised for young men to go to jihad, and subsidized their travel, hoping that the troublemakers would bleed away in a doomed cause. Little thought was given to the prospect of thousands of these young men returning, now trained in guerrilla-warfare tactics and empowered by the myth of their victory. Like any returning warriors, they brought home psychological problems and memories that were difficult to live with. Even those who had little actual experience of combat were indoctrinated with the culture of martyrdom and takfir. They strutted around the mosque, often wearing Afghan garb to signal their special status.

According to Saudi Arabian intelligence, some 15-25,000 Saudi youths trained in Afghanistan as jihadists (other estimates are much lower). “Those who came back to the Kingdom were taken directly to jail for two or three days of interrogation,” Wright recounted, but other

countries simply refused to let the fighters return. They became a stateless, vagrant mob of religious mercenaries. Many of them took root in Pakistan, marrying local women and learning to speak Urdu. Some went to fight in Kashmir, Kosovo, Bosnia, or Chechnya.

While these jihadists went from being heroes to outcasts, the United States also experienced a role reversal in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s Afghanistan defeat and subsequent disintegration. “Privately, bin Laden” in Saudi Arabia had “approached members of the royal family during the Afghan jihad to express his gratitude for American participation in that war,” Wright wrote. Now bin Laden and his Afghan jihad veterans in Al Qaeda would switch enemies in the post-Cold War world, as Wright examined:

The Soviet Union was dead and communism no longer menaced the margins of the Islamic world. America was the only power capable of blocking the restoration of the ancient Islamic caliphate, and it would have to be confronted and defeated.

This switching of fronts would surprise many Americans, who under President Ronald Reagan had naively conceived of Afghan mujahideen as freedom fighters contributing to a global struggle against godless Communist tyranny. Indeed, this author personally recalls an Afghan refugee emphasizing such common values at a 1985 local community presentation in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, Minnesota. The man praised the ubiquitous presence of local churches as a manifestation of religious faith, a devotion supposedly appreciated by Muslims like those in Afghanistan.

For the likes of Al Qaeda jihadists, reality was different, as Wright revealed:

Why did these men turn against America, a highly religious country that so recently had been their ally in Afghanistan? In large part, it was because they saw America as the locus of Christian power. Once, the piety of the Muslim mujahideen and the Christian leaders of the U.S. government had served as a bond between them. Indeed, mujahideen leaders had been considerably romanticized in the American press and had made tours through American churches, where they were lauded for their spiritual courage in the common fight against Communism and godlessness. But Christianity—especially the evangelizing American variety—and Islam were obviously competitive faiths. Viewed through the eyes of men who were spiritually anchored in the seventh century, Christianity was not just a rival, it was the archenemy. To them, the Crusades were a continual historical process that would never be resolved until the final victory of Islam. They bitterly perceived the contradiction embodied by Islam’s long steady retreat from the gates of Vienna, where on September 11—that now resonant date—in 1683, the king of Poland began the battle that turned back the farthest advance of Muslim armies. In the next three hundred years, Islam would be overshadowed by the growth of Western Christian societies. Yet bin Laden and his Arab Afghans believed that, in Afghanistan, they had turned the tide and that Islam was again on the march.

For this new jihad against the West, the United States itself would serve as a support base. Bin Laden and his associates like the Palestinian Muslim cleric Abdullah Azzam had developed fundraising networks in America for the war against the Soviets. Now jihadists like the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted America’s Muslim diaspora to support jihadist groups like Islamic Jihad. “For years,” wrote Wright,

the United States had been one of the main fundraising destinations for Arab and Afghan mujahideen. Sheikh Abdullah Azzam blazed a trail through the mosques of Brooklyn, St. Louis, Kansas City, Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego—altogether there were thirty-three cities in America that opened branches of bin Laden and Azzam’s organization, the Services Bureau, in order to support the jihad. The war against the Soviet Union had also created an international network of charities, especially dense in the United States, which remained in operation after the Soviet Union broke into splinters and the Afghans turned against each other. Zawahiri hoped to tap this rich American vein for al-Jihad.

“The great powers that had chosen to use Afghanistan as a venue for the existential battle between communism and capitalism,” Wright meanwhile noted, “were notably absent in the chaotic aftermath of the war.” In 1992, after the Soviet Afghan departure, their client “communist government in Afghanistan had managed to hang on to power, but it was on the verge of being overrun.” Rival jihadist groups “engaged in a bloody struggle to determine who was going to seize power.”

Worried about the Iran’s Islamic Republic influencing its Afghan neighbor, Saudi Arabia “was inclined to support the more intransigent and fundamentalist Sunni elements” in Afghanistan, Wright noted. Pakistan similarly sought to counter the influence in Afghanistan of India, which aided Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance coalition, as Gunaratna stated. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia therefore supported the Taliban movement, which took over most of Afghanistan in 1996. In addition to material support such as 400 pickup trucks donated to Taliban troops by Saudi Arabia, “regular Pakistan army troops, often disguised as Taliban members, fought against the Northern Alliance,” Gunaratna wrote. “What is clear is that without the strategic advice, logistics and manpower of Pakistan, the Taliban could never have brought neatly 90% of Afghan territory under its control.”

Even as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two nominal American allies in the Muslim world, brought to power in Afghanistan the Taliban, subsequent hosts to Al Qaeda, Pakistani national interest did not support all jihadists. Zawahiri’s November 19, 1995, bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, resulted in Pakistan’s deportation of nearly 200 Arab veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad who might engage in similar disturbances. The bombing had displeased bin Laden, who worried about losing support in Pakistan, which “still offered the best route into Afghanistan and, until then, had provided sanctuary to many Arab Afghans who had lingered after the war,” Wright noted.

Yet Pakistanis did not oppose all jihadist activity, befitting the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s longstanding use of jihadist groups as an element of national security policy, particularly with respect to Pakistan’s enemy, India. After bin Laden had made his August 23, 1996, “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Two Holy Places,” a group of Pakistani reporters visited him in Afghanistan in March 1997. “The Pakistani reporters as weren’t interested in bin Laden’s declaration of war against America, which seemed like an absurd publicity stunt,” Wright noted. Rather, following recent Indian initiatives to test nuclear weapons, “they wanted bin Laden to declare jihad against India instead.”

The tangled history of Afghanistan and its regional neighbors demonstrates the dangers of trying to instrumentalize in Realpolitik terms jihadists, who never lose sight of their ultimate conflicts and enemies. Leftists around the world, who today often make strange bedfellows with Muslims in the oft-noted Red-Green Alliance, would do well to embrace this teaching. The cruel fate of many Leftists who supported Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, only later to face execution under the regime, is here a stark warning.

Muslim states themselves also have had bitter experiences with Allah’s warriors. Their support of jihadists against specific targets has promoted an uncontainable ideology of violence, threatening in various ways the original sponsor states. Perhaps no other state manifests this tension between Islam’s transcendent, universal doctrinal dictates and practical raison d’état than Saudi Arabia, the topic of the next article in this series.